Life Beyond’s Creative Vision Q&A

Welcome, Agents!

On March 2nd we presented our Creative Vision to our Founders and select partners. At the end of the presentation, they had a chance to ask our team any questions that might be on their mind. As you can imagine, they had quite a lot of interesting ones that you might have as well, so we decided to compile them here. Just a reminder, we’ve also published an article summarising the Creative Vision of Life Beyond, so be sure to check that out as well!

Is there going to be a second Open Alpha, and when?

We are moving away from the concept of Open Alpha seasons because we want to enter the live service mindset, rather than releasing content in waves with nothing in-between.

Our commitment to this new ideology begins with the Hub, which is going to be live 24/7 after it releases. The Hub will provide all of Life Beyond’s players with just a social area initially, but will also connect to all of the other experiences we’ll be releasing in the future like combat training, building simulations, agriculture and economic simulation. Rather than having seasons, as soon as our development team have a new feature ready they will add it as a prototype for our community to test and give us feedback. To give an example, when we develop the agriculture experience, it will be quite basic at the beginning, but community feedback will allow us to improve it, move it in whichever direction you all want, and add features to build the best possible product.

When will Life Beyond tokens release?

Release is still a few months away for us. We’ve always had the mentality that it’s important to do it right rather than fast. We’ve seen a lot of projects rushing into tokens without having a proper economic layer in their product, or without fully thinking through such an important element in the product’s design, but we’re very confident in our design. We’ve planned an upcoming session dedicated to discussing the tokenomic and game economy systems for you all, so keep your eyes open for that. In addition, we’re working with best in class technical members and partners to prepare for the launch of the token. Animoca Brands is a superb partner in that endeavour as they have ample experience at launching sustainable and beneficial tokens, and we’re hard at work getting it ready.

Will the Hub be on Unreal 5?

Yes, technologically 100% of our content is now Unreal 5. However, the new art direction isn’t yet implemented in the game as it’s still being developed. What you’re going to see when the Hub releases will still be the “old” art direction assets, but they’re both being reworked at the moment. It’s our intention to “refresh” the hub as soon as everything is ready later this year.

Will I be able to level up in the Hub?

At first, there will be no progression within the Hub, as we’re just providing a place for players to socialise and form bonds ahead of the rest of our content releases. In addition, Agent Zero Jackets won’t be available as in-game cosmetics at first, but we’re intending on changing this in one of the first updates to come.

Will there be specific token-gated missions?

Yes, taking care of our Founders is a big priority for us. We’re actively working on token-gated content for specific NFT holders, to be released in future updates. Separately, the Hub will be token-gated as well, with Founders receiving first entry beginning the week of March 20th.

Will Bored Ape avatars be available?

We’d love to be able to onboard all of the Bored Ape community, but it will take a lot of development time. There are a lot of vital things to work on in the immediate future and our team is still growing, so other things need to take precedence for now. However this is exactly the kind of thing that we’d love some support from the community on. It’s our intention to utilise token allocations to create the proper incentive for community development, but this requires us to work on the proper ecosystem and tokenomics first. Keep your eyes open for future announcements, as we’re intending on working closely with you all in areas like this in the future.

How much funding does Life Beyond have?

Darewise is a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, so we don’t rely on traditional funding in the way that we used to. Referring specifically to Animoca Brands, they’ve raised just under $630M over the past 18 months, so we’re confident that we’ll have the means to back up our ambitions.

How do you envision managing the Governing phase of Life Beyond? What will the purpose of the DAOs be within it?

The idea is that the rules for governing will be put to a vote initially- we want to develop this with our players. If you’re part of an organisation, this is the time to reach out, as we’re conducting small-group brainstorming and feedback sessions in order to make the right decisions moving forward. With relation to DAOs, we’ve started the process of establishing the Foundation, which is an independent autonomous organisation that will run our tokens and will initiate the original Life Beyond DAO for us.

How big of a role will player guilds have in the Life Beyond game loop?

At the core, guilds are extremely important because they maintain the realistic expression of life in Life Beyond. However, guilds can take many forms. For example, some esports/ highly competitive guilds will likely be focused on pioneering, specialising in skill-based challenges like combat. On the other hand, some other guilds will likely act more like corporations or alliances that focus on different kinds of verticals like farming and mining. It’s completely up to you as players; we want you to tell us what tools you need to foster these kinds of organisations.

It’s worth mentioning that Darewise-authored content will likely be heavily outnumbered by user-created content. Our job is to build a set of systems that allow you as players and guilds to make your own content and define who you are. If you want to be a pioneering guild, you can make yourself that. If you want to be the ones that people call to defend their lands from attack, you can do that. What we want to see is what kind of organisations are out there, and what you anticipate from Life Beyond so that we can help build the tools for what you want.

How big of a priority is security & identifying things like bots?

The maintenance of security is why we ran alphas first, to identify exploits and develop measures that we need to put in place. We identified key areas that we needed to improve on in our open Alpha, and we have dedicated teams in place to actively counter developing issues. Especially as delicate systems such as economics come into play, maintaining security will be one of our highest priorities.

