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Next Island
Next Island is a 3D open-world sci-fi MMORPG and is one of the planets that make up the Entropia Universe. The game features a virtual world with a real economy system where players can live any life they choose and play anyway they want with the option to convert in-game currency to real-world cash.
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Publisher: Next Island LLC, MindArk Playerbase: Medium Type: 3D Sci-Fi MMORPG Release Date: December 10, 2010 Pros: +Great visuals. +Real economy system. +In-game currency can be converted to real-world cash. +Flexible open-world sandbox gameplay. +Play your way. Cons: -Pay-to-win elements. -Progression is slow for non-cash depositors. -Grindy gameplay. |
Next Island Overview
Live the virtual life and make a name for yourself as one of the new colonists sent to Next Island, a new planet in the Entropia Universe. Explore a vast tropical planet featuring a variety of environments, including tropical cities and extravagant resorts, beaches, lagoons, waterfalls, mountains, jungles, and deserts, as well as a cave that can transport you to Ancient Greece. Earn real-world money through the game’s real cash economy system by taking on various tasks, quests, missions such as hunting dangerous wildlife, working on an oil rig, and mining. Use your hard-earned cash to learn hundreds of skills, purchase equipment, and buy property. If you have the cash and necessary skills and equipment, you can set up your own business, rent a shop, and peddle your services to anyone in need. You can also purchase land and other properties to do with as you wish, or invest in shares that pay regular dividends. If PvP is your thing, you can buy or build your own spaceship to plunder and loot other space explorers as a space pirate. You can travel across the planet in a variety of vehicles or offer to give other players a ride for a fee. Your imagination is the only limit to what you can do and achieve!
Next Island Key Features:
- Real Economy System – currency earned in the game doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. Project Entropia Dollars (PED) have real value and circulates just like real-world currencies and can even be converted to real-world cash.
- Vast Open-World – explore a lush tropical planet teeming with life, with little to no restrictions on what you can or can’t do. You can also travel to other planets in the Entropia Universe.
- In-Depth Character Creation – customize your avatar with a large array of options from hairstyle and color to more minute details like eye size, nose length, and ear position.
- Flexible Sandbox Gameplay – play the game your way. Go on MMORPG-style quests like hunting boars, plunder and loot other players as a space pirate, spend your time partying in clubs, or use your entrepreneurial skills to open and run your own business.
- Buy and Own Property – make enough money and you can purchase a piece of land to build a house on, a shop, a club, a resort, or whatever tickles your fancy. You can also just leave the land as it is and still earn from taxes levied on other players mining or hunting within it.
Next Island Screenshots
Next Island Featured Video
Next Island Review
By Marc Marasigan
Back in the day, if we wanted to earn money from playing MMORPGs, we resorted to real-money trading, or RMT. Unfortunately, RMT is frowned upon in some games and illegal in most. But, what if you could earn real money without breaking the rules the shady dealings associated with RMT’s? Entropia Universe lets you do just that, a virtual sci-fi universe that features a real-world economy where in-game currency, called Project Entropia Dollars (PED), actually circulates among the population through trades (buying and selling), auctions, taxes, and as payment for services offered to other players. Real money doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, so why should it be different in games? You can even opt to cash-out and convert your hard-earned PED into real money at a fixed conversion rate of 10 PED to 1 US dollar, or you can deposit real-cash in exchange for PEDs.
Welcome to Next Island
Next Island is one of the planets that make up this universe, a lush tropical planet with pristine beaches, lofty mountains, tranquil lagoons, massive waterfalls, dense jungles, green meadows, and a cave that lets you time travel back to Ancient Greece. The game features a regular day/night cycle with four hours of daylight and an hour of night.
At ten years old, Next Island’s visuals still look great compared to more recently-released games which is to be expected of a game that runs on CryTek’s CryEngine 2. Turn on max graphic settings and climb a mountain to get a breathtaking view of the beaches and surrounding areas, or kick back and relax by the beach as you watch the sun set on the horizon. The audio and sound effects are crisp and on point but I usually just turn the sound off after a while. Repeatedly hearing the same laser pistol sound and animal screeches for hours on end can be a bit annoying.
Make It Rain, Or Not…
As a member of the second wave of Elysian colonizers, players are tasked with searching for missing Elysians that were part of the first wave of colonists that arrived on the planet. Along the way, players will be helping out with a variety of tasks, from hunting local wildlife, delivering messages, and repairing broken equipment. Of course, the main goal is to make as much PEDs as you can and make a name for yourself in the virtual world, but everybody has to start from somewhere, right?
Compared to other games, earning in-game currency is immensely harder in Next Island, or any other planet in Entropia for that matter. Apparently, animal sweat is a prized commodity in Entropia which means that collecting sweat from the local wildlife will be your bread and butter for the next couple of weeks or so. Earning money is literally a “daily grind” in this game and the NPCs can be very stingy when it comes to rewarding in-game currency for completing quests. My first eight hours in the game were mainly spent “sweating” boars and pappoos, or monkeys as I like to call them, before killing them for loot, and all I got was a measly 1 PED for the effort.
The starting quests will task you with hunting a certain number of monsters or collecting a set number of hard-to-acquire monster drops. One of the first quests required me to collect 50 Animal Hides in exchange for a shirt. Killed over 50 boars, got two hides, and just gave up. It doesn’t help that it takes a while to kill a mob and uses up your precious ammunition in the process. You can also earn PED by selling resources you get from mining. Mining, however, also requires a special type of ammo.
