Being the avid crypto gamer I am, I was very delighted by the amount of new games announced coming to Hive during Hivefest. Two days ago, I already published an article discussing the first of these new games - Unsung Hero. Another game that was announced during this years Hivefest was Ocean Planet. Last night, the official game's account, @oceanplanet, released its first article officially announcing the game.
Sadly, I was quite underwhelmed by the amount of information the article contained or rather did not contain. It's only made up of a few images with basically no additional text. Admittedly, that would usually be the point where I just sit back and wait for more information to come in, but I found the stuff shown in the article to be quite intriguing so I dug deeper and found another article by the same account. This one does contain a lot more information but sadly, it's written in Ukrainian. Luckily for me, Google Translate seems to be rather good at translating Ukrainian to English these days so I ended up with a somewhat readable article.
In this article, I'm going to share my findings from the translated article with you. I'll discuss what the game is all about, what information we have so far regarding the gameplay, and finally, what I make of the information available to me.
So what exactly is Ocean Planet going to be? According to the article, it's an economic strategy game running on the Hive blockchain. It's going to feature character development, extraction and exchange of resources, equipment, interaction with different buildings and some more. So as you can see, there are already a lot of ideas and concepts floating around for the game. There's no mention in the article how far progressed the game already is in terms of development, so for now, I assume that this is what the developer hopes to deliver one day rather than what we can expect from the get go.
As the title suggest, the game takes place in a post apocalyptic version of Earth that's akin to what you might know from the movie Water World. For what ever reason, the whole earth has been flooded and the survivors are now living in floating villages atop the more shallow water where the actual land is only a few meters below.
Players take on the role a single survivor living in one of these cities. Each character will be of a certain class that each comes with different boons and/or additional abilities. So far, there are the following classes:
- Miner
- Farmer
- Trader
- Engineer
- Warrior
So while each of these classes will have its strengths in certain areas, all tasks will be completable by all classes, some will just be better at doing them then others.
Players all start out in one of the scattered cities. The city itself will be rather basic in the beginning but is going to improve and be build up step by step as players advance further during the game. All buildings have different interactions available to them, like a Garage where you can install upgrades to your ship or a Scientist's House where you get to learn new technologies.
The game isn't only played in the city, though. Players will travel to different regions using the mini map shown above. Not all regions will be accessible right away and different regions will feature different threats and opportunities. Players will travel to these areas looking for fame and treasure. Since the whole world has been flooded, a lot of the old worlds treasures still lie buried on the ocean floor. The main focus of the game seems to be on retrieving these artifacts in order to craft new items, trade them with other players or use them to improve what you have.
All items found in the game will be represented by cards found in players inventory. If you ever played Cryptobrewmaster, you should alraedy know what to expect. Cryptobrewmaster seems to be a great reference for the game in general. I did an article some days ago why I find that game's economy to possibly be the best crafted one we have on Hive right now. Ocean Planet seems to come close to the concept, as the article also mentioned a Farm that you can rent in order to grow crops from seeds extracted from the ocean floor.
While renting instead of buying might seem odd to some players, to me it's a brilliant move. This way, you'll always have to reinvest some of your earnings which certainly helps to make the game's economy more sustainable and puts new and older players on a more equal footing. That's not to say there won't be permanent upgrades, though. There will be many different items and characters in the game that should provide you with a certain bonus or unlock additional options for you.
The game is actually having a pre-sale of some of these items right now:
These lines of text below each item is all the information we have right now about what these might do. Since the presale will last until the end of the year, I'll wait a bit more to see if we can learn more about the game until then. The game itself will be released in about 8 days, so it will start on January 1st.
That's about all the information I could extract from the Ukrainian article and in case you haven't figured out from reading the article yet, I'm pretty excited for the game. We'll obviously have to wait and see how the different mechanics click, how viable the different activities will be, and how well the economy will be crafted in the end.
The game's concept are certainly sound, though, and if it manages to deliver on what it promises, we should see a pretty complex game with many different options and viable strategies. Keep in mind that we have no information yet how much of all that will be available on January 1st, though. Personally, I expect a release akin to what Cryptobrewmaster did - so a very basic game with just enough of the core features to make it actually playable and more and more features added to it as development progresses.
I'll certainly keep you posted as soon as I have any more information on the game. You might also want to give the game's account - @oceanplanet - a follow as they'll certainly release more information in English soon as well.
And that's all from me for today. I certainly feel like my playing schedule is going to become a lot more busy in the coming weeks. It's great to see more and more crypto games coming to Hive. Personally, I'm convinced that blockchain games are one of the (if not the) best way to bring new people to Hive. I have 300 referrals in Cryptobrewmaster and half of those probably didn't have a Hive account before joining the game. So these games are a great opportunity for the whole blockchain and I hope they'll see the support they deserve from the community.
Anyway, thank you all for reading and see you next time!
