To make in-development blockchain game Guild of Guardians (GoG) more palatable to web2 gamers, developers have changed the rules around progression.
Players will no longer have to engage with the web3 side of the dungeon crawler to level up.
“Instead of making web3 mandatory for player progression, we’ve reimagined it as the optimal path for advancement,” the project said in a recent Medium update.
The game is still in development on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s being built by Shanghai’s Mineloader Studios for web3 platform company Immutable, and is “on track” to launch in open beta on mobile in Q4 this year.
*Enjoy our reporting? Sign up for the Pharos newsletter and receive an update every week for free
A screenshot of Guild of Guardians gameplay.
“We want this game to be mainstream,” the game’s economy designer Howie Zhang told a community town hall this week.
“We don’t want to lose players because we’re railroading them through web3.”
Zhang said there would always be a path in the game that was playable without using web3.
“You can still play and acquire Guardians and advance through content,” Zhang said, “it just might not be the optimal path.”
Zhang said that if a web2 player really liked the game, they would want to get better, and would hunt out information on how to accelerate their progression, and would eventually become more “intrinsically motivated to go through the web3 hoops”.
“We think that’s a better strategy for onboarding the mainstream into web3 over time,” Zhang said.
“As we develop our technology and make it more seamless – make it more comparable to the web2 experience – then we can dial this back a little bit and maybe make web3 more prevalent. But there is a staggered approach to this.”
Zhang also explained that he wanted web3 actions that have economic ramifications – such as minting or burning – to “occur when players are already habitually playing”.
“We don’t want to have systems that give players NFTs only for those players to churn out in a week.”
“We want to delay the introduction of web3 elements further into the players’ lifecycle.
“This also helps us be anti-bot… and basically just makes the economy a little bit slower from a web3 perspective but much more safe.”
When asked by a community member if the game’s open beta would launch as planned in Q4 this year, game director Chris Clay said: “At the moment, we are still absolutely on track to be able to hit it.”
“As we continue development, we’re progressing well towards the next milestone that we’re calling Friends and Family, which is just around the corner.”
Game director Chris Clay shared this roadmap update at the community town hall.
