Strategy Games

Axie Announces Rebrand to Axie Origins and Season 1 Launch

Axie banner

Sky Mavis, the creators of the well-known blockchain game, Axie Infinity, announce an official rebrand into Axie Infinity: Origins (not to be confused with the Origin Axies). The announcement comes from AxieCon, where they also revealed the launch of Season One, as well as some details about Axie accessories and an upcoming land-based mini-game!

We’ve known this was coming for a while, but now it’s official! As of September 8th, 2022, Axie Infinity: Origin is now Axie Infinity: Origins. The announcement came from AxieCon, a conference currently ongoing in Barcelona, Spain. With a new combat system, Axie customization through Runes and Charms, and a number of other features, Axie Origins is a major reboot of their game system.

But this isn’t the first we’ve seen of Axie Origins. In fact, they’ve been running open alphas and betas for some time, and just finished up Season 0. The first official season of the relaunch, Season 1, kicks off on September 14th, with a prize pool of 112,000 AXS tokens, 6,750 of those going to the first-place finisher!

In addition, two new, upcoming features, Upgrading, and Accessories, will allow players to personalize their Axies. Upgrading lets players improve the Parts of their Axies. By upgrading a Part to level 2, not only does that Part become more powerful, but it gets a new visual look as well! Accessories are just cosmetic, but who doesn’t want to give their Axie some cool shades!?

Axie Land Alpha and Mini-game

a preview of Axie land gameplay

Axie land gameplay is a feature that many have been anticipating for a long time. Known also as Project K, the land gameplay is inspired by Stardew Valley.

The first Project K alpha is expected to release later this year, with an off-chain version. This alpha will focus on the gathering and crafting aspects of the game. Players will be able to harvest and process resources, as well as build structures on their land. These structures allow players to craft items, which they then sell to the local, native population. The natives engage in idle combat, contributing currency and leaderboard points to those who sold them the items.

Axie also plans to release a mini-game called Raylights that uses the land NFTs. In Raylights, players gather minerals and use them to grow decorative plants for their land. Progression opens up new ingredients, plants, and layers. This sounds like it will be all self-contained, and just for showing off the cosmetic changes to your land. It doesn’t seem that there will be any additional NFTs or tokens involved in Raylights, but we don’t have all the details on the game yet, so that could change.

And, in a very interesting development for the Axie ecosystem, Sky Mavis announced a collaboration and agreement with Google Cloud. Google Cloud will become an independent validator for the Ronin network! This is a big name company that is agreeing to help support the network! That’s huge!

As the conference is still ongoing, there may be more news and leaks from the Axie team. Follow them on Twitter and Discord to see all of their updates and announcements.

Axie Origins trailer
Phil Hall has been a gaming enthusiast since birth and a crypto enthusiast since 2017. He enjoys new discoveries and sharing those with others via blogging and photography. You can follow him on Twitter or read his other articles on Medium.