Blue Mars Will Turn Heads

Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II. These three games have proven that providing a place for people to live out their fantasy lives can be a lucrative business model. While many other developers have tried the MMO business model, few have succeeded.

Avatar Reality, a startup from Hawaii, is looking to change that. Their late 2008 release Blue Mars will provide players with a graphically rich MMO experience. Blue Mars is set over a hundred years in the future on a terraformed Mars where players will live and work to buy virtual land and objects to populate it with.

Avatar Reality chose CryTek’s CryEngine2 to run most of the game’s back end. This choice means that the jaw dropping visuals and physics seen in the recent Crysis will be possible, depending on the implementation of the engine and, of course, the go-power of your computer. So far screen shots look to be on par with the CryEngine2, though some of the early house models look a lot like pastel versions of suburbia. A couple galleries worth of what

appear to be in game screens can be found on the front page of the Avatar Reality website here.

Based on early reports, the game play of Blue Mars sounds like it will be a little more structured than that of Second Life’s “It’s your world, build it” model. From the information available, it seems that Blue Mars will provide players different avenues to make a yet to be named virtual currency. Working for NPCs in different service vocations will probably be the starting point for most players, either as a greeter or sales clerk of some sort. Whether or not the virtual currency that you make will be translatable into actually currency is not known at this time. Content for the game will be mainly provided by third parties. At this time only e frontier has signed on to make virtual houses.