sulka haro, lead designer at habbo, has a posting questioning the viability of virtual worlds on the console. from my side, while i’m not a professional game designer, i’m not sure that i agree.
the biggest reasons cited are the need for an external keyboard to enable communication, and the potential for voice not to go over well if you have a mismatch between player and avatar.
definitely the keyboard point is valid. and nate combs points out in a comment on the terra nova blog discussion about voice/webcam gender verificiation that you’ll need voice to get far in the game anyway.
what strikes me about this is that there essentially are mmo’s on the console already. for instance, my wife and i sometimes play kameo on our xbox 360 in multiplayer cooperation mode. granted, we’re in the same location, so we talk face to face. however, i’ve also played other games on xbox live, and the voice worked fine, even if it totally doesn’t match the character. i don’t think i could make my voice pass for kameo, major ruin, chilla, or any of the others. ok, we know each other, and maybe for that reason we don’t have an issue with a voice/avatar disconnect. in the brilliant south park episode “make love, not warcraft,” there’s a huge disconnect between kyle, stan, kenny and cartman and their wow avatars. but as you watch that episode, i don’t think that even occurs to the viewer as being awkward.
it’s a very small step to combine the live aspect with the voice. it’s already done in many games. game saves (which could easily be executed on two or more consoles and/or on the xbox live servers) give you the persistent nature of the world.
aside from the communication, there are other aspects, like the economy (buying/sellng items). in-world shops have been around for a long time, all the way down to games like some in the mario family. i think most of these can be worked around pretty easily.
so maybe my conclusion is that it probably works better for mmorpg’s than for social worlds like habbo or twinity, but there’s no reason that it shouldn’t work. in fact, for a lot of game play, having a console-based mmorpg could work better, since the controller might be more manipulable for movement, attacking, etc than the keyboard.
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