The Six Dragons alpha release before end of 2019
The Six Dragons will get an early access alpha release on Steam this December. TSD Studios is making an open-world role playing game that follows gameplay principles of games like Skyrim. The game differentiates itself from the famous competitor by introducing Enjin blockchain-powered item ownership, crafting and enchanting.
The alpha testing phase will be rolled out in so-called 'alpha waves'. Employees and security testers are obivously the ones to play the game first. Followed by early investors, community members, media, and MFT token holders. The developers will announce the exact date of the Six Dragons alpha release in a few weeks.
The Six Dragons is an open-world role playing game, build using the Enjin blockchain. Because of this the game allows players ownership over every item they find, create or buy inside or outside the game. Adventurers can dive into an open world filled with randomly generated dungeons, or gamers can become a trader and sell their goods to other players.
We create a game where players are the protagonists as they constantly shape the game but also retain the opportunity to capture value from their progress. The vision of The Six Dragons is that the community will adopt various gameplay roles (e.g farmers, merchants, workers, etc) and will freely run a decentralized blockchain economy.
TSD Studios, Savvas Lazopoulos - blog post (November 14th 2019)
Create unique items on the blockchain
To be able to create items and resources, players will need to own the recipe. As soon as players have the necessary materials, an item can be crafted. They can do this at crafting station. Here the game checks whether the players owns the needed assets. After the blockchain confirms the transaction, the player will receive a newly created item. This is all done in-game. In addition players can manage their items using the Enjin wallet on their phone.
Players can find the newly created blockchain-based game immediately in their in-game inventory. This item is a new token with an unique ID and a supply of 1. In addition item statistics are randomly assigned, and the name of the item creator is immortalized in the item's meta data. As a result this will be an easier way for adventurers to find merchants, blacksmiths, enchanters etc.
Loot based RPG ideal for blockchain
Games that rely strongly on loot and inventory management are ideal for blockchain technology. The Six Dragons is not the only blockchain-powered role playing game. Taiwan-based developer Biscuit is currently working on Knight Story, an idle RPG for iOS and Android. Even though the combat is much more simple, the way this mobile game uses item management is comparable.
Players can pick up loot from fallen enemies. They can merge three items together into a new item, and so on. They call this process synthesis. Every time a player wants to merge items together, there's a change it will fail. As a result some items are hard to obtain. This creates value. Knight Story is slightly different, because it doesn't allows players to put every item on the blockchain. Players will need a special in-game currency to move items to the blockchain. Each transfer will costs approximately 0.15~0.20 cents.
In this case Knight Story is build on the Ethereum blockchain, while there's also a version coming to Tron. The Six Dragons is build on the Enjin blockchain, making it much more efficient in terms transaction costs.
Posted from my blog: https://www.nederob.nl/2019/11/18/the-six-dragons-alpha-release-before-end-of-2019/
This is just such a weird game design choice, but it is one of the few times I've seen blockchain integration with a digital game actually applied to something that almost makes sense. De-localising the database storage for objects and object management, effectively requiring two factor authentication for any sort of object manipulation, could definitely be of some use if you expect the gameplay to be focused very heavily on loot and loot training.
It's mildly concerning that there isn't any discussion about what the rest of gameplay is supposed to be like, either in this article or in the video from the creators. When people talk about a game without actually talking about the user experience of the majority of play (as one would expect), it generally says that the action of the game is not the primary concern beyond what's being talked about.
That generally ends poorly.
All that said, this does, at the bare minimum, perk my curiosity and I admit that I am slightly intrigued.
Absolutely. So far they've only talked about the items, the open world, but hardly anything about combat mechanics, leveling up, factions you can join, online guilds, Dovahkin or whatever story elements there will be. The list of things they haven't covered is endless, and I guess at this point they just want to make the blockchain elements right. When that's all set in stone, they can fit the story and gameplay better around it. Keep in mind, the game is online in an early alpha phase at this point. They will probably use that alpha to obtain more funding to continue development on their RPG. Like you said, it's an intriguing project.
From my perspective, a role-playing game (and in particular a role-playing game) should probably have things like story elements, setting design, and to a certain level gameplay as the central design elements that need to be in place before you can decide what kind of database management you're using to store and manipulate objects/loot in the game. After all, in a real sense – there is no game other than the setting, the characters, and the gameplay.
As a reviewer, seeing stuff like that makes me really nervous. If you craft story and gameplay around a particular mechanic you have a lot of problems compared to when you craft mechanics around your stories and gameplay.
Now, maybe they intend to make the fact that their auction house/object persistence database is decentralized a notable and significant part of the story. That is to say, it will affect the player experience in a way that the "blockchain" has a real story impetus. But if that were the case, you would think that be really proud about coming up with a clever integration like that and they would be pushing it really hard upfront.
I'm curious what direction they want to go in for a number of reasons, but I'm simultaneously more than a little cautious because of the way it seems to be getting developed.
It's that way for a lot of cryptocommodity integrations with gaming, frankly. I haven't seen a really good when yet, at least from the perspective of a gamer. Well, nothing outside of betting pools or games which are specifically about interacting with a blockchain itself. Part of that is because the developers all tend to be seriously on board the cryptocultist bandwagon and are just looking for a horse, any kind of horse, to hook up in front of it and drag it down the road.
I'd like to see something like this work. I'll try to keep an eye on it, myself.
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