How players will battle for crypto in War Riders became a little clearer this morning.
In a gameplay trailer released exclusively to CoinDesk, Cartified, the company behind the game, teases how post-apocalyptic vehicles will duke it out for a crypto token called Benzene (BZN).
And while the game isn’t yet live, 3,700 cars have already been sold as non-fungible, ERC-721 tokens, according to the company. Souped-up Car Tanks and War Lambos have sold for anywhere from $450 to $2,200 each, payable in ETH (more affordable cars are coming, Cartified says).
The game itself won’t cost money to play. Players simply need to own at least one vehicle.
CoinDesk last reported on War Riders when it was kicked out of Coinbase Wallet at the behest of Apple.
“Our Pre-Alpha Gameplay Teaser video is released to show the quality of the graphics and what to expect from the actual gameplay,” Cartified CEO Vlad Kartashov told CoinDesk in a statement. “We are still keeping most of the actual gameplay mechanics in secret (to prevent copycats).”
We know a bit about the gameplay already, based on what we can see in the video and previous conversations with Kartashov.
First of all, the economy of War Riders runs on BZN, which is an ERC-20 token. Players need BZN to “survive” the barren gamescape, so in the world of War Riders it’s expected to be the same thing as money. Interestingly, there are plans for BZN to be tradeable in the real world, just like other tokens, making the game a potential bellwether for crypto’s gaming use-case.
“We have plans to add it to an exchange after the end of the vehicle pre-sale/start of the alpha,” Kartashov said via email.
The game will use an algorithm to determine how much new BZN is needed to keep the economy stable and it will randomly distribute caches around the game world. So, the more a user plays, the more likely he or she is to stumble on caches.
Gameplay
“Hey, cowboy: mine or die today,” begins the new trailer. “I’m thirsty for some BZN.”
In the first portion of the trailer, what appears to be two gangs of vehicles are driving around a desert and firing weapons at each other. The game emphasizes its three-dimensional nature by, for example, showing one car ramping over another and cars knocking each other over through direct hits.
Then a tanker seems to break away and start fueling up with BZN at a way station.
Kartashov explained to CoinDesk that getting the BZN isn’t enough. A player won’t be able to use it from a personal wallet until they get their cars back to their HQ. If they get a load of the stuff out in the field but other players catch them, they risk losing the loot.
The next part of the trailer is perhaps more telling.
It shows a mission-selection screen where the player can choose to chase after BZN in some wasteland. It shows the player selecting vehicles for the mission. As they select more vehicles, their odds of success increase.
Kartashov told CoinDesk that players will be in control of their vehicle, but there’s also clearly some kind of armada element to the game. It could be something like the PC gaming classic Sacrifice, where players both controlled a wizard but also gave broad direction to his army of mythical beasts as they completed missions for different gods.
For now, Kartashov won’t say more.
The total amount of BZN is finite and some of might be burned with different uses. Over time, BZN will appear more slowly or caches will contain fewer tokens.
Just like in a real post-apocalypse, “The fight for it will get more aggressive and more aggressive over time,” Kartashov predicted.
War Riders image (from pre-alpha gameplay video) courtesy of Cartified