With the recent NFT / blockchain ban in Minecraft, ecosystems that understand and embrace blockchain received a bit of a boost. There are a number of virtual world projects around, but we haven’t covered World Overlay before. So let’s take a first look at this gaming / virtual world platform, currently in development on the Ethereum blockchain.
While NFT Worlds pivots and reboots, there is an opportunity for other virtual world platforms to make their presence known. One of those, World Overlay, is building a fantasy style MMORPG in parallel with their ecosystem development.
World Overlay is a virtual world platform, with builder tools, an NFT marketplace, and world indexing option. Much like NFT Worlds and Sandbox, World Overlay seeks to create an ecosystem where other game developers can leverage their tools and build their own game experiences. Builders can utilize both Unreal and Unity SDKs to create their worlds with a proprietary SDK called Veraloy. World Overlay also includes its own token, Aether, which is not yet released.
To showcase their project and its capabilities, the World Overlay team is building a open world, fantasy MMORPG called Aetheron.
Aetheron
Aetheron will offer free to play and play and earn opportunities. The team building Aetheron is very keen on creating a lore driven project. Players can already join one of the Factions on their Discord server and compete in various events, games, and activities.
As for gameplay, we know that players can own and customize land plots in Aetheron. And there will be some sort of opportunity for income as a landlord. Players mine Aether shards from land plots, giving the land owner a passive bonus. The dev team also plans quests as well as in-game contests and events.
And though the the first Aetheron land mints were scheduled for mid 2022, the team decided to delay the mint due to market conditions. But despite the NFT sale delay, the team is still focused on building their world and tools. Before the delay decision, Aetheron did hold an airdrop and sale for their first NFTs, Human Faction Banners. These banners can be anchored onto land parcels, allowing more players to visit, potentially earning extra Aether for the land owner. Humans are one of five main factions in the world. The others are Dwarves, Faerin, Beastmen, and ‘Muhat’.
Though the mint for banner is done, Aetheron has already partnered with IMX and the banner NFTs can be purchased from the IMX markeplace.
Final Thoughts
With the recent announcement about Minecraft and NFT Worlds being forced to pivot to a new game engine, there may be an opportunity for these other up and coming virtual world platforms to attract additional attention. World Overlay is relatively new to the scene and will have some competition. Unfortunately for them, there isn’t really much at the moment to make them stand out from the crowd.
There is no whitepaper or much detailed documentation at all. The very brief demo video they put out looked nice, but not spectacular. Getting onto IMX from the start was a good move. I hope it pays off for them. And I hope that this project does well in general. There is definitely room in the metaverse for a variety of gaming platforms. But World Overlay needs to show something more soon to avoid being relegated to a forgotten corner of the Internet.
The roadmap puts the first alpha version of the tools launching in Q3 2022, with an Aetheron alpha in Q4.
To learn about this project, follow World Overlay on Twitter and join their Discord server.
