What I liked about it in general was the way it was very open to being used in ways the original designers never imagined. It gives the users a lot of freedom to implement their own games or activities on top of SL. I also liked the way this enabled them to have a very democratic approach on the selection of a lot of the artwork, using the best any user could make for skins, clothes, hair,...
What I didn't like very much was the limited support for bots (officially none) which was especially annoying in the context of roleplaying environments where you often have minor roles nobody really wants to play (e.g. city guards at the gate, servants,...) that would better be filled by automated or semi-automated avatars.
What was also annoying was the way some things that would have been easy to do for the makers of SL were hard to impossible for the users, e.g. using a custom mesh for the avatar or telling the game in some way about patterns in an object to make the game more efficient (e.g. the left half of this object is an exact mirror image of the right half or all these pillars look the same and there are 200 of them around the edge of the parcel in equal distances).
Another thing I would probably do very differently is the way servers are handled, in particular the equal size of all regions doesn't fit all uses very well, some might want sparsely populated deserts or forests and need more space per computing power consumed, others have very computing intense small places like e.g. dance clubs.
Of course there are also some technical issues like their scaling problems due to insisting on one large grid but those are probably boring to list and read.
Either way, I will probably never get to the point of making my own game anyway since it would be an effort of several man-years at least requiring several skills I don't possess besides the programming I do know.
I hope this post won't get too long if I continue after listing all my opinions about SL.
The main activities I would want in a new game are
- meeting new people for all kinds of activities in the game (possibly with some kind of match-making system so people with similar interests can find each other)
- roleplay in small groups, individual scenes in one location (e.g. one room or one house at most)
- roleplay in a medium-sized world, e.g. for scifi a colony on an alien planet or for fantasy a region with two or three villages
- live concerts (if you haven't seen any of those on SL there are some really good musicians on there
- social places (like the clubs in SL) to spend your time in a larger group of your old and new friends relaxing
For roleplay I do want to find a way to allow both adult roleplay (I liked the way how every group interested in any fetish could find their place on SL; even most of those not exactly tolerated in RL society; there are very few places like that even on the internet) and the more general kind. The ideal case would be to mix both of them freely as adult roleplay is much more fun if it is just part of a larger story with non-adult elements.
After playing some text-adventures recently and being in general very text-based in most of my computer interaction and roleplay I wonder whether it would be wise to include more text descriptions of items, people,... too. It is much easier to make a vivid and elaborate text description than to create the same mental image in actual 3d artwork.
As a last point I want to say that I tried some programming in Ogre3D to get started with some experiments to see how hard it is to make a game like that and I ran into a problem right away. Any game that should include adult parts needs attractive 3D models, at the very least one male and one female one to get started (well, for the absolute start one female one might do since lesbian relationships are relatively universally considered hot too but that wouldn't work for long, especially not with just one female model).
I tried to find a decent human 3D model that would allow redistribution with a game but most (free as well as commercial ones) are licensed in a way that only allows distribution of images and movies made using the model, not the model itself, which would be necessary for a game. I got some video tutorials and started working on a model of my own but I noticed I am not very good at it. If anyone is interested I might post some screenshots of the head (didn't get any further than that so far).
I believe this should be enough to give you a rough idea of what has been going through my mind about this game project but of course I left out many, many details. There probably won't be anyone to read this here anyway since I only made my account the other day. If you do and think it is interesting please leave a comment so I know posting more about it is worth the effort.
xoxo
PinkCrystal