Will Second Life 2.0 beat the curse of the sequel?

If you missed M's keynote speech at SLCC, you can go look at his slides and write your own script, because I haven't seen a transcript yet! There's a lot of talk of new viewer layouts, and there's a lot of good info about SLCC 2009 over at New World Notes.

However the concern still remains, that sequels often aren't very good. Obviously there's The Empire Strikes Back, Godfather II and Max Payne 2, but all too often sequels end up leaving a sense of disappointment, such as Matrix Reloaded, From Dusk Till Dawn 2 and Jet Set Willy 2. Heck further down the line you get gash like The Phantom Menace and Godfather III but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

What's coming, we're not sure yet but viewer 2009 is on its way first. Earlier in the year Massively had a sneak peek, that was later denied by Linden Lab as being a sneak peek, However menus are being moved around, things will be moved and I have a good supply of pitchforks ready for when I can't easily find what I can easily find now or the viewer simply performs like a dog.....well 1,23 has hardly been a great viewer but they put groups back on the pie menu so my pitchfork went back into storage.

The new viewer is said to be more intuitive. I redesigned the helpdesk software at work to make the screens more intutive and less cluttered, let me warn Linden Lab right now, I got yelled at because it looked different. People get used to where things are and how they function, what's intuitive to a noob isn't pleasing for someone who is used to the layout. Of course I won that little battle because I'm the boss, but that's not the point! I had to supply coffee and chocolate and tell them to stop being so silly. People will complain about the new viewer. An option for a classic viewer layout would help there.

Then there's the issue of importing 3D mesh objects, this stuff is beyond me. Ignore the content that wouldn't be allowed on Xstreet used to demo the concept (and if City of Heroes had trouble with this, LL certainly would too) and focus on the concept...and maybe explain it to me if you have time! This looks kind of exciting but I seriously have no idea how that would be imported into Second Life as a functional object. I mean could that be used as an avatar?

Personally I long for the day when a really good combat system is here, or a day when I can pretend to be Usain Bolt in a Daley Thompson's decathlon type arena, without beating the crap out of my keyboard to make my avatar run that is. A day when football games have some fluidity and people can create their own little worlds with different systems whereby little worlds truly can have their own game engines, but I guess I'm years away from seeing that, but I can live in hope.