Worlds Adrift

» see worldsadrift.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I met this one as infrastructure before I met it as a game. SpatialOS was being pitched around 2017 as a way to run a single simulation across many machines rather than cutting the same world into a hundred identical copies and calling each one a server. That is an engineering claim before it is an entertainment claim, and it is the reason the name reached people who were never going to play it.

The game on top was Worlds Adrift. A broken sky full of floating islands over an endless drop, with a grappling hook as your main verb. You salvaged wrecks for hull plates and engines and welded an airship together out of them, part by part. Then you sailed it into weather that could take it apart again, because everything obeyed the same physics and nothing was decoration.

Bossa Studios in London made it, which surprised people who knew Bossa from Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread. Those were jokes about physics. This was the same interest taken seriously and scaled up to a persistent world where your wreck stayed in the sky after you died and somebody else could strip it for parts.

The Island Creator went out free on Steam in 2016 and the islands players built with it became the actual map. Closed beta ran through 2017. Early Access opened on 17 May 2018, fourteen months before the end, which is not long enough for a world that was supposed to have a history in it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

For the first weeks it worked the way the pitch said it would. People met in the sky and boarded each other, and ships that had taken a week to build came apart in ten minutes. Character death was permanent and the knowledge you had unlocked carried to the next one, so the world accumulated wrecks and reputations rather than resetting.

Then the curve did what Early Access curves do. Sandbox MMOs need population the way a bar needs a crowd, and an empty sky is worse than a small map. Bossa's own language at the end was a lack of interest from new players, which is a polite way of saying the people who stayed could no longer find anyone to meet.

~ the decline ~

Running one continuous simulation costs money whether or not anyone is inside it. That is the bill a shard-based MMO gets to avoid by turning off empty copies, and Worlds Adrift had built its entire identity on refusing to do that. The infrastructure that made it interesting was also the meter that never stopped.

Improbable had raised half a billion dollars from SoftBank in 2017 and was a British unicorn on paper. In January 2019 it fell out publicly with Unity over engine licensing, which rattled everyone building on SpatialOS even though it did not directly close this game. Four months later Bossa announced the shutdown, and SpatialOS never got the flagship it had been waiting for.

~ the day it died ~

The announcement came on 29 May 2019. Anyone who had bought the game in the previous month got a refund, as did anyone who had spent money in-game since the last major update, which is a more honest exit than most closures manage.

The servers ran until 26 July. Bossa held an end of the world event to close it out, so the last thing the sky did was collapse on purpose in front of the people who had built it. Fourteen months of public life for a world designed to outlast everyone in it.

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