25 hours.

That’s the amount of time the average World of Warcraft MMORPG player spends playing their favorite video-game every week.

These days however, most popular MMORPGs present us with static “theme-park” universes where we can engage with everything in the world, but never truly change or evolve it, much less own it.

Granted, game developers design these worlds to be as fun to engage with as possible, but after a few months of playing, even the most well-designed universe will grow repetitive.

Luckily, there’s a solution!

Community-driven Game Design

In fact, in other corners of the games industry, this issue of our digital universes growing stale has been solved long ago by simply putting players in charge of their own gameplay experiences.

Indeed, we only have to look at games like Minecraft and ROBLOX to see millions of players using their imagination and creativity to create instanced worlds and experiences that others can partake in.

In these games, the players are in full control of the worlds they create, but at the expense of a vast persistent universe and MMORPG gameplay experience.

In the Shooter and MOBA genres, community-driven game design has also flourished for years as “Mods”, which are alterations or modifications to the original game, made by players or fans.

Just how popular are these Mods?

Well, the most played game on Steam, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), started as a mod. Counter Strike started as a Half-Life mod, and even DotA was originally a mod.

Not having this type of control over the game world in MMORPGs, has often lead to players expressing frustration with the decisions made by the centralized company who develops and controls the game world.

And understandably so.

Without any impact on the world they spend so much of their time engaging with, even previously dedicated players may end up quitting the game they used to consider their hobby out of frustration.

That’s what the decentralized game design of Ember Sword changes, giving the community of players real impact of the open, persistent, game world.

From Community-driven game design to Decentralized game design

What’s the difference between community-driven game design and decentralized game-design then?

Ownership.

Sandbox MMORPGs like Ultima Online (released in 1997) and Albion Online are examples of games that attempt to provide players with a sense of control of the world.

But with Ember Sword, we take it one step further by decentralizing control of the world (through tokenization), allowing players to not only decide the fate of the persistent open world, but quite literally own and monetize it!

In Ember Sword, the community owns and evolves the game world!

Decentralizing MMORPG game design using the blockchain provides 3 overall pillars of change for the games industry:

It gives Landowners a sense of control and ownership by turning passive consumer of a pre-defined gameplay experience into active participants in control of the world they help populate. It creates a better, more interesting gameplay experience for everyone. As Unanimous AI has shown, under the right circumstances, a group of laymen can easily out-perform experts on any subject (such as predicting Oscar winners with a 94% accuracy!).

So at 1344 parcels of LAND, the world of Ember Sword is sure to be more interesting than any world a single group of developers could ever come up with. That’s what excites us about Ember Sword and decentralized game design in general; with the players in control of evolving the world, you’ll enter a new experience every single day! It allows for decentralized monetization by enabling Landowners to sell items and monetize experiences on their land. This is a topic we’ll cover more in-depth in the near future.

The Power to Mold Worlds

Decentralized game design will change everything for both players and game developers of MMORPGs, and we’re excited to be at the forefront of that change with Ember Sword.

In Ember Sword, every landowner decides the fate of an area of in-game land, which other players will engage with to progress.

Build what’s in demand and you might just turn your land into the most popular piece of virtual “real estate” in the Ember Sword world!

You can build structures and make them look unique with cosmetic skins, place any resource, monster or NPC, create mini-games for other players, and even open up a permanent marketplace to sell your own and other players’ items, earning a Landowner tax on every sale.

Welcome to the ever-evolving, yet persistent and open-world fantasy universe controlled by the players — welcome to Ember Sword!