Faraway Will Use Off-Chain Lands to Onboard Web2 Gamers to Legends of the Mara and HV-MTL

Developer Faraway has announced the introduction of earnable and purchasable off-chain Land: Paradis for card and idle tap game Legends of the Mara (LOTM), and Rift for HV-MTL, a blockchain game combining casual worldbuilding and pet mechanics with competitive dungeon crawling.

How Does Land Work?

Lands act as playable areas that influence the leaderboard you rank on but also the rewards you earn from playing one of the two Web3 games. So if you’re playing on Rift Land, you will naturally earn HV-MTL-related goodies alongside cross-land prizes such as Points, Point Multipliers and Ascension materials. But these assets are also interoperable, so if you use Rift Land in LOTM, you can then use your HVs as the main fighters while Kodamara, Koda or Mara hop in using partner slots. The other way around works too: Paradis Land or Deeds can be used in HV-MTL to equip HVs in partner slots while using Kodamara, Koda or Mara as the main combatants.

These Lands are split into 5 environment tiers, but there are also Platinum versions that feature special benefits. Those who participate during the current Season 3.5 have a chance of getting these special editions by ranking among the top 500 players on the leaderboard. Reward distribution is as follows:

• 1st place: 5 Platinum Paradis & 5 Platinum Rift Lands
• 2nd place: 4 Platinum Paradis & 4 Platinum Rift Lands
• 3rd place: 3 Platinum Paradis & 3 Platinum Rift Lands
• 4th place: 2 Platinum Paradis & 2 Platinum Lands
• 5th - 500th place: 1 Platinum Paradis & 1 Platinum Rift Lands

Players who have earned Legendary and Epic Point Modifiers from chests will also be rewarded with Lands, though in a more randomized way that excludes the Platinum editions. One Land is awarded per Legendary/Epic Point Modifier, so the more of these you have, the more Land you get, with a system randomly determining the tier and type of Land in question.

It’s important once again to state that these are not NFTs, but regular off-chain assets that cannot be traded. One of the main goals behind these assets is that they’re designed to make it cheaper to start playing LOTM, with prices ranging from $2 to $20. Once Season 4 begins, basic lands will become available for purchase, while HV-MTL owners will get a free Tier 1 Land.

Future Seasonal Changes

After Season 3.5 ends, players will no longer be able to earn Sediment through gameplay. Actually, there won’t be any way to earn it ever again, as it seems the developers are planning on burning Sediment 30 days after the end of Season 3.5, so you’ll want to make use of it while you still can before it gets completely removed from LOTM. Sediment will be replaced by new gameplay rewards that are distributed based on the type of Land and its environment tier. As previously mentioned, the type of Land that you own will affect which leaderboard you can actually rank for, so you can look forward to seeing multiple different leaderboards with distinct prizes in the future.

Community Response

The community response to the introductory Twitter/X announcement thread has been less than stellar. Most of the reactions have been either negative or have displayed confusion, with players who have previously spent thousands of dollars on NFTs from both games particularly disappointed at this news. This prompted Faraway to create another thread in an attempt to clarify the purpose of these Lands and how they affect the utility of actual on-chain assets.

In the follow-up thread, which fared a somewhat better response (albeit with way fewer views and replies: ~15k views and 13 replies vs. the other thread's ~111k views and 122 comments), the studio reassured Otherdeeds owners that their NFTs will be usable in Season 4 and that they have no need to buy anything. However, the developers want to have their own concept of Land in order to add worldbuilding lore to their games, something which they can’t do with Otherdeeds as they don’t own the IP to those assets. The studio’s thread also states that a lot of the Land will be distributed as leaderboard rewards for free in the form of the non-tradable special Platinum Land so as to “reward effort and strategy in Season 3.5.”

The thread goes on to reiterate the nature of these assets being off-chain and as such, non-tradable, while pointing out that “in many cases” the Tier 1 Land will be less than $5 in order to onboard new players for upcoming seasons. The reason for this is because, understandably, there’s no way the playerbase can grow if there is a $1k barrier to start playing, so the new Land is designed to resolve that issue. By bringing in more players in an accessible way, the developers believe that there will be increased demand for existing assets such as Kodas, Maras, Deeds and so on. Lands will also bring more utility to HV-MTL, as Rift Land will enable HVs to have up to 5 partner slots, while not having such Land is limited to one partner slot.

When asked by an X user about the supply, the team further clarified that because these are off-chain assets, there is no limited supply, allowing Web2 gamers to buy without worrying about missing out their entry ticket to Legends of the Mara.

While this indeed will lower the barrier to entry as there won't be a need to own Yuga's Otherdeed NFT, it looks like Web2 gamers will still need to buy a playable character, such as a Mara NFT in order to play on their off-chain Land. At the time of writing, the floor price of a Mara NFT on Magic Eden is 0.011 ETH, which is currently valued at around $33. To deliver a user-friendly experience, players will probably be purchasing whatever assets are needed using the non-custodial Faraway Wallet.