I can’t believe it’s that time of the year again. I want to start by celebrating all our achievements in 2023. We started the year strong by listing HIGH on KuCoin, bringing liquidity to those outside of Binance’s service regions. This was quickly followed by the launch of the world’s first phygital wine shop on Highstreet Campus. The NFTOO Wine Shop gave us the opportunity to deliver a booze-filled Valentine’s Day to our players around the world, while providing us with the experience and knowledge of dealing with global liquor logistics.
In spring, we launched our second IHO with the Animoca All-Terrain Trailer, celebrating the Animoca Archipelago region in Highstreet World. The IHO sale was followed by our very first phygital event: we conducted an online racing rally in tandem with the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix.
https://youtu.be/wrkCDADcgbA?si=DB5FsV1kYsAOwVz4
The phygital event not only gave our community members around the world an experience of a lifetime to participate front and center in the world’s most prestigious motorsports race, but also gave our team members a rare opportunity to engage with the community on a personal level in real life.
Midway through 2023, we announced our partnership with Mandopop superstar Jay Chou’s streetwear brand PHANTACi, resonating across not just the crypto community but Mandopop fans all over the world. Forging ahead with the Mandopop trend, we decided to leverage JJ Lin’s Arc Community as a venue to soft launch the VR version of Highstreet Labs during TOKEN2049.
As Halloween came along, we celebrated our spooky tradition with the addition of the Forbidden TALON Temple on Highstreet Campus. Our collaboration with wildcard team PSG Talon marked Highstreet’s first steps into e-sports, an industry with the fastest-growing fan base and major crossovers with the web3 community.
Embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjRAockDGHI
Finally, in December, we ended the year strong with our thunderous entry into the Korean market with our Bithumb listing. Korea is home to the best e-sports players in the world, and has the highest percentage of gamers by population. Making our mark here was a significant form of validation for our gaming and web3 thesis. We now have absolutely no doubt that we’re the right team to bring a truly decentralized metaverse to life.
Even with all that we’ve accomplished in 2023, I still have to apologize for deviating from our original milestones set at the beginning of the year. Part of it was due to market forces leading us to rethink our timeline, but more importantly, we realized that in order to achieve the experience we’ve set out to deliver, a ton of new technology is going to have to be built. I will highlight these developments in this article and the challenges they’ll solve for us in 2024.
Technology #1 — The Highstreet Wallet
Yes, yes, there are thousands of wallets out there, and everyone is advertised to be a game changer and revolutionary. Our need for Highstreet’s own wallet, however, came from the necessity of creating a new account system for Highstreet players. You see, Meta Quest currently has the biggest global VR market share by a major margin. Our thesis is to enter this nascent field with our dream MMO and claim as much of this market share as possible, then simply grow and scale along with Meta, i.e. leave the adoption problem to them. The problem is that Meta is a walled garden, and does not allow MetaMask or Coinbase Connect extensions to interact with its native applications. So, in order for us to build a seamless user experience for our VR MMO, we’re going to have to build a wallet that can be natively accessed within a Meta Quest app.
As our development team began tackling this issue, we realized the cost-benefit of designing a wallet just for VR probably wasn’t the most economical, so we quickly decided to go into full product design mode and come up with a wallet that addresses all our major concerns as web3 gamers.
First, the wallet must be cross-platform, easily accessible not just on VR, but also browser and mobile. Second, the wallet must be Soulbound, allowing you the ability to gain gamer experience points in the form of non-transferable social tokens. This means that your work and effort in one game can potentially translate to rewards and achievements in other games, along with the possibility to receive NFT airdrops and qualify for token-gated events. Finally — and this is very important — the wallet should help prevent accidents or mistakes from costing you your entire balance. Highstreet Wallet’s dummy system automatically creates a burner address whenever you connect to an unverified site. Based on our research, the majority of scam victims fall for phishing attacks from fake sites; this can easily be prevented if we have a dummy account standing between you and the potential scammer.
With these ambitious goals in mind, our blockchain team spent most of the year prototyping and testing a new type of wallet based on Account Abstraction, or ERC4337. We are happy to announce that the Highstreet Wallet MVP is ready, and we will begin integrating it with the game in the coming months. The wallet will first launch as the backbone of Highstreet’s gaming experience, serving both as your login account and as a container for your in-game inventory, before expanding to support other games. The goal is to have the wallet as the entry point to our very own appchain that will not only differentiate an on-chain MMO from traditional gaming, but demonstrate why it’s superior.
Technology #2 — The Smart NPC network
One of the biggest challenges we face in the metaverse industry is the cold start adoption problem. Aside from Roblox and Fortnite, most metaverses resemble ghost towns. This is because most digital worlds don’t give players a reason to continually be in them. There is only so much novelty you can introduce to the world until a true game loop needs to be implemented to drive retention. Highstreet’s MMO element solves this problem by introducing a shared path toward progression for all players, but we recognize that our initial VR player base might still be too small to truly make the world feel alive.
