I recently looked into a blockchain game I haven't seen anyone talking about -- Nine Chronicles: The Fire of Musphelheim.
Nine Chronicles is a 100% decentralized open-source game backed by Planetarium and Ubisoft. To build the game, they also created LibPlanet, a .NET library for developers to create games using blockchain technology, while the game runs on its own blockchain of the same name. It utilizes its own cryptocurrency, Nine Chronicles Gold (NCG), that is generated solely by players mining.
It's a fantasty auto-battler RPG set in a world based on Norse mythology.
While the game touts itself as an "MMO Idle RPG," it doesn't do much in the way of either MMO or idle gaming. Instead, it's one of those games you've seen a million times on mobile where you select a stage and let your character run through to see if they win or not.
The gameplay loop is exactly as you would expect -- try some stages until you die, grind stages to gain loot and EXP, craft better equips and level up, and then try the harder stages again to see if you can clear them.
As you clear stages, various things unlock for you, like new recipes to make in the crafting system, or even entire new game modes.
Leveling up and clearing stages is basic. The meat of Nine Chronicles seems to be in its crafting system. As you progress in the game, you get more complex crafting options, and the results are randomized, meaning you'll have to gather lots of loot and try again and again if you want to get the perfect item from the workshop.
These items can then be used to power up your character, or sold to other players, which is where the marketplace and economy comes in.
Players buy and sell items in the in-game marketplace for NCG. The source of NCG is mining, which is done by the players through the game itself. While running the game or the launcher, you have the option to turn on the mining feature to allow your computer to mine for NCG.
The only ways to get NCG are through mining or trade -- so if you're wanting to buy some expensive items, you're either going to have to mine or RMT for the NCG on the Discord using a fees-free transfer network feature built into the game launcher (there's a tax on NFT trading using the transfer network). There is also the possibility of building an Ethererum bridge so that NCG could be wrapped and transferred to ETH and traded on Uniswap.
And that's where the play-to-earn aspect of Nine Chronicles begins. You can either mine or grind equipment and sell it for NCG, then sell your NCG for USD or other crypto on the community Discord server. Planetarium even offers free middleman services to players!
So if you like autobattler mobile games and want to dive into one that has P2E possibilities, Nine Chronicles sounds like a great game to jump into, right?
Well, in theory, the game sounds great, but in my experience, the game is janky as hell. I started playing back when the game was open to anyone with a Twitter account, then put it away because of how awful it played. Now pulling it back up, it seems to suffer from the same problems, with the added frustration of transactions taking forever to verify.
When I click a stage to play, it takes several minutes before the stage actually verifies and I am able to play the stage. You have to verify a transaction to do much of anything, too. Want to open the shop menu? Wait a few minutes! It gets annoying fast. Apparently there are a lot of new players playing recently or something, which was the reasoning I got from the Discord.
But what's even more annoying are the constant reorgs and bugs that come with them. Every 10 seconds or so, you'll see a "Reorg occurred" message showing that two peers tried to mine the same block at the same time. And this messes with your game history. So the game is constantly failing to do things its supposed to do. For example, you'll probably have to accept a quest reward seven or eight times before the reward actually ends up in your inventory. Even worse, you might craft two rings then combine them into a ring +1, but then your two original rings will finish crafting several times and you'll have duplicates, but then they'll disappear, and you'll never know if your final ring is on its way or not, and you don't want to waste your forging space and time trying to do it again. This also seems to change how much NCG you appear to have at a time -- I got messages that I mined so many blocks and had 50 NCG, but then I had 30 NCG later, stuff like that.
Interestingly enough, the game is set to release on Steam in the future. They'll really have to get their mess together and make the gameplay experience more smooth if they're wanting the game to be more of a success.
So far, for me, crafting and running through stages has been fun, and the prospects of eventually grinding out loot to make equips to sell for NCG sounds fun and fascinating, but the clumsy user experience makes it hard to stay too interested.
I'm still quite early in the game, so I'll make another post later when I've explored more of the game, like the PVP Arena and more. Some of it doesn't unlock for quite a while. Despite all the jankfest, I'm still willing to give the game a bit of a try, as I enjoy these types of games already and a blockchain version of one is a great idea.
If you want to check out Nine Chronicles for yourself, check out the official website or join the Planetarium Discord server where you can try to nab someone's referral code, as the game is now invitation-only.
