The first guideline for creating a blockchain game is to refrain from discussing the technology. Yet first…
Top gaming news this past week:
The reviews of Microsoft’s Starfield were positive.
Sony’s response to the Switch is PlayStation Portal.
After a restriction was lifted, a popular game was played in India.
A seasoned Chinese gamer is back
Since the failure of Axie Infinity, investors and creators of cryptocurrency games have been attempting to create a game that doesn’t appear to be a platform for dubious financial speculation.
Up until the trillion-dollar crypto market implosion over the past year, the promise of wealth was sufficient to keep these games alive for a while. Spaceships, pixelated avatars, and digital real estate were going for absurd sums of money. But players are also seeing that many of these games aren’t all that entertaining to play, on top of the fading promises of cryptocurrency fortune.
That final problem seems to be addressed by at least one new game. At a cost of $5 million, the game MetaCene has been in development in China for about two years.
A week-long test of the game that ended in August attracted 3,000 participants, the majority of whom were hooked. According to Tan Qunzhao, who oversees a team of 60 developers creating the action role-playing game, two-thirds of them kept playing for the entire week, logging in for an average of 2.5 hours every day.
Ten years after leaving Shanda Games, a Shanghai-based studio that released Final Fantasy XIV and Dungeons & Dragons Online in China, Tan began working on MetaCene. He claimed that earlier games in the gamefi, or game-finance, genre were doomed by poor game design.
The idea was that gamefi players only participated for financial gain and not for enjoyment, according to Tan. But that was simply a result of the developers’ decision to prioritize the “fi” rather than the “game.”
Players are given a sword, a set of gauntlets, or an electromagnetic pistol by MetaCene to begin their journey in a post-apocalyptic world. Gundam-like world bosses and grinding dungeons in teams of four are how you level up. Mining crystals can be done even when not looking at the screen to gain currency.
Tan played the game on his laptop for me while I was unable to play it. For better or worse, many current online games have similarities to MetaCene. The player-versus-player battle system is modeled after the Legend of Mir 2, which Tan helped promote in China while working at Shanda. Additionally, some of the parkour objectives are comparable to those I struggled with in Guild War 2.
Not everyone will enjoy MetaCene. Since it’s free to play, several aspects could seem like money grabs. Tan’s business takes a share of any cryptocurrency exchanged between gamers. After gaining the support of companies like Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures, he intends to seek an additional $8 million from venture capitalists to assist development.
Although there is still a long way to go for this game, the initial response demonstrates that a strong game with a crypto component is preferable to a crypto economy with a game attached to it.
Games to Play
A Chinese independent firm has released the narrative-driven adventure game A Guidebook of Babel. Through the eyes of four crew members and passengers, you witness mysteries develop aboard a ghost starship and use the butterfly effect to travel back in time to attempt to change events. Think of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction when playing this game, which does a decent job with parallel tales and has a distinctive art style.
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