You may recall we knocked Blue Mars in the past for cozying up to corporations by restricting content creation rights to big business. It was surprising, then, that our number came up for an opportunity to beta test Avatar’s well-promoted baby.
Never one to waste a good opportunity, we jumped into Blue Mars with a palpable excitement.
The character creation screen is necessarily slim. I don’t hold this against Avatar, since the important point was to get players out into the world. For its slim selection of faces and hair, though, Blue Mars provides an impressive rendering of the human form. The level of customizability – a slim eyebrow here, pouting lips there – provides depth while not feeling overwhelming.
This is a major point in Blue Mars’s corner, as Second Life has perhaps the most user-unfriendly interface for a player new to online gaming.
You’ll find an endless ocean in the “Landing Zone.” This vast expanse of nothingness is a simple way of introducing the player to the movement and interaction modules. A dutifully assigned Avatar intern greets you upon arrival, and you’re likely to see five or ten other avatars milling about, learning the controls, exploring nothing in particular.
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This was where the beauty of Blue Mars’s characters really stands out. I met an avatar named Desiree Bisiani, pictured at right, and she was, without a doubt, pretty. The avatar is leagues ahead of anything available on a free-to-play MMORPG, no doubt thanks to the all-consuming CryEngine2 and its graphics pumping ability.
You encounter a major gameplay hurdle at this point. While Blue Mars is certainly beautiful, it’s demanding on an older computer. Even my GeForce 8600 GT struggled to run the game at anything near the default high-graphics setting to which it’s locked. Blue Mars staffers in the Landing Zone readily admit it that running the game without debilitating graphics stutter requires a GeForce 8800.
That’s a big investment for a casual player, and cutting out a wide swath of your potential user base at the outset is hardly a wise idea. Avatar insists it is running Blue Mars at high settings for testing, but will soon allow the player to downscale the graphics. But in a world built so wholly on beauty, this kills one of the game’s major selling points.
There is also a shocking lack of direct-chat and instant messaging features, and this was a complaint many players came back to in the Landing Zone. Aside from complaints over graphical demands, a lack of utility for the friends list was the most common one I heard.
Staggered graphics aside, it feels empty in Blue Mars, and not because there are only a few people there. Sure, you can sail a ship along a photorealistic ocean; you can golf and take in idyllic views; you can explore New Venice, pictured to the left, and go on an orb-hunting adventure. But these games won’t hold players for long. This leads to one of Blue Mars’s major let-downs:
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Content creation is a no-go unless you’re corporate. Unlike Second Life, players can’t produce content and expand the game beyond its original parameters.
That right belongs to large landholders, mostly corporations, which found themselves shut out of Second Life due to their inability to compete with the native content producers. It really is a shame, because content creation would put Blue Mars in a league of its own.
Blue Mars will succeed in its own right regardless of content creation, because Blue Mars caters to a different kind of gamer. There are countless players to whom learning content creation and scripting skills reminds them of homework. I’ve yet to create anything in Second Life. For those players, Blue Mars will succeed so long as it continues producing engaging, immersive activities and fascinating landscapes like the one pictured at right.
Blue Mars may not be a Second Life killer, but it won’t matter. These two games, it is clear, are not competing for the same fan base. With increasing numbers of online gamers logging on for the first time every week, there is an expanding and heterogeneous group of new recruits from which to choose. Blue Mars simply pulls from a different group.
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Its graphical benchmark aside, Blue Mars has potential. It will be interesting to see how the corporate-friendly model works, and it would be wrong to condemn it too harshly.
The Metaverse is a place of infinite experimentation, where worlds like Blue Mars and Second Life can exist side-by-side, trying out opposed market ideas and viewing the results of their experiment in real-time.
Now if only Blue Mars let you fly.
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