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N3twork Studios is officially unveiling the next game in the Legendary franchise; Legendary: Heroes Unchained. The new game is a hero collecting RPG — picture gacha games in your head and you’re almost there. It’s not a perfect comparison, but the differences are there and noticeable if you play both.
Legendary: Heroes Unchained is also a play-and-earn game build from the ground up for blockchain. Which makes sense, since N3twork Studios is at the forefront of blockchain games. The studio isn’t just making them, it’s trying to make them so fun the barrier to entry for players stops mattering.
It helps that N3twork Studios is staffed by a bunch of industry veterans. It’s got people from EA, Double Fine, Disney, Marvel, Zynga, Activision and more. Eagle eyed readers out there might recognize a lot of those studios have dipped toes into this sort of thing before. Maybe not blockchain specifically, but loot boxes, gacha mechanics and free-to-play titles are all covered.
“As proven experts in free-to-play, Web2 gaming, we believe that Web3 marks an exciting, inevitable, and player-first evolution that will put the power of digital ownership into the hands of our community,” said N3twork Studios boss Matt Ricchetti, in a statement to GamesBeat. “We firmly believe that when players own their heroes, gear and other in-game items, games will be more fun and more fair for the players who spend endless hours strategizing with their guilds, building the ultimate collection of heroes and fighting for the top spots in the seasonal leaderboards.”
N3twork Studios is pre-gaming the game
And, yeah, a lot of people don’t like loot boxes. I’m one of them, for sure. But I like a good gacha game, and I’ve blown countless hours in free-to-play games. That stuff can easily hook a player. I’m not even saying Legendary: Heroes Unchained will have any of that.
I’m just saying the people behind it have worked with those elements before. They have the experience to know what works and what doesn’t.
“Having strong expertise in mobile and FTP is actually one of N3TWORK Studios biggest advantages. We believe that the squad RPG genre in which we specialize is the perfect fit for web3: games are easy to pick up and play but offer deep progression, engaging guild-based social features, and robust liveops,” said N3twork Studios boss Matt Ricchetti, in a statement to GamesBeat. “By combining these core characteristics with the best of web3–true digital asset ownership and sustainable community economics driven by token loops–we can create wholly original squad RPG experiences with mass appeal across platforms.”
A great example is how the Legendary: Heroes Unchained team is generating interest in the game. The first pre-sale of Founder’s Edition NFT Heroes is coming in November. To get people fired up the team is running a daily, dungeon-crawling minigame playable directly on Discord. By playing and landing high scores players can earn spots in the allowlist for the Founder’s Edition NFT Mint.
That’s not something I’ve seen a lot of other blockchain game companies try. N3twork Studios is actively trying to bring players in. If it works they might have come up with a pretty fun solution for how to convince gamers to give blockchain games a shot.
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