The fates of Guild of Guardians

Launching 15th May 2024

Game development is a tricky beast.

I’m not sure whether blockchain game development is fundamentally more tricky — technically more complex I guess — but the people making blockchain games tend to be less experienced, which throws up its own issues.

Perhaps more significant, however, is that blockchain game devs build in the open, often with every little change shared with the waiting community to demonstrate progress. This can prove a headache if the developer then wants or is forced to change direction.

Still, such pivots can also be crystallization points for community to recommit themselves, and that’s what Immutable will be hoping for Guild of Guardians, its much anticipated mobile RPG which will be globally launched through the app stores on 15th May.

Pre-registrations are open here.

I’ve written extensively about the game’s progress — also been fortunate to be invited to some playtests — since its March 2021 announcement as an actively-controlled squad RPG, which Immutable co-developed with Ukrainian outfit Stepico.

This is what the first version played like in the summer of 2022.

Originally scheduled for an early 2023 release, the game was significantly rescoped as an auto-play squad RPG sometime in late 2022, however.

The broad art style and characters remain but with Chinese studio Mineloader taking over co-dev duties, the game has been remade to better fit mobile play sessions, in which players attempt to make their way through a series of dungeons, collecting loot that they use to build out and level up a large catalog of characters.

In this way, it’s the typical mobile balance between light gameplay and deep metagame, combined with a strong collection element.

Personally, this is a genre I really enjoy, having been an avid multi-year player of Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes and Raid: Shadow Legends, so I much prefer the game’s new direction.

And from my time testing, I do expect to be playing Guild of Guardians a lot.

Yet there is also complexity…

One element is that a lot — 200,000 — NFTs in highly complex rarity editions were released in 2022 and they now look and feel a little stale. Indeed, they were originally issued on the ImmutableX blockchain, but Guild of Guardians will be one of the first games on Immutable’s new Polygon zkEVM infrastructure.

Migrating such assets is technically straightforward but psychologically complex for players, some of whom have likely lost interest in the game, or lost access to their wallets.

In order to reignite that enthusiasm, Immutable is launching an NFT crafting event next week in which players can fill specific “receipts” using old character NFTs which are destroyed (burned in crypto terms), replaced by a new series of characters.

Immutable is positioning this within the game world as “The Altar of Sacrifice” in which players burn NFT prayers to summon new characters. If nothing else it will engage some power NFT holders, as well as generating buying velocity for the old NFTs.

More complex, however, is that over the years, Guild of Guardians has become an increasingly significant project for Immutable, beyond being a game.

For one thing, it’s one of only two first party games from Immutable. Original launch — 2020’s Gods Unchained — continues to be supported but as typically happens with TCGs hasn’t and now won’t expand beyond its highly niche audience.

Combined with this, Guild of Guardians is also the first (or at least one of the first) games that will go live using Immutable’s Passport wallet solution and its zkEVM infrastructure, including support for wallets, NFT marketplaces, launchpads etc.