The makers behind ZED RUN launched their first Metaverse title on Monday, featuring a 3D world built using a fully-customizable user avatar and an Unreal Engine.
Chris Laurent, the founder of the popular digital horse racing game ZED RUN, envisions a future where people will spend their leisure time creating their own unique descriptions within Metaverse.
Below an exaggerated story, this virtual world will have a mix of gaming, entertainment, and social experiences, he believes:
“My perception of the metaverse isn’t just a meeting of people; it’s coming home after work and not turning on Netflix but seeing what happens to yourself and your friends in some type of storyline that is flexible.”
The founder of ZED RUN spoke to Cointelegraph on Monday after launching its first metaverse platform, Human Park. It features an aesthetically pleasing 3D world created using a fully customizable user avatar and the unrealistic engine of Epic Games, the same platform used for top gaming titles like Fortnite and Borderland.
In an interview on the day of the launch, Laurent and his team at Virtual Human Studios (VHS Labs), including Steven Na, executive producer of Human Park, and Rick Pearce of Spectre Studios, emphasized that Human Park differs from other Metaverse projects because it focuses on the story -Tell users instead of taking them to a 3D world to wander aimlessly.
Pearce, co-founder and creative director of Spectre Studios, said, “We are storytellers at heart, so we’re here to empower players to tell their own stories. In this way, we believe we will transform how people engage with and express themselves in this new internet we are all building”.
Steven Na said to Cointelegraph that they didn’t want to make a platform that white-boxed users into particular gaming experiences:
“We want to empower users to tell their own story within the metaverse, so we don’t want to be heavy-handed and say ‘hey, you’re going to play RPG, and that’s the Metaverse,’ or ‘you’re going to play a sandbox game, and that’s the Metaverse.”
Laurent added that the Metaverse will propose “many different types of game experiences, entertainment, and social environments.”
He added, “Much like you would see if you look at something like Roblox or Minecraft or even Fortnite where they’re almost like a social platform”.
When questioned whether the vision companies such as Meta and Microsoft have placed out for the Metaverse, such as virtual-reality powered work meetings or entire businesses run out of the virtual world, will come true, Laurent said he believes anything is possible at this stage:
“In regards to the experimentation, some of these bigger entities are making, obviously, they’re doing it for a reason, and we can’t ignore that, so our theory is that weird stuff is going to happen in space.”
The launch of Human Park on Monday was attended by the drop of its first theme-based release. Season Zero, a retro-cyberpunk world, will come with a limited-edition-themed non-fungible token (NFT) drops. The game is free-to-access, with voluntary gameplay modes that can be retrieved by user-owned NFT avatars and wearables.
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