NFT
Some other way around game worlds are mocked look empty and feeling (or actually be) devoid of human life, but that was not at all the case with Bored Ape Yacht Club maker Yuga Labs’ Other side Second Trip play test late last month.
I fell into a lobby filled with thousands – literally thousands– from other players, all running around, jumping and flying through the air. And they were all talking at the same time.
It was a sensory overload… but also hugely impressive. While it’s true that everyone had a similar robotic tribe design and the lobby was simply decorated, perhaps reducing the technical load, the Second Trip ended up packing some 7,200 unique players per Yuga. And it worked fine in my browser on a two year old MacBook Pro.
Thanks to each of the 7,200+ simultaneous Voyagers who joined us for the 2nd Trip, everyone who watched our official livestream, and @jfwong, @brycent_, @champmedici and @lowbellie for leading their teams through the Trip. We hope you enjoyed your time at Otherside. pic.twitter.com/BOfKhnGPPg
— Othersidemeta (@OthersideMeta) March 25, 2023
“I think it’s really hard for people to understand when you turn on another type of experience called the ‘metaverse,’ and there’s not such a dense experience, there’s not that many people in it,” Yuga Labs’ Chief Creative Agent Michael Figge told it Decrypt after the event. “You won’t find that at Otherside.”
Admittedly, it was a planned event within a small portion of the final Otherside game world, and it was the first such playtest in several months – for a game with over 22,000 virtual landowners (at the time) who were certainly eager to see what they bought to inside. Still, Figge said it’s essential to maintain that level of activity as Otherside continues to test and build a live product.
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“How do we publicly build and maintain that density,” he said, “and scale that density even further so that more and more people find this to be something they want to come to?”
It’s a ‘journey’
It’s a question Yuga Labs grapples with as it attempts to scale Otherside from last year’s massive NFT land drop and $1.25 billion in trading volume to date – according to data from CryptoSlam– in a robust online world full of Bored Ape themed stories, social gameplay challenges and all kinds of NFT avatars roaming the land.
Building in public and showing NFT holders what is clearly still a work in progress is a different vibe from most traditional AAA games. Some games launch in an “early access” mode, and many do a beta testing period leading up to release, but Yuga’s demo felt even earlier in the process. The technology seems sturdier than the content at the moment.
A screenshot from the Otherside Second Trip lobby. Image: decrypt
After completing an introductory session in the Second Trip lobby, we all jumped through a portal into a jungle-like environment with “magic blobs” to collect and take to giant, laser-spewing toads. In other words, it looked and felt more like the atmosphere of the Bored Ape Yacht Club universe than the sterile lobby arena.
Yuga divided the players into four teams led by Web3 personalities such as the content creator Bryce ‘Brycent’ Johnson And Cordell “Champ Medici” Broadus (son of Snoop Dogg). The team leaders urged their respective players via voice chat to collect the most orbs and feed them to the toads. Thousands of players jumped and sprinted like crazy to get the spheres, and eventually the winning team was promised an exclusive “winged helmet” wearable NFT.
The comeback was insane! The last moments were heartbreaking…@OthersideMeta 😪 pic.twitter.com/n7uBAOFrgB
— Brycent 🚀 (@brycent_) March 25, 2023
It was a great social spectacle. But the experience lost steam before it was over, and felt like a monotonous quest that went on for far too long. After more than 20 minutes of the same routine, some players took to the chat feed to write missives like “boring” or “this is stupid”.
“This is pretty bad if this is the Otherside,” one player wrote.
Build in public
It’s not Otherside, at least not in its final form, but the early taste still raises expectations.
Figge and Yuga Chief Gaming Officer Spencer Tucker told Decrypt after that, they saw a series of comments from players, and that some enjoyed the orb-collecting routine thanks to the socially competitive atmosphere. Not every player will feel the same way. And it’s hard to raise expectations when you’re presented with a limited piece of gameplay.
Crowds of players pile up in the Otherside Second Trip world. Image: Yuga Labs
“I think what’s important to keep in mind, and to keep the community on the ground, is this concept that we’re building and testing together,” Tucker said. “This is a joint development with the players and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga and the wider Otherside community.”
With these tests, Tucker explained, they examine not only technical feedback and data points, but also player sentiment and reactions. According to Yuga, it is an iterative process.
“We’re just tuning a guitar, right?” Figs added. “We’re figuring out what’s best for this new medium.”
