Development studio Etherplay has announced that their upcoming space strategy game Conquest.eth will launch on May 1st. They will release the alpha version of the on-chain with $1,000 in rewards for the most active players. Players will need a special token to get access to Conquest.eth, but Etherplay didn’t provide a lot of details on this yet.
When Conquest.eth will launch on mainnet, the game doesn’t have an ending. However, for the alpha version they will set a start and end date. Players will earn rewards based on their success when compared to others. This testing phase will start on May 1st and will last 3 to 4 weeks.
“But for the alpha it won’t matter, as we will be giving players some testnet tokens”, they wrote in their newsletter. Players who are curious to give the game a try, need to subscribe to their mailing list.
According to earlier statements, Conquest runs completely on the Ethereum blockchain. However, they will be using a layer-2 solution. Whether that would be a sidechain like Polygon or zk-rollups like Immutable X, or just maybe xDAI, remains to be seen. We’ve already seen Dark Forest using xDAI, and that worked pretty well.
What’s special about on-chain gaming?
On-chain games are persistent and can function without the need of servers of other centralized authorities. All the user needs is a graphical interface, while all the game rules are stored on the blockchain. As a result the rules are always provably fair. Players only need to download a game interface, or perhaps just go to a website to get started.
Those who are looking for decentralized on-chain games, have several projects to look at. Xaya is working on both Taurion, a completely decentralized online strategy game, and of course Soccer Manager Elite. Both games require users to install the game on their computer, but all game mechanics and gameplay is running on the custom Xaya blockchain. Soccer Manager Elite will even come to mobile devices, which is a very interesting development.
In addition there’s a relatively new project called Dark Forest. This grand strategy game in space is all about exploration, expansion and domination. However, in some case it could be a good idea to work together. There are also NFTs to find by exploring the universe, and there’s a prize pool for the best players. However, Dark Forest is far from finished and the game has not been audited. However, it’s cool to see a game being completely on-chain and it has already generated quite some hype. Ultimately this could be a truly persistent game world that will never ever go offline as long as Ethereum exists. We added this game to our list of blockchain games to watch in 2021.
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