Legends of Venari: Alpha Season Deep Dive
Disclaimer:
I’m not a financial advisor, this isn’t financial advice and these opinions are my own. I’m just a dude that is a crypto gaming enthusiast and reads too many whitepapers. Additionally, for this project I am an alpha pass minter, gilded pass holder and have one of the top leveled accounts in the game. However, I analyze a lot of games and this will be an objective review. Lastly, like any game in alpha many aspects of this review could change as the game is developed. Ok now…
Intro: What is Legends of Venari (LoV)?
This is going to be a real deep dive so grab a snack. I’d appreciate you reading the whole article but life is busy, I get it, if you don’t have 10-15 min there’s a TLDR at the bottom.
Legends of Venari is a creature collection game built on the blockchain that takes place in the world of Caerras. Venari are unique low-poly creatures loosely based on real biological stuff: each species has 6 or 7 elemental variants that are found in 5 different sizes, born under 13 different constellations and come in 3 different rarity tiers. The trailer below opens up with an Air Nyrie interacting with 3 of the faction exclusive Venari: Fire Leolis, Water Tourio and Earth Mooroo.
Still with me?
Ok, so how do you catch these things? Well, the game is accessed through an NFT pass, which will be explained in the next section. The core gameplay loop consists of these steps. Pick an area and place a bait then wait for 2 to 6 Venari, depending on bait and luck, to show up. You then choose 1 Venari to attempt to capture, a rig which provides varying capture bonuses, and another optional bait to feed to them. From there you enter a mini-game where you can feed, play with or fight the Venari. Every Venari has an ideal action combination and order which will provide the best odds of capture and it’s up to the player through trial and error to figure this out. There are 2 regions, Tecta and Ayena, each has multiple areas, which contain different venari and require different amounts of energy to explore. Venari will have a leveling system which I’m going to skip over in this article for sake of length.
Want to catch the best and rarest ones? Well, tier 1 Venari have unlimited populations while tier 2 and 3 have limited populations of 5,000 and 500, respectively. As you might guess this means they are more difficult to find and catch. Within the catch mini-game, tier 1s only have 3 action combos, while tier 2s have 5 actions, and tier 3s have 9 actions. This also means tier 2 and 3 are capped across the entire game’s player base. Speculatively, because of this, tier 2 and 3 sales will dominate the marketplace when it’s released because they are scarce. Lastly, there are event-exclusive Venari, which as the name implies are injected into the game for a limited time and thus are quite rare and the Golden Folicri, which is the only tier 4 and only 100 total exist in the game.
If you didn’t understand that wall-of-text that’s ok, the takeaway is, like any good creature collection game, all these layers of variance in the Venari and RNG factors are what give players a lot to dive into.
I want to play or invest, how can I do that?
Legends of Venari is currently nearing the end of its alpha season. In order to play the game you need to make an account on the game app and either own or borrow a pass. There are 3 pass types. There are 600 gilded alpha passes which are the genesis NFT collection and have access to the alpha season and some additional perks. 3,150 alpha passes, which also have alpha season access but with less perks than the gilded. Lastly, base passes which are yielded every 20 days by using the other 2 passes but these aren’t playable until season 1. Simply, activate a gilded or alpha pass that is in the Ethereum wallet you linked to your game account and you can now play.
Can’t afford a pass, have a pass with no time to play or want to invest in multiple passes? LoV has a trustless and incredibly easy to use lending system. The pass owner can select a loan percentage and then anybody with a LoV account can request to borrow the pass at that loan rate, all in the app. For example you can click here and see I’m loaning an alpha pass to a friend where my cut 25%. Every Venari they catch is marked with this percentage so if they sell or release the Venari for materials I’m given 25% of that currency. Pass loans have a 24 hour cooldown so it’s also very easy to let people test the game using your pass or move it to a new scholar. It’s comforting for pass owners that no borrower has control of your assets nor can they affect you through the game ToS. The drawback here is if someone abandons an account and doesn’t sell or release Venari the pass owner can’t profit from the loan. The LoV team is looking into ways to mitigate this.
The Game Economy
The question every play and earn gamer and investor wants answered first: How much money can I make? There’s a lot to unpack for this and most is speculative. I won’t speculate on amounts of ETH or USD, only ways that you could make a profit.
Short answer, currently nothing, unless you flip a pass on a NFT marketplace like Opensea or Looksrare because the LoV in-game marketplace is not live. Think of the alpha season as a Venari seed round with a vesting cliff. You can accumulate Venari but can’t sell them until the marketplace is running, which is on the roadmap for the very end of the alpha season. So with that, let’s speculate.
First, it’s worth stating there’s a minor amount, if any, “pay to win” in this game. Yes, you can go and buy the rarest Venari once the marketplace is live but that Venari had to be caught by a player, it can’t be purchased from the game itself. So if the player base isn’t selling the best Venari, too bad, you're going to have to catch your own. Additionally, essence is split into refined and pure, both of these are required to level Venari. Only refined essence can be sold on the secondary market so every player has to acquire pure essence with their own time and effort.
There are 3 types of assets you’ll be able to buy/sell to potentially profit: level 1 Venari, refined essence and the passes. Note again, level 1 Venari sales only. Level 100 is the max, you can’t pay your way to a max level Venari.
