Mysten Labs is Grand Cross: Metaworld’s blockchain partner

Netmarble F&C subsidiary Metaverse World is picking Mysten Labs to be the blockchain partner for Grand Cross: Metaworld. Mysten Labs is the creator of Sui, a layer 1 blockchain. The founding members of the company are former Meta developers who worked on Project Libra.

Sui is a Layer 1 blockchain designed from the ground up to let developers build experiences which cater directly to users. It supports a wide range of development at both high speed and low costs. Sui boasts high throughput, instant settlement speeds and rich on-chain assets.

Most importantly, it offers user-friendly Web3 experiences.

“Great metaverses require great infrastructure,” said Netmarble’s Woowon Seo, in a statement to GamesBeat. “We are excited to partner with Mysten to build our metaverse on Sui, which is uniquely designed to support fun, high performing games and experiences at scale.”

Grand Cross: Metaworld enables thousands of simultaneous users to hang out together in various cities and neighborhoods in a huge open world. It rocks a distinct anime style, which covers both characters and settings.

Like any hopeful metaverse, Grand Cross: Metaworld lets players design their own spaces, from actually creating a spot to decorating it out. Gamers will be able to use webcams and mobile cameras to customize their individual avatars. The same tech can create user-generated content to share across the internet.

One of the biggest selling points of Grand Cross: Metaworld is that the whole project uses Unreal for 4k graphics. The team behind Metaworld built its own cartoon rendering shader to use with Unreal 5 to make everything come together.

I’ll say one thing about Grand Cross: Metaworld. It looks gorgeous. Whoever put together the trailer for the upcoming closed beta test deserves a bonus, or a raise or something.

What I’m properly curious about, though, is that Metaworld is trying to dip into the V-Tuber market. It’s citing built-in tools for the creation of V-tube models. It specifically acknowledges the high cost of entry for anyone looking to put together a functional setup for Vtubing – the hardware can cost hundreds of bucks on its own, and cheap Vtuber models cost about the same.

The real good ones cost thousands.

Depending on the level of customization and motion tracking available in Grand Cross: Metaworld there might just be a new wave of Vtubers coming, with good looking anime models streaming from a gorgeous 4K backdrop. 

It’s honestly exciting.

Grand Cross: Metaworld is heading into a closed beta test in the first half of 2023, and aiming for a full release by the end of 2023.