

The central sq. of ChinaJoy Plus 2022. /CGTN
The central sq. of ChinaJoy Plus 2022. /CGTN
ChinaJoy, the biggest online game present in Asia, prolonged to the metaverse this yr with the brand new “CJ Plus” model. We beamed ourselves into the present and this is what we discovered.
Step one is, in fact, discovering the doorway of the metaverse. Observe that this digital world has nothing to do with Meta, the dad or mum firm of Fb – ChinaJoy created their very own metaverse.
As a substitute of forcing guests to put in a desktop or cellular app, the organizers collaborated with Tencent to offer another choice: only a webpage. The expertise very a lot resembles cloud gaming, the digital world is rendered by Tencent’s server and streamed to customers like a traditional YouTube reside. The one distinction is that the stream is totally different for every customer and so they can management characters within the stream like in video video games.
The organizers additionally made heavy use of the online game engine to arrange missions for guests to information them via the present. That feels very very similar to enjoying a role-playing recreation: fulfilling quests one after one other.
We managed an avatar to tour across the colourful place and have been amazed by the expertise driving the present. The present is cross-platform – that means it is accessible on PCs, smartphones and nearly all the pieces that may run a typical net browser. The community connection is steady sufficient for us to work together with a whole lot of different guests. The graphics run fluently on each our three-year-old testing smartphone and a seven-year-old testing PC. The interplay works for everybody with earlier video gaming experiences.

A photograph captured within the metaverse of ChinaJoy Plus, August 29, 2022. /CGTN
A photograph captured within the metaverse of ChinaJoy Plus, August 29, 2022. /CGTN
However all these nice applied sciences type of obtained wasted by the lackluster content material.
The cubicles have been designed with a lot creativity and are engaging – we noticed many guests take in-metaverse footage of the cubicles, particularly these that aren’t possible to construct in the true world.
The issue is, we failed to search out any necessity for the content material to be displayed in a digital world as an alternative of simply video. A lot of the cubicles are simply well-designed containers of video galleries. The one factor guests can do in a number of the cubicles is click on on the floating video cowl footage to play the movies.
The metaverse is designed to be way more succesful than this.
Additionally, the standard of 3D artworks within the digital world might be drastically improved. They don’t seem to be even near fashionable cellular video games, to not point out the console ones.
With that mentioned, ChinaJoy Plus 2022 can nonetheless be counted as a stable present, as a result of guests can discover the content material they’re all in favour of and get a metaverse expertise nearly on par with fashionable cellular video games – sure, that counts as a praise within the early days of the metaverse.