Cradles: Reshaping the New Chapter of MMORPG, Leading the New Trend of AAA Games — Public Beta Coming Soon

Since the start of 2023, the crypto industry is coming out of the winter, with the overall market financing size and number of financings on a rising trend. However, the GameFi sector, which was a strong segment last year, has been underwhelming this year.

In the early stages, GameFi evolved from DeFi, combining the asset allocation principles of DeFi with game elements. The early stage of GameFi was mainly focused on using DeFi principles as a framework, rather than truly integrating them into the game itself. For example, Axie Infinity, which led the early development of the GameFi market, had users mainly focused on earning profits, not the game itself, so when the overall market increment and sector heat declined, its user retention was extremely poor. The strong financial attribute led to the downfall of the first generation GameFi applications (Axie Infinity currently has less than 9000 daily active users).

In the X2E stage, it further manifests as attracting users by gamifying real-life behaviors, such as Move to Earn, Learn to Earn, etc. Although user participation is significantly increasing in this stage, participants are still mainly focused on ‘Earn’, not the ‘X’ itself (the essence of the problem has not changed). So when the market is down, most of these applications also go into the doldrums due to the death spiral

Distinctive Cradles

Cradles is a large-scale AAA MMORPG blockchain game developed based on Unity, providing players with a highly immersive gaming experience with various functions through exploration, discovery, and strategic use of the game world. In Cradles, players can encounter extinct creatures that once existed on Earth in an open world, explore the environment of the prehistoric world, and also gain benefits through various gameplays such as hunting monsters, gathering in the wild, completing NPC tasks, maintaining the food chain, PVP, participating in city defense battles, and so on. They can also explore major cities and adventure areas, dig for treasure and minerals to strengthen equipment and levels, and experience different puzzle games in taverns and casinos.

Cradles adopts the same way to enter the game as World of Warcraft, using a subscription to purchase monthly cards, which means that the game pays more attention to long-term operation rather than obtaining high returns through NFT in the short term. In addition, the game’s instance function is different from other current games, so any organization or individual can provide innovative game modes to the game development team.

The development team is more like a square owner, renting the limited stalls on the square to player communities or creative development teams in time to develop their own mods. Players can experience various fantasy world plots without disrupting the overall gameplay of Cradles. At the same time, each instance is a story chain. Community players can choose which instance to continue playing after trying a few instances, and even the plot is decided by the community. And the highly open mainland editor can fully stimulate the imagination and creativity of players, further helping them transition from player-created content (UGC) in the early games to player-created assets (UGA). Therefore, unlike other AAA games, it emphasizes more gameplay and players’ active maintenance of the game ecosystem.

This highly open mode can allow more players to participate in the construction of the game, which is more in line with the concept of Web3.

The game itself is developed by the DRepublic Labs team. It is worth mentioning that when DRepublic Labs developed the Cradles game, it adopted an innovative NFT scheme. Based on this, the Cradles game itself gives players a high degree of combinability. For example, most of the NFTs in Cradles have the following characteristics:

1. Variable attributes: Different NFT attributes can be combined into new NFTs, and this combination makes NFTs have more interesting changes.

2. Transferable attributes: When an NFT is destroyed, its attributes can be partially transferred to other NFTs.

3. Upgradeable attributes: NFTs can be upgraded with one click, usually accompanied by an increase in other attribute values, which means that most transfers will not incur a fee or the fee will be very low.

4. Evolvable attributes: NFTs will change over time, just like items in the real world change over time, reflecting the uniqueness of the game.

Cradles makes NFTs combinable, disassemblable, and patchwork, turning a static PFP into a dynamic PFP. With the gameplay and different mechanisms in the game, players can combine NFTs into various forms, which also provides a foundation for the extensibility of the Cradles game itself.

Application of multiple top-notch technologies, an AAA blockchain game is closest to traditional Steam games.

Cradles game itself employs many top-notch technologies, including immersive illumination magic — HDRP, self-developed PBR shaders, HyperShader, as well as the use of Unity tools, and a self-developed AI suite, to further ensure the quality of the game’s own image realism and rendering.

