Knightlands Game Overview: A Dark Fantasy MMORPG With a Cute and Cuddly Web Browser Side

About
Latest Posts

If you want someone to tell you what's hot within the world of Web3 gaming, then look no further than Alex. Alex is constantly on the prowl looking for the next crypto-gaming combo, signing up for alphas, testing games, and making a quick buck in the process.

He's a long time gamer, and a long-time crypto enthusiast, and even in this hostile Web3 landscape, he believes that he can spot the shining stars of the medium.

Gameplay Breakdown: Clicking, Clicking, and… More Clicking

I’m gonna be straight with you. Suppose you’re not into numbers or hate games that offer little interactivity. In that case, you’re not going to like Knight Lands: Prologue. However, Knight Lands: Prologue is designed to be something other than a 3D RPG with beautiful environments and ghastly ghouls to fight in real-time.

No, thats saved for the full release of Knight Lands. The developers created the little web game to capture the nostalgia and honor web browser games.

The web browser era is a bygone era of gaming that holds little footing outside of cheeky high school students goofing off playing games and ignoring their teachers. In my school days, we’d open up Line Rider and Big Head Football or, if we were lucky enough, play Halo: CE thanks to a sixth-form hero installing it on the shared drive.

Those were good times when mice featured rubber balls to operate; you were lucky if your computer had a working one!

Due to mobile phones, this isn’t even a thing anymore. So funny enough, Knight Lands: Prologue is a fun nostalgic trip down memory lane.

The combat in Knight Lands: Prologue is barebones, limited to a simple click of an attack button or if you’re feeling extra lazy, an auto button, where the game will automatically progress you through battles and quests.

An Abundance of Quirky Creatures to Encounter

There are all kinds of enemies to defeat and encounter; they’re represented on the screen as simple 2D images with a minuscule amount of animation. Some battles will include item drops such as consumables and charms.

At the same time, the combat offers little to no variation. The actual game comes from managing your character’s equipment and stats.

Amongst a few oddballs, there are some cool-looking creatures, and I’m excited to see their 3D forms once the full version of Knight Lands is released.

The developers have released a few images here and there of the mobs in development. However, it’s more than likely that not all the creatures in Knight Lands: Prologue will feature in the full game.

Being an MMORPG multiplayer will be one of the main aspects of the full Knight Lands game. The game will have a big emphasis on dungeon raids and character progression.

Hamilton Gilpin Silverblock Studios and Knight Lands CMO showed off concept art for the Archer class. Moreover, Hamilton went on to state in the latest developer blog that the team is exploring the Gaia Pro tool in Unity for procedural generation aspects of the game.

Lots of Quests to Keep you Busy

The progress through ever increasingly difficult enemies, you must have graded your gear and character stats. Failing to do so will result in a waste of your character’s Energy. It’s possible to return to all the quests and fight these enemies again to farm items.

There are 40 quests in total, all including a unique theme, background artwork, and a series of battles. Completing the Shadow Palace quest unlocks new difficulty levels bringing even more replayability to quests.

Each battle, excluding bosses, will require you to spend Energy to attack an enemy. As you progress to more challenging quests, battles will require you to spend even more Energy.

Energy can be replenished with consumable items, the premium currency, and leveling up your hero. It’s possible to earn premium currency by completing daily tasks And daily login rewards. This is a common feature amongst mobile games, and it’s designed to pull you in and spend money so you can continue playing.

Some of the features will require keys and premium items to access; however, acquiring these items through questing and other free adventures is possible. Here is a list of all the available game modes in Knight Lands:

Quests – Feature increasingly difficult battles with a boss at the end of each quest. Requires Energy to participate; you can acquire items questing.
Raids – Summon a high-level boss to fight for better loot. Requires Energy to summon and fight; you can make raids public or fight alone with your army.
Trials – Completing Trials rewards you with enchanting materials and requires participation tickets. There are different kinds of Trials for each kind of enchanting material.
Adventures – An idle activity that, once complete, rewards you with items. You can expand adventure slots with gold to increase the number of active adventures.
Onyx Tower – Require Onyx Keys to participate in; this activity challenges you with single battles and rewards you with Beast Souls to upgrade your Castle’s beast. More on that later!
Champions Tourney – A passive mini-game where you can enter a competition to compete with other players to spend as much gold as you can.
Royal Sprints – An activity where you race with other players to acquire a certain amount of gold to win rewards.
Battle Events – A battle Event is an activity that is only available when an event is being hosted. For example, Knight Lands Hall of the Dead event. You can earn NFTs for participating in these events.

You will receive additional rewards for completing these activities and defeating the enemies within them. Such as keys for opening chests for hero loot and summoning scrolls to summon monsters to join your army’s ranks. As well as consumables and buffs.

