I heard the description of a 3d virtual world game you played with a low poly count and voice chat and I immediately though of DigitalSpace Traveler. There were a few online games with 3d environments back in the late 90's and early 2000's so I might be off but does this image look familiar?
haha holy crap, that's it I think. Crazy! I was on there. A lot.
It might still be active, though for arcane reasons known only to the gods of the days of yore it doesn't seem to like my machine.
always wanted an excuse to fire up ye olde packard bell pentium 133 with windows 98 OEM SR2 in the garage.. that's probably about the right genre.
Windows 98 on a Packard Bell 133? Sacrilege! Windows 95 is the only proper OS for such a beautiful creature lol.
lucky you, the only machine I have that could perhaps run this is a pentium 3 that operates as my email server. Can't exactly take that one offline.
In an earlier episode you said something about making some of the game servers have riddles to get to the server, this could be like that challenge. Anybody with the resourcefulness or breadth of collection could hang with tek syndicate in DigitalSpace Traveler. It's an idea so stupid it might just work!