Coin Rivet recently spoke with Enjin co-founder and CTO Witek Radomski to discuss the wild, wacky, and revolutionary ideas and concepts Enjin is exploring for the blockchain gaming Multiverse.
Innovation
Witek discussed how the Multiverse is providing genuine innovation that the mainstream gaming industry has been lacking for some time.
The Multiverse is a collaborative effort of many game developers feeding into one unique and authentic experience for both the developer and the player.
One of the central pillars of the Multiverse is the ability to take in-game items from one game to the next – almost as if the player is being transported to a different universe complete with all their hard-earned gear.
“It’s a really unique concept, and we always get questions like ‘why would I give my items to another game?’, but you have to think about how that’s going to make players think of your game and your items,” comments Witek.
“If they can start travelling between multiple games, they’re going to feel more engaged, and in terms of more innovation, you know we’re really just building out more tools.”
One example provided by Witek is a tool called ‘TempWallets’, which allows a player to join a game, start playing, and begin receiving virtual items in a virtual wallet without having to install a blockchain wallet. If they then download the wallet at some point in the future, they will have access to all of the items inside of it.
Another area Enjin is exploring is a layer-two scaling solution called Efinity. Enjin wants a solution that doesn’t require the average user to pay gas costs to use the blockchain, which should help bring more people and in turn more innovation to the blockchain gaming space.
“Efinity is going to have a unique economic model where there is economic incentive for the game developer to provide that service for players, and players will be able to do an average amount of transactions on the game without having previous blockchain experience – and then it will be faster than base Ethereum.”
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— Enjin (@enjin) May 15, 2019
Autonomous NPCs
Witek went on to discuss how Enjin has also been thinking about truly wild and wacky possibilities. One such idea is fully autonomous non-player characters (NPCs).
“We have all sorts of crazy ideas for future stuff we can work on. I mean one of my favourites is NPCs that are autonomous in games that own items.”
“When games get more complicated and the stakes get high and these items are very sought after, you may actually have NPCs that control their own blockchain accounts that are running on their own servers, and these are now actually real entities in the real world that you have to solve the puzzle with.”
“So now you have an autonomous creature that owns assets. That’s a weird and interesting concept that’s only possible with crypto.”
“Crypto is the only real medium that lets you do that. The NPC can pay its own way and basically have its own business model. Maybe in the future we’ll be experimenting with ideas like that – but that’s sort of far-out.”
“We’re just trying to give game developers the tools they need to really exploit blockchain, this new form of game. It’s like a new tool set you can work with.”
Another aspect Enjin is working on relates directly to metadata, which is information attached to a token such as item ownership and history.
“In the future, I envision games doing things like having interactive storytellers that look at your character, look at your items, and look at all of your blockchain history and then be able to weave some stories and have some story points that pop up from that.”
“So if your player had a lot of kills in various games then they’ll be able to reference that, for example.”
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— Enjin (@enjin) April 29, 2019
Quests beyond worlds
One concept that is truly revolutionary is the ability to have quests spanning across multiple games, something that Witek notes Enjin is “really pushing for, because it’s easy to do with blockchain and with our platform”.
“All you need to do is support that item ID in your game and boom, you’re using the Multiverse.”
“We are already seeing some of our developers using these cross-game puzzles and things. We’re also doing a game ourselves. Well it’s not really a game, it’s like a puzzle on the blockchain called ‘TradeSmith‘. So you’ll actually have to go into many games that are on our platform to be able to collect various items and shards.”
From there, the player will be able to combine these items or perhaps craft them into newer, better items.
“It’s a bit like a scavenger hunt. You’ll need to do some trading with people who have an item that you want and then you can craft new, higher-level items, and those items can have various impacts in the games as well that help you progress.”
Witek also discussed how TradeSmith is partially inspired by the novel Ready Player One, with the end goal being the “ultimate token” – the very first token minted on Enjin, known as the Monolith.
The Monolith is embedded with more than a million Enjin Coins, so it’s going to be a “very difficult but attainable goal”.
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— Enjin (@enjin) May 1, 2019
Removing the barriers
One key point Witek spoke about is that for mainstream adoption to happen, certain barriers need to be removed to enable wider audiences to delve into the wonderful world of blockchain and crypto.
“Games themselves being released and players coming in from outside of the blockchain space, that’s going to be really interesting to see, and I think all of the tools are being built to remove all the barriers.”
“I mean, the most critical thing is not needing Ether to start using them, then not even needing a blockchain wallet in the first place – those two barriers, when they’re removed, will allow people to come in and start playing a game without knowing anything about blockchain.”
In roughly a month or so, Enjin is set to release Space Misfits, which is a “full-on game where you can fly around the universe and collect ships and all of that”.
“So people are going to start playing these games. They’re going to start learning about blockchain and then ERC-1155 and their tokens. I really see the snowball of adoption happening this year.”
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the author should not be considered as financial advice. We do not give advice on financial products.