The game likes to throw a billion items at you, so if you like opening chests and sorting through loot to maximize your character’s output, then you’re going to have fun with Knightlands.

But thats not all. A second tab called the Castle offers even more activities and a refreshing break from all the monotonous combat. In the Castle, you will be able to click on the following activities:

Alchemy Lab – The Alchemy Lab is where you’ll be using materials to craft, upgrade, evolve, enchant, and disenchant weapons and craft accessories.
Beast – You can inspect your Castle’s beast here and upgrade it using gold or Beast Souls to get new beasts and gain a stat boost to your character.
Legions – Organise your Legions to take on raid bosses.
Units – Inspect your troop’s and creatures’ stats and upgrade them.
Garrison – Manage your troops and dismiss creatures you don’t want

There are ten ways of crafting items, over five hundred items to craft, and over three hundred soldiers to collect and combine. As you can see, there is an abundance of items to collect and activities to participate in, even if they are limited in gameplay variation.

Game Specific Aspects

It’s not uncommon for a video game company to develop a small game to spark interest and supplement the main title in development. However, I must say Silverblock Studios has gone out of its way to create this little browser game.

The game will tie into the full Knight Lands game, and playing it will give you a headstart in earning FLESH tokens and opportunities to obtain NFTs.

Heroes Unchained is another blockchain-based game in development that features a mini DND-like game built into their official Discord server.

It uses letters in a grid to represent a dungeon as well as quests, while emojis are used to represent the heroes. It’s a minimalistic game that serves only as flavor. Knightlands: Prologue, however, has events and is regularly updated, and features lite multiplayer features.

Knightlands NFTs: Shiny Dungeon Delving Gear

Knightlands wouldn’t be a blockchain game without featuring every Web3 surfer’s favorite: NFTs. A dark fantasy MMORPG stinks of NFTs; look at Diablo. Although not a Web3 game, the looter dungeon crawler exploded onto the video game scene. Gamers love to loot and shoot; therefore, an MMORPG with NFTs makes sense!

The developers have already enabled players a chance at obtaining NFTs for the Knightlands game within Knights: Prologue’s themed events. To obtain NFTs, you must craft them from items obtained within the events. NFTs come in the form of equipment, gear, and even pets.

Note that the developers have stated that NFTs are not planned to have stats and are purely cosmetic to protect the gameplay in the Knightlands MMORPG.

The Benefits of Multi-chain Deployment: Accessibility for Everyone!

Knight Lands is a multi-chain blockchain game that operates multiple blockchain networks. Built initially on Terra, a fully decentralized network powered by its community, Knight Lands receives a wide range of benefits for being a multi-chain crypto game, Such as faster transaction speeds and reduced gas fees.

Statistics gathered by DAppRadar discovered that the trading volume of NFTs on Ethereum games decreased by 87% in May 2020 because of gas fees.

While gas fees have been reduced by the recent Layer 2 solution on Ethereum, multi-chain games benefit from the flexibility to bridge crypto assets across blockchains.

This means that more gamers will have access to Knight Lands. Moreover, Knight Lands will contribute to numerous chain ecosystems, keeping them from becoming stagnant.

Therefore, the ease of access being a browser game means that the game is already widely accessible to players from mobile and desktop PC.

Knight Lands has an edge in accessibility, being a multi-chained web browser game as this allows anyone to play at any time. Moreover, multi-chain integration makes it easier for players to transfer NFTs and tokens between wallets and networks.

Knight Lands Tokens

Knightlands wouldn’t be a blockchain game without having its own tokens. The game features two kinds of tokens, KL Tokens and FLESH Tokens.

KL Tokens have not been implemented yet and will have a maximum supply of 100,000,000, allowing players to trade NFTs on the marketplace, create their own items using rare resources and a KL token fee, and purchase Genesis Pets and other in-game items.

Moreover, players will be able to spend KL Tokens on regular gameplay items such as gold at a discounted rate and have a voice in the game’s future direction thanks to governance features in Web3 games.

Or a player might decide to stake their KL Tokens for a duration of time to earn unique rewards such as better character stats and increased resources. (Basically, pay to win)

On the other hand, FLESH Tokens are widely available to the player. They have an unlimited supply and are earned by participating in multiplayer activities such as Champions Tourney and Group Raids.

Players will also have a chance at earning FLESH Tokens by earning a daily RP Score for participating in the game, which is converted to FLESH Tokens at the end of the day.

What’s so special about FLESH Tokens, I hear you say. Well, FLESH Tokens can be used in several ways:

You can spend FLESH Tokens on promoting your troops and generals to higher star tiers.
Spend FLESH Tokens to craft and enchant items.
FLESH Tokens can be spent fo increased Raid points rewards.