Why did Animoca Brands buy Darewise? How will they support Life Beyond?

Animoca Brands saw in us a leading product in the second wave of metaverses. The important thing for them was that in Life Beyond they finally saw a product that not only could draw in Web3 enthusiasts but also the wider gaming population. If you look back at Free to Play for instance, Free to Play experienced a similar cycle to Web3 where people were questioning the model/dismissing the product due to lack of quality (at least that was the perception). It took Clash of Clans on mobile and League of Legends on PC for F2P to see true engagement with the wider population, and Animoca Brands saw in Life Beyond a flagship product that would do the same thing for Web3. They believed that it would help onboard people for the right reasons- to play, to build, and not for the short term financial gain that is possible from this type of experience.

It’s always been at the core of our vision to develop a very high quality gaming experience/MMORPG that would address the drawbacks that we had all experienced in the previous generation of MMOs; questions like “Why can’t I do this”, “Why can’t I sell my assets” “Why can’t I have more control over my own content so that it gives me the incentive to innovate/create/participate more in the development of this thing- me, who engages so actively in this world and participates in the values of this community.”

Animoca Brands brings substantial funding but also a fantastic level of expertise when it comes to tokenomics, marketing and publishing, community building, technology etc. We have a very strong relationship with them. Employees move between the two companies and the leadership team of both companies travel a lot, attending and hosting events together.

What will the purpose of communities be in Life Beyond?

The meta in Life Beyond can be compared to games like EVE Online. It’s an economic and social builder that takes place in a persistent world through your character. It’s our intention to have it be a combination of the big dynamics that you get with EVE Online and also intimate, individual experiences.

Let’s talk about an example of Life Beyond’s interconnectivity. If you’re into combat, you can purely engage in progress there. However, the output of whatever action you take will serve as an input somewhere else in the economy. For example, you might go to an extremely dangerous place that only high level players can go because it requires very advanced equipment and an advanced avatar, and a high level of skill. So you accomplish that, and you receive a reward. That reward might be an item or resource that is necessary for a different individual/community/corporation that builds very advanced vehicles, and the only way they can get that is through people like you. We’re focused on connecting all of these different player stories in a big economic and social loop, and that will be how Life Beyond thrives.

Will the unlocking of new regions be akin to MMO expansion releases?

The simple answer is “yes”, but the reality of it is a little bit more complicated. We don’t want to automatically shift all player focus to the newest region released. The idea is to find the right balance where each region has its own specificity, with its own resources, elements/minerals and specific landmarks that allows you to expand your possibilities. Each region will be so vast that it will be difficult for a single player to actually collect the resources from all regions. That’s where building guilds/corporations/communities is fundamental, and that’s also the reason why we’re convinced by the power of player-player interactions and trade, which drives Life Beyond’s whole philosophy. The player driven economy is led by player/player trading and bounty systems, where you can put a bounty/request out there for players to provide me with what you need.

The problem with traditional MMOs and the kind of vertical progression that they employ, is that they expand the world, and create more advanced equipment and technology, and it creates “power creep”. To explain, say you had this item that you worked incredibly hard to get on the previous update. With the new expansion, it’s suddenly worth nothing. This is really frustrating when you’ve been working hard to build something, so rather than that we want to also have horizontal progression: expanding possibilities rather than upgrading constantly. It’s our hope that this will lead to a much healthier in-game economy, because it’s less about always chasing the next big thing and more about enjoying/specialising in something. You spend a lot of time not playing in MMOs; you’re interacting/socialising with your guild/friends, which is also part of the MMO experience. With our model it’s our intention for you to be able to invest in yourself, be part of the experience and part of the community, without constantly chasing the next big thing.

What sort of brands do you see likely being advertised in Life Beyond?

We’d love to see brands building inside Life Beyond. The reality is that we’ve always been very adamant about the principle of saying “when you build a society/city/life, it always comes with brands, shops, branded activities like in real life.” As developers we can go one of two ways; the traditional way where we invent fictional, in-universe brands, or the new way, where we just open the door for them and create a safe space for them to do whatever they want to do. They might want to create awareness for their brand, advertise a product, mimic their services in digital, all kinds of things. That’s the path we’ve decided to go, and recently we’ve been on so many interesting calls and introduced to so many interesting brands that are looking for projects just like Life Beyond. They seem to be really interested in the kind of product we offer; this kind of artistic direction/high fidelity focus with a game that is less about confrontational action and more about social interaction.

So yes, we expect to see many brands coming in- we’ve already signed a partnership with Swear London, and there are many more to come- NFT Paris week was extremely busy for the leadership team, and we talked with brands such as L'Oreal, Adidas, Farfetch, UNXD, Porsche and Lamborghini, so this is just the starting point for us. It wasn’t just brands as well- there are a lot of opportunities for us out there with existing Web3 and gaming projects. We’re building a world — it can’t be a level with just some creatures- a world is all these stakeholders, all these agents that contribute to the lore and the fiction. If you guys play GTA, you’ll see a coffee shop, clothing brands, pop stars etc; all these things contribute to making it a believable world. It’s always been our take to leverage the brands from the physical world to bring them into our digital one so that they contribute to this massive amount of content creation, rather than authoring everything from scratch. It’s also a way for us to double down on this promise of bridging the gap between the physical world and the digital one. We want to utilise these connections so that we can easily navigate between these layers rather than creating a gulf between them.

