This year may have had a great many negatives, but let’s not dwell on them when we can instead focus on the influx of fantastic Web3 games that are being rolled out and announced. Walker World recently showed some gameplay footage and we think it’s worth a look.

I cannot quite believe how far blockchain gaming has come in the last 2 years. From 2018 to 2020, there was a drought with mere rumblings of simplistic projects. Now, it feels as if daily we are seeing AAA-quality games announced or released into early testing. This latest unveiling really caught my eye, however.

What Is Walker World?

Walker World is a Web3, massive, open-world, Play & Earn, interoperable, third-person shooter and adventure game created in Unreal Engine 5. As specific as that sounds, the description is rather vague and it’s difficult to delineate exactly what that means. Nevertheless, what we can see in the above video will endear itself to gamers, myself included.

In fact, Walker World first entered my radar with a screenshot on Twitter and I thought it all sounded a little too good to be true, and so I put a pin in writing anything about it. Then, the gameplay preview dropped and I escalated that to “research immediately.” Walker World looked so good my first thought was that it might be a well-executed rug pull using Unreal Engine 5 assets, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Now, there’s still a real lack of information to work with, so I have my reservations, but between the gameplay trailer and the team, I’m certainly interested. As regular readers will know, the team behind a project is paramount to how much stock I put into a game that’s still in development. The founders — with all due respect to them — didn’t display much in the way of game industry experience, so I was initially wary. However, they have done what good founders do: hire well.

There is a wealth of talent and experience behind Walker World, but what has sold it to me above all else is one person in particular. The Director of Game Dev Strategy, Johan Döhl, was COO of DICE, Head of the Frostbite engine, and Head of Development for the best Battlefield games ever made (note: I haven’t stated that softly; BF1, BF3, BF 1943, and BF:BC 2 are works of art and I’m not open to disagreement. He also gets points for not having worked on BF 2042.)

There are a few areas of Walker World that still have question marks for me and that have the potential to be a cause for concern. Firstly, if the Walker NFTs are necessary to play — and I don’t know that they are — they’re obnoxiously expensive with a 0.27 $ETH floor. Secondly, the NFTs for Walker World are (unless I’m mistaken here) only available on Ethereum directly — that is not conducive to blockchain empowering gamers or a game with active trade. Thirdly, I’ve grown wary of land sales, which Walker World has scheduled; they are often tacked on to games as an afterthought to generate front-loaded revenue.

Still, as real as these reservations are to me, all three are solvable; do not have an absurdly high cost of entry for players under the guise of everything in crypto being seen as an investment, port over to Immutable X or another gaming-centric blockchain, and make land genuinely useful to the players (that is, not just some lazy staking mechanic.) As a result, I believe there are more positives to focus on than there are potential for flaws, and let me highlight again, this Walker World does look stunning.

So, gentlefolk, we have another AAA-standard project to keep an eye on!