The Quality Evolution, MetaHuman, and Netflix's Nextworld: This Week in UGC
Welcome to the first full issue of This Week in UGC! If you missed our announcement, we’re Magnetik Gameworks, and we’re all about the evolving possibilities of gaming platforms like Fortnite and Roblox. If you’d like to learn more about us, visit us at the link above. Without further ado, let’s talk some games.
Let the quality evolution begin
Since it’s essentially our whole central thesis and reason for existing, it’s only appropriate that our first topic is all about quality. To set the foundation, as compared to AAA PC and console gaming, Fortnite and Roblox creators are working within narrowly focused toolsets. After all, the whole history of UEFN traces back to creating new ways to play Fortnite - not create entirely new games. Even still, what some creators managed to do, even from the early days, has been impressive.
But the quality shift is already beginning and is about to skyrocket. Considering just Fortnite, Epic’s recent State of Unreal at GDC 2024 made it clear that the expansion of UEFN and the growing number of non-shooter experiences from Epic is spurring a huge design evolution. If you’ve been out of the loop, Verse recently brought true progression persistence into Fortnite experiences, while Epic has also extended elements of their popular LEGO Fortnite and Rocket Racing into the UEFN toolset for all creators to use. Then there’s MetaHuman, which you might hear more about very soon…
With updates like this, the list of possibilities for higher quality, diverse game design options has expanded much more quickly than most Fortnite creators have been able to keep up with. For example: persistence means RPG-like character progression and questing are now possible, LEGO Fortnite shows the potential for huge crafting or survival games, Rocket Racing enables experiences that could include on-foot and vehicular gameplay…the list goes on. And with a growing alignment to the core Unreal Engine toolset and increasing development on UEFN from Epic themselves, it’s easy to imagine this evolution happening even faster moving forward.
Here’s the challenge: Fortnite creators used to a limited toolset and game design scope focused on third-person shooters could quickly find their knowledge outpaced. At the same time, game makers creating on Fortnite for the first time may completely miss what kinds of games the Fortnite community wants to play. Moving forward, possessing only one of these skillsets isn’t going to be enough. Great Fortnite experiences are going to be driven by the creators with insight into the Fortnite ecosystem and playerbase, and the designers who can take popular mainstream game design and translate it successfully into the UEFN toolset. And that’s not necessarily an easy task.
We will, without a doubt, be talking about quality much more in the future as creators test and find success with these expanding toolsets. We’ll even have a quick highlight of some cool Roblox news later in this very newsletter.
MetaHuman - It’s not just a pretty face
Meet Meg. Meg was created in MetaHuman in about three minutes. Cool. So, um, what now?
If you’ve followed Unreal Engine news recently, you may already know all about Epic’s free character creation toolset. If you missed more recent news from GDC 2024, Epic has also made it possible to import MetaHuman creations into UEFN projects. But it’s not necessarily clear from the current state of UEFN projects why that matters. In short, it’s a shortcut to a lot more than unique faces.
Unique = quality: One of the most critical needs for UEFN projects right now is more diversity, including how the games look at feel. Gone are the days where everything needs to exist in the confines of Fortnite BR. MetaHuman ensures that new projects don’t need to look like every other project on the platform.
NPCs: Creators who lean into NPCs in their projects are going to be a step ahead of everyone else. NPCs can enable everything from quest-givers to enemies. For those super important NPC characters, a well-designed MetaHuman is an excellent option.
Storytelling: Bringing single-player or narrative-focused games into Fortnite is a huge opportunity, and MetaHuman makes that considerably easier, especially with adjacent tools like MetaHuman Animator. This could lead to high quality cinematics and cutscenes.
Beyond all the individual applications, the overall MetaHuman toolset also streamlines a huge number of individual processes usually needed for character rigging and animation. If you’re a creator hoping to create a character outside of UEFN, converting it to a MetaHuman means a fully prepared character rig that can be used with MetaHuman Animator and more.
Netflix Nextworld - The next generation of branded Roblox experiences?
Huge news last week as Netflix dropped Netflix Nextworld, an expansive branded space that they call “your central hub in the Netflix universe.” It’s a big pitch: a Netflix theme park, constantly updated, where fans’ favorite characters come together and players can quest through their worlds, hang out with their friends, and collect exclusive cosmetics. They’re even planning watch parties and exclusive premieres - May 17th will see the first foray with a Jurassic World limited-time event.
The structure is pretty smart: alongside the main Nextworld hub, major experiences like One Piece: East Blue Brawls (the very first One Piece content on Roblox…right?) exist as separate game pages branded as “a Netflix Nextworld Experience.” The vision certainly seems to be an ever-growing web of Netflix branded experiences.
Ambitious! For an entertainment brand as huge as Netflix, the scope is appropriately huge as well. But as with all branded experiences on Roblox, ambition and scope will need to translate into players, and Nextworld is off to a slow start. As of this writing, the main Nextworld hub has 70 active players, One Piece has about 600 (with an impressive 1.5M visits), Stranger Things comes in at about 40, and the Rebel Moon game has…zero. Player feedback has been mixed as well. While the main Nextworld hub is labeled as “early access” and each of the connected games comes with a “beta” tag, Netflix will need a strong player attraction strategy to achieve the player counts they’re likely looking for.
Numbers aside, the quality shift - especially for Stranger Things - is quite remarkable. It’s a first-person perspective that leverages excellent environment design and props to create dark and moody high school hallways. It plays somewhat like the exploration and investigation of a game like Phasmophobia and the spooky avoidance of the Amnesia series. From the game design perspective, it just may not include enough of the gameplay styles that Roblox players tend to enjoy (imagine if they had done Stranger Things RP!).
We’ll see if the word spreads and the games get more popular, but it’s nice to see such a well-conceived branded experience on Roblox.
A quick note in conclusion: gamesindustry.biz just posted a great article about Why LEGO sees its gaming future in Fortnite. We’ll be back next week to dive into why LEGO won’t be the last to say this.