Half a year ago, Farsite would have been one of these projects I would have gotten highly excited about. Some sobering months later, I'm a lot less hyped about most crypto gaming projects out there and as such, I'm a lot more cautious when taking a first look at any new project I come about. Nevertheless, at first sight Farsite is looking like a pretty interesting concept and who knows, maybe we'll get some more real gaming opportunities in the crypto world after all. So here's what I found out about the game so far:
So what exactly is Farsite? According to their website, it's a DeFi-powered economic MMO RPG/RTS game with elements of adventure in a sci-fi setting based on a post-apocalyptic story to be released on Ethereum 2. Now these are a lot of buzz words in a single sentence, aren't they? From what I've gathered, we can probably expect something between Star Traders: Frontiers and Elite Dangerous but in a persistent, massive multiplayer universe. So you'll travel around the stars, always looking for riches, be it through a good deal, a rich asteroid to mine, or a lone star traveler to rob. All things will be kept together by an ERC-20 token that people will use to deal with each other. Their webiste hints at a lot of different career paths to follow without giving away too much about any of it:
It's obviously too early to be sure how all of the above options will play out and how unique each of them will be but I have to admit that it sounds pretty interesting at first glance. I'm a huge fan of the old sandbox SciFi games like Privateer. As a kid, I've spent countless hours just flying around the galaxy, doing random trades, fighting off pirates or committing piracy myself. Having a game like that run on blockchain technology would be pretty amazing. To tell the truth, a massive multiplayer space adventure game just sounds like the perfect fit for blockchain gaming. It's one of the things that got me so excited about eXode in the first place for example.
Nevertheless, recent titles like Alien Worlds and R-Planet have made me somewhat wary of these kind of games and as much as I like the sound of the hinted at gameplay features, there's also the dreaded DeFi part in the above announcement. Not only that, though, there's more on how that is going to work than on anything else surrounding the game. Here's what to expect:
- Staking native ERC-20 to create NFTs
- Collateralized loans to leverage production
- Granted insurance for ERC-20 backed NFTs
- Interest-bearing deflationary token
Honestly, this once again sounds more like an investment scheme than like an actual game. I'm well aware that a lot of people out there are extremely excited for this combination of DeFi and games and it's exactly what some of the currently most successful "games" (if you want to call them that) are doing. Still, I can't help but wish for blockchain games that actually cared more for their gameplay than they cared for their tokenomics. I might be a bit too harsh on this one as it seems like they have at least some pretty clear ideas of what they want to add to the game in the coming years. They already put up a solid top level road map with more details:
As you can see, it's still some months until we'll see any of the actual gameplay. You can already pre-register, though, and if you perform some basic interactions with the game like following their account on Twitter or referring friends to the game, you can already earn some ingame assets. So to tell the truth, I can't really tell whether the game will be worth your time eventually or not, but I found the information and screenshots provided to be intriguing enough to make me follow the game for now. As more information gets available, I'll follow up with more articles about the game.
Even if the game turns out to be not really interesting, though, there's one thing to keep in mind with titles like Farsite. The NFT craze out there is real at the moment and there's a lot of money to be made with them. At the same time, DeFi seems to be getting bigger everyday and combining both elements almost feels like at least some form of success is guaranteed. So even if the game ends up being bad, in the end, chances are you should be able to make quite some money in the process before everything goes down. Just look at what happened with Alien Worlds and you'll get a good understanding of what to expect. I've made more than 1000$ by just clicking Mine every now and then and then selling everything when full FOMO was kicking in.
That said, I'm really not a big fan of making games on ETH, especially not if they want to strongly focus on NFTs. So it will depend a lot on whether ETH2 will be substantially better at dealing with Gas fees and a very high number of transactions or not. Because of that, I'm certainly not going to invest any money into the game for now but I will claim everything I can get for free and also see if I can refer some users to the game while I'm at it. We'll have to wait and see how things turn out for Farsite but either way, I'll keep you posted as soon as I find out more about the project.
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!