Legends of Venari: Vocari Update
Beta Season News!
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. For disclosure, I currently own 1 gilded alpha pass and 6 alpha passes NFTs, and have the 2nd highest leveled account in the game.
What is New in Legends of Venari?
This is actually my first game update rather than a full review. I was prompted to write this because today was both a Vocari Hangout and public community hangout in the LoV discord, annnnnnnd we got BETA SEASON NEWS! The “Vocari” is the community name for the gilded alpha pass-holders, of which there are only 600, and these NFTs get you some interesting perks within the Venari ecosystem. One of them being the Vocari hangouts. We got some sweet new branding and art for the beta season, which I’ve splashed into this post as well. Before I go further, I’d like to briefly summarize what Legends of Venari is. If you are familiar with the project skip ahead to the next section. If you haven't heard of it, you can quickly read my alpha season deep dive on the project here or the summary below.
Legends of Venari is a creature collection game in its alpha season that takes place in the world of Caerras. In order to play the game, you need to purchase a gilded alpha pass or alpha pass NFT from Opensea or Looksrare. Once the beta season is live, you will also be able to access the game with a base pass NFT. Passes can also be borrowed via the in-game loan system.
Venari are unique, glowing-eyed, low-poly creatures loosely based on real biologics: 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 core gameplay loop consists of these steps: Pick an area and place a bait, then wait for Venari, depending on bait and luck, to show up. You then choose 1 Venari to attempt to capture, a rig which provides capture bonuses, and another optional bait to feed to them. From there you enter a mini-game where you can feed, play or fight with 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 resources to explore.
The Beta Season
The big news, we finally have a confirmation we are moving out of the alpha season. This is welcome news as I’m sure any alpha season player would tell you, the alpha season has gotten quite stale. If I wasn’t so competitive and didn’t feel the need to defend a top account, I’d have probably taken a break from it. It wasn’t intended to go this long, but the delays have been necessary with the current market and some pivoting in direction by the Venari team.
So what did we learn? Of course the date. As usual, the Legends of Venari team didn't give an exact date, but we are expecting the beta season to start the third or fourth week of July. The beta season will have a full wipe of all in-game resources and world progress but account level will be kept. A brand new region with 8 areas and about 300 new Venari will be introduced. All of the alpha season Venari will be permanently retired, although some species will return as new tier 1 variants. All alpha season tier 2, 3 and 4 variants will never return. Base passes will become active which expands the number of available passes by approximately 5,000, bringing the total number of playable passes for the beta season to approximately 9,000. There will be about a 1 week break in between the alpha and beta season to: on board new players, switch factions, and prepare for the season in general.
The biggest change will be the new core gameplay loop, which the team is referring to as The Grid. This will overhaul the catching mini game, making it far more dynamic in the rare venari available, adding player controlled land, PVE co-op raids, and eventually PVP mechanics as well. The new grid system is not entirely finished, but these were the details that we've been given so far.
The last big piece coming to the beta season will be the highly-anticipated marketplace. A testnet marketplace will be available only to the Vocari at the start of the beta season. The mainnet marketplace is going live somewhere in the middle of the beta season on a layer 2 that is most likely to be Polygon or Arbitrum.
The Vocari
The whitepaper is currently MIA as they are rewriting it. It didn’t do the best job of describing some of the gilded pass benefits before, so I’d like to highlight some of the perks that come with being a Vocari and more beta season news. Again one of the main perks is the Vocari hangouts, where sneak peeks and major updates are first given. More importantly, they are smaller low-key meetings with time allotted for Q&A and suggestions for the main team. I'm not going to leak some of the exclusive looks that were given in the hangout today but rather just mention what they were.
Some of the future partners and the unique venari that have been made for those partnered events.
A sneak peek look at the progress of the open world game, which is currently self-contained and a second game entirely, but most likely will be interlinked with the current game in some form.
Sneak peeks of the new profile pics, which will have unique traits for the holders of gilded and alpha passes.
It should be noted the passes are all going to become PFPs, they will still serve the same function as access to the game
Many other small details that were covered in various questions from the community.
Moving forward the team wants to include the Vocari more, holding the hangouts at a consistent monthly cadence. As mentioned earlier they will have first access to testing the marketplace on the testnet and some limited access to the developer environment for upcoming feature testing. The team randomizes all RNG aspects of that as to not give them an actual advantage. They will continue to be the first heard when it comes to feedback and suggestions for the game. I can personally attest to this, as some of my suggestions have been directly implemented.
The perks for the gilded alpha passes are many and really, in my opinion, fill part of the Web3 ethos of allowing the players to have a “place at the table” when it comes to shaping what the game and projects are going to be.
That's all I have for this short update, I plan on doing a new update most likely about a month into the Beta season to cover the actual gameplay and eventually I'll do another near the end of the beta season transitioning to season 1.
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You should always do your own research. Here's a bunch of links from Legends of Venari for you to do that.