Over the past few weeks I’ve been rounding out my coverage of my trip to Bright Star Studios (BSS) in mid October. Throughout these interviews, I was able to play through Ember Sword’s first dungeon The Ultra Deep and learn about the capabilities of the team’s custom game engine. Of course, a visit with Bright Star Studios wouldn’t be complete without a thorough conversation about Ember Sword’s blockchain endeavors.
I sat down with Mark Laursen, Founder and CEO, and Amber Sutera, VP of Marketing of Bright Star Studios. As we sat in the serene ambience of a former recording studio, we started the conversation by taking stock of how far the game has come from the team’s original vision.
“The original idea for the game was that it was 2D.” Mark said. “We always wanted to do it in a browser, we worked with another engine that we could use for a browser. Unfortunately they came back in 2020 and said sorry, you’re on our own. That’s when we had the idea of, ‘either we throw in the towel, or we create our own engine.’ Through that, the aspects of the game changed, because now we have more freedom and we could see all of the things we were lacking. So we expanded on that whole aspect, with Streaming and it became 3D as well.”
Back in 2020, however, the team was gearing up for their first set of land sales, which meant that blockchain was still a central part of Bright Star Studio’s ideology. It’s also important to note that blockchain also took a turn in the latter half of 2020, which resulted in a lot of projects in the industry shelving their development. Yet Ember Sword didn’t falter through the market downturn, and the team has actually grown over the past several years.
Blockchain Doesn't Always Mean What You Think It Means
“We haven’t been affected by it. I will say that sentiment from people outside, you kind of have to educate them on what (Web3) is. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about it, and I think that’s the hard part, and why we decided to make the game in a way that’s so accessible.” Mark explained.
He believes that people will come around on Ember Sword because the team isn’t primarily focused on the Web3 aspects. The fact that the game is accessible in a browser from just about any device, loads in just a few seconds, and was in development back in 2018, prior to the flash-in-the-pan hype of the crypto boom will eventually show potential players the difference between what BSS has accomplished in comparison to the cash grabs and rug pulls that Web3 has often been associated with. “I think it gives us some credibility at least.” He told me.
Of course, many players still question what benefits blockchain has over any other database. It’s a continued question that I’ve heard a lot, especially from potential players that aren’t against the idea of blockchain, but they just don’t understand the purpose of it in gaming.
“I always thought that (blockchain) made a lot of sense.” Mark began. He pointed (figuratively) to the public distributed database of blockchain. “We can’t cheat our users.” He said. “If we make something in the game, like a cosmetic, whether it was made today or in a year, you can see when it was made.” With blockchain, anyone can potentially see a particular item’s history. How many were made, and how many owners it had.
Mark states that this is important because some developers re-release sought after items, devaluing some gamers unique achievements by creating or earning these items from the very beginning. With blockchain, you would be able to know about a unique item’s journey, even if Ember Sword’s blockchain based items are all specifically cosmetic, but the history is still cultivated and meaningful, and those details will all be kept on chain. Of course, that doesn’t account for the land sales, or Ember Tokens, which are two separate pieces of the blockchain economy.
Blockchain is certainly built into the game in many facets of gameplay, including earning their Ember token which you can obtain through completing quests, selling items, and taking part in events. While players are able to buy these tokens on an external crypto exchange, the use of the token is limited to alternative play mechanics, such as cosmetics and land sales, and the fundamentals of the game, such as combat, questing, PvE and PvP combat won’t be affected no matter how much money you spend.
"The Game Takes Care of Everything For You"
“We will generate a wallet inside the game. And that game will have all the tokens, all the NFT's, etc. So, you don't need to do anything. You just have to play the game and the game takes care of everything for you.” Mark said. Essentially, if you’ve never played a blockchain game before, you won’t really notice any difference between Ember Sword and any other game. You’ll earn Ember Tokens, and you may even buy, earn, or craft cosmetics that might be NFT’s but unless you’re an advanced player that wants to go the extra mile and include your personal Crypto-Wallet, it’s going to play like just any other game.
Of course, this is a double edged sword in a way, as all of the cosmetics that drop or are crafted in game will be sold by players, to players. That means that players decide the price, and while you’ll be able to pay for your cosmetics with Ember tokens you earn in game, players haven’t always been known to price things according to their worth. Still, that gives a lot of players the opportunity to put the onus on the more “advanced” players to cash out their Ember tokens if they want to “make money”. Despite being able to earn tokens, and sell items in Ember Sword, the team doesn’t like the term “Play to Earn”.
Bright Star Studios doesn’t want players to play the game just because they might be able to earn some money. They want gamers to play the game because it’s a fun game. Earning or spending money on NFT’s is completely optional. That includes the plots of land that Ember Sword has been selling. While the pre-sales of land plots have been a major boost to the funding of the game up to this point, if players determine, after playing the game on launch, that they want to buy their own plot of land, they could do that primarily based on the value they’ve earned by playing the game.
“I’m sure there will be people in Solarwood who will be selling some plots. There’s the idea that people have to pull in money from the outside, but you can do it all with the value inside the game, then buy (plots) from somebody else in the game.” Mark said. Functionally, these transactions might take place like any other in game purchase in another game -- the fact that these are NFT’s would be immaterial if that part of the game doesn’t interest you.
Aside from NFT’s, and taking funds through transactions of land and cosmetics, there will be some alternative monetization utilized in Ember Sword. “For us, there will be premium items in the game. But those could be like name changes, or maybe you want to change some stuff about the character.” Though it seems to be too early to tell what character-specific items the team has determined would be worth selling. “We'll do some seasonal stuff as well, of course, and some specific things like that. We are also looking into maybe doing some cosmetic founder packs.” He told me.
Building The Right Partners
Finally, we ended our conversation with some notes on making Ember Sword accessible across a wide range of platforms. While Ember Sword can run on anything, the team hasn’t committed to listing on Steam, Epic Games Store, the Google Play Store, or Apple’s App Store. As predominantly a browser game, and a blockchain game, it may seem like it will be hard to market the game on the more conventional platforms, even if many blockchain games have found a home across all of these platforms, including Steam who “banned” blockchain games back in October of 2021. For the moment, Amber told me that the team wants to cultivate partnerships of players that actually care about the game itself.
“We're building the right partners right now. We're trying to pick selectively who we want at launch… We've got browsers that we're talking to, and tons of guilds, obviously, you've got your blockchain guilds, you've got your gaming guilds… We're trying to go as naturally and organically as possible, so word of mouth instead of just putting ads everywhere.” She said.
Even with Early Access initially planned for October 2024 (though the date could easily change), Ember Sword is still a long way off from being feature complete. The last thing the team wants to do is generate a major advertising push before the game is ready for prime time, but that hasn’t stopped the team from running multiple tests along their development cycle. One thing is for certain, whether you’re interested in the blockchain portion of Ember Sword, Bright Star Studios is building their game to cater to real gamers, and not NFT speculators. Whether or not real gamers can be convinced to try Ember Sword is going to hinge on the game itself. Personally, I can’t wait to see where the game goes from here.