Bear in mind that Knightlands is still in early development, so the use cases will likely expand in the future.

The Bleak Future of Knight Lands: Cease of Development

Navigating the blockchain gaming space is like taking a walk through Mos Eisley at night. “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy” this lingers in the back of my mind checking out a blockchain game project.

You’ve got to be incredibly careful when choosing what projects to support. Victor Espinosa, a fellow block Game Fans writer, put together a fantastic article on How to Spot a Scam in Web3 Gaming. I highly recommend you check it out! Here are two key points that stuck with me from the article:

A project with little detail in the Whitepaper should raise some red flags. The Whitepaper should show full transparency in everything from thorough tokenomics information, such as whether tokens are burned, supply, and use cases.
A development team that has little interaction with its community and a project with hiding developers is a serious red flag. It installs a lot more faith in the player and investor if the developers’ roles, names, and experience are highlighted on the studios’ page.

Knightlands doesn’t get an A* in these categories, but the developers have put their faces out there and have frequently offered information regarding the game’s development in the form of Medium articles and dev blogs, and videos.

Denis Ermolin, the founder of Silverblock Studios, has experience working as a Senior Software Engineer at Animoca Brands. One of the leading blockchain videogame development companies in the space. Moreover, he also worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Polygon Technology, one of the most extensive networks that reduced gas fees of Ethereum transactions.

However, don’t get your hopes up too much for Knight Lands, as Denis announced on Discord that due to the recent crypto events with FTX, the team is ceasing all development until further notice on 17/11/2022. Why is this? Well, Knight Lands had unfortunately been limited by the collapse of Terra LUNA and now has been hit by a second blow due to Solana having close ties with FTX.

Denis hasn’t completely given up hope and has stated that his main goal is to finish Knight Lands. However, it’s unknown when development will start again, explaining that they haven’t got enough funds to develop the game. It’s a tumultuous time in the blockchain space, and projects and networks seem to fall out of the sky.

However, this is to be expected, and only the strongest projects will survive. It’s another reason why full transparency and community interaction in Web3 gaming companies is the new top marketing strategy.

Denis Ermolin closed the announcement off, stating that he will keep the Knights: Prologue servers running; however, whether players will still be interested in the browser game after this announcement remains to be seen. I personally haven’t touched it since.

Reception

Blockchain gaming has indeed gone cold as of late, with negative news bombarding the niche. Just recently, Mark Zuckerberg cut 11,000 employees from Meta due to a loss in company revenue. However, strong projects are surviving through these turbulent times in the Web3 space.

Knightlands has attracted little buzz regarding its project, and its growth on social media sites has stagnated. I suspect this is the same for its player base as my account ranks within the top 3,000 range and even 1,000 range for some scoring parameters. Moreover, the game has only amassed 3,074 followers on Twitter and over half that number on Discord since 2019.

Although these are minuscule numbers, there is still a lot for Silverblock Studios to complete on their Roadmap, and with all development halted, it could be years before players see a complete game. Despite a small following, Knightlands continues to move and push out dev blogs showing off their updates and work.

Alternatives

Splinterlands – Splinterlands is a web browser and mobile blockchain auto-battler card game. In Splinterlands, battles are determined by the selection of cards and order placement. Spinterlands isn’t free, but it’s a fun little strategy game to pass the time.
Ember Sword – Ember Sword is a highly anticipated blockchain RPG. The game has not been released but is similar in features to Knightland’s main RPG game that is in development and partnered with Immutable X, a platform that negates gas fees for minting NFTs.
Guild of Guardians – Guild of Guardians, is yet another unreleased blockchain dungeon-delving mobile RPG game partnered with Immutable X and a game that has got me excited. In the game, the player must build a team of four heroes and synergies multiple classes and element types. Your team can be enhanced further by bringing an NFT pet along to raids.
Defi Kingdoms – Is a cross-chain fantasy RPG web-browser blockchain game built on the Harmony network. If you enjoy playing Knights: Prologue and are a fan of fantasy but looking for more RPG features, Defi Kingdoms will be right up your alley!

Beginner Tips

To get to a flying start with Knight Lands, I recommend following all the tutorials when they pop up. There are over fifteen features to learn, and understanding them is key if you want to earn a big stack of FLESH tokens. Now that didn’t sound right!

You must unlock features by leveling up when you first begin Knight Lands. Each time you level up, your character’s stats will increase, and more importantly, your Energy and stamina. Energy is spent each time you strike an opponent running out of Energy, and you’ll have to wait for it to recharge.

