Will the highly anticipated "Off the Grid" make a mark in the mainstream gaming world and usher in a new era of Web3 games?

Author: ZEN, PANews

Last week, a third-person battle royale game called “Off the Grid” (OTG) became one of the focal points of the entire gaming community’s attention. Through trial play live streams by several top game streamers, this AAA-quality OTG, with its cyberpunk aesthetics, cool action design, and outstanding game visuals, also earned the admiration of many mainstream players, although most of them were unaware that this game is essentially a Web3 game.

OTG was developed by encryption game developer Gunzilla Games, and is currently available in early access on Epic Game Store, PlayStation 5, and Xbox. After being promoted by multiple game streamers, OTG quickly became popular, and has topped the list of free games on the Epic Games Store since last week. It has also garnered at least hundreds of thousands of live views on the Twitch streaming platform.

The total financing scale is over 100 million, and the development has taken nearly 5 years

Video game developer Gunzilla Games was founded in November 2020 by Alexander Zoll and Vlad Korolev, aiming to create a new generation of AAA shooting games. At the outset, Gunzilla Games announced that it had secured a $25 million investment, with the initial funding coming from GameGroove, a venture capital fund established by Korolev and Zoll in 2019, focusing on the technology and gaming sectors.

Alexander Zoll has served as the CEO of Crytek Kyiv Studio, known for leading the development of the popular online shooter game ‘Warface’. Vlad Korolev is a serial fintech entrepreneur and gaming enthusiast, who founded a free online gaming website on his own in the 8th grade.

Gunzilla Games has just been established, and the two founders have formed a luxury team. Neill Blomkamp, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director of District 9, has joined Gunzilla as the Chief Visionary Officer, responsible for storytelling and visual art. Richard K. Morgan, a British science fiction writer and author of Altered Carbon, is the screenwriter. Timur Davidenko, the former Technical Director of the CryEngine game engine and involved in the development of Far Cry and Crysis, is the Chief Technology Officer. Other members of the Gunzilla development team also come from various well-known studios and publishers, including Ubisoft, Electronic Arts (EA), Blizzard Entertainment, THQ, etc., and have participated in the development of famous series games such as Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, Total War, and Need for Speed.

In May 2022, Gunzilla Games announced that it will release a new AAA third-person shooter battle royale game, Off The Grid (OTG), which will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and is expected to be released in 2023.

Three months later, Gunzilla Games announced the completion of a new round of financing of $46 million, led by Republic Capital, which focuses on the blockchain and cryptocurrency fields, and participated by many encryptionVCs, including Griffin Gaming Partners, Animoca Brands, Jump Crypto, Raptor Group, CoinFund, Shima Capital, Blizzard, etc. At the same time as disclosing the huge financing, Gunzilla Games officially announced its entry into the blockchain gaming field, stating that it will use the digital economic platform “GunZ”, which integrates Non-fungible Token technology, to allow players to obtain the “complete ownership” of game assets and realize “in-game item trading”. However, Gunzilla is not just focused on creating purely Non-fungible Token games. It promises that OTG players can skip related functions and enjoy the full version of the game for free, and also guarantees that it will not directly sell Non-fungible Tokens or other hidden consumption to the player community.

In March this year, Gunzilla Games once again completed a large financing, with a total of 30 million US dollars raised in this round of financing, led by CoinFund and Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund, as well as a 10 million US dollars strategic Token financing participated by Republic Capital and Morningstar Ventures.

Building a new generation of 3A-level battle royale game with Avalanche

“We drew inspiration from games such as PUBG, Apex Legends, The Division, and Uncharted, and created a game that includes all our favorite elements,” Vlad Korolev said in a previous interview.

Currently, Off The Grid has released an early access version on the PC, while it is called the public test version on PS5 and Xbox. However, the actual open functions in the game are the same, only providing the Extraction Royale mode. OTG inherits the mechanics of classic battle royale games like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, but its cyberpunk-style equipment and props provide players with a richer experience. In addition to firearms, players can also achieve more agile and flexible movement through jetpacks, as well as change and use different mechanical prosthetic limbs with different abilities in the game. Gunzilla said that it is expected to launch over 260 unique weapon combinations in the future, excluding skins.

Similar to the pursuit of exquisite visuals in AAA like “Black Myth: Wukong”, Gunzilla also used Unreal Engine 5 in the game development process. By introducing its Nanite technology, OTG is able to render high-quality graphics and textures with extremely high level of detail. By combining tools such as World Partition and Geometry Collections, Gunzilla creates a huge and detailed open world, containing extremely realistic environments, characters, and objects without sacrificing performance or using too much memory. The level of detail (LOD) models allows OTG to optimize game performance by dropping the level of detail of objects that are far away from the player or less important. And the lighting and shadow effects endowed by Lumen technology make the game world more realistic and immersive.

