Ubisoft has finally released its first blockchain game, and it’s all about collecting and battling with NFT figurines. It’s called Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles, it’s a PvP tactical RPG, and its marketplace currently lists the most expensive collectible NFT at over $63,000.
As spotted by IGN, the Assassin’s Creed publisher stealth-released its project backed by controversial blockchain technology this week on PC. The art style looks like a mashup of Darkest Dungeon and Warhammer miniatures, and the gameplay revolves around rows of characters battling it out with turn-based abilities in search of XP and loot. Players grow their champions or craft new ones and can then sell them on a crypto-backed marketplace.
Here’s the gameplay trailer:
While the most expensive champion currently listed has an asking price of $63K, or about 1.9 million gold, many of the most recently listed ones are going for anywhere from $5 to around $200. The way cryptocurrency game economies tend to work is that players invest money to get stronger teams to win more matches to make their collectibles more valuable in the hopes of then turning around and selling them to newer recruits. It is 100 percent not a pyramid scheme, fans of these NFT-based games swear.
Ubisoft’s initial push into blockchain technology came in late 2021 when it tried to incorporate NFTs into Ghost Recon Breakpoint. The backlash from both fans and developers was swift, however, and the buzz around everything crypto faded pretty quickly throughout 2022 and into 2023. The French publisher has been keeping at it, though, in case the gaming genre ever does blow up into something bigger.
Weirdly, Champions Tactics: Grimoria Chronicles lists an age rating of “adults only” in one of its trailers. A spokesperson for the ESRB told IGN that this was an error, and the game hasn’t officially been rated at all yet. It’s still unclear how successful the game will be, or if that will even matter for Ubisoft’s ongoing blockchain ambitions. The fact that Champions Tactics revolves around an NFT economy isn’t even the worst thing it has going for it. That would instead be the fact that you can currently only play it by downloading the company’s Ubisoft Connect launcher, which to some is even more disqualifying than needing to connect a crypto wallet.