Dead or Alive Creator Tomonobu Itagaki Announces New NFT-Based Game

Tomonobu Itagaki and his studio Apex Game Studios are working on a new NFT-based MMORPG called Warrior. 

Itagaki is best-known for creating the fighting game series Dead or Alive and the reboots of Ninja Gaiden. The acclaimed game producer will now be turning his attention to the oft-maligned NFT or Web 3.0 gaming sphere. 

In an announcement on Twitter, Itagaki revealed the studio had “incubated” its first game, an MMORPG called Warrior. In the tweet, Itagaki states “Warrior aims to solve the performance and security issues of GameFi 1.0 and achieve GameFi 2.0.” 

For those unfamiliar, GameFi is a combination of “gaming” and “finance”. This is a word those in the cryptocurrency community use to describe “pay-to-earn” games. These are games where the player eschews having fun in favour of gambling on speculative finance. 

Snark aside, Itagaki seems to recognise the “lack of fun” factor that’s plagued past attempts at building NFT-based games. In an interview, he expressed that a blockchain game must actually be fun to attract attention and he hopes to achieve this with Warrior (via Coin Telegraph).

There is little information on Warrior as of yet, the game’s website talks more about Warrior’s economic system than any solid in-game content. However, there are tidbits. There are planned to be over 100 different types of creatures called Mob Servants which will support the player in battle. There will be unique talents and randomly-generated gear as well as “hundreds of territories in the game.” 

The game is being built on Unreal Engine and Apex is planning to release it early next year and gradually introduce new mechanics as well as updates that focus on keeping Warrior operating in the long-term with effective economic management (via Eurogamer). 

Itagaki has stated his future intentions for Apex Game Studios, saying he wanted to develop games based on the Metaverse as well as games based on NFTs.