Ubisoft’s got yet another NFT project, and man do I feel bad for the artists whose great work is being wasted on this garbage
Despite the fact that we’ve sort of universally agreed that NFT games aren’t going to happen, the nature of game development makes it so we’re bound to be seeing doomed projects fly their unwanted freak flags high on the proud ship “Sunk Cost”. See, videogames take a few years to make, so whatever trend was popular a few years ago will only be surfacing now, unless you’re willing to go all Early Access about it (which plenty of NFT projects have).
Ubisoft has gotten a big run up and leapt onto the bandwagon already halfway to Oregon with Champions Tactics, a Web3 (that’s “NFT” in tech bro speak) PVP game which, looking at this trailer, has an art department that’s utterly wasted on it.
Here are the nice things I have to say about Champions Tactics: This aesthetic, a blend of Darkest Dungeon and Heroforge-style tabletop minis, is rad as all hell. Going onto the website, you can see 3D models of these things, and they all have this lovely painterly texture to them. This might be the first NFT game I actually think looks halfway good—certainly better than the weird, lifeless pseudo-anime dolls of Square Enix’s Symbiogenesis.
Here are the bad things I have to say about Champions Tactics: It’s an NFT game. Despite being so thoroughly, annoyingly touted as the future of game development since it surfaced circa 2015-2017, I’ve yet to see a single use of the tech that isn’t just replicable with what we have already.
Evangelists of the stuff will tell you that you can own your own digital corner of the information highway (Second Life came out in 2003, and most MMOs have housing), or that you can trade rare items with your fellow players (TF2 and Counter-Strike have been doing this forever). Then there’s this idea that you “own the item” in question more than you would otherwise (you don’t, you own a certificate that’s associated with it, and the item will vanish if the infrastructure does). Then there’s the whole “you could use a sword from one game in another game!” nonsense, which I think we can all agree was cooked up by people who don’t understand how game design works on even a fundamental level.
And this is no different. If you missed the free minting orgy back in July, the game has “Ethereal Champions” that you can temporarily play with, but if you want to actually engage with game mechanics you’ll have to shell out enough cryptocurrency for some at the marketplace.
These champions range anywhere from $7 to $63,000 at the time of writing, and you just know those more expensive ones are going to dominate the meta of a PvP game, because obviously, otherwise they wouldn’t be worth that much—okay, that’s a little unfair. This seems to be a player-made ecosystem. The more typical price for a high-end one seems to be around $300-1,000, with which you could buy several good games instead of bragging rights over a game no-one with a normal day job cares about.
I think the biggest tragedy is how that kickass visual identity I just mentioned crumbles here. The artstyle which—again, is cool—is used to generate thousands upon thousands of randomly-assembled champions, instead of anything with any kind of spirit in it. I’m not convinced anyone’s attached to “Methodic Warrior” or “Earthy Pugilist”, the latter of which has a gun, by the way. The closest this gets to being conserved is in the game’s factions page, outlining the film-thin lore of the setting, and I mean—look at this art, it doesn’t belong here. Let me rescue you from this prison Ubisoft put you in.
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I think the real tragedy here is knowing that, unless Champions Tactics somehow manages to avoid the 100% miss rate these NFT projects have had so far, all of this genuine effort is going out the window in a scant handful of years when the tokens eventually devalue and the game winds down. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, maybe Ubisoft’s stumbled on some secret sauce, but this game isn’t entering into a competitive genre as much as it is wading into a graveyard and yelling “I’m alive!” Ah well. At least it’s not giving people skin and eye injuries.
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