Setting Sail — Pirate Nation Launches
I’m extremely excited today to announce the launch of the beta version of Pirate Nation! (Playable at https://piratenation.game)
So much work has gone into getting us to this point and it’s important to remember that this is very much the start of a long journey. We know exactly where we’re going, even if we don’t know the exact route we will take to get there yet. We are hoping that Pirate Nation shows the gaming world why games should be built on-chain and the value of building something truly decentralized — not because it’s buzzy, but because it enables new types of games with an engaging, social, player experience and an overall transparent ecosystem where players and creators alike win.
When we say beta, we mean it
When FarmVille launched it had no analytics, no tutorial, no shop, pretty much nothing except a core game loop of “Plow, Plant, Harvest.” However, that didn’t stop the game from becoming played by 300M+ people who spent many billions of hours collectively.
What we’re launching today is our version of that: take your pirate on quests, craft items, and use those items to level up your pirate. It’s a simple core game loop that we intend to build up over time with our roadmap and feedback from our community. We know there are going to be bugs and areas that are rough around the edges which is why we’ve published a known issues page in our Docs. Explicitly, we’d much rather underpromise than overpromise and disappoint you. We don’t believe in generating hype for hype sake and would prefer to continue delivering a quality product that people love.
But, why make an on-chain game?
There are very few blockchain games today and even fewer fully on-chain games. This is a nascent industry and we are on a mission to prove that there are three reasons to build games on-chain:
- Permanence: The game will live on forever and has no servers that we maintain. Even if we go away, the game will continue to exist.
- Composability: Everything we create on-chain can be used to remix or build something new, both by us and by others. We’re investing in infrastructure and reusable components for everyone by building on-chain.
- Interoperability: All of our games and products will live in the same universe. Everything a player does outside of our games can still be utilized by our games. A player’s session doesn’t stop when they leave our site.
We’re at the very early stages of building a MMORPG that is fully decentralized and is infinitely large. Chess is a decentralized offline game but you can’t really see the history of everyone’s matches. Open gameplay leads to interesting new dynamics within players as everyone can see what the others are doing. Blockchain ensures fairness and it also means that the history of every player, character and item have a permanent record.
Collective and continuous storytelling
When you enter the Pirate Nation universe with your Founder’s Pirates, what you are really doing is writing the story of your pirates on-chain. If you decide to part ways with your pirates, the story of those pirates will continue with the next owner and somebody will pick up where you left off; characters don’t have to be forgotten when you’re done playing the game. All games really are collectively writing a story with gameplay. Our goal is to build gameplay that encourages social collaboration and competition, creating opportunities for players to connect in a third place on a story with no end.
In our games, every player is a story-teller and, by simply playing, they are crafting narratives for everyone else to enjoy.
Creators are at the core of what we do
We believe that every player should also be a creator and we made a deliberate decision to build our game in voxel style because we plan to bring other creators into our universe. Voxels have a much lower barrier to entry which means more people will be able to create. Because the game contracts are open to the public, it’s entirely possible that somebody will build their own voxel game client on top of the core game loops we designed on chain. In fact, it’s something we’re betting on!
We have an exciting journey ahead
We’re still learning how to build fun, engaging games on-chain. That being said, we have a bunch of ideas on where we think on-chain games can excel. Every on-chain game is essentially a MMORPG and a social game. So we believe that leaning into social features will really highlight what’s new and different about these types of games.
In that vein, almost all of our future roadmap deals with social competition or social collaboration type features. We believe that the community is where the heart of gameplay resides and the role of an on-chain game is to help galvanize and create opportunities for that community to have interesting and novel interactions.
We’ve hinted at some gameplay mechanics that we’re excited to build out: PvP, island customization, guilds, and world bosses (raids) to name a few.
The exciting thing is that we can also see where the community wants us to go and take that into account. As you’ve already seen, we’re present and willing to engage on Twitter and Discord, and even if we don’t build your suggestion, you can always know that we’re listening and considering all possible paths forward.
We can’t wait to set sail with you all and see where the winds take us!
Onward,
Amitt
CEO & Cofounder
Proof of Play
