Nine Chronicles: A New Paradigm In Gaming
By: Nine Chronicles
Tags: Article, English, Ninechronicles, Planetarium, Decentralized Gaming

With the mainnet launch of Nine Chronicles almost upon us, we know that the community are as excited as we are to finally play the game. Fortunately, the wait is almost over. We at Planetarium have had an intense year of long days and late nights gearing up the game for early access. All the effort is worth it to provide a new gaming experience with the cutest cats in blockchain 😼.

Cutest cats in blockchain

In this blog we will recap some of the highlights of our journey while also reiterating the vision we had at the beginning.

A few highlights from our journey so far:

Our Vision

The whole time that we’ve worked on Nine Chronicles, we’ve kept a set of principles firm in our minds to guide us through the long days and tough decisions. It is not our desire to be immovable in our ideas, but rather we have a core set of principles that ensure we build a unique product that puts the community first.

It hasn’t always been easy to convince the world that a product such as Nine Chronicles is needed. Yet here we are on the cusp of launching the first ever open-source decentralized MMORPG that leverages blockchain technology for secure peer-to-peer interactions.

Massively multiplayer, but decentralized and perpetual

Nine Chronicles is one of the very few games that is truly peer-to-peer. All players will be helping to maintain the decentralized network that is known as “serverless”. Those players who opt-in to “mine” while playing the game are helping to keep the network secure and in turn they earn rewards for their efforts.

A huge advantage of working with our Libplanet blockchain engine is that it is now easier than ever to create multiplayer games on a blockchain.

The inherent decentralized architecture removes the developer as a single point of failure. As a result, the network is more robust and less likely to be knocked offline. Even without the developers, the player community can perpetually power the network — so your items, characters, and the world they live in will always be available.

Liplanet is written in C# and is fully compatible with Unity (the most popular game development engine). It is our hope that more game developers are inspired by our journey and which to collaborate on building an ecosystem of inter-connected and massively peer-to-peer online worlds.

Community first: open source and fully moddable

Planetarium as the game’s developers have written the initial code to get the game launched, but the entire codebase will be open sourced so anyone is free to fork it and start fresh. (We’ve already open sourced the API client and the game logic. The frontend client will follow soon.) This freedom to start over puts pressure on us as developers to keep the game running in line with community expectations.

We know that starting fresh and coordinating a wholly new separate game is a lot of work, so rather than providing that as the only option we are very receptive to players making a pull request on our GitHub for bug fixes or game improvements. If the pull request is accepted through the review of the core dev team, the update will be included in the next client deployment.

Visit us on github.com/planetarium !

Variations to the game that do not affect the in-game economy (e.g. character appearance changes) can be used simultaneously on the same mainnet. This allows the community to freely mod the front-end without changing the nature of the game.

Should the modifications and variations affect the game economy, players can choose to start a new mainnet, or hard fork from a specific block of the current mainnet to create their own Nine Chronicles network. All of this does not require permission from our team.

This marks a huge difference between Nine Chronicles and traditional MMOs where game modifications, reverse engineering, and running private servers are often against the End-User License Agreement. We are giving players the freedom to experiment.

Player centric: Monetizable

Keep what you earn! Blockchain is all about being in control of your assets. This is the notion of “true ownership” that you might have heard about in the blockchain gaming community. If you buy or earn tokens, they are your tokens. Likewise, if you find or craft items then they are your items.

1 of 9 Black Valkyrie Mythical-class Costume

For instance, there were nine limited edition mythical-class Black Valkyrie costumes available in the presale, which were quickly grabbed by the community members who each invested $10K. These hugely valuable gaming assets are tied to unique tokens on the Nine Chronicles blockchain, and each token is owned by a player.

You are free to keep, destroy, or trade your assets to any other player without our permission. Due to the decentralized nature of the network, Planetarium does not have control over any player’s account.

Nine Chronicles Gold (NCG), the mineable base currency, has a capped supply and will power the content, market, and governance of the network for years to come. As Nine Chronicles can be enjoyed without initially purchasing cryptocurrency, we can onboard mainstream audiences into the game as shown by our player base already. We are excited to grow the user base to build up a thriving virtual economy where players can be involved from the very beginning.

Join the community!

We look forward to seeing you in-game, but before we get to launch we want to remind you to come say hello on our Discord channel!

About Planetarium

Planetarium is a blockchain company pioneering the ecosystem for community-powered online games. Planetarium’s technology equips developers with powerful tools to create fully decentralized, cross-platform blockchain games that can live forever on networks powered by the players. The team is also developing Nine Chronicles, an open source, decentralized role-playing game set to launch 2020. To learn more, please visit planetariumhq.com.