Dark or Light
logo
Logo

Abyss Online Team Q&A Addresses Controversies, Leaving Blockchain Behind, and Fleshes Out Their Vision

Christina Gonzalez Updated: Posted:
Category:
News 0

The team behind Abyss Online is responding to questions about the project’s original blockchain-based origins, about controversial monetization, and the new direction for the in-development sandbox MMORPG.

Recently announced, Abyss Online, was quickly met with criticism for selling sometimes expensive packs to fund development without much to show just yet. Following this, some in the community saw something familiar in the presentation and dug up an older blockchain-based project called Metagates, leading to even more criticism and accusations that the team’s newly-announced game was some sort of scam or cover.

In a brand new FAQ, the team addresses their history as amateurs diving into Metagates as an initial project, complete with joke offerings.

“In August 2021, my friends and I grew restless waiting for a new MMO. We started a self-funded project on Discord called Metagates, creating basic arena combat and an open world with a basic social element. We started hosting weekly PvP events.

Within weeks, gaming veterans flooded our Discord after trying our free, rough online demo. When asked how we'd fund ongoing development, many suggested blockchain as it was popular in 2021. One night as a joke, we created and individually named 2222 pixelated poops to sell ironic packages modeled after Kickstarter rewards, poking fun at blockchain culture.

We never expected many sales, nor did we even promote the idea. But surprisingly, our satirical poop sold out during a dev stream, raising ~$100k from crypto gamers overnight through sales in January 2021”

Beyond this, the FAQ is mostly centered around what their vision is for Abyss Online, after that experience, saying that “Over two years, we hired the best developers to train us and work on the project beside us to perfect our game and expand it into our full vision”.

The rest of the Q&A informs us about the servers, monetization, plans for 11 classes at launch with three subclasses each, lots of player choices, quest generation, world bosses, PvE content, and a whole lot more. Their vision is becoming much clearer, but they needed to get controversy behind them first, and they have declared that “the team realized that integrating blockchain was not core to the gameplay experience they wanted to create”, and is “a distraction” from fleshing out their initial vision. While this doesn’t close the door on blockchain forever, it does answer some of the most-asked recent questions.


Seshat

Christina Gonzalez

Christina is MMORPG.COM’s News Editor and a contributor since 2011. Always a fan of great community and wondering if the same sort of magic that was her first guild exists anymore.