When the “metaverse” becomes a reality in the near future, all the clothes you bought for your avatar in “Fortnite” will effortlessly transfer to “Minecraft,” “Call of Duty,” and whatever other games you wish to play. At least, that’s what supporters of “Web3” ideas like NFTs, blockchain technology, and cryptocurrency would have you believe.
The most recent example comes from Linkin Park co-founder and lead singer Mike Shinoda, who took to social media last weekend to outline his future vision. “Consider taking your favourite skin from ‘Valorant’ and putting it to use in ‘Fortnite.’ And you won’t have to pay anything additional because you own it. Then I used it in ‘CoD,’ ‘Minecraft,’ and even Twitter and Instagram. So many options, don’t you think? “On Saturday, he stated.
There’s just one problem: the individuals who actually produce games have repeatedly pointed out the many issues in this vision of the future, including one guy who works on the game Shinoda gave as an example. “Once again, you cannot take one ‘skin’ from one game and slap it into another and expect better results — even if they were created in the same engine,” Riot Games’ chief engineer Jules Glegg stated on Sunday. She referred to the technical difficulties associated with shifting an “asset” from one game to another.
According to game engine maker Unity, the term “asset” is used generally in video game creation as “anything that goes into a video game – characters, sound effects, objects, maps, environments, and so on.” The “skin” of a character is an asset, and changing it from one game to another is a technological headache. “The scales will not balance. The rigs will not match. The [detail level] will not fit. The hitboxes will not correspond. The shader budgets will not be able to compete, “She stated.
Two other game developers Insider spoke with last week expressed similar sentiments.
In a phone interview on Monday, Bithell Games COO Alexander Sliwinski said, “You can’t just go over to Burger King and say, ‘Now make me a Big Mac.” The problem is transparent in the case of burger joints: You shouldn’t expect the same burger from one at the other just because they both make burgers. They aren’t interoperable, and interoperability is essential to the idea of moving a piece of one game into another without difficulty.
If you have a question like, Why shouldn’t a suit you bought for one game’s character be able to be worn by another game’s character? Isn’t this just a jpeg?
The short answer for that question is NO, it’s much more than a jpeg— and every component of that suit is unique to the game for which it was designed. “Everything you see in a game is actually dozens of assets working together as defined by the code,” said Rami Ismail, a game designer, and consultant.
“If you actually want to bring that suit along,” he explained, “you run into the problem that a suit is made for a specific character.” “As a result, the fit will be unique. It’s animated in a particular way. It has physics made in a specific way — once again, for the first game’s custom size and gravity. This isn’t going to work in the second game.”
They said that these are just the first technical issues that such a concept would face before dealing with legal matters like intellectual property rights, not to mention the resources needed to make it all work.
“Just because something is intangible doesn’t mean it wasn’t created,” Sliwinski explained. Many game developers don’t have the financial or creative incentive to make the NFT dream of integration a reality.