Immersive Illumination Magic — HDRP

The Cradles team, based on the industry-leading HDR illumination pipeline, is applying this highly challenging technology to deeply enhance visual effects. It is reported that only a few teams around the world are so proficient in HDRP

Based on this technology, both creators and ordinary players can feel the poetic and picturesque world of light and shadow, as if they are in a real world with an amazing experience. HDRP illumination pipeline gathers a series of cutting-edge technologies, including traditional rasterization techniques (such as reflection probes and plane probes), illumination baking, ray marching and ray tracing (such as SSAO, SSGI, SSR, contact or ray tracing shadows), full-frame path tracing, and multiple anti-aliasing options. These technologies are extremely challenging, like climbing Mount Everest, pushing the limits of game developers.

Self-developed PBR Shaders

In game development, hand-coding PBR is a technology that requires a craftsman’s spirit. It’s similar to hand-making furniture, requiring developers to continually refine and meticulously craft to create unique, quality PBR shaders. Just as a carpenter needs to choose different woods and tools to create unique furniture, PBR hand coding requires developers to create highly realistic and detailed game scenes through carefully selecting different material properties and textures and combining precise mathematical formulas.

The PBR shader used in Cradles is programmed by the team itself. Making a self-developed PBR shader is like creating a complex mechanical part; developers need to spend a lot of time and energy perfecting every detail and need a deep understanding of illumination, reflection, transparency, and so on. They also need to master various mathematical knowledge and programming skills. In this process, it is necessary to constantly adjust parameters, optimize algorithms, and even try various different methods to find the best solution.

Based on this, the depiction of Cradles’ scenes is like making a piece of art, repeatedly carving, constantly optimizing, to ensure that each scene has a high degree of realism and detail, ensuring that every detail in the game becomes vivid, every scene is full of vitality, and the quality of the game has been significantly improved.

HyperShader Boosts Artistic Diversity

On top of the default materials offered by HDRP, Cradles has achieved a range of exceptional material effects through continuous improvements and integrations. Customized material effects have been meticulously crafted for each project to highlight the details and unique characteristics of the game.

Specifically, Cradles has realized material effects such as dinosaur fur, skin, and custom character materials. These effects are based on HDRP’s custom materials and have undergone detailed adjustments and optimizations. The engineers at Cradles continually explore and experiment with new material techniques, applying these to the game and adding more visual details and expressiveness.

Advanced Use of Unity Techniques

In the development of the game using Unity, the Cradles development team has skillfully applied advanced Unity techniques, such as:

1. Using the KWS water System to simulate various water surface forms, such as oceans, rivers, lakes, and pools, providing the most realistic water effects for HDRP rendering on PC and console platforms.

2. Applying MicroSplat to bring more realistic terrain effects to the game without affecting performance, including seamless integration of textures and terrain.

3. Utilizing the VFX Graph to easily achieve complex special effects, presenting more realistic and exquisite visual effects, and improving efficiency.

4. Using Cinemachine & Timeline to achieve stunning skill close-up effects, enhancing the cinematic feel and dramatic tension of the game.

Self-Developed AI Game Development Kit

Cradles has also developed some visual development components, including HyperShader, AI-Driven pathfinding system, and AI-Driven character barrier system, etc. These allow visual effects and character control to be optimized automatically based on AI, providing players with a richer visual and gaming experience.

Ultraland Mainland Editor

Ultraland is a C-end player-oriented editor that allows players to freely create their own game mainland.

This editor not only allows players to easily edit terrain directly, creating a more personalized and realistic experience for the game world, but it can also compress the original hundreds of megabytes of terrain data to just a few KB files. This greatly reduces data transfer costs and synchronization time, providing players with a smoother gaming experience.

Players can freely create land with a brush, raise mountains, dig out rivers and lakes, create a forest, or even generate swamps, etc. Players can create their unique mainland and use props like flowers, trees, and buildings to decorate it, creating their own levels. Players are also expected to receive system incentives for their creations. All these created assets will follow the NFT asset standards, and are expected to be circulated as assets.

How to obtain $CRDS crystals in the game?

1. Go to the mining area

In the current version, there is only one crystal mining area in the game, located in the Giant Weed Forest map. To get there, players need to depart from Curvtian City and travel through Curvitan’s Outskirts to reach the Giant Weed Forest map. The crystal mine is located in the bottom left corner of the map, and the entrance to Curvitan’s Outskirts is in the top left corner of the map, as shown in the diagram below.

