In Palia, humanity is the past… or at least, humanity was the past. Palia starts with a giant purple void and a halfway-decent character creation tool. I do love a good character creation tool. After crafting the perfect human, I was thrust into a world where the legendary human race was supposed to be extinct. No one seems to know exactly how or why humanity died off or, more importantly, why they’re reappearing from nowhere. One thing is certain: this cozy little town just got a lot smaller.
AVALON MMO Q&A – Ex EverQuest Designer Talks Metaverse Concept, Generative AI Integration, Blockchain & More
29.11.2023 - 17:41 / wccftech.com / Ai
Earlier this month, a new independent game development team called AVALON announced its highly ambitious namesake debut project. This MMO game seeks to largely deliver on the concept of the Metaverse as it was enunciated in Ernest Cline's seminal science fiction novel Ready Player One while also pushing the user-generated content trend forward and taking advantage of the latest technological advancements, including two different generative AI tools (Didimo's Popul8 and Inworld AI's Character Engine) that we previously covered on Wccftech.
The development team at AVALON is led by Jeffrey Butler, who was a producer on old-school MMORPGs like the original EverQuest and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, as well as a designer on the more recent (canceled) MMO EverQuest Next/Landmark, which also had a strong focus on UGC but never saw the light of day.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Butler in an hour-long Zoom call about everything AVALON, from the project's inception to its more controversial aspect (the inclusion of blockchain technology). Brace for a long but very interesting conversation.
How did you connect with Sean Pinnock to create this new company?
That's a great question. One of my old employees is working on an independent game, and he's also a popular streamer, discussing the state of the games industry and the quality of the games that he's been playing recently,
But he also does interviews with people that he's worked with over the years and he reached out to me. It was like the anniversary of EverQuest, so he wanted to do an EverQuest-themed interview. Our discussion ended up going on for three hours. We were on camera interviewing, and we had this massive, three-hour EverQuest discussion. About a year later, Sean Pinnock ran across it. He discovered it because he was looking up information related to EverQuest Next and Landmark due to it being a user-generated content-focused game.
As he was watching the interview, he realized that he and I shared a vision for the future of gaming. So, he reached out to me on LinkedIn and set up a discussion. It was kind of out of the blue, but he was a game maker and I liked his website and the games he had worked on, so I said, sure, let's sit down and talk.
He pitched me a game, and in the middle of the pitch, I held up my hand and I was like, hold on, let me finish the pitch for you. He looked at me and I started talking.
He was like, are you doing due diligence for one of our investors? Do you have our documents? And I said, no, man, that's just the game I want to make. It was an example of parallel thought where he, independent of myself, had effectively thought up an idea for building the same game.
Amazingly enough, we immediately hit it off not only over that
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