How Blockchain MMORPG Cradles and its Time-Lapsing Virtual World Plans to Shake-Up Online Gaming
July 21 2022 - 3:57AM
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Blockchain-based technologies, as expressed by cryptocurrencies and
other forms of digital assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs), are
beginning to make their presence felt in many different industries.
While appearing little different on the surface from other types of
digital money, the excitement crypto and NFTs have generated
centres around their enabling features in digital transactions, in
particular with ownership management. NFTs, in their own right,
have attracted a lot of interest over the last two years owing to
the way they have allowed for the secure and authenticatable
transfer of physical items via the blockchain. Stripped down, NFTs
are simply tokens that represent unique assets. In the case of art
and collectibles, this proved to be a highly useful feature that
let people create NFTs representing unique and rare pieces of art
and culture. If you owned an NFT, you owned the creative rights to
a piece of art – verifiable by anyone just by cross-checking the
NFT data on a public ledger Yet NFTs in this form has barely
scratched the surface of what’s possible, particularly when dealing
with industries where non-fungibility and fungibility factors are
crucial aspects. Beyond Static NFT Use in Gaming Game developers
DRepublic, the team behind the upcoming MMORPG Cradles: Origin of
Species, are among those who believe that blockchain technology can
provide solutions that could spell groundbreaking innovations in
the gaming industry. While some gaming companies have already
dabbled in crypto and NFTs, they’ve so far been met with limited
success. High-profile NFT efforts have even resulted in a major
backlash from the gaming community. The ire drawn by NFT
experiments like that of Ubisoft can be traced back to the
simplistic implementation of NFTs in games, either as an
alternative currency or as a way to generate more money for the
company by generating even more “unique” items like skins. In other
words, NFTs in gaming so far have only served to further the
much-maligned “lootbox” mentality perceived by many gamers as
plaguing game developers. Cradles developers seek to move beyond
the static features of NFTs that have made them so popular among
speculators, by fine-tuning a new type of NFT token based on what
they call the EIP-3664 protocol (technically, it is simply a naming
of a proposal for a new set of rules on the blockchain), that
expands on existing NFT standards, ERC721 and ERC1155. The new
EIP3664 NFTs will allow all game elements to contain far more
information than regular NFTs, giving them many more attributes
that result in a variety of ways the game can interact with these
elements. In game-speak, this simply means that the entire game
world is made up of components that can be combined with or
separated from each other. Combinable game elements and a
time-lapsing virtual world Component NFTs can be described like
this. If characters, items, and even plants and animals are all
made up of component NFTs, it would be possible for a player to
fully create and participate in the world-building of a virtual
universe. For example, you would harvest raw materials from nature
and combine them to create tools and weapons bearing all the
different attributes of their individual components. Then, attach
these tools, weapons, clothes and even skills to a character and
that new character bears all the different attributes of all their
combined components. Similarly, you can break down an element into
all its separate components to recreate a virtually unlimited
combination of possible new items and characters. In effect, the
EIP-3664 protocol is set to make these digital assets more
customizable for Cradles players to shift and change their in-game
articles in unlimited ways by harvesting raw materials obtained by
exploring and going on adventures. Crucially, NFTs in Cradles will
also have evolvable attributes hard-coded into every component,
enabling all game elements to simulate the laws of time and physics
– something no virtual world has been able to properly implement.
DRepublic calls this effect “entropy-increase”. Using block time as
a stable basis for perpetual time lapsing, each game element
evolves gradually. Items rust, characters age, and buildings slowly
break down as block time passes, requiring the active intervention
of players to incentivize cooperation amongst players. Players will
be able to see their NFTs (as characters and even items) evolving
over time. Rather than the static standards of today, Cradles will
create a world in motion with its own changes, deterioration, and
progress. A game that insists on new experiences At the core of
Cradles is an open-world MMORPG with elements of the metaverse but
with an aim to expand on the conventional RPG experience. Cradles
players will experience a virtual reality game compatible with deep
immersion hardware that will enable them to play and interact with
other players at any species of their choosing. The game will
provide players with ultimate freedom, capacity for exploration,
and community building. Players will be able to explore different
areas in the game, a Main City and an Adventure Zone. In the
former, players will be able to explore and interact with other
players while in the latter, players will need to defend themselves
from potential hostilities and gather supplies from their
surroundings. The entire virtual world also ties into the spine of
the plot, where characters are sent far back in time from a doomed
future, seeking an answer to avoid a destiny of extinction. In this
way, exploration, research and discovery are the only ways to
further the world-building as Cradles hopes to be a game that
encourages and motivates new gaming experiences, to try and move
beyond the repetitive grinding spiral that most online RPGs tend to
end up with. Blockchain will have a say in the Future Of Gaming
Despite already raising significant funding for its development,
the team behind the project is keen to lay the foundations for an
open, decentralised community that will eventually result in a
self-sustaining game. Its growing community aren’t just considered
as gamers but as game creators. Even now, the game developers
continue to work on improving the overall gaming experience by
implementing new features, fixing bugs, and testing new
functionalities – following the direction and feedback of its
community online. Cradles players can position themselves today and
benefit from a sector destined to keep on expanding over time by
attracting new users to its ecosystem. Today, according to data
from Dapps Radar, the top 10 Blockchain games command over $700
million in assets with close to 1 million active players. Clearly,
there is interest and potential in more decentralised forms of
games that rely on community-based efforts to develop, particularly
when the relationship between gamers and traditional game
developers in recent years has been fraught with disappointment and
frustration. The games of tomorrow may not necessarily be all about
being able to earn cryptocurrencies and buy NFTs in the game. But
should blockchain technology provide the next true innovation,
enabling and unlocking new gameplay aspects that traditional games
have always lacked, it may very well be the gateway to the future
of gaming.
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