Admittedly, that headline has a lot of techbro buzzword nonsense in it, so let’s try to break down what Nine Chronicles is. At the brass tacks level, it’s a side-scrolling MMO that promises dungeons, crafting, trading, arena-based PvP, and nine worlds to explore. The game is also open-source, making it fully customizable thanks to a level editor that lets players design levels and features, send contributions via GitHub, and launch a new network with friends. This ties to its “decentralized” nature, as the game runs on peer-to-peer networking instead of a single server.
Nine Chronicles is created and released by Planetarium, creators of the Libplanet game engine that touts the ease with which designers can create free-to-play games, keep them live via P2P networking, and monetize them via blockchain networks.
“Planetarium is a new engine specializing in peer-to-peer gaming. We have built a .NET-based engine that allows developers to code complex logic and interactive gameplay together in a single Unity project. Think of Node.js, but for multi-platform online games.”
As for the game’s link to blockchain, an official FAQ details how players can turn on in-game mining to both contribute their personal processing power to the blockchain while getting some in-game incentives like 10 NCG per block mined. The FAQ does state the amount of NCG gained from mining will lower by half every four years, and promises that only about 25% of processing power — or one core of a quad-core CPU — is used.
Nine Chronicles is releasing on Steam and through its own launcher, with plans to arrive to mobile later. The FAQ and website offer some more details, while the preview trailer below grants a look at the game as created by Planetarium in action.
