OthersideMeta: our complete guide before the launch of the project — how to get in and what to expect

On July 16 the famous Yuga Labs will open a demo version (also known as First Trip) of its unusual and already notable project OthersideMeta. Recently they also held closed testing of this virtual game.

The company is cautious with its evaluations and promises, so all the game development stages are devoid of specifics and dates. We tried to collect everything that we know about the present and the future of this highly ambitious Web3/GameFi project.

What is what

The Otherside Metaverse game turns out to be very unusual. Let’s list its main components as an introduction.

Otherdeed is an NFT collection of metaverse created by Bored Ape Yacht Club founder Yuga Labs and the gaming venture fund Animoca Brands. Otherdeeds are the virtual land deeds to be used in Otherside, a gamified metaverse currently in active development.

Otherside is a MetaRPG combining the mechanics of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and virtual worlds with web3 support. Players will own the world, their NFTs can become characters, and thousands of people can play together in real-time.

To better understand the specifics of this unusual virtual world, such as Koda and more, we recommend reading this great glossary of all the terms and components of the game.

If there are too many buzz-words for you and it’s still hard to put everything together in your head, let’s decompose all the parts of this innovative concept:

• Your NFTs are turned into game characters here. In other words, they take on applied meaning and value. The next plan is to create a marketplace for clothing and other artifacts based on NFTs.
• The players’ activity is recorded on the blockchain and also brings cryptocurrencies into virtual world — with all the perks, like the ability to earn money through minting.
• Visually it looks like a collaborative online game with very different worlds (MMORPG).
• People who get there use virtual glasses and other devices for contact with virtual reality.

What we get is a rattling mixture called OthersideMeta. Compared to analogs (which offer only a person’s connection to some kind of virtual environment), this version of the metaverse looks superb. In this version of the meta-universe, it was possible to glue together all the hot things of this season: web3 (crypto and NFT) with virtual reality and gamification of our life, aiming at GameFi in the long run.

A virtual world with such enormous possibilities and diversity may well be an exciting experience for young people worldwide.

Launch Stages

The launch of Otherdeed already caused a severe overload of the Ethereum blockchain and the project infrastructure.

• In this regard, the good news is:
  The Otherdeed launch was very successful and raised a considerable amount of bucks and attention from the public.

• But there is also bad news:
  The number of people was huge, so the overload killed the project’s infrastructure for some time.

This time the studio decided to prepare for the launch of the Metaverse game more thoroughly by working on the mistakes. To accomplish this, they broke down the launch of First Trip into preparatory stages.

 Here they are: 

• Metaverse Otherside has announced that it will conduct two load tests before the upcoming First Trip technology demo: July 6 and 9.
• The project will launch on July 16 — it will only be a demo. However, OthersideMeta is not giving any official details about First Trip. According to the Otherside website, First Trip is a “celebration of what’s to come and an opportunity for Voyagers to gather, explore, and plan.” And that’s all there is to know on the official side.
• The Metaverse game will go public later, closer to the end of 2022. For now, the company is very stingy with promises, probably wanting to see how successful the demo will be.

How did the testing proceed?

There were a lot of people who wished to take part, so the company came up with a lot of different restrictions. Let’s take a look at what came out of this.

The testing of the Otherside and First Trip meta universe was conducted only on desktops and laptops. To participate in load testing and the game itself, the user must have a wallet with at least 1 Otherdeed NFT.

Load testing started with 3,000 players and gradually increased by 1,000 players every 2–3 minutes. Anyone who didn’t get in due to the capacity limitations of each three-minute time slot could try again in the next slot. Each test lasted about half an hour.

Many users encountered blank gray screens when trying to log in, and some could not connect to the system. Users suspect that access was only open to users from the U.S. and Canada, although there was no official word on that earlier.

So do we just sit here and wait? pic.twitter.com/ibFinxvcsW

— Shōk.eth (@shok_eth) July 6, 2022

But many lucky people could still access the demo, which featured a monochrome-colored virtual environment and the ability to interact with thousands of other faceless avatars. The game is still obviously in its infancy.

