How Blockchain MMORPG Cradles and its time-lapse virtual world plans to shake up online gaming

Blockchain-based technologies, which are expressed by cryptocurrencies and other forms of digital assets such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), are beginning to make their presence felt in many different industries. Although they seem little different on the surface from other types of digital money, the excitement crypto and NFTs have generated centers around their enabling functions in digital transactions, especially with ownership management.

NFTs, in themselves, have attracted a lot of interest in the last two years due to the way they have allowed the secure and authenticated transfer of physical objects via the blockchain. Stripped down, NFTs are simply tokens that represent unique assets.

When it comes to art and collectibles, this proved to be a very useful feature that allows people to create NFTs that represent unique and rare works of art and culture. If you owned an NFT, you owned the creative rights to a work of art – which can be verified by anyone just by cross-checking the NFT data in a public ledger

Nevertheless, NFTs in this form have barely scratched the surface of what is possible, especially when dealing with industries where non-fungibility and fungibility factors are crucial aspects.

Beyond static NFT usage in games

Game developers DRepublic, the team behind the upcoming MMORPG Cradles: Origin of Species, are among those who believe that blockchain technology can provide solutions that could mean groundbreaking innovations in the gaming industry.

While some gaming companies have already dabbled in crypto and NFTs, they have so far been met with limited success. High-profile NFT bets have even resulted in a major backlash from the gaming community. The ire drawn by NFT experiments like Ubisoft can be traced back to the simplistic implementation of NFTs in games, either as an alternative currency or as a way to generate more money for the company by generating even more “unique” items such as skins. In other words, NFTs in games so far have only served to promote the much-maligned “lootbox” mentality that many players perceive as plaguing game developers.

Cradles developers seek to go beyond the static characteristics of NFTs that have made them so popular with speculators, by tweaking a new type of NFT token based on what they call the EIP-3664 protocol (technically, it’s simply a naming a proposal for a new set of rules for the blockchain), which extends the existing NFT standards, ERC721 and ERC1155.

The new EIP3664 NFTs will allow all game elements to contain far more information than regular NFTs, giving them many more attributes resulting in a variety of ways the game can interact with those elements. In game-speak, this simply means that the entire game world is made up of components that can be combined with or separated from each other.

Combinable game elements and a time-lapse virtual world

Component NFTs can be described as follows. If characters, objects, and even plants and animals are made up of NFT components, it will be possible for a player to fully create and participate in the world-building of a virtual universe. For example, you will harvest raw materials from nature and combine them to create tools and weapons that carry all the different properties of their individual components. You then attach these tools, weapons, clothing, and even skills to a character, and the new character has all the different attributes of all the combined components. Likewise, you can break down an item into all of its separate components to recreate a virtually limitless combination of possible new items and characters.

In fact, the EIP-3664 protocol is set to make these digital assets more customizable for Cradles players to shift and change their items in-game in unlimited ways by harvesting raw materials gained through exploring and adventuring.

NFTs in Cradles will also have expandable attributes hardcoded into each component, allowing all game elements to simulate the laws of time and physics – something no virtual world has been able to properly implement.

DRepublic calls this effect “entropy increase”. Using block time as a stable foundation for eternal passage of time, each game element evolves gradually. Items rust, characters age, and buildings slowly degrade as block time passes, requiring active player intervention to encourage cooperation between players.

Players will be able to see their NFTs (such as characters and even items) evolve over time. Instead of today’s static standards, Cradles will create a world in motion with its own changes, deterioration and progress.

A game that insists on new experiences

At its core, Cradles is an open-world MMORPG with elements from the metaverse, but with the goal of expanding the conventional RPG experience.

Cradles players will experience a virtual reality game compatible with deep immersion hardware that will enable them to play and interact with other players of any species they choose. The game will give players ultimate freedom, capacity for exploration and community building.

Players will be able to explore different areas in the game, a main city and an adventure zone. In the former, players will be able to explore and interact with other players, while in the latter, players must defend against potential hostilities and collect supplies from the surroundings.

The entire virtual world also ties into the backbone of the plot, where characters are sent far back in time from a doomed future, searching for an answer to avoid a fate of extinction. In this way, exploration, research and discovery are the only ways to advance the world building, as Cradles hopes to be a game that encourages and motivates new gaming experiences, to try to move beyond the repetitive grinding spiral that most online RPGs tend towards to finish. up with.

Blockchain will have a say in the Future Of Gaming

Despite already raising significant funds for development, the team behind the project is keen to lay the foundation for an open, decentralized community that will ultimately result in a self-sustaining game.

The growing community is not only viewed as gamers, but as game creators. Even now, the game developers continue to work on improving the overall gaming experience by implementing new features, fixing bugs and testing new features – following the direction and feedback of the online community.

Cradles players can position themselves today and take advantage of a sector that is destined to continue to expand over time by attracting new users to the ecosystem. Today, according to data from Dapps Radar, the top 10 Blockchain games have over $700 million in assets with close to 1 million active players.

It is clear that there is interest and potential in more decentralized forms of gaming that rely on community-based efforts to develop, especially when the relationship between players and traditional game developers in recent years has been fraught with disappointment and frustration.

Tomorrow’s games may not necessarily be all about being able to earn cryptocurrencies and buy NFTs in-game. But should blockchain technology provide the next true innovation, enabling and unlocking new gameplay aspects that traditional gaming has always lacked, it could very well be the gateway to the gaming of the future.