To address this, we first introduced our commerce layer, built-in city centers designed to be cross-platform and accessible through the browser, so that casual players can interact and provide value for our VR explorers who are on the front lines. Next, we built a hive mind powered by GPT-4 to breathe life into all of Highstreet’s NPCs. Code-named project Eywa, after the living planet of Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar, this project feeds personality and ancestry data into every FOMO Duck NPC in the game. The hive mind structure allows NPCs to share information with one another based on their personality and familial settings, and GPT4’s large language model allows them to not only converse with players in a natural format but also learn and acquire new information about the outside world. Furthermore, an adaptive memory model built into each Duck provides a path for players to increase friendliness with individual NPCs. This means if you have a good relationship with the weaponsmith Duck, perhaps you’ll get a discount on the next sword you buy.
While this project is still in its early test phases, we can already see the new methods of storytelling that are now on the table. Highstreet World will continue to evolve along with the player base as the entire network of NPCs collectively grows and adapts to the community, making the metaverse more vibrant over time.
Technology #3 — Game Design
While not in the realm of “hard technology,” the current landscape of VR leaves much to be desired. To address this, an enormous amount of game design time and engineering resources need to be put into testing and reimagining new user experiences that aren’t just copied and pasted from the previous era of gaming. A quick glance through the Meta Quest store led us to the conclusion that the current VR gaming market can be divided into three main categories: arcade-style mini-games like Beat Saber and Pistol Whip, single-player narratives like Red Matter and Vader Immortal, and VR versions of popular FPS games including Population: ONE, Fortnite, Onward, Call of Duty, and so on.
All of these VR games are incredible innovations, but lack the depth in gameplay to become timeless classics like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Doom. There are a few games that break away from these categories, like a handful of MMOs — OrbisVR: Reborn, A Township Tale, and Zenith: The Last City. While we have a massive amount of respect for them, we feel like a truly native VR MMO should be so much more.
As an example, let’s examine locomotion. In order for us to build a world with depth and rewarding movement mechanics, we have to look beyond established tropes in VR gaming. Climbing in Population: ONE feels amazing, but it only works in a sandbox environment. Completely owning the z-axis (or y-axis, depending on your perspective) takes away from some of the potential mystery and excitement we can put into level design. Standard Xbox-style movements like those in Onward or Pavlov get us engaged right away, with little to no learning curve, limiting player movements to simply walking and crouching. However, that closes the door on all the other mobility possibilities like sliding, vaulting, swinging from vines, and all the other actions you expect in a virtual world. Our team aims to address this in our upcoming playtest events.
Our goal is to begin sharing developmental journeys with everyone starting in Q2 2024. The game design team will create video explainers for the mechanics we’ve implemented and showcase how they impact the current landscape of virtual reality.
Roadmap for 2024
Given the complexity of what we’re building, we’ve decided to break things down into bite-sized projects. In order to be accurate in our projections and to keep ourselves accountable, here’s our development pipeline for the year.
Project Paradise
Project Paradise builds upon the adventure mobility system described above. After Adventure Mobility gave us the building blocks of Highstreet World’s level design, Project Paradise puts it together in a sandbox environment where players can experience a tutorial followed by navigating two or three blocked-out areas to fully immerse themselves in Highstreet World’s mobility mechanics. We aim to complete the design for Project Paradise by mid-March, and our engineering team expects to take it to completion by the beginning of April.
Project Agency
Project Agency is developed in parallel with Project Paradise and consists of the entire UX layer of the game. This includes everything from how the in-game menu looks to the way earning achievements make you feel. The design team aims to complete all aspects of Project Agency by the start of Q2 and will perform continuous testing and update cycles until the public release.
Project Battlefield
As the name suggests, Project Battlefield is all about combat. Highstreet World is filled with dangerous monsters lurking just outside the safety of our city walls. Battlefield will cover everything from monster aggro, HP/MP/damage balancing, combat planning and communications, and MMO class design — all to create an “Easy2Learn, Hard2Master” combat system. The design is slated to be completed at the end of summer 2024, with engineering aiming to wrap near the end of Q3.
Project Worldforge
Projects Paradise, Agency, and Battlefield all focus on the player, while Project Worldforge is where Highstreet World as an environment truly comes to life. Worldforge focuses on tools and systems that encapsulate everything from weather patterns to quest creation. It involves the integration of our Project Eywa AI system that will power every NPC you meet in the game. Worldforge is also where our event system will come online so that we can bring together our community from all over the world, whether they’re on PC or VR, to join us for special celebrations and activities. The design phase for Worldforge is set to be completed by the end of September, and then our engineering team aims to bring it all home by Christmas 2024.
As ambitious as it seems, the projects have already been broken down into weekly sprints. Last week, our engineering and design teams began their year-long expedition to improve and build out Highstreet World. Meanwhile, the drop and smart contract teams are working on a four-month timeline to launch the Highstreet Wallet system, where many unique opportunities will be available for both HIGH and FOMO Duck holders.
In 2023, we built the foundations for where we are today. 2024 is the year when everyone in the Highstreet community will get to enjoy the fruit of that labor.
Travis
About Highstreet:
Highstreet is a commerce-centered metaverse integrating shopping with gaming. While products from brands bring an endless supply of cosmetics, bridging character customizations with real world fashion, an MMORPG backbone further adds utility to them, allowing players to craft unique NFTs to either profit or elevate their gameplay. As Highstreet’s phygital products continue to gain traction both online through E-commerce storefronts like Shopify and offline through various department stores around the world, Highstreet’s Metaverse grows steadily through land sales to brand partners; accumulating new stories to be shared and discovered by players around the world.
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