Blockchain gaming has always been an area that I am very much looking forward to.
Although there are short-lived popular games on various public chains from time to time, they are basically inseparable from token incentives. Once the token incentive mechanism is removed, the remaining gameplay, experience and fun of the game will be difficult to match with traditional Internet games.
However, it seems that token incentives are difficult to sustain for the time being, so the above games are at most just "small episodes" in the field of blockchain games, and they may find it difficult to carry the banner of blockchain games.
In addition, there is another type of blockchain games that focus on visual experience, fluency, etc. I think the space for this type of blockchain games is also very limited, because the areas they focus on are the strengths of centralized servers, and blockchain technology is difficult to compete with them.
What I am most looking forward to in blockchain games is that people can create a whole new world on the chain through games.
A team called Lattice once created a game on the Optimism second-layer extension that allows users to build their own games. In the game, a team announced the establishment of the "Crypto Republic".
This game once caused a sensation among a small group of geeks, and I also introduced it in the article.
Lattice calls this type of game Autonomous World.
Unfortunately, the game was only a beta version, and the Lattice team subsequently terminated the development of the game. However, they did not give up the goal of building an autonomous world, but instead focused on the construction of game infrastructure and the development of tools. In addition, they also built a second-layer extension Redstone based on Ethereum, and positioned this chain specifically for building an autonomous world.
But since then, I haven’t seen any interesting new projects in the blockchain gaming field.
Recently, Bankless introduced two games, which gave me a glimmer of hope.
One of them is Biomes (https://biomes.aw/).
This game is built on Redstone. It uses many components and tools developed by the Lattice team, allowing users to freely create their own "items" in the game and give these "items" various functions.
The game is still in its very early stages, and it will probably take until the first quarter of next year before users can truly create and implement various functions in the game on a large scale.
I tried the game and it felt very crude and the relevant information was very scarce. I played for a long time and even some basic actions were guessed by myself. As for creating items and realizing the functions described in the game, I couldn't find any trace of it.
Another game is Eternum on Starknet (https://eternum.realms.world/).
This game evolved from an early NFT project (Realms) similar to Loot on Ethereum. At that time, I bought its NFT and mortgaged it.
But since then, I have forgotten about this project. After so many years, I thought this project was dead, but it is still alive and has become a more popular game on Starknet, and was even mentioned by Bankless.
The route of this project is very similar to that of Biomes. The goal is to build an autonomous world on the chain. The core gameplay is also very similar to Biomes, allowing users to freely create new worlds in the game.
Both games are still very rudimentary, and the features they demonstrate are far from what they describe in the documentation. Their current status is not worth talking about in detail, but what makes them valuable and meaningful to me is that the direction they are moving in is the direction I have always expected, and they have been working hard in that direction for so many years.
In fact, there are similar games in traditional games, and the most well-known one is Roblox. But I always feel that the games built by Roblox are just buildings on the beach. No matter how beautiful they are, they are not solid and cannot become a new world. Only with blockchain technology as the basis can we have a real new world.
Regardless of whether the autonomous world is a direction for blockchain games to break out of the circle, at least at the moment, I think apart from this direction, I don’t see any other possibilities for breaking out of the circle. So I am very much looking forward to such projects to show us amazing progress next year.