Twinity

just saw someone mention this game and tried it, been walking around in NYC a bit, not sure what to think about it yet

 

Its purely a social world? or are there gaming aspects? The term "flirt" in advertising is kind of a turn off to me. I'm full grown with a wife and kid, and the older I get the more annoyed I get by horny teens(or 20-60yr olds that act like them)

Just the stereo type that comes to my mind, I have no idea if there is any reality behind it or not.

narfi

 

Well as I said I have been walking around a bit and found a grand total of about 6 people maybe in game.
So far all I could do is walk around and buy stuff for 'globals' the ingame money. (at least you get more of those in Twinity then in EU :))
Did some of the beginners 'missions' and earned some globals, bought some new clothes for myself for another mission and walked around a bit more.

I have tried both Second Life and Blue Mars and now Twinity and all 3 feel the same to me, boring and not very nice looking.

So not a game that appeals to me at all, but I will give it another go, maybe I can find some more people to talk to and 'flirt' ;)

 

OK after asking around and trying to talk to some people in the beginners area I finally met Lexie who was willing to help me out a bit.

It turns out that the game is much like Second Life and basically a big fancy 3D chat room, with some real world locations you can visit (New York, London, Berlin, Singapore, Miami) but so far just very small parts of those cities. You can own a house (I got one for free for some reason) and can buy stuff to put in it. You can also make your own stuff and upload it to the game if you have a 20 euro a month commercial account, but because it is a beta you can upgrade for free for now. So I made this :)



As you can see in the image, the game is not looking very nice compared to EU and it looks a lot like SL.

As I said not much else to do than chat and buy stuff for your apartment or clothes and build your own items with SketchUP or some other 3D program.

So that is my exploration of Twinity for today, might give the creation of items another go, but overal the game is the same as SL if you ask me and therefor not one I would like to play very much.

 

OK, I have been playing this game for a while now and it is not really a game, more like a 3D chat thingy.
One of the fun things is that you can (like SL) create your own content, like the shirt I showed, but also furniture and other stuff and sell that.
So the last few weeks I have been decorating the apartment I bought, which is pretty fun to do

They are trying to make the game a RCE game, but they have some trouble with security and cheaters, so they need to sort some stuff out first. The fun thing is that the developers of the game are asking players for idea's to combat cheating, so I told them how that works in Entropia. There is also the issue that newbies get some free money to play with, but if they buy stuff from my shop with that I do not get any money, because it is newbie money. That's is one thing they use to prevent cheating, but a very wrong one and I think I have told them very clearly :)

Anyway, a game very much in beta with a long way to go to become a real RCE game, but it might get there some day. To bad there is not really any gameplay.

Some pics of my apartment:

 

So played a bit more and actually making some ingame money by selling shirts I created :-)
I must say that creating stuff is pretty nice and boosts my skills in a few programs as well (Sketchup, 3Dstudio, Photoshop) and I have seem to create stuff people like, so that's nice to. I am now trying to figure out what people are willing to buy in game, but so far not to much of a reaction.

One thing that is different (well one of many) to EU is that the developers are pretty accessible. I got a member of the staff on my FL after just a few days playing and she actually responds to me in game and on the forum.

There is a discussion going on about people building stuff outside their apartments. That is pretty easy, because anything can float in mid air so you can build yourself a nice place in the sky accessible through your balcony (id that to try). The game company is not making a big deal of it right now, but has said that there will be rules when it comes out of beta (whenever that may be). People reacted by saying it restricts peoples creativity. I proposed to keep the cities as they are now (london, new york, berlin) and sell islands where people can do what they want (the Earth islands in Dubai would be a nice location). Lets wait and see what happens.

 

well I did get my free place and had started a little shop in there with shirt I designed myself. Today I logged in to add a few more and found out I could not do that, so I send a message to one of the people from the game and asked what was going on. She told me that they removed the ability to place stuff on sale in starter apartments and that I needed to buy a shop in order to do that. So I told her I think it is weird that change stuff that I was give by them as a gift and I invested a lot of time in to turn it into a shop people actually bought stuff from. So she tells me I should not complain because it is free and I didn't loose any money because of the change and that they did not anticipate that people would start shops in them (which a lot of people did). So instead of changing stuff for new people they decide to take away the ability for everybody.

I guess that's the last time I was online in that game. They took away the only thing I liked about it (there is no gameplay what so ever).