A fever of manta rays glide over the fluffy clouds that surround you: they’re flying in between beautiful islands which appear to float in endless sky.
With a grappling hook on your arm, you can swing Spider-Man-style around this world—exploring overgrown ruins, bright temples and dark underground dungeons.
And if you’re not inspired by what you discover, you can build your own floating fortresses, shaping the very world you exist in.
This is Worlds Adrift: a genre-defining PC game that launches in "Early Access" on Valve's Steam platform today.
It’s perhaps the closest you can get to stepping into a Ready Player One-style world, with gameplay access costing between £19 and £30 ($26-$40) for different tiers.
“For the first time people are free to play the way they want and to create the world they are playing within,” says Roberta Lucca, cofounder of the London studio behind the game.
What’s makes Worlds Adrift so special?
Worlds Adrift has been built by Bossa Studios off the back of a $10 million investment from VC fund Atomico. The studio was also the first to partner with Improbable, the U.K. company which itself raised a whopping $502 million from Japan’s Softbank in 2017.
Building on Improbable’s SpatialOS game platform has allowed the Lucca’s team to create a massive multiplayer game that exists on a scale never seen before.
“The technology is an enabler to allow co-creation that’s vast and accessible to many people at one time,” she explains.
Since its beta launch in 2017 its 50,000 early adopters have created over 10,000 islands—a number that’s rising all the time. Perhaps even more exciting is the real-life continuity Bossa Studios has built into the game.
If you fell a tree, it will fall. Not only will this action be instantly visible to other players, but—if left untouched—the tree will remain where it is, even if you go offline.
“It’s like the philosophy of ‘If you don't see it, it doesn't happen’,” says Lucca, “except in Worlds Adrift actions and consequences do exist even if you don't see them.”
Even Minecraft, one of the most successful games focused on creation, has limited space to build and lacks real-time consistency.
“Our world is always evolving with the actions and interactions of its players,” Lucca explains.
How to play Worlds Adrift
Although there is a story behind the Worlds Adrift universe, the beauty of the game is that players can enjoy it however they choose.
Games writer Matt Cook is the man behind its mysterious narrative. This involves an ancient civilization who once built weightless ships to explore the skies.
Players can, if they want, spend their time roaming the universe, collecting scraps of information to work out what happened to cause the downfall of this long-lost world.
However, many instead focus on shaping the game’s future: building islands and new communities and embarking on missions of their own.
“You can create islands, builds ships, become pirates or simply stargaze,” says Lucca.
“There's one gamer who’s become a cartographer mapping the whole world, which we deliberately didn't do; there's a lady whose established herself as a trader, and a player called Synovus who’s one of our biggest island creators: the islands he’s been creating are just breathtaking.”
Secrets revealed
With the seemingly limitless possibilities, Bossa Studios has even more surprises up its sleeve.
“Our producer might kill me,” says Lucca, struggling to conceal her excitement about revealing upcoming features.
This year, gamers will see the launch of both “alliances” and “territory control,” she confirms.
Alliances will mean a crew of people will be able to face the dangers of the world together, she teases, while territory control will give players the ability to claim parts of the sky, gaining and losing defensible boundaries.
Lucca also plans to build an economy into the platform so that gamers can buy and sell items, skills or islands. And the company will even build water into its environments in the coming years allowing islands creators to imagine “endless waterfalls, lakes, and mirror pools.”
“There are a lot of things nature-wise we want to add,” adds Lucca, hinting at the possibility that many more creatures will be introduced to Worlds Adrift too.
Indeed the game “may never be finished,” says the Bossa Studios founder.
“We wanted to create a habitual game where people can experience endless possibilities forever.”
Bringing collaborative gaming to the fore
One thing that is clear about the future is that collaboration will always sit at the heart of Worlds Adrift.
It's a concept that sits at the core of Bossa Studios, which has created all its games (including Worlds Adrift, and games like I Am Bread and Surgeon Simulator) through a process of monthly collaborative Game Jams.
“If you look at the globalized world and the internet, society is becoming more collaborative: I can go on Twitter ask who wants to create a soundtrack for my new game, or create a campaign on Kickstarter and get immediate feedback on my product.”
“Worlds Adrift represents this, allowing people to share their experiences rather than having them on their own.”
Is collaborative gameplay always peaceful? “That would be unpredictable,” Lucca laughs. “We just want to make sure we’re always reinventing the way games are created.”
Are you ready to ride a flying manta ray or build an exciting new island of your own?
