Right now I’m just so freaking excited about this game that I could piss my pants.

Ahem.

Sorry about that. I’m just a bit excited because Tad William’s sci-fi book series Otherland has been just begging for a video-game adaptation of some sort ever since it was written. The books mostly take place in a fantastical world of virtual reality, where anyone can build anything, as long as they have the money to do so, and avatars roam freely and play different games and interact in a myriad of ways.

Making a game out of people using the Internet, despite doing so in virtual reality, seems like a difficult task. But as far as I can tell, RealU and dtp entertainment AG (the developer and publisher, respectively) are nailing it. There’s not a ton of detail on the game right now, but we do know that it will run on the Unreal 3 engine, and that they’re aiming for 1080p resolution with a quad core processor for the benchmarks. All of this basically translates to the game looking extremely pretty, as you can tell from the image above.

Players will start out with a relatively featureless avatar, and then, as they learn to “manipulate the code” of the virtual reality their character inhabits, players can improve their avatar’s look, slowly gain more health, and so on. The very nature of the books and the previews released so far also hint at user generated content, although only time will really tell on that front.

So far two locations have been announced: Lambda Mall, which will serve as a social hub for the world, where NPCs and Player Characters alike will be able to hand out quests, and a host of minigames will be available for play at various shops; and Mars, the first of many virtual reality worlds built by characters in the game, which features a tower that looks like it’s a mile high. Both look absolutely incredible, and they’ve obviously been designed with an eye toward the fantastical.

The story gets a special note, as well. Tad Williams himself has been heavily involved in the game since its inception, and is apparently very happy with what’s going on so far, as you can see in his blog post on the subject. The story will not be a retread of the books’ either; players will define their own stories throughtout the game, although characters from the books will show up, although their roles haven’t been made especially clear.

I think this game has a shot. It’s the first really high-quality looking MMO to come along in a long time. It has quite a few really unique gameplay concepts, and, for once, it looks like an MMO developer isn’t just copying WoW.

Good luck to you, RealU and dtp entertainment AG. Keep it up, and I’ll be buying this game on day one.

Today’s picture comes from Tad Williams’ blog post on the game. Information comes from both that blog post and this fabulous preview article by Eurogamer.