If you build it they will come – eventually.

According to this article on Gamasutra many developers in Asia are licensing the Big World MMO engine:

BigWorld is the creator of the BigWorld Technology Suite, an integrated set of tools, software and systems that provides all of the underlying technology and content development tools required to produce an MMOG. The company has licensed their technology for use in more than 43 different upcoming games, often Asian-developed MMOs, including Shen Mue Online, Citizen Zero, and a number of other unannounced titles.

For those unfamiliar with it, BigWorld was developed in Australia in partnership with the government by Microforte (best known for Fallout Tactics)...

Here are a few blurbs from the company’s web site:

The BigWorld Client is highly customizable, having been designed with an easily extensible modular layout that facilitates the integration of externally developed libraries such as physics engines. Adherence to industry standard languages such as Python, HTTP & XML gives developers ready access to engine code and makes custom tool creation & modification simple and accessible.

Here's more on the server tech:

The revolutionary BigWorld™ Technology server utilises a dynamic load balancing infrastructure to remove the arbitrary zone limitations implicit in conventional MMOG server technology. BigWorld's server infrastructure assigns and reassigns servers to game world areas (Cells) based on CPU usage. The server infrastructure is constantly monitoring CPU usage in the game world and is constantly balancing server resource allocation to optimise coverage throughout the entire game world. Conventional MMOG server technology on the other hand uses a static server infrastructure that imposes arbitrary restrictions on players by coercing them into one shard or another. Player interaction between shards is impossible. These shards are further broken down into zones of a fixed size. Passage between zones is possible, but only by interrupting game play while the new zone is loaded on the client.

If any of our contributors or readers have any experience good or bad with Big World we would like to hear about it.