Starting with Venari themselves. Scarcity will be king. Golden, tier 3 and event-exclusive Venari will likely net the most profit as they are all very limited in number. Only 500 of each tier 3 exists, there’s 3,750 alpha passes being used, simple math a bunch of players don’t have a particular tier 3 and might be willing to pay for it. Let’s not forget RNG, god rolls. There’s randomization in size and constellation of every Venari caught, which affects stats. Those with the peak stats will probably fetch additional premiums, especially if that roll is already on a limited population.
Essence is needed to level Venari and is gained by releasing Venari. It’s categorized into groups (genus) meaning I can level my tier 3 by releasing a bunch tier 1s of the same type. Whether or not this stuff is going to be bought/sold is going to highly depend on the supply versus sink for leveling. If there’s demand for essence it could be profitable for those strictly farming and not PvP’ing or leveling their own Venari. If the supply is too high, it could just be worthless outside leveling your own Venari. Or somewhere in between.
The passes. Alpha passes yield a base pass every 20 days of use, maximum of 7 depending on the pass. Approximately, 15,000 base pases will exist when season 1 starts meaning ~19,000 total passes are in the ecosystem at that point Pass owners can loan their base passes and get a cut of the potential profits listed above from their scholars. Or they could do the route of selling the base passes on the open market. Again, demand will be everything here. Total chalkboard numbers here. If the game catches fire and 50k people want in, initial entry will be high on the secondary market. Vice versa, only 10k people are interested, base passes won’t go for much and people will undercut the floor to try to realize some ROI on their alpha pass investment.
Development: Where is Legends of Venari and Where’s it Going?
Legends of Venari at the time of writing is still in its alpha season. The most recent patch introduced Venari releasing as a mechanic and essence as a material. The “leveling primer” patch notes are released and the patch tentatively should go live in the next 48 hours. If you looked at the LoV whitepaper recently, you’d have seen they are behind on their roadmap delivery. The alpha season was supposed to end in late March. I will echo what the team has publicly stated, which is, part of the team is from Ukraine and the war with Russia has impacted their productivity. I will also state as someone following this project since day 1 of the alpha season, everything had been delivered on time prior to the war.
Caerras Credit ($CC) token. This is a bit of an outlier right now. It’s been stated that the team may or may not produce a premium currency. If they do then it will be on an Ethereum layer 2 but which one isn’t decided. If made, it would be used for the in-game marketplace along with ETH and likely be used to reactivate base passes each season. Alpha passes likely will be permanent and won’t require this $CC sink.
So what’s next? This team iterates like crazy and community feedback is often incorporated into the game so nothing is set in stone. In fact, here’s links to their public Trello boards for bugs and suggestions. Forms to enter these can be found in their discord. As for the likely order of major updates, you’re looking at something like this:
leveling >> in-game marketplace >> final alpha season event >> season 1 launch. Further down the line the team plans on leaderboards, competitions, season 2, merchandise and even a 3D open world RPG, which they have sneak peaks on here and there on Twitter.
The TLDR:
The Good
Legends of Venari utilizes a battle tested dopamine loop, which is a simple creature collection with several layers of RNG and variance within the Venari to keep the player engaged.
~1.5k ETH of secondary NFT sales across the 3,750 passes currently available to play the alpha with a relatively steady floor.
Extremely engaged community discord. The community managers and core team are chatting with the community daily and very receptive to feedback.
Trustless lend/borrow system for managers and scholars. Pass holders can select a percentage split and anyone with an account can request to borrow it. The percent split is tagged to each Venari caught and automatically given to the lender upon sale or release of the Venari (burn). Scholars can even be switched every 24 hours.
Blockchain light. Anyone in blockchain gaming knows there’s a lot of resistance to adoption. You only need a NFT to play the game beyond that it functions like any other web2 browser/mobile game. This makes it an easy onramp for those new to crypto: purchase 1 thing, play a game, simple.
Fair. There’s no pay to win, in fact the devs have iterated on mechanics that actively force players to play to achieve top level Venari.
The neutral
There are several perks for playing in the alpha season like alpha exclusive Venari, max energy cap going into season 1 and leveled Venari that give in-game bonuses. Good for those early, not so much for those entering the ecosystem in season 1. It’s pretty standard for teams to reward early adopters but it’s also standard for those late to the party to whine about being disadvantaged.
Ambitious game development and lengthy roadmap. Building up to an open world RPG with land ownership, developer SDK and a fully fleshed brand is awesome. But it takes time and the crypto space is as impatient as it comes.
The bad
Put a big asterisk next to this one.* Delays. Part of the LoV team is in Ukraine and have been impacted by the war with Russia. This delayed the end of the alpha season and features like the marketplace but obviously this was completely out of the developers’ control. Prior to this, everything had been delivered on time.
Unclear direction for the $CC (Caerras Credit) token. If it’s even going to be created and what blockchain hasn’t been publicly stated. Token investment is an angle of investment many want to pursue for blockchain game investment and without concrete details it’s difficult to want to do so.
If you made it to the end, I appreciate you and if you want to discuss any crypto related stuff, usually best to find me on Twitter (@OzoneNFT).
Ozone, you’re just an overinvested idiot, where can I research this myself?
Agreed, you should always do your own research here’s a bunch of links for you to do that.
This is fantastic - thank you
I love how you laid out all the details by part and how well you explained the entirety of the game :D