I get a lot of questions from my friends now that I've started streaming myself playing Lost Relics. Most commonly we have "What's a blockchain?" or "What are NFTs?" which I'll try to address here briefly, but the most important question is "Why do you like this?"
Lost Relics is a free-to-play action RPG inspired by games like Diablo and RuneScape. There's no real story; you're just dropped into a tavern and told to go adventure. And that's exactly what you do in the game -- you go on adventures into various randomly-generated dungeon realms where you hunt monsters, collect lute, and scavenge for resources, all while looking for the exit. When you find the exit, you take what found with you, and do it all over again.
Your progress is not always linear. If you die while on an adventure, you lose not only everything you found during the adventure, but you lose every virtual item you brought in with you. Potions, weapons, scavenging tools, whatever -- it's all gone.
You also are limited on what you can bring into any given adventure based on its rarity. So you can't just overpower yourself and blast through low-level stuff to grind out whatever you want. You always have to be on your toes, managing your limited inventory, and learning the patterns of the various enemies to know who to target first and so forth.
As you get better at adventuring, you start to focus on how to do it faster. You're not just wanting to grab some gold and loot from a dungeon, but you're wanting to maximize the amount of goodies you can collect per hour. This adds a layer of time management to the game, and incentivizes risk, as you'll put yourself in danger to squeeze out a few more seconds here and there.
There's also a bunch of little things to level up which keeps you striving for little short-term goals of watching numbers go up. I get easily addicted to junk like this, and it's this aspect inspired by RuneScape that initially made me decide to give the game a chance, because who doesn't like rising numbers?
With the permanent loss system, focus on time and resource management, and various skills to level up, the game becomes immediately addicting to someone like me. You feel like a lot is on the line every time you go on an adventure, and the goal to complete it quickly but successfully is quite a rush.
But if it was just that, I'd probably play it for a few hours and then move onto another similar game, as the beginning is always the most fun with games like this. You get to see all those pretty little numbers rise and rise quickly, and it gives you that satisfaction of having accomplished something when all you've really done is clicked on a few targets.
But Lost Relics is special in that it has a unique aspect compared to other games like it that will give it longevity for me: the economy.
Other than a very small few basic items that can be bought through an NPC, all buying and selling with gold is done through the Royal Emporium in the game. You buy everything from other players, and sell everything to other players. There are no NPC shops to sell your items to for gold, making all buying and selling of gold and items purely player-to-player.
For example, sometimes I want to buy a bunch of Raw Bron Trout to cook into a tasty meal to heal me up while on adventures. I can look up the trout in the emporium and put up a listing to buy 15 trout at market value. But there might not be 15 trout out there listed to sell at market value, so I have to wait. Or I can offer to buy for a higher price, and see if that matches more listings, getting all the fish I want at once at the cost of a bit more gold. And likewise, other players can sell their fish a little above market value hoping for impatient players like me to come along and need to buy in bulk quickly, or they can sell cheap to match any buy listings that are out there to make their money fast.
And with all of this going on, the market value for items changes in real-time, creating a living economy.
This is already infinitely more interesting than selling to an NPC for a flat price, and way more convenient than hooking up an interpersonal trade in a chat room or forum somewhere.
Now that alone isn't what makes it unique compared to most games. This is a blockchain game, and there are items in the game that are NFTs, and a cryptocurrency to trade with them.
If you're here from Hive, you know what this means, but for my friends who ask: an NFT is a token that exists on a blockchain -- it's a peer-to-peer managed chain of data blocks that are publicly verified, making changing the information near impossible, allowing for secure and accountable exchange between people in the network.
Owning an NFT is not just data checked in a game to allow you to use that part of the programming, but it's owning an actual thing that is verifiably yours, unique to you, just like a physical possession. For example, only 5000 Scorpion Stingers exist, and mine is one of those 5000, a unique one at that. Unlike an item in another game which is just copyable data, only this one instance of a Scorpion Stinger can exist both in the game and in the real world.
Because they're unique and limited, NFTs have value. In Lost Relics, Blockchain items are bought and sold using an in-game cryptocurrency called Shadowstones. Shadowstones can be converted to the cryptocurrency Enjin, which can be bought and sold like other cryptocurrency. In other words, Shadowstones are a form of real money.
At the time of writing this, one Shadowstone is worth 0.01 ENJ. 1 ENJ is worth $1.12 USD. So 100 Shadowstones are worth about a little more than $1. On my second day of playing, probably less than 5 hours into the game, a monster dropped one of those 5000 Scorpion Stingers just for me. In the current Royal Emporium, the market price for a Scorpion Stinger is 503 Shadowstones. That means that I could list it for sale and likely get about 500 Shadowstones. Within a few minutes I could convert that to ENJ and sell the ENJ for around $5 USD.
Just today while streaming I got a Blockchain ingot worth about 200 Shadowstones. So in just three or four days of playing in my spare time, I've already accumulated $7 worth of items in the game, by playing for free. Now, that's just my personal luck -- you could play for 12 hours a day, day after day, and get nothing at all (shoutouts to Flux).
I can spend all day hatching Pokémon eggs -- each one is like a little lottery ticket with the possibility to have the stats line up just right so you get your "perfect" monster. And that's just running in circles waiting for eggs to hatch.
Put that type of excitement on top of an engaging risk-reward time-and-resource-management gameplay loop, with each monster and treasure chest a chance to obtain a cool item that also has real-world value? There's no surprise the formula for Lost Relics is making addicts out of myself and other players alike.
If you want to try out the game for yourself, just visit the Lost Relics website and sign up. New accounts are being added all the time recently, though you never know when that will end.
