World Zero, Shanda’s Gamified Second Life

You may hear a lot about a company called Second Life and its counterparts in China, HiPiHi, UWorld etc back in 2009 when the concept of 3D Virtual World was super hot. In those virtual worlds, every user is expected to be able to use the virtual tools to build his/her own virtual world containing houses, shops, cars, trees etc. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a hype in the end. There are some technical issues to be resolved but more important, especially in China, people feel lost when they are in the empty virtual world because they are required build almost everything from scratches. Most users in virtual world are looking for fun to play with, are not creative people who are willing to create more fun. In other words, the old virtual world lacks of incentive to keep the users.

Last week in Shanda’s Got Talent party, Tan Qundao, CEO of Shanda gave a keynote and disclosed some information about a new game which as he described could be the best game in the world. It is named World Zero, which actually looks like more than a game. It’s a gamified Second Life.

Shanda has been working on World Zero for more than one year. World Zero is officially described as a 3D MMORPG, but unlike other MMORPG, it will come with a handy tools and rich development resource to allow users to not only create new 3D virtual world (games), but also manage them and share them with other players. World Zero will be like an open 3D game development platform/environment, or you can say an Unified virtual world designed for hundreds of user-generated (small) virtual worlds.

I am not sure how fast gamers can get the idea of creating their own virtual worlds in a game, but gaming elements will definitely give people more interests to explore the virtual world. Tan said more details will be disclosed in October this year. Below is the impressive CG video of World Zero: Your World, Starts from Zero.