First Look at Pulsar: SciFi MMO-RTS on Avalanche

Pulsar is an upcoming SciFi MMO-RTS with a player-driven economy on the Avalanche Blockchain. This web3 game is being built with Unreal Engine 5 and players can count on AAA gameplay and graphics.

Pulsar is the StarCraft of Web3. Players will have a base with buildings, units to fight and gather resources, and their land plot to defend and manage. The game will have three different game modes:

• PvE in land (contracts) 25th Dec, 2022 single and co-op
• PvE Story Mode on March 23, 2023
• PvP, no date yet

This game will be free-to-play and players will not need to spend any money to play it. It will work like a traditional online game where users download the launcher and play.

Like every other RTS, there will be a lot of in-game resources like Gas, Minerals and Pulsar. These resources can then be used to upgrade your existing units and buildings.

Then, the game will open up the possibility for players to have different specializations:

• Miner (focuses on harvesting raw resources)
• Builder (focuses on building and crafting equipment)
• Trader
• Fighter (focuses on defending other player’s land plots from alien waves)

Accordingly to Pulsar’s twitter the public Beta will come on the 30th of November.

NFTs, $PLSR and Play-to-Earn

Since this is a web3 game it will interact with one of Avalanche’s subnets, it will have NFTs and a token $PLSR.

The gameplay will go around managing a land plot, so those who do not own one will have to work on another player’s land plot or in one of the land plots the team will provide. But, when extracting resources from other players there will be a tax on everything that is extracted and on NFTs that might be earned when these are sold.

Then there will be $PLSR which can be obtained by extracting Pulsar(off-chain) and refining it to $PLSR(on-chain). This token main utility will be to trade NFTs on the game’s marketplace. When a land plot is minted it will come with an amount of Pulsar that can be converted into $PLSR by playing.

When it comes to NFTs they will exist in the form of:

These will be upgradable with the resources harvest in-game.

Last thoughts

The team did a few play sessions and it looks really good. Besides this, there are not many RTS games in web3 so it could be an advantage for the project.

But this is not the typical RTS, since everything will happen on the same world map and every inch of this world map will be owned by players at some point.

Other titles decided to go for this approach, where every player uses a portion of the world map. Rebel Bots and Heroes of Mavia are examples of this, but in these titles, fighting happens in an instance and not in a never stopping live world map.

The level of ambition and complexity here is quite high and it will be a challenge to balance an economy like this, especially during crypto winter. As in every web3 game where every player can extract tokens and NFTs, there are always people who just play to earn money and extract value from the ecosystem and that might be problematic.

Nevertheless, we need innovation and ambition in Web3Gaming. If the team succeeds in delivering a good gaming experience and a balanced economy, then I believe Pulsar will attract a lot of players both from Web2 and Web3 and will become a major success in NFT Gaming.