And the Trips should be coming much more often soon. Figge said the first two Trips were “large-scale, theatrical experiences”, and their “beasts of their own”. But Yuga plans to “enable many more visits” with a more regular testing schedule – to “return to the same idea, but it grows and grows and grows over time,” he added.
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“To figure out what features people need, we need to move to a model that opens to us every few weeks,” Figge said. “That’s where you’ll see us turn to.”
If all goes according to plan, Yuga Labs could be on track to open up the world to other builders by the end of this year, he suggested, allowing for the creation of user-generated content that will live on Otherdeed plots and create Yuga’s own work will complete. on the world.
“I think a goal for success is that by December we can all sleep and someone else is building across the street — and they don’t need us,” Figge said. “They build their community, they build their own activations and experiences… and they have all the tools to do that.”
Ours and yours
So what does all this mean? What is the ultimate version of Otherside? Tucker and Figge described it Decrypt as an online world where Yuga’s own official content can coexist with the creations of potentially tens of thousands of players and digital landowners.
An image from the Otherside Second Trip. Image: Yuga Labs
Figge pointed out that the great games League of Legends and Dota 2 grew out of a fan game (Defense of the Ancients) created as a mod for Blizzard’s classic Warcraft III. He says Web3 provides a way for third-party creators to leverage Yuga’s building blocks while increasing the value within the original game ecosystem, and it could benefit those creators as well.
“You can really motivate a creative economy that can produce really, really immersive experiences,” Figge said, “as long as you keep the primitives and the Web3 rails to them. I think that is a very special model.”
However, how these two potentially disparate elements coexist remains to be seen. A proto-metaverse game like Roblox is completely user-generated, with its 40 million games united by a simple interface. Likewise, Decentralized provides basic infrastructure and hubs and hosts events with partners, but the space is mostly filled by brands and independent creators.
Tucker provided an interesting anecdote, comparing Yuga’s mindset to Star Wars and its vast universe of content. Granted, that’s all official content created under Lucasfilm and eventually Disney, but it provides a construct for thinking about what’s considered “canon” and what might be considered alternate universe, “what if” stories, and so on .
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“That’s kind of up to us to mediate,” Tucker admitted.
But that sort of thing is already happening in the Web3 world, and especially around the Bored Ape Yacht Club – “what we could describe as layer-2s to our layer-1,” Tucker said, using blockchain terminology to describe derivative creations (“layer-2” content) by NFT holders developed and owned on top of the “layer-1” brand and artwork are from Yuga Labs.
Who is in?
The other burning question about Otherside is how, or even if, it will eventually become a game available to a mass audience. With Bored Ape NFT prices currently sitting around $92,000 worth of ETH on the low side, or even Otherside NFT deeds approaching $2,500, a completely exclusive experience would surely leave most gamers out.
For now, the answer is that Yuga Labs is really focused on the NFT holders, the people who invested in the startup’s Web3 vision. And Yuga prefers to give them the ability to bring friends or even lend their credentials to bring in more users.
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Figge pointed to the Second Trip plus-one tickets given to Otherdeed landowners, saying it allowed NFT holders to be “the gateway” to bringing friends into the ecosystem. And with Yuga’s recent stand-alone Dookey Dash web game, players can use the Delegate Cash service to allow another wallet to play the game without holding the access pass NFT.
“We think that’s where the real sticky behavior will come from,” Tucker said, “unlocking scale.”
It’s not the only teaching Yuga Labs has taken away from Dookey Dash. The runner-style endless game was all over Crypto Twitter for weeks, the Sewer pass NFTs generated $110 million in trading volume and the winner received an NFT prize which he then flipped for $1.63 million in ETH.
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It was busy to say the least. Even people mocking Dookey Dash, whether for its open embrace of toilet humor or the rising prices of NFT access passes, ultimately helped it stay in the conversation in the crypto and gaming world. Tucker said Yuga is trying to “create that virality of experience” in future games and “[crowdsource] grow somewhat.”
As the focus remains on NFT collectors for now, Yuga isn’t trying to hide the Web3 elements of its games or keep those users a relatively niche segment of the overall player base. But Figge believes Yuga’s games will be recognized above all for being fun, perhaps even expanding “the image of what a digital collectible can be.”
“One of our favorite things about Dookey Dash and Otherside is that you really forget you’re interacting with NFTs,” he said. “You just think you’re having fun.”