Immortal Player Characters, or IPC, bring a new NFT to the blockchain gaming space. Much like the Loot Project from last year, Immortal Player Characters don’t offer any functionality or even an image. Instead, these NFTs provide data for other projects to build on.
The first Immortal Player Character was born way back in 2018. Since then, 12,000 IPCs were created before minting was shut down just recently. Immortal Player Character NFTs offer detailed stats, though they stop short of defining what a character should be, leaving room for third-party developers to use the data however they wish.
The data for Immortal Player Characters is meant to be somewhat generic so that they can be used in any sort of game or environment.
Immortal Player Character NFTs
Each Immortal Player Character NFT comes with a 32-bit DNA string, and a 32-bit Attribute string. These strings contain detailed, but generic data, allowing developers to utilize the characters in their games in different ways. For example, two DNA values could determine skin and hair color, but how that information is used is up to the developers. If the game features standard, human characters, then the use of that data is obvious. But maybe someone wants to make a game where each ‘character’ is actually a combat mech. In that case, skin and hair color do’t make sense, but the devs could instead use that data to give the mech a color scheme.
An interesting design decision, IPCs do contain ‘race’ data. IE, human, elf, orc, etc. This includes a number of ‘sub-races’, which are rarer. Despite their talk about providing generic data for use in any game, hardcoding a fantasy race into the data feels like a step in the wrong direction. I guess other developers can ignore that data, but it still feels like an odd decision.
Unfortunately, Open Sea doesn’t show all of the interesting metadata for these NFTs. To learn the secrets of each, you have to look up the details on the my IPC site. And even then, these character sheets are not showing 64 bits worth of data.
Their whitepaper does go into some technical details about the IPC contracts, but they are still in serious need of documentation. I’m not really sure how developers are supposed to access the rest of the data, especially with no support channels or community that I can find!
Closing Thoughts on Immortal Player Characters
Is there something actually here? It’s hard to tell from their social media. Their official webpage links to an entity called ‘Playchemy’, though neither their Twitter nor Facebook page are very active. And as far as I can tell, they have no Discord or Telegram channel! So how they managed to build up enough of a community to mint 12,000 of these things, with over 4,00 different owners, I don’t really know.
The official website claims that several IPC games are in development, including IPC Fight!, IPC Dating, IPC RPG, and IPC FTL. But that’s it. All we have is a list of these games supposedly in development. No other info is available at all!
I love the overall idea. But, as with any NFT project that expects others to build on their creations, there needs to be some incentive to do so. After all, most of the blockchain gaming projects make their money by selling NFTs. Would the value from using these pre-generated characters outweigh the income from making their own NFTs? Probably not. In addition, third-party developers have to be officially sanctioned if they want to interact with the IPC experience system, creating an additional barrier to entry.
But somehow, the text NFTs from the Loot Project are now worth $1000 each, so I guess Immortal Player Characters could end up seeing some success as well.
