We had a the honor of connecting with the Ember Sword development team for a quick interview.
Can you tell me a bit of background about you and your team? What inspired you to get into blockchain / crypto games?
Our entire core team comes from a background in the games industry, where we have worked on everything from indie games to commercial/AAA games such as Guild Wars, Aquanox, Kaos Wars, Blitzkrieg, and more. Our team covers every part of game development, from programmers and artists to marketing and business, and part of the team have also been making game development tools for several years, with over 100,000 game development customers.
Our core team is supported by several expert industry Advisors providing input on everything from business, blockchain, and tokennomics, to games design and monetization.
Tell me about how the vision for Ember Sword came about. What inspired you to make a game like this?
Games have always been a big part of our lives, and right from the early days of MMORPGs, we’ve all been captivated by the vast universes these games provided us. This sadly also means we’ve all felt the frustration of never actually owning any of the items we spent thousands of hours and hundreds of dollars collecting in-game, and of always being limited by the universes the developers decided to create instead of being active participants in shaping the future of the game world.
That’s what we want to change with Ember Sword.
In Ember Sword, we enable the players to shape the vast in-game universe as Landowners, and rare cosmetics in scarce supply, like skins, emotes, and capes are gathered through gameplay objectives instead of bought from us – not to mention that players literally own these cosmetics, and they’re thus allowed to sell them to others directly within the game.
What is the basic gameplay, story, and marketplace of Ember Sword? How does the game and marketplace work?
Ember Sword is a new type of MMORPG where the player is truly in control of the experiences within. Players acquire tokenized cosmetics through gameplay, which they trade & sell for PIXEL, and those who become Landowners evolve the world by placing resources, monsters, NPCs etc, and can turn a profit by creating services, like vendor marketplaces where other players buy in-game subscriptions, access land and cosmetic auctions, and more.
Create a character, pick a home region and venture out into the dangerous world with a bow, staff or sword to prove your worth in the classless combat system, build and rule the most popular piece of LAND by deciding where to place monsters, NPCs, or resources like ore or wood used for crafting, or explore the vast universe of Ember as you gather resources to craft and sell items to others in the player-driven economy.
Instantly accessible through the browser, or as a desktop client, the Ember Sword shard server system creates a visually immersing persistent world - instead of splitting players into individual worlds and servers, which means you can always play with all of your friends.
So the marketplace works like this; players get rewarded scarce cosmetics through in-game activities, with new cosmetics every month as content updates, and they then trade these on the marketplace alongside parcels of LAND.
What are some of the barriers you see ahead for your project and Crypto Games in general?
Two things: User-friendliness and scalability. The latter can be solved in many different ways already, but the former is the big one. Ember Sword is a game made for gamers, not (just) for crypto and blockchain enthusiasts. That means players should reap all the benefits of Ember Sword using blockchain technology, but never have to fully understand it. Things like ensuring that you don't need to install a plugin or download anything or create a wallet elsewhere before you can start playing are things we're spending a lot of time on.
The biggest barriers holding games using blockchain technology away from going mainstream, is the fact that we keep calling them blockchain games, crypto games etc. I'm not pointing fingers because if you look at our company website, you'll see that we're also at fault - but when approaching mainstream gamers, we have to stop using words like blockchain and crypto as the main selling points.
Give us your perspective on the ingredients that makes a great "blockchain game"?
A great blockchain game is any game that uses blockchain technology to add previously impossible gameplay experiences, solve an actual issue, or make something better or safer for the players, AND that doesn't let the fact that blockchain is used hinder or make the game less appealing in the eyes of actual gamers. This, I believe, is the correct reason to implement blockchain in a game.
To give just a single example from Ember Sword, we use blockchain technology to enable and make trading of cosmetics between players safe by not forcing players onto "illegal" black markets. Instead, everything is controlled through a marketplace smart contract.
Tell me about your perspective on blockchain technology and games in general. Where is this all going? and why is it important to you?
I believe we're moving towards a future where more and more free to play games with a heavy focus on cosmetics (e.g. Fortnite, Runescape etc.) will start adopting blockchain technology. This is particularly true for Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying (MMORPG) games, as the technology and smart use of NFTs can help solve some of the biggest issues the genre has had to deal with over the years.
Blockchain technology will especially make a big difference for free to play MMORPGs, many of which are pay-to-win because they have "cash shops" where players can spend fiat to get items that provides them an advantage over others in-game. To us, blockchain represents an opportunity to forge an alternative path for games, away from predatory monetization and loot box gambling, towards a future where players have a permanent stake in their game world.
What is your roadmap, and what plans do you have for the future for your team and your project?
We're just now about to enter our private pre-sale for the PIXEL Token, with a public crowdsale 3-4 months after the end of the presale. We will continue to release more details and early previews of the game until we reach the earliest alpha test, where people who own PIXEL will have fist priority to start testing the game. We expect the fully-released game to be ready in late 2020 / early 2021.
When the presale has concluded, we'll start scaling our team to get the earliest alpha build of Ember Sword ready as soon as possible.
Any key dates or milestones coming up that you would like to share? Any announcements coming up?
We're about to enter private pre-sale, so anyone who wishes to participate in that and the upcoming LAND Auction, should reach out to me at [email protected]. We have started whitelisting interested buyers already.
Checkout more info on Ember Sword here: https://embersword.com/
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