However, your Energy completely recharges each time you level up. Therefore I recommend completing your Daily Tasks to earn experience rewards to aid you in leveling your character. Moreover, try to time your energy depletion by leveling up. This will give you way more value from leveling up.

Another point on leveling your character, you’re going to level up fast during the early stages of your character, and you’re going to have a lot of items thrown at you. I recommend that you save some of the consumables that replenish Energy and Stamina to use when you’re at a higher level, as energy costs will increase with each quest.

Moreover, the amount of experience required to level up drastically increases, making it much harder to level up and regenerate your Energy.

Later in the game, you will unlock better gear to raise your character’s Energy capacity. You can equip these pieces of equipment before leveling up to get a boost of Energy, then switch these items out for combat-orientated gear.

Game Background

A.I. Generated Concept Art

From my research, I’ve discovered that the developers have been using A.I. generative tools to help them create concept art and other aspects of the game. I previously mentioned in the article that Silverblock Studios would use procedural generation to create terrain for the game.

This is called prompt engineering, and it’s a fantastic tool available thanks to open A.I. At first glance, you could say this is cheating. But it’s actually a fascinating tool to use in game development.

The CMO explains that this is just one part of creating concept art as more detail is added, such as paths, creatures, and color details to create the correct mood. Although skeptical, I’m interested to see the final product.

You can try it out for yourself using DALL-E, a free online tool. I tried recreating the concept art of the spooky forest filled with spider webs. I had a lot of fun with this and came up with a basic piece.

However, I’m still in the mindset that the artist’s vision is a thousand times better. For example, Illuvium’s concept art is unique and feels like every piece fits together for the overall world.

My Thoughts

Check out the Silverblock Website for more information; just kidding. There is literally nothing on their website apart from a few social media buttons.

Now on the grand scale of things, the time frame isn’t far off from many other blockchain videogame development teams. However, I approach blockchain games with high speculation, especially those that are of a small team.

A successful blockchain game must capture its audience by appealing to gamers; it will likely fail if it lacks polish and fun gameplay. I’ve seen this with the Enjin-powered open-world fantasy RPG The Six Dragons.

The game begged me to part with my cash, advertising premium starter packs and resource packs with FIAT currency alongside NFT blueprints and items for cryptocurrency.

Now I’m not saying this is the same as Knight Lands, as the game isn’t even out yet. The concept art sure looks great, and they’ve revealed snippets of footage of assets that will feature in the game.

It looks way more stylized than The Six Dragons, with a much better and more coherent premise. However, I won’t purchase any NFTs or premium items for Knight Lands and will utilize its free-to-play model instead.

However, the CEO’s recent announcement doesn’t fill me with hope, and its more than likely that Knight Lands won’t see the light of day.

FAQs

Question: How Can I Obtain Knight Lands NFTs?

Answer: Currently, Knight Lands NFTs can only be obtained by participating in Battle Events in Knights: Prologue. These NFTs can later be sold or used when the main Knight Lands MMORPG releases.

Question: How Do I Connect my MetaMask Wallet to Knights: Prologue?

Answer: You can connect your MetaMask wallet to Knights: Prologue by clicking on the shop tab and an item of your choice. The game will then prompt you to either add a Polygon or Ethereum wallet to your account. Note that gas fees make cheap items, such as the $1 deal for 100 Shines, cost almost ten times the original price.

Question: How Can I Increase The Number of FLESH Tokens I Earn in Knight Lands?

Answer: You can increase your RP Score mining rate via the shop by spending FLESH Tokens in the account menu found on the home screen. Simply collect RP Score and wait for it to be converted at the end of the day.
You can also purchase a Premium Card from the shop to increase your RP Score collection rate and gain better experience and gold rates from playing the game.

You May Have Heard the Last of Knight Lands

In conclusion, Knightlands could be a fantastic MMORPG. The benefits of the game operating on a multi-chain network give the game an edge over competitors.

Moreover, I’m excited to see how the final product plays and looks from using A.I. generative tools. That said, procedural generation can be a detriment to a game if not done correctly.

If you’re interested in playing Knight Lands, you will be waiting for a long time as it may not ever be released due to the CEO’s announcement to cease development until further funding. In the meantime, check out the Knightlands: Prologue web browser game, as it ties into the main game. However, I would refrain from investing any money into the game as its a risky investment!

There are dozens of companies declaring their game is the first blockchain RPG. However, the proof is in the pudding; projects such as The Six Dragons have already gone quiet. In a final thought, for a blockchain game to be successful, it needs players to help grow its own economy and ecosystem.

Knight Lands has generated very little noise at the moment, as shown by the number of Discord users on their server and the number of transactions. Meaning it’s a fantastic time to get involved with the game and earn some tokens while player numbers are low.