Bozzlife: Nine Chronicles early access

over 3 years ago

I feel a little guilty writing two gaming posts in one week. It almost feels like I am double dipping or something. That doesn't change the fact that a new game was dropped on Tuesday and I have been playing it pretty much every day trying to learn the ins and outs.

Nine Chronicles is a decentralized open source crafting game in a similar vein to EOS Knights. If you have never played EOS Knights the key thing to focus on is the fact that the combat is fixed. They refer to it as "idle" which means you have no control over the combat, you only have control over the gear and items you use in combat to impact the outcome.

To be honest, I have actually been playing Nine Cloud a lot longer than two days. I was part of the beta testing and then when they announced the presale I jumped on board with that so I could have early access to the game.

A couple things that set Nine Chronicles(NC) apart from other games like EOS Knights:

I am pretty sure it is running on it's own blockchain so the issues many of us experienced when the EOS network got severely congested shouldn't happen with NC. The graphics are pretty amazing. That was the first thing I was most impressed with. Yes, they have a cartoonish feel, but they are sharp and vibrant. It is really pleasing to the eye to play this game.

Finally, they have an in game currency called NCG (Nine Chronicles Gold). This can be mined while you complete transactions on the blockchain as well as a background miner that you can run semi-independent of the game. From what I have seen, you aren't going to get rich mining NCG at this point. There are too many people out there with hefty CPU rigs that I think are claiming the majority of the rewards.

The miner is a PoW (proof of work) system. Take the time to look PoW up if you want to learn more about that.

One of the mildly annoying things about the game is the intro. Don't get me wrong it is totally awesome... the first time. The problem is, being early access players have needed to reload the game a lot. Each time you launch the game you have to watch the intro. You can skip, but it requires clicking the mouse button a good fifteen times just to get to the character screen. It seems a simple if-then statement could take care of this fairly easily. If first launch flag = 1, then play intro. If first launch flag = 0, then skip to character screen.

Trust me, I know it is more complicated than that, but again it should be fairly simple for a programmer.

After you pick your character, you get a brief look at their stats before you open the game. Right now warrior is the only playable class. They have plans to add other classes in the future (archer, mage, etc.)

I forgot to point out, because this is early access, not everyone can play the game. There have been daily presales of early access codes, but those are selling out each day in less than ten minutes.

The main menu screen is pretty straight forward. There is a store, a workshop, the PVP area, and your often used stage portal. Along the bottom you have a mail area where you items appear after they are crafted in the workshop, a quest area where you get rewards for stage, level, crafting, etc. There is also a character screen where you can equip items, the workshop tab where you can speed up crafting tasks as well as a chat and settings menu.

That is the character screen.

Above is a picture of one of the PvP battles. I have done about six PvP battles so far and this is the only one I have won. I was feeling pretty good about how I have been progressing in the game, but it appears I am much farther behind than I thought. There are a handful of people who spent more on the presale than I did this seems to have benefitted them greatly.

Proof I actually won something!

This is the stage map. I am already on the second level, but there are some people who are past stage 50 at this point. Going into battle requires 5 AP (action points). Once your action points are gone one of the only ways you can recover them is by waiting for your Prosperity Meter to regenerate. I have heard that regenerating your PM from 0 to 100% takes about six hours.

You can add buffs or change gear before going into battle.

As I mentioned before, the graphics are pretty sweet. You can tell that they put a ton of time into them.

Overall, I really feel this is a pretty cool game and I will continue to play it even though I may not excel at it. Due to the decentralized nature of the game, it frequently slows down as blocks are reorganized. Also, sometimes during that reorganization a block is lost and you have to re-do whatever the last action you just did was. They have been applying fixes and it has gotten markedly better over the past two days.

Although I have been plugging along, I still feel somewhat behind and where I once thought this would be a good source of mining revenue for me, I now feel that I may have better luck playing the item market once the game goes live for a wider audience.

I think it has a lot of potential and if you are into this sort of game, you should definitely give it a try. If you aren't able to snag one of the early access codes from the store, you might be able to get one from a player. The presale packages each came with three activation codes. Just be aware, from what I understand each machine you want to run the miner on requires a separate activation code.