There’s something that’s important to note, though. Every time we’re considering a brand or partner for Life Beyond, we don’t want to break the immersion or the narrative layer we’re building. It’s extremely important, which means every time we consider a brand, we come to them with three strong requirements:

• No compromising of the look and feel of the game
• No compromising the narrative layer, which means that when a brand comes in we’re building them a reason to exist in Life Beyond.
• The integration must have value for the community.

Will there be NPCs that can buy items, or will Life Beyond be fully player-driven?

It’s early in the design process, but we want to have NPCs that contribute to the world in an interesting way. We want to explore the opportunities and options that we have using AI and procedurally generated content to contribute to the experience. Our new Narrative Director, who’s joining us from Ubisoft, will be exploring this avenue and how we can connect everything to make the whole experience interactive and interesting.

When will the new character designs be available?

New character designs are still in active development, but we should hopefully see them by the summer.

Can you give us more information about archaeology within Life Beyond?

Speaking on a very high level, it’ll be about finding and decrypting puzzles to unlock new possibilities and new information about the world. However, the point of having Founders is the high level of interaction between them and the development team. We’ll be sharing some details about the roadmap prioritisation with Founders and putting to vote details to see what areas the community wants to see first.

What other Animoca Brands projects does Life Beyond have strong connections with?

Life Beyond has strong connections with all of Animoca’s major projects, but of course some fit better within the universe that we’re creating:

• Phantom Galaxies
• The Sandbox, who are the reason we’re part of Animoca Brands today.
• Dustland
• Cool Cats
• Revv Racing
• Torque Squad

Of course there are many others though, and you’ll be the first to hear about any exciting collaborations in the future.

Do you have a timeline for upcoming NFTs?

We don’t have a timeline for our next NFTs yet, but we’re actively working on it. We wanted to focus on the Hub and the stop of the existing collections. The next drop will probably be around Avatars; there will be a combination of free-claim mint and crypto-purchased mint. Over the next few Hub releases, it’s our intention to have physical representations of NFTs within the game, so keep your ears open for mention of that.

Have you thought about any use cases for the Medal of Courage/Honor?

This is part of the NFTs that we want to reveal utility for this year, but we can’t say more right now.

Can you share any information about events like NFT Paris?

What is important to say is that these events are incredibly useful to us, but the best connections aren’t always on the show/main floor. The main value for us is that it’s a big gathering of the community. We gathered an amazing group of people during our private side event at NFT Paris, and we’re building partnerships with all of them, so these events are a way to strengthen those relationships.

We’re at the point where it’s very important to build the core/first layer of the ecosystem with these builders and you all. It’ll be of great benefit to Life Beyond, so we’re bonding with all of these individuals who are leaders/decision makers in organisations that can help.

However, it’s also important to connect more with local communities, which we haven’t had a chance to do and we want to do a lot more. We’ll be at NFT LA and GDC, and we need to have a better understanding of who is where so that we can try to organise more events in real life since all the team is always travelling. We know we need to communicate a lot more on the community side regarding where we are at events to let people know how to connect when we’re there. There are many many events that we’re trying to figure out how to go to; NFT LA , Paris Blockchain Week and GDC all occur in the same week, so we need your input on what the best events are to look into, and we value your continued feedback.

Besides the in-game token, will there be other Life Beyond currencies?

We’re not spoiling too much as we have a very unique, awesome token structure on the way. It combines benefits for both Web3 and Web2 players, and is definitely one of our biggest breakthroughs. We’re creating something unique that will facilitate the onboarding of Web2 friends, but we’ll dedicate a whole session to explaining it at a later date.

Will the physical edition of Agent Zero Jacket be branded?

We’re exploring options around this opportunity especially after conversations we had in NFT Paris, so keep your eyes peeled for something really cool later.

Will there be any Mocaverse benefits for the Life Beyond community?

It’s not yet decided what form the integration with Mocaverse will take, as they’ve been extremely busy in the past 3 weeks. However, there will be a lot of utility for the Life Beyond community within Mocaverse, and we’re trying to bridge the other way, making sure that the Mocaverse community as a whole is welcome in Life Beyond.

Thank You

It’s amazing to get a chance to share all the work that we’ve put into the project with you guys, and great to get a chance to build Life Beyond together. It’s something that we were happy to do at the start of development, but it’s even better now that we’ve entered the Web3 world and all the community became real stakeholders and contributors.

If you have any other questions about the project, our team members would be happy to answer on our Discord. In addition, if you are the proud owner of a Founder Key, our CEO is connecting for one hour every week for a live discussion in a dedicated section during “Founder2Founders”!

Thank you all for showing so much passion- in a way it’s the best reward that we can get. You’re all a member of this project as much as us, so we need your help and participation- help us to grow, and help us to make better decisions. We look forward to the next opportunity to chat.

-The Darewise Team