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A group of former WoW and Elden Ring devs is making an AI MMO called Avalon, and it sounds like a buzzword-fueled nightmare. “Former Elden Ring devs” is also a bit of a stretch, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
The MMO Avalon is from a new studio also called Avalon, led by EverQuest creator Jeff Butler. At the center of the project is the goal for players to create their own stories, levels, and pretty much everything else. It sounds a lot like the push toward emergent storytelling that Rod Humble and Paradox are embracing in the life sim Life By You, but with a catch.
Avalon is using Popul8 to create all the game’s NPCs. Popul8 is the same AI tool that Colossal Order used in Cities Skylines 2, responsible for rendering thousands of individual teeth, tanking performance, and giving us NPC masterpieces like this terrifying child.
It also suggests a pretty archaic approach to MMOs, where characters exist just to fill a void and give quests. Non-story experiences might be a big part of what keeps hardcore fans playing an MMO after the main story ends, but characters, their place in the world, and even how they look and dress are significant reasons why people flock to games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and even Palia. The FFXIV community lost its collective mind over G’raha Tia eating a taco in the Dawntrail trailer, and that’s not the kind of reaction you’d get from some AI-generated amalgamation of tropes and nightmares.
Amazon took a similar character-and-narrative-lite approach to New World, which debuted with nearly 1,000,000 concurrent players and, six months later, dropped to under 50,000. It hasn’t recovered since.
Then again, it doesn’t look like writing is a big focus at Avalon. A look through the team roster shows only Butler – the studio’s self-described “lore master” – and one or two others whose roles exist outside management and technical expertise. Since Avalon wants Avalon to be a metaverse game with NFT objects you can use in shared universes, that skew toward tech knowledge is probably to be expected – and maybe a little concerning. NFT games don’t have the best track record for success and feel like work more than entertainment, and metaverse ambitions have cost companies millions of dollars with no worthwhile results.
The tagline about the team’s collective experience is also a bit strange. The Assassin’s Creed experience comes from Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre, a former AI engineer at Ubisoft, with most of the Blizzard experience coming from former test manager Ed Hocking. Only one person listed has Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco on their LinkedIn history, Zack Karlsson, but that was in 2010, long before Elden Ring was a thing.
Roughly a quarter or a third of the team hails from CyberDream, an Orlando-based VR studio.
It’s an odd claim to make, but this is the games industry, which is infamous for not crediting people’s work properly.
Whether Avalon can live up to its lofty ambitions or go the route of New World remains to be seen. Development is ongoing, and there’s no anticipated release date yet.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF