For those who’ve received a once-beloved however now dormant recreation sequence gathering mud, you may as properly toss it into the metaverse and see what occurs. That is what Sq. Enix has seemingly performed with Dungeon Siege, which has been resurrected as a element of The Sandbox, a so-called metaverse which describes itself as “a number one decentralized gaming digital world”.
Underneath the association, there might be a brand new Dungeon Siege LAND (their italics) on Sq. Enix’s Sandbox Property, which the writer has held since no less than mid-2021. Sq. Enix additionally invested in The Sandbox in 2019. Owned by Animoca Manufacturers, The Sandbox enables you to purchase digital actual property (Snoop Dogg and Deadmau5 are amongst those that have purchased up some digital land), in addition to “monetize voxel belongings and gaming experiences on the blockchain,” utilizing its VoxEdit and Sport Maker instruments. In different phrases, it is kinda like Minecraft meets Roblox meets “the metaverse” meets NFTs. Now it is all that, meets Dungeon Siege.
The place Dungeon Siege is anxious, characters and objects from the sequence will now be out there on each the VoxEdit and Sport Maker creation instruments—in voxel type, after all. As for the Dungeon Siege LAND, that is the place you will go if you’d like “interactive RPG experiences gamers can get pleasure from whereas studying finest practices for establishing Dungeon Siege adventures.”
It is not tremendous shocking. Except for Sq. Enix’s funding in The Sandbox, firm president Yosuke Matsuda has expressed enthusiasm for NFTs and the metaverse. “I notice that some individuals who ‘play to have enjoyable’ and who at present type the vast majority of gamers have voiced their reservations towards these new tendencies, and understandably so,” he wrote in January, implying some folks play video games to not have enjoyable.
What’s shocking, is that Sq. Enix selected Dungeon Siege because the one IP deserving to be solid into this dizzying trendy context. The final main recreation within the sequence was the Obsidian-developed Dungeon Siege 3, which launched in 2011, solely a 12 months after Sq. Enix acquired the sequence from Fuel Powered Video games. That Obsidian outing was broadly thought of a bit common, although our reviewer quite liked it. Uwe Boll has since directed three (!) Dungeon Siege movies, however that is about as lively because the sequence has been of late.
Possibly it is smart to make use of a sequence not many individuals care about anymore: if Sq. Enix had chosen Ultimate Fantasy, for instance, there can be a lot wailing and gnashing of enamel. Equally, Ubisoft introduced Rabbids to The Sandbox earlier this month, which is hardly the jewel within the writer’s crown. In any case, in the event you’re unfortunate sufficient to have craved a Dungeon Siege revival, that is how it will be, I am afraid.
