This summer months have passed us by and many people have returned to school or are back into the work grind after a vacation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still time for fun! Here are a few web3 games to watch that might have something interesting for us in the month of September.
Release dates in software development are a fickle beast. So much so that dev teams often hate giving out any date deadlines at all. And for good reason, as some players will be quick to jump on missed deadlines as a sign of catastrophic failure. But of course, that’s not always the case.
We have some games we’ve mentioned in these monthly articles that still haven’t delivered on the feature or release that we were watching for. Splinterlands failed to deliver land 1.5 in August (they keep saying ‘soon’), and we are still waiting for the next beta test from Influence (who was supposed to have had an official launch by now).
But we still have hope for those releases, and we also look ahead to some other projects that are worth keeping an eye on this month!
Otherside and Faraway
The first gameification of Otherside deeds, known as Legends of the Mara, is set to launch an open beta in the month of September. Along with the recent initial release of the HV-MTL Forge game, Yuga Labs is rapidly bringing more functionality to their NFT collections.
Along with that, the Otherside also announced that they were partnering with Faraway to help build out Legends of the Mara beyond the beta! This is a pretty big score for Faraway, who so far only have the web-based, lite FPS game, Mini-Royale to their credit. Though, not too long ago, Faraway did announce their plans to independently build a game around the Mutant Ape collection called Serum City. So perhaps those plans gave them an inroads into development for the Otherside. Whatever the case, we look forward to seeing the first release of Legends of the Mara, and hearing about what plans Faraway has for growing and expanding the game!
Farsite
After months of radio silence from the Farsite team, a recent email and announcement bring hope and skepticism to the Farsite community. In their first communication since January of this year, Farsite says that they have been hard at work behind the scenes.
They also say that they expect to deliver module crafting and usage, implementation of space combat, a tutorial, player crafted ships, and an integrated token exchange with their beta. I don’t expect to actually see any new game releases from Farsite this month. But I do expect to see some details about what they have been doing, what their plans are, and a general timeline.
Champions Ascension
Champions Ascension has now switched over to keeping their servers open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (aside from maintenance or unexpected outages). While this is great, MMO games do require a certain number of active players available to make them more interesting. The Champions Ascension team seems to understand this and have been holding near daily events, and also just opened up a Festival of Xiva with more activities for their players.
However, outside of the events, the world feels a little dead, especially with the mini-games which see hardly any human activity. Champions Ascension is free to play, so there is no real barrier to joining the game. And all players have access to the same Champions in the arena, so aside from skill, nobody has an advantage there.
So this is kind of a crucial test for Champions Ascension. Can they create and deliver enough content to keep their current playerbase occupied while also growing their community? We shall soon see!
The Sandbox
The Sandbox has just been kind of steadily doing their thing for a while now. Slowly but surely selling out their land plots while hosting a continual stream of play to earn events with various partners.
But a key moment was reached recently when The Sandbox began accepting applications for non-partner projects. Accepted applicants will be able to publish their experiences for public consumption, and have them advertised by The Sandbox. This is the first opening of the floodgates to full, user-created content in The Sandbox. In fact, we already see some projects, such as Pickaxe Master, create and host their very own play and earn experience! Cryptostache, a famous content creator for web3 gaming has his own game in The Sandbox almost ready for release as well.
After many years of development, The Sandbox seems to be on the cusp of realizing their goal of having thousands of user created games and experiences of all kinds hosted on their platform. Keep an eye out over the coming months for other independent projects releasing on The Sandbox. I think there will be some pretty cool stuff!
But that’s not all…
Of course this is not all that will be happening with web3 gaming in September. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and visit our website regularly to keep up with all of the latest web3 gaming news!