Fight or Flight
Combat in Next Island is pretty straightforward and makes use of a typical tab-targeting system. Select your target and blast away with your weapon or sweat collector, press tab to move on to the next target, and repeat. Mobs, however, are a bit tougher to beat compared to other MMORPGs simply because you won’t be able to get a new weapon unless you save up for it. Ammunition is also hard to come by and is a precious commodity in the early stages of the game.
It takes about 5 or 6 shots to kill a starting mob, which uses up around .05 PED worth of ammo per kill. I killed about 30 “monkeys” and earned loot worth .40 PED after which I had to purchase more ammo for .50 PED. You do have the ability to recycle ammo “shrapnel” and convert them to regular ammo but the amount you loot seems to vary with each monster you kill. I would regularly run out of ammo while doing hunting quests and and couldn’t afford to buy more, so I had to resort to sweating them instead before making a run for it.
To make matters worse, all monsters are aggressive in the game. Once they’ve got you in their sights they’ll follow you to the ends of the planet to take you down. Make sure to keep your distance and keep an eye on your surroundings or risk being chased by the stubbornest pack of mobs you’d ever seen. Jumping into the ocean seems to shake them off, though. Just be on the lookout for sharks. Of course, you do get slowly stronger as you progress through the game, level up your skills and weapons, and buy more powerful gear. You can also invest real-world cash to give you a little bit of seed money to buy powerful gear right from the start. The biggest problem here though is that while tougher enemies can yield much greater rewards, weaker enemies often cost more in ammo than they yield in rewards. This means players will need to keep pouring cash into the game just to restock up on ammo or resort to sweating animals for hours on end.
The Color Of Money
The game becomes a lot more entertaining once you successfully slog past the initial stages of the game and start raking in PEDs. It also becomes more lucrative. Save up for new tools and equipment that will allow you to earn even more PED by offering a variety of services, including mining, crafting, tailoring, medical services, body-sculpting, or even chauffeuring other players around. The game features a flexible classless skill system that will allow you to be anyone you want to be. Simply pick a skill you want to work on and use it until it levels up. Your imagination is the limit, just keep in mind that some skills are more in demand than others.
Once you have enough cash, you can start thinking about investing in property or shares in Entropia. You can buy an apartment for about 1000 PED to show off your in-game memorabilia, host house parties, or just to have a place to call your own in the virtual world. Or, you can use your entrepreneurial skills to open up your own shop to sell in-game items or services. You can also purchase a piece of land and turn it into a resort, a bar, or just leave it as it is and earn PED from taxes levied on player micro-transactions within its boundaries, such as mining or hunting mobs. Again, it all boils down to how you want to play the game, but in Entropia, as in the real world, ive income is the best way to go.
One Entropia player even mortgaged his house for $100,000 to buy a space asteroid and turn it into a club called Neverdie. He eventually sold Neverdie for more than $600,000 dollars in a deal that landed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “Most Expensive Virtual Object Sold”. That player, Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs is now the founder and CEO of NEVERDIE Studios, the same studio that developed Next Island.
Final Verdict - Good
Next Island offers a unique take on MMORPGs and virtual worlds by giving players the ability to earn real-world money by simply playing a game. The virtual world, Second Life, offers the same mechanics, but while Second Life’s Linden Dollars conversion rates vary depending on supply and demand, Next Island’s PED remains fixed at 10 PED/$1. Next Island also offers a gameplay experience much closer to an MMORPG than its competitor. The only drawback is the intense grinding needed to start ively earning PED. The game is also dominated by Depositors who exchange real-world cash for in-game currency. That being said, the game is well-built and entertaining to a point. If you like grinding and have dreams of earning money while playing a game, then Next Island is definitely a winner and well worth checking out. Keep in mind though, the vast majority of players will never earn any meaningful income from the game, but I’ll definitely be checking back on my character once in a while with the hope of making it big.
Next Island Screenshots
Next Island Videos
Next Island Links
Next Island Official Site
Entropia Universe Official Site
Entropia Universe Wikipedia Page
Next Island Facebook Page
Next Island Wiki
Next Island Subreddit
Next Island System Requirements
Minimum Requirements:
Operating System: Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.x. or Windows 10
U: Intel i3 or equivalent
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 Series or better / ATI Radeon 1900 series or better
RAM: 4 GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 20 GB available space
Direct X: Version 9.0c
Recommended Requirements:
Operating System: Windows 10 64 Bit (latest Service Pack)
U: Intel i5 or equivalent
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Series or better / ATI Radeon 2900 series or better
RAM: 8 GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 20 GB available space
Direct X: Version 9.0c
*Requirements are similar to Entropia Universe.
Next Island Music & Soundtrack
Coming soon!
Next Island Additional Information
Developer: Next Island LLC
Publisher: Next Island LLC, MindArk
Platforms: PC
Engine: CryEngine 2
Open Beta: December 7-8, 2010
Official Release: December 10, 2010
Development History / Background:
Next Island is a 3D open-world sci-fi MMORPG and one of the planets in Swedish-developer MindArk’s massively multiplayer online virtual world, Entropia Universe. The game is developed and published by NEVERDIE Studios, a development studio founded by Entropia Universe player and celebrity, Jon “Neverdie Jacobs”.
Jacobs is known for purchasing an in-game space asteroid for $100,000 and turning it into a vast resort nightclub called Neverdie, one of the most popular areas in the game. He made headlines a few years later when he sold the virtual property for over half a million dollars which he used to fund the development of Next Island.
Next Island was first announced in November 2009 followed by a closed beta test in December of the same year. This was followed by a short open beta period from December 7-8, 2010 just a few days before the game officially launched on December 10, 2010.