EverQuest, Planetside Co-Creator Reveals Open-World Shooter Game ‘Reaper Actual’

Game industry veteran John Smedley—who helped bring games like EverQuest, H1Z1, and Planetside to life as president of Sony Online Entertainment (later Daybreak Game Company)—is back with a new studio, Distinct Possibility Studios, and a blockchain-powered debut first-person shooter called Reaper Actual.

And while blockchain games have typically found a muted or hostile response from traditional gamers, Smedley believes his game could bring in “millions and millions” of players due to the shooter’s unique implementation of crypto tech.

Reaper Actual is a PC-based, open-world multiplayer shooter that will see players upgrade and defend bases, placed on what Smedley told Decrypt will be the largest map of any first-person shooter—four times larger than Call of Duty: Warzone’s Al Mazrah.

Gamers will be able to attack other bases to steal items from a player’s vault, but to do so, they’ll have to weave through the traps that are laid out by the base owner.

Distinct Possibility is gearing up to launch the pre-alpha Foundation release of Reaper Actual in the “near future” following two years of work—and a newly announced $30.5 million funding round led by Bitkraft and Brevan Howard Digital.

To enter the Foundation experience, players will be required to purchase one of the limited bases that will be bundled with a unique character (pricing TBC). For the full release, which is scheduled for “early next year,” a similar system will be in place before the game goes fully free-to-play approximately six months later.

“We view bases as the thing that we’re actually selling. It gives you access to your home in the world,” Smedley told Decrypt. “We’ll be selling those early to let in a small group of players that will increase over time, so they can be a part of the foundation of our community.”

These bases will be available as NFTs as well as through entirely Web2 avenues, such as the Epic Games Store, due to the studio’s commitment to keeping crypto completely optional.

Set on an island called Marova that was recently hit with a brutal civil war, players drop into this world as “Reapers” who come from the world’s intelligence services for “fame and glory.” What the Reapers find, however, is an island of five AI-controlled factions that are constantly at war over territory.

Reapers will be given missions to work for or against the five factions. The missions are designed to encourage conflict between players, meaning that one Reaper may be tasked with defending a faction while another must attack them.

“The game can best be described as if Call of Duty: DMZ or Escape from Tarkov were set in a massive open world, and it had a baby with Rainbow Six Siege. That would be our game,” Smedley told Decrypt.

Base types will range from basic bunkers to spacious apartment hideouts and derelict submarines. Smedley said that the allocation of bases will be evenly spread out, so finding a game won’t be an issue despite sharing the same base location with several other users.

In the case that two players are in the same lobby with the same base, Reaper Actual will have a “phasing system” that prevents them from bumping into each other in-game. Plus, any Reapers that the player is not currently using will guard their base from attackers.

Players will head out into the open-world to find and steal resources to craft weapons or base defenses. In-game items will be tradable on the Steam community marketplace, as well as via NFTs on an in-browser marketplace based on Tezos layer-2 network Etherlink.

By allowing players to trade items with or without crypto functionality, Smedley believes players will understand the power of crypto marketplaces.

A base in Reaper Actual. Image: Distinct Possibility

“Let’s say you and I are on the same raid together, and we both get this Vantablack gun skin—and I watch you go sell that […] and you make the equivalent of $500,” he said. “A lot of players will look at that and go, ‘Hey, that doesn’t suck!’ They’ll like it. We think that we can migrate people [that way].”

On launch, Smedley projects that only 8% of the player base will start by trading on the crypto marketplace, but believes this figure will swell to 30% over two years.

When Avalanche-based shooter Off the Grid launched last year, it was an instant viral success, with several top streamers praising the game. Former professional Counter-Strike player Shroud compared the game’s use of NFTs to the Steam marketplace, and streamer TimTheTatman echoed a similar sentiment last week.

Smedley said that the launch of Off the Grid gave him hope that Reaper Actual’s model would work, as players start to realize that there isn’t much difference between the Steam marketplace and a crypto-fueled one.

He added that the idea for this model first sparked following the creation of the hit battle royale game H1Z1, later rebranded Z1: Battle Royale. When he saw players buying and selling items on the Steam Community Market, he felt inspired.

As a result, Reaper Actual will encourage players to mod the game to create new game modes, servers, skins, and more.

“This is the type of game that can bring millions and millions of people in, if the history of the games I’ve worked on are any evidence,” said Smedley. “We’re going to be able to sell Web2 players on this idea of Web3 done right.”

Edited by Andrew Hayward