Bright Star Studios, creator of Ember Sword, describes the game as an open-world sandbox role-playing game inspired by MMO legends such as World of Warcraft, Runescape, and Guild Wars.
Ember Sword’s top priority is accessibility, focusing on removing entry barriers for both new and veteran MMO players. As is common in other role-playing games, there are no classes. Ember Sword, on the other hand, allows players to experience everything the game has to offer, from leveling up skills to crafting and combat, all through a single character.
Ember Sword takes place in the fantasy world of Thanabus. It is divided into four nations: Duskeron, Ediseau, Sevrend, and Solarwood. The nations are divided into three territories: Kingship, Outlaw, and Wilderness, each with its own set of game objectives ranging from player-versus-player combat to epic open-world boss battles.
Ember Sword will also use blockchain technology to encourage community participation and give players ownership of in-game items. Future Ember Sword land plots will be available on Immutable X in the form of NFTs, along with a variety of cosmetic and vanity items that players may use to customise their characters and adorn their plots.
Improving the MMO Experience
Unlike many existing MMORPGs that use a pay-to-play subscription model, Ember Sword will be available for free. Bright Star will earn money by taking a commision on Ember Sword NFT sales, hence the company’s success is dependent on the success of the game.
To make sure that Ember Sword will flourish, Laursen drew on his extensive gaming knowledge to address pain points in existing MMO games. Social interaction is one of the most significant aspects of MMORPGs. Role-playing games transport players to a fantasy world where they can kill dragons and demons, allowing them to collaborate with other players and form new connections.
Instead of using multiple “servers” of the same game that each host a limited number of players, the designers of Ember Sword created a single expansive world in which everyone participates at the same time.
“We want it all to be one big world that’s connected,” Laursen asserted. “It can get lonely—even in an MMORPG—which is kind of weird, you know, because it’s supposed to be with a lot of other people. So we want to nurture the whole social experience and everything that comes with it, something we think has been lacking in other games.”
Bright Star is using a proprietary artificial intelligence engine to encourage player interaction. The AI will introduce dynamic difficulty based on a player’s skill level, recommend routes and objectives that allow players to cross paths and collaborate, and make suggestions tailored to the player’s style. In addition to encouraging cooperation, the AI can assist players in locating and attacking each other in player versus player scenarios, allowing for even more interaction and bringing the Ember Sword world to life.
Ember Sword also intends to improve on existing MMO games by making it easier for new players to join. Bright Star has developed its own in-house game engine to power Ember Sword, allowing for quick, browser-based gameplay without the need to download a specialised client or load huge amounts of data. “We’ve made it easy to jump in, do something cool, then sign up after if you want,” Laursen said.
NFTs in Ember Sword
Ember Sword NFTs will take two main forms: land and cosmetics.
Bright Star raised $204 million by selling 40,000 Ember Sword land NFTs on the Ethereum scaling solution Polygon last year. The plots were divided into five categories: land, settlement, city, town, and capital.
Regular land plots grant the Sir/Lady title and will include features such as campsites, NPC houses, resource deposits, and monster spawns that will be revealed as the game world progresses. Settlements, towns, and cities, on the other hand, will allow owners to build structures that other players in the game can use. Furthermore, towns and cities will only support exchanges, allowing players to buy and sell cosmetic NFTs and other in-game items.
When trades take place on exchanges, a small fee will be split 50/50 between the landowner and Bright Star, allowing players to earn passively from their land plots. Furthermore, regardless of type, all land plots will receive a share of the revenue generated by the areas around them. “The philosophy is that half of what goes in goes out into the community,” Laursen said, emphasising how the player-owned nature of towns and cities allows them to become dynamic, ever-changing hubs rather than the static settlements found in other games.
Ember Sword will also feature tokenized cosmetic items. Though these NFTs will not provide players with any material advantage in the game, they can be used to change the appearance of player characters or land plots. Ember Sword has big plans for cosmetic item customisation—even details like building textures and ambient sounds for player-owned land will be represented by NFTs that players can collect and trade.
The majority of cosmetic NFT items will be released in batches through in-game events and updates. Hence, rather than Bright Star dictating how much certain items are worth, the players will set their own prices. Those who want to buy cosmetic Ember Sword NFTs will have to use the game’s upcoming EMBER token, similar to how Yuga Labs recently introduced ApeCoin as the exclusive currency for its own Metaverse ecosystem.
However, Laursen clarified that NFTs in Ember Sword will not make the game “pay-to-win.” “You can’t buy power in the game—you can only buy looks and cosmetics and vanity, all that stuff,” he explained. Generic items like in-game gold, armour, and weapons will not be NFTs, and the game will be designed so that farming items to sell to other players for real-world currency will be futile. “If you’re just farming gold and selling it, you’re kind of doing yourself a disservice because there’s not really stuff that you need to buy. It’s the NFTs that you want, and you can’t bot farm those—you have to actually be good at the game and go out and play it,” Laursen explained.
All Ember Sword NFTs are currently hosted on Polygon and can be traded on NFT trading platforms such as OpenSea. However, Bright Star is planning to migrate Ember Sword’s land NFTs to Immutable X, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution powered by StarkWare’s ZK-Rollup technology.
Bright Star chose Immutable’s NFT tooling to simplify the process of creating in-game NFTs and deploying the contracts on Layer 2. By doing so, NFTs stored on Ethereum Layer 2 will be able to connect with Ember Sword while enjoying negligible transaction fees and near-instant transactions. When the game goes live, all future land and cosmetic NFTs will be deployed with Immutable X and tradable on Immutable’s NFT marketplace.
Preparing for Launch
Those who took part in last year’s Ember Sword land sale and have either an Ember Sword land NFT or an Ember Sword badge can now test the game’s pre-alpha version. Laursen revealed that the next major update to the pre-alpha version will be the introduction of combat, which will function similarly to popular battle arena games such as Dota 2 and League of Legends. When questioned about the long development timeline, Laursen hinted that Bright Star would release a more substantial version of the game by the end of the year, but he refused to make any promises. “Either way we’re looking to put out the full game by around the end of 2023,” he said.
Bright Star is also in the process of onboarding new talent to its growing team in order to accelerate development. “We’re adding a lot of really high star talent that I’m sure will shock everyone. They’re people who are actually changing to our startup from huge companies and taking pay cuts because they believe in our vision,” Laursen said.
While Ember Sword is still over a year away from fully launching, the team behind it has big plans for the game. If Ember Sword is successful, Bright Star could be one of the first companies to incorporate blockchain technology into a free and open game. Meanwhile, Ember Sword NFT holders will have to wait for the official release to see if it lives up to its promise.