In the game’s demo version, users could also text chat, use emojis to do so, and run and jump around in the environment. Before entering the environment, users were asked to allow access to the microphone, although it was disabled in the test itself. But the Otherside team members themselves used audio to inform users of problems.

 

Enjoyed my first experience on the #OthersideMeta in the load test. Incredible this runs in the browser with smooth 3d rendering across thousands of players with spatial audio. This is the future! pic.twitter.com/HrdZB0koSB

— 0xFastly.eth (@0xFastly) July 9, 2022

What to say about the finished tests? Yuga Labs keeps silent, avoiding giving any evaluations or reports on the test results. But judging by Twitter, the demo worked, even though there were a lot of complaints from people who failed to connect. The testing became quite popular — many people who wanted to participate could not do so because of the excess of participants and rather strict entry rules. 

Market Reaction

Otherdeeds NFT trading volumes have increased dramatically by more than 100 percent in the 24 hours since Yuga Labs announced the start of the Otherside Metaverse load tests on July 6.

Despite the increase in trading volumes, due to the crypto market’s general crisis, the price of Otherdeed NFT has dropped nearly nine percent in the last week and is 2.75 ETH at the time of writing.

The price of Apecoin has increased slightly since the start of the tests, generally maintaining a reasonably low value compared to the price at the beginning of sales in May 2022. 

 

After a massive market crash, the entry point looks interesting (if you believe in strategies like Buying The Dip). Also, there are no competitors with comparable plans in the hype market of meta-universes.

The only competitor is Meta (formerly Facebook), which may surprise by the volume of its audience — remaining relatively primitive compared to OthersideMeta on all other parameters except the audience. OthersideMeta makes the Meta project look like a huge and clumsy corporate monster that will have a hard time capturing the attention of a spoiled generation of zoomers.

Investment in OthersideMeta is available in either buying NFTs (already integrated into the tokenomics of the game world) or investing directly in this virtual reality coin — Apecoin (APE).

What’s next?

Again, the company remains silent and intrigued, without giving any details about the upcoming plans. We used a highly poetic Roadmap of the project to try to imagine an approximate future development of the project. Each new stage has no dates or clear description, just a general sequence of stages of development and a code name for each.

• First Trip — we described this launch stage above. It’s a soon-to-be-launched demo engine of this meta-universe. It is already obvious that this will be very limited gameplay, and this is only the initial version of what is planned to be done.
• The Codex — creating some sort of collective karma system (or set of rules) where your interactions with other players will somehow automatically affect your future and abilities.
• Koda Origins — creating the ability to separate resources from your deeds, allowing you to sell your resources and artifacts, and alienate Koda attributes. In return, buying other people’s resources will be possible by modifying your deeds and Koda. That is an attempt to create a marketplace within the game world, where everything will be traded for ApeCoin.
• The Growth — your deeds come to life and start generating additional resources (which you can sell), but at the same time, there are new risks and dangers. As usual, there are no details in the description.
• The Agora — the ability to create gangs (alliances) for joint action, trade and strategies. This synergy allows you to create unique artifacts with new properties and abilities.
• The Dream — the appearance of the arcade machine for travel, a kind of teleport to any place in the virtual world.
• The Choice — at this stage, it is necessary to choose between Evil and Good, between Light and Darkness. After such a choice, everyone will be automatically divided into friends and enemies. It is not clear yet how exactly this possibility will be implemented, but it will bring confrontation into the game.
• The Settling will allow the creation of settlements and communities from strangers on their deeds. There are no details yet as to exactly what this means.

Short conclusion

The company is very careful with its promises, so all game development stages are vague, lacking specificity and dates. This strategy is quite usual for the crypto-world — it is an attempt to promise something great while not creating any legally significant obligations. So far, it is evident that the idea is so majestic and beautiful that this virtual world already has crowds of devoted fans.

But will it be possible to realize such a complex project? Only time will tell. But if it succeeds — we will witness the arrival of a new mutant monster at the intersection of gaming, crypto, and virtual worlds. Therefore, all investors should keep a close eye on this unusual project so as not to miss the rapid rise of another unicorn.