New observations on blockchain games

Blockchain games have always been an area I look forward to.

Although there are short-lived 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.

Token incentives seem to be difficult to sustain at present, so the above games are at most "episodes" in the field of blockchain games, and they are probably difficult to carry the banner of blockchain games.

In addition, there is another type of blockchain game that focuses on visual experience, fluency and other aspects. I think the space for this type of blockchain game is also very limited, because the areas they work on are the strengths of centralized servers, and blockchain technology is difficult to compete with them.

The blockchain game I look forward to more is that people can create a whole new world on the chain through games.

A team called Lattice once created a game that allows users to build independently on the Optimism second-layer extension. 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, that game was only a beta version, and the Lattice team subsequently terminated the development of this 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 have not seen any interesting new projects in the blockchain game track.

Recently, Bankless introduced two games that seemed to give 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 a very early stage. It may take until the first quarter of next year for users to create and implement various functions in the game on a large scale.

I tried this game and it felt very rough overall, and the relevant information was very poor. I played for a long time and even guessed some basic actions by myself. As for creating items and implementing the functions described in the game, I searched for a long time and didn't even see the shadow.

Another game is Eternum on Starknet (https://eternum.realms.world/).

This game evolved from an early Loot-like NFT project (Realms) 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 had died long ago, but I didn’t expect it to be alive and became 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 that of Biomes, allowing users to freely create new worlds in the game.

Both games are still very simple at present, and the functions they show are far from what they describe in the documents. Their current status is not worth discussing in detail. 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 game built by Roblox is just a building on the beach. No matter how beautiful it is, it is not solid. It cannot become a new world. Only with blockchain technology as the basis can we have a real new world.

Whether the autonomous world is a direction for chain games to break the circle, at least at present, I think I can't see any other possibility of breaking the circle except this direction. So I am very much looking forward to such projects to let us see amazing progress next year.