Gala Games is one of the biggest names in Web3 gaming and an organization we have been tracking closely for over a year. For further reading on Gala, I recommend these two articles: Gala Games: Creating the Future of Blockchain Gaming and The Top 8 P2E Gala Games to Get Excited About! One of the games in that top 8, The Walking Dead: Empires, has now announced the first playtest will begin this month!
What Is The Walking Dead: Empires?
The Walking Dead: Empires is a survival MMORPG under the umbrella of Gala Games and is an officially licensed product of AMC. Details are a little sparse as we are still in pre-alpha, but through the genre alone, we can deduce a lot. You team up with friends, settle on land to build a base, craft weapons, and survive zombie onslaughts. The land ownership is likely to be on-chain and teaming up with friends may be more complicated than it sounds. That is, the developers are aiming at full social structures.
Playtest Coming 30th August 2022
Gala Games Tweeted the announcement earlier this week but for the official times and updates, you’re best off joining the Discord where there is an official channel for The Walking Dead: Empires. After some internal testing (a video of which I sneakily lifted from said Discord and inserted above), the developers are ready for the closed alpha playtest, which starts at 8pm on the 30th August 2022 and runs until 8pm on the 1st September 2022 (these are, I believe, the times where I am, which is in the British Summertime timezone.)
Who gets entry to the test isn’t clear yet, though as you can buy a hero for the game in the Gala shop, I would guess that the best-case scenario is anyone with a hero will get the chance to play.
Gala Games has a lot of interesting projects in its ecosystem, including the wild west battle royale game, Grit, which made headlines as it will be the first blockchain game listed on the Epic Games library. However, The Walking Dead: Empires is right up near the top of the Gala projects we’re most interested in, so we’ll be keeping a keen eye on this playtest!
