Marco Heimeshoff @[email protected]

I pitched this idea to Meta for @BeatSaber , but there are other games it could also work for. The Global Frequency The fuzzy abstract vision of the Metaverse, and cinematic visions like Ready Player One, almost always involve crowds of people having a great time. While I remain “the champion of the power of isolation”, I acknowledge that there is real value there, and VR has so far failed to deliver it. For a lot of reasons, it isn’t going to happen inside Horizon Worlds. I propose a concrete, focused experience built on Beat Saber. Playing with friends is great, but the random online servers are tough to match paid music packs on, and the current players tend to converge on Camillia songs, which is offputting for casual players. My suggestion: In addition to the current online play modes, offer a “global frequency” that plays a schedule of songs that an arbitrary number of people can join at once. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Actually, two frequencies: one with just the free tracks, and one with all the paid music packs. The schedule should be viewable in game and on the web, so you could decide to join when your favorite music pack is playing. The nature of Beat Saber offers a unique capability for multiplayer – you can switch difficulty or modifiers between songs at will, and still be playing with the same crowd. The song is forced, but it doesn’t matter how you play. This is key for the Global Frequency, but I would also suggest it as an option for regular multiplayer. In the 60 second intermission between songs, everyone is in “the club”. If you sit out a song, or fail out (and don’t have no-fail enabled), you also drop into the club. Music is always playing in the club, either the current song, or the hook from the song just completed, so everyone has something to move to. Beat Saber avatars are very lightweight, and it should be possible to render hundreds of them, giving a good palette to render the optimally cool crowd scene, which would be the core design question. It would be a fun tech challenge to represent the entire set of thousands of players, but just intelligently picking a hundred good neighbors would still look amazing. Any explicit friends you have that are also playing should be near you, and some effort should be made to allow you to “recognize regulars” that you have played together with before. You should probably be able to walk around and even fly up in the air like Walkabout Mini Golf so you can appreciate the crowd. There are leaderboards up in the sky, with spotlights and other effects highlighting players in the crowd. Someone “wins” the song on each difficulty level, and is celebrated, but everyone has the opportunity to achieve first-completions, personal bests, and full-combo perfection, which result in visible effects for all to see. Every intermission manifests joy for some of the players, which is contagious. The play field should default to the multi player field, with the giant avatar hologram of the global lead player (for your difficulty level), and the other players that were closest to you in score on the last song surrounding you, automatically giving you a competitive field and ephemeral rivalries, but there should be an option to let people play with the single player environments if they want. I would play the hell out of that, and I suspect potentially millions of others would too.