Recently I've been branching out into other virtual worldish games. Not straight out 3D chat rooms like Second Life is, but games that are a bit more than just "this game." Games that are sort of a middle ground between being a game and being a VW. Often they have creator tools and a lot of player generated content, but still have a lot of emphasis on "play" versus social. One of these games is Roblox. Another that probably falls into this category is Minecraft, though I've been playing that off and on for a long while now. Fortnite seems to sort of fall into this category as well.
One I recently came across an interesting platform called Core. Or maybe it's core Games. Honestly, the name is kind of a little too generic, which makes it hard to look into and search on. I noticed it as "Coming soon" in the Epic Games store, but it's already available on the website, so I signed up and checked it out. It's actually changed recently from when I initially loaded it, and it's fairly limited in scope at the moment. It reminds me a bit of Fortnight visuals in a Roblox interface.
Originally, when you launched Core, you were greeted with a sort of launcher, and a variety of games to choose from and play. I imagine many of these games are created by the Core devs but there seem to be some that are created by users. There is a little tutorial on the website I plan to look into on how to build an environment for Core. You also have some options to customize your avatar, though it's pretty limited at the moment.
For example, there are several "base avatars", both male and female, and a couple of robots. Picking any individual avatar allows you to swap around clothes, and adjust skin color. but you can't do anything with hair at all. Also skin color is limited to 2-3 similar options per base avatar. You can't pick say, one of the lighter skinned avatars because you like her hair style, and make her darker skinned, or visa versa. Or give a robot avatar hair.
Clothing is also weirdly limited by gender. You can't give the female avatars the same tactical jacket the male avatars can get, and you can't turn your male avatars into lumber jacks with the lumberjack themed outfit of the women.
After a bit of customizing, you can launch a variety of mini games from the selection. Depending on the game, you may or may not have your initial avatar at all. There is an FPS Sniper game where you play as your avatar, and another Plaza where you can explore and interact as your Avatar. But another I tried was an elaborate game of the classic Snake, which gave you a snake Avatar. Another was a sort of city building puzzle game that didn't have avatars at all.
Recently they updated the interface a bit. The old menu is still there when you open it, but the game now dumps you into a central hub with other players. The hub also has little portal areas to different subsets of games. Plus a few other things to do like some ramps for the in game mounts and hover boards.
What has interested me a bit here is the idea of using the same Avatar across games. This whole system feels like something I've kind of wished Second Life could do for a long time. Essentially have highly customized zones where you can play games as your avatar, be it a racer or an FPS or a fancy Theme Park. Granted, SL sort of has this, but there is a lot about SL that is kind of jankey when it comes to creating rich interactive experiences. Though Linden Lab seems to be working on this a bit with well, "Experiences" which rolled out a while back.
There is some interesting potential to this platform I feel, and it is, after all, still Alpha. You can equip items you find in the world, and even buy things with collected currency found in world, though none of this seems to be persistent like say, Roblox (from what I can tell there). The characters look pretty nice, though possibly a little cartoonish for some people's tastes. I can see these being easily manipulated by some swappable parts and styling sliders for more customization in the future though.