“When we are looking for the best partner to build our blockchain platform and ecosystem, Avalanche is the only company that allows us to build the game’s layer 1 solution, in which we can achieve zero transaction fees, secure and verified source code, eco-friendly protocol, and the ability to pay gas fees using native tokens.” In April 2023, Gunzilla Games announced the launch of GUNZ, a blockchain-based digital economic platform built entirely on the Avalanche Subnet. GUNZ aims to be one of the first player-friendly encryption economies in AAA games, aiming to empower players by granting full ownership of in-game items in the form of non-fungible tokens, and the platform will also be integrated into OTG first.

Web3 games are making an impact on the mainstream? Or is it a bit difficult…

In the second and third quarters of this year, various point-earning mini-games in the TON ecosystem have indeed attracted a lot of attention, attracting tens of millions of players in the short term with the expected Airdrop rewards. However, after the Airdrop landed, it was widely criticized by the community, and the mini-games that were once in the spotlight are obviously unlikely to become widely adopted. At this time, the long-awaited and high-quality ‘semi-finished product’ launched by OTG can become a hot game in the Epic store, once again showing Web3 game enthusiasts the ‘hope’ of dawn.

According to AVASCAN data, as of October 15th, the volume on GUNZ has exceeded 50 million, with over 5.6 million independent Wallets. In addition, according to SullyGnome’s data, the game has accumulated over 2 million hours of viewership in the first week. From being relatively unknown to gaining unprecedented popularity among mainstream players, apart from its excellent quality, the successful marketing and promotion by Gunzilla Games is another major factor. By sponsoring well-known game streamers such as Ninja, Timthetatman, and Ludwig Ahgren to live stream and play, it has attracted a large number of followers and subsequently attracted more streamers or bloggers to participate. Dr.Disrespect, a top FPS streamer who has previously collaborated with OTG and is currently controversial, expressed his liking for this game, bringing at least tens of thousands of viewers to OTG during his live broadcast.

But it should be pointed out that, just like these top streamers who only talk about the games themselves and avoid mentioning Non-fungible Tokens or Cryptocurrencies in Web3 games, the official page of OTG games also completely lacks any promotion related to Non-fungible Tokens, GUNZ, or blockchain technology. Only in the FAQ can you find the term ‘Non-fungible Token’, but it still emphasizes: ‘Off The Grid is not a Non-fungible Token game. It is a battle royale game with optional Non-fungible Token elements. If you want to try Non-fungible Tokens, you can; if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. Players can decide how to play the game on their own, and they don’t need to use Non-fungible Tokens to play the game.’ In summary: I can be a non-blockchain game. And when most mainstream gamers are generous with their praise, most of them don’t even know that OTG can also be considered a Non-fungible Token game.

The high popularity of Off The Grid has also attracted many unsponsored streamers and bloggers, including YouTube gaming blogger Tomographic. In his gameplay video, he gave a detailed introduction to Off The Grid’s Non-fungible Token. In the comments section of the video, the highly praised comments took a turn, all becoming like “This game does look very interesting, but when Non-fungible Token comes into the picture, my interest drops sharply.”

Tomographic indicates that most players are not aware that “Off the Grid” is leading the trend of Web3, they simply enjoy the game itself. “I’m not stopping you from enjoying the game, or waging war with Cryptocurrency, it’s just something I’m not interested in, and I don’t want to promote it on my channel. The volatility of Cryptocurrency is unsettling, but OTG is indeed the biggest example of a Block chain game we have seen, and I think it’s worth discussing,” he added.

In addition to the dispute between Non-fungible Token and Cryptocurrency, the early access version of ‘Off the Grid’ also has issues in terms of gameplay. According to the configuration parameters listed by Epic, the devices typically used by PC players need to meet at least Intel I7 12700 and RTX 4070 to achieve a better gaming experience. The recommended minimum configuration of RTX 3060 simply cannot balance the graphics and smooth gaming experience. For most players, the lack of encryption is put aside for now, and the insufficient game optimization, excessively high hardware configuration requirements, and in-game issues such as shooting sound effects are the most concerning for Gunzilla.

However, with version updates and continuous game optimization, the full version of ‘Off the Grid’ may eventually face controversies brought by Non-fungible Tokens and Crypto Assets. Gunzilla has also taken measures from the beginning to allow players to choose not to integrate Non-fungible Tokens, in order to maximize the favor of mainstream players.

Therefore, it is difficult to predict whether Off the Grid can maintain traffic after gaining a huge following, and even if it can “achieve great success” in the future, how much of it is related to Web3 is unknown. What about the future of Off the Grid? Will it always be the representative of Web3 games? We will wait and see, and PANews will continue to follow.