Richard Garriott NFT MMO will start selling lands soon
How would you play a Richard Garriott NFT MMO? No? Well, we probably should have told him before he launched the new website for Iron and magica blockchain game where he apparently intends to start selling land soon.
What is this Richard Garriott NFT game about?
Do you remember The Shroud of the Avatar? Kickstarted back in 2013 and launched in 2016, Richard Garriott’s ill-fated MMORPG went through a series of high-profile layoffs and delays before being handed over to an unknown indie studio in 2019. Garriott’s failure with The Shroud of the Avatar doesn’t seem to have dissuaded him from the gaming industry as he is now back with a new project in the form of Iron and magic. Surprise surprise, it’s a Web3 effort, apparently making Garriott the latest in a depressingly long line of industry legends to succumb to blockchain madness.
So, what exactly is Iron and magic? Uh…it’s not clear from the website, really. In what is becoming a predictable trend among Web3 games, is Iron and magic the website shows you some of the NFTs and metaverse land you can buy in the game, but it doesn’t actually tell you anything about what the game is. It is a rather enigmatic description that portends Iron and magic as “a new Web3 open-world sandbox MMORPG from the creators of Ultimate“, but that’s all you get. The short video previews of buildings on the site seem to show some kind of thick Warcraft-style fantasy aesthetic, but other than that it’s very light on detail.
Things get a bit more informative over at the game Twitter page, where the developers share some tidbits regarding features that will be present in the game. These include apparently upgradeable buildings, different biomes like tundras and deserts, and tiny sneak peeks into the development process. However, developers are noticeably reticent about sharing information about the core gameplay loop itself Iron and magic, which, given that it’s a Web3 gri-uh, game apparently designed to sell NFTs, probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve come a long way from Richard Garriott, who once agonized over how players would bring their real morals to life in open-ended RPGs; now he seems to be as susceptible to greed as the players he admonished for killing in-game vendors just to satisfy their lust for gold.
NFTs in play: everyone wants to make money, no one wants to play them
NFTs and the wider blockchain world is a pretty hot-button issue in gaming right now. Major game companies such as Square Enix and Krafton have signed up for NFT sca-uh, model full-time, and mentioned industry legends such as Mega man‘s Keiji Inafune creates NFT art collections for sale as well. Despite this, the gaming public doesn’t seem to be buying the idea of blockchain gaming en masse, with companies like Team17 having to own up and back off from NFT plans after receiving major backlash for announcing plans in that area. It’s also fair to say that no company really offers any tangible benefits to players when it comes to NFT gaming; it’s about corporate profits rather than increased fun.
There is a vocal backlash against NFTs from certain figures in the industry as well. Recently, Chroma Squad Developer Mark Venturelli lashed out at NFTs at a talk sponsored by Web3 companies. Digital distribution platform Itch.io has also declared its opposition to the blockchain gaming world, describing NFTs as “a scam”, while Steam does not allow cryptocurrency on the platform (except when developers bypass it). It’s pretty hard to imagine how Richard Garriott’s latest venture could possibly attract a player base in a world of vicious MMORPG competition and widespread player antipathy towards blockchain games, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe he can avoid another one The Shroud of the Avatar-disaster.
