The first ever episode of our new “What Is…?” series covered the arcade, Play-to-Earn shooter on Solana and Fractal, Ev.io. In episode two, we stay within the FPS genre, but go in a totally different direction: The Forge Arena.
What Is The Forge Arena?
The Forge Arena is a tactical, competitive, first-person shooter made by GEN-E Studios on the WAX blockchain. The aim of the project is to create the first-esports-ready blockchain FPS in a similar vein to Counter Strike or Valorant. As of July 2022, it is in Closed Beta with Open Beta coming any day now.
After watching SuperDope stream the game on our Twitch channel with CEO and founder of The Forge Arena, m1nac, I knew it was time I got some games under my belt. Although the game is in closed beta, it’s substantially easier to get into than many blockchain games in that phase. Firstly, to get in, you just need a weapon skin NFT for the game, not some beta pass that serves no other purpose. Secondly, the cheapest NFTs for Forge Arena are as low as 0.20c at times. Click here to see what the cheapest skins on Atomic Hub currently are.
In this video, I cover a lot of ground, but there is one fleeting point I wish I had highlighted more. A small playerbase in closed beta testing is par for the course and I expected as much. However, it made creating the video more difficult than I had anticipated. I could only get games at certain times of day and even then, sometimes there was a 30-minute wait or longer. This was frustrating as I wanted to capture some more exciting and impressive gameplay and learn the maps.
As I alluded to in the video, however, this is the best kind of problem to have. My desperation to daisy-chain competitive matches was only half born out of a content creator’s obligation; I wanted to play because it’s damned fun and I want to improve. As it stands, the biggest hurdle for GEN-E Studios is to get people through the door when open beta launches. With a large player base and some more of the roadmap ticked off, this has the potential to be a milestone project for the space, and — if I’m being highly optimistic — the future of the esports FPS genre.