2. Mining area setting

Crystal mining area map: Giant Weed Forest is set as a black level danger zone. This level of area allows players to attack each other. When a player dies in the black danger zone, all items in their backpack, including equipped equipment and weapons, will be dropped on the ground (excluding currency and mission items), which can be picked up by other players. This drop rule also applies to crystal mines in the backpack.

3. Tools required for mining and proficiency restrictions

Mining does not require tools such as mining pickaxes. When a player’s mining proficiency reaches level 50, they can unlock the “Crystal Mining” talent. After the “Crystal Mining” talent is unlocked, players can mine crystal mines. The way to increase mining proficiency level is to mine in game ores such as Copper, Iron, Mithril, Adamantit, etc. Each time you mine, you will gain a certain amount of mining proficiency experience. When the mining proficiency experience reaches the upgrade standard, the mining proficiency level can be increased. In the current version, it is expected to take players 90–120 minutes of mining time to reach the required mining proficiency level for mining crystal mines (an average of 30 minutes a day will take 3–4 days of game time).

4. Crystal mining rules in the mining area

Players need to find crystal mines themselves in the mining area, and there will be many crystal mine respawn points in the area. When a player stands next to a crystal mine and has unlocked the “Crystal Mining” talent in their mining proficiency, and no other player is mining the same crystal mine, they can click on and mine the crystal mine. After a period of time, the player will obtain a certain amount of crystals. Each crystal mine can be mined multiple times.If a player is attacked by other players or moves during the mining progress bar of a crystal mine, the current progress will be interrupted. Interrupting the mining progress bar will not reduce the number of times the ore can be mined, and the next mining attempt will require a new progress bar.

Cradles Public Beta:

The Cradles game is set to begin public beta testing on June 15th, and participating users will receive $ CRDS Token incentives,

The total quota for this public beta is 10,000, of which 5,000 places are distributed to Cradles Dinopets NFT and Crystalios NFT Holders. Crystalio will be issued in the near future. Another 5,000 are distributed to their own community, partners, and some partnered Kols.

Benefits for Cradles Dinopets NFT and Crystalios NFT Holders:

In addition to participating in this public beta, holders of Cradles Dinopets NFT and Crystalios NFT also have other rights

-Players can increase the daily limit of CRDS ore acquisition

-In-game attribute enhancements.

We will announce more benefits for Holders in the future.

Cradles: The Vanguard of the AAA Wave in the GameFi Track

One of the defining features of Cradles lies in its extendable mechanism design. For instance, it leverages innovative NFT technology solutions, allowing users to engage in open creativity and receive a superior gaming and creative experience. Players are expected to receive token incentives while becoming immersed in the game.

On the other hand, the team’s mature development and delivery capabilities are noteworthy. We see that Cradles employs a wealth of challenging visual development technologies and tools, including HDRP, proprietary PBR shaders, HyperShader, proprietary AI game development suite, and Unity techniques, conferring top-tier visual effects onto the game. Simultaneously, while ensuring the game’s inherent quality, Cradles also considers the stress of running on certain devices, continually optimizing to match a broader range of players’ hardware. In this regard, even many leading traditional games are hard-pressed to compete with Cradles.

Therefore, the Cradles game itself possesses advantages in terms of worldview, narrative, and economic system.

We observe that the enthusiasm for top-tier blockchain games among on-chain users remains unabated. However, since the advent of GameFi, there has been a constant call for AAA-level large-scale blockchain games, but the actual results have been underwhelming. Starting from last year, AAA has gradually become the new narrative direction for GameFi development. Still, many early AAA blockchain games faced the market were restricted by their technological prowess, with the vast majority unable to deliver on time. Even several traditional game giants, including Zynga and Ubisoft, loudly declared their entry into Web3 and GameFi but have yet to make any substantial progress. As the market continues to evolve and the wind changes in the GameFi track, many once-popular AAA GameFi games are fading into obscurity.

Thus, the technical development and delivery capabilities of game teams are determining the longevity and upper limit of ecosystem development, which is where the value of the Cradles game lies.

Given its excellent production, it’s expected to attract a large number of Web2 players to participate. As the industry’s first to achieve full delivery and the capability to launch on Steam, Cradles, an AAA masterpiece, may well become the new leader of the AAA wave in the GameFi track.

Official Website: https://www.cradles.io/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cradlesio

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/cradles

Whitepater: https://www.cradles.io/statics/cradles-white-paper.pdf

Ingame Leak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvn4PbUQj60