Blocklords is as if Age of Empires and Total War consummated on-chain and birthed a Web3, PvP strategy game. Well, after a long wait, we’re finally seeing some in-game footage that was demoed at the GAM3 Awards 2022.

In the first quarter of 2022, something caught my eye. It was a strategy game and that’s noteworthy because strategy games rarely interest me. It’s not that I don’t enjoy strategy in games — even games where it’s a key feature — but the Age of Empires and Total War series never resonated with me, despite how fantastic they were. I wanted to like them, but something just didn’t quite click.

When it comes to gaming, I have a potentially unusual blocker that prohibits me from playing the vast majority of games: my need for Player-versus-Player (PvP). It is so rampant that I miss out on many singleplayer games as a result. Now, Age of Empires and Total War both have PvP modes, they’re just not particularly popular, so that contributes to my lack of interest. This is where Blocklords hooked me: they used the terms “PvP” and “permadeath”.

What Is Blocklords?

The best overview I can give is from my aforementioned article in April 2022:

“Summary

• MMO strategy game using Immutable X
• Player-owned economy, PvP, and complex gameplay
• Highly experienced team with EA, Ubisoft, and Paradox backgrounds; team now 100 strong”

Blocklords is absurdly ambitious, let’s put that out there straight away. It’s ambitious to the point where I believe that’s its biggest vulnerability, and if it were to fail, I’d guess that would be front and center of the causes. It is a dynamic game where you aim to build your legacy and family, with your character dying of natural causes (though probably not natural causes) and you move on to your character’s next of kin. You create a bloodline with traits and you build out a history for as long as you survive.

Blocklords has the mechanics in place to be something truly special and the use of blockchain can underpin that in a way that would act as a masterful demonstration of the technology to detractors. Whether it can reach its potential is, of course, a big question indeed, though the team behind the project and the investors in it are of the caliber required. I met some of the team at Gamescom and the passion was palpable.

Enjoy this brief glimpse into what’s to come from Blocklords and know that we’ll be straight through the keep door and play-testing it the moment the opportunity arises.