In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to MMOG legend John Smedley about his new studio Distinct Possibility and its forthcoming persistent extraction shooter Reaper Actual, which will be released on Steam and Epic Games Store as a pure web2 game, with the web3 version only available via its own website.
BlockchainGamer.biz: Tell us about Reaper Actual.
John Smedley: It’s a mix between a first-person shooter and an MMORPG. From our perspective, it’s a completely new kind of game that we hope is going to be the start of a new genre. It’s an open world persistent shooter is the colloquial term we are trying to use.
The game takes place on this massive 16 kilometer by 12 kilometer map, which in gaming terms is huge. It’s four times the size of the largest map in CoD: Warzone. It is this massive open world game that’s controlled by different AI factions that are run by an AI we’ve created called Cerberus.
The players play as these tier one operators from different intelligence services around the world. They adventure through this world we’ve created. Their goal is to level up as you would in a traditional MMORPG.
Players also have a home in the world called their base, and their base can be raided. The way I like to describe the game, the short version is if Escape from Tarkov was set in an open world and it had a baby with Rainbow Six Siege, that would be Reaper Actual.
So it’s got extraction elements where players are doing missions both for and against the different AI factions and they end up taking their loot back to their base. But if they’re not careful in the world, they can generate heat. Very similar to Grand Theft Auto, their base can be raided in real-time. The bases can grow from small, like a bunker base, to absolutely huge mansion bases where there’s whole compounds. We want to allow outfits, which are clans in our game, to own these bases and have to defend them from other outfits.
Many teams have tried to make a more mass market Tarkov. How will this work?
There have been several very highly competitive games. Let me start with Delta Force, which is on Steam. Terrific game. In my opinion, one of the best games in the extraction genre right now. There’s also Arena Breakout: Infinite. I’ve played that crap out of both. Those are both triple-A games that do an amazing job.
But they’re following a formula, which is session-based gaming. What makes our game truly unique is that it’s persistent. You are in this virtual world that we’ve created. It makes a very large difference because, for example, let’s say somebody kills you over and over again. You have an opportunity to get revenge on them in our world. You die. You go back to your base. And then you can venture out and hunt down the person. Very different from a “one death and you’re out” round-based game. So we think we’ve got a material difference there in fun in terms of how we’re addressing the mass market.
We’re also addressing approachability by making the game less hardcore. The first way we’re doing that is by giving players that have Reapers, which are our operators, default loadouts. So in Escape from Tarkov, you can be beat down so bad that you have to become a scav. In our world, we don’t want to beat players down that bad. We want the bare minimum to be what the particular Reaper player have. As well as unique loadouts, they also have unique abilities. So we are trying to make something that’s much more approachable to a larger number of people.
In terms of the game’s persistence, I assume the islands are all instanced so it’s really about object and base persistence?
No, it’s actually the island themselves. So the way persistence works is that Cerberus controls all of the locations of all of the AIs on all the different worlds.
When you get into your first gaming session, you’re given an affinity with the other players on that map. If you join your friends, you’re given an affinity with them. And if you die, you go right back into that same world. And if you log in the next day, we try to put you back into that exact same world. If none of your friends are on, then it doesn’t matter because the persistence at your base is still there. So you’re always having access to the same supplies. But the state of the world is also something that we persist across all of the different game servers.
Can you talk more about the Cerebus AI system? Does it use genAI?
We do use some genAI but we went out of our way to do it super ethically. What we genAI is for are things like creating missions.
The way we’ve made this and the way we’ve built the engine and the tools for it is to make a storyline for a season. As part of that season, we’ll create maybe 5,000 missions that we’re pre-creating. We’ll use genAI to come up with things like NPC names and to come up with some backstory that fits into each of the overall themes based on the season. Then we have a human review every one of those things, which gives us a lot more storytelling variety.
For example, if you’re going to go kill a low level drug lord, we want that to be a unique name within our gaming world. It might create that character and that character exists solely for the reason that somebody will slaughter them. So what we’re trying to do is get more variety and make it more interesting.
We’re also using a company called Eleven Labs for our text-to-speech. I know there’s a lot of feeling out there right now about voice actors, and we agree with that completely. The entire reason we went with Eleven Labs is that they make it possible for us to select voice actors that are actually getting a backend payment. It is super important for us to do it ethically.
We’re not one of those companies that sees AI as a bad thing, but it can be if you don’t use it correctly in an ethical way. I think it can be easily abused. There’s this sense out there right now genAI is horrible. It’s not. It’s all about how you choose to use it, in a way that is good for all the people that help make the game and for the people playing the game.
How does blockchain fit into this?
I’m a huge believer in the concept of player ownership, but I’m not going to go too much into that because I feel like it’s been ‘blah, blah, blah’ to death. What I’ll give you is our take on it. We believe in this concept of an ecosystem around our game. So we are bringing a lot more than just the game features to bear in a new way.
First of all, we’re going to let our players rent servers from us. Where this comes in with blockchain is that we’re going to let people also monetize those servers, which is very new. So our players will be able to rent servers from us and they will be able to do that with crypto if they want to, or without if they want to do that on Steam or Epic.
And the idea is that players can mod our servers. If they mod them too much, they fall outside of what we call vanilla. Vanilla is just a set of pulldowns. Like, for example, our game has a day-night cycle. We will allow users to make their server an all night server and that will still be vanilla.
But if they want to, they can take our game, which isn’t a battle royale, but they could add a battle royale on top of it. They could rent a server from us and then they could turn around and charge for those servers. We also are going to let users create the exact same things we’re creating for users to purchase. So, for example, gun skins, operator skins or what we call Reaper skins, and anything where there’s a cosmetic feature. We’re going to let users make that and sell to one another.
What blockchain gives us is, in our opinion, something that is amazing as compared to something like a Steam Marketplace because there’s a direct connection. People can make money from that. We are not a play-to-earn game. That is not something that we are. But we want to build an ecosystem outside of our game where users can take what we’ve made and build something more out of it.
The last two big genres in gaming, I would submit are MOBAs, which came from as a direct result of a mod, and battle royales. We made the very first commercial battle royale called H1Z1 with Brendan Greene because we were playing his mod [Arma 2: Battle Royale Mod].
We think that the next big opportunity can be built on top of our game, which we think is going to be big in-and-of-itself. But the creativity of users powering this, will also be paired with the ability for them to control who is going into the server.
For example, a YouTube streamer could say ‘only my subscribers can play here’. That’s a game changer, in our opinion. And on the blockchain side, what it enables is this direct connection from player to other players that we think is going to be very powerful.
What’s your philosophy in terms of having separate web2 and web3 builds of the game?
There is absolutely a very real negative association between gamers and blockchain. The reasons for that are largely tied to very scammy things. A lot of the previous web3 games are nothing more than monetization vehicles. We aren’t those games.
This game would not exist, but for a bunch of great investors who believed in our vision that we could take a web2 ecosystem and over time get people more more comfortable with the web3 version by showing them, number one, it’s optional, hardcore optional. They never even have to look at it if they want to play it on Steam.
The second thing, though, is that we’re also trying to show them the things that are being sold are actually beneficial for the larger ecosystem. So I would argue there is no way for us to get the type of ecosystem adoption that I think we can get out of web3 as easily on web2.
Let me explain why. Probably the number one marketplace in the world for games is Steam Community Marketplace. I’m a big, big believer in that. If you look at the Counter-Strike 2 market, you will notice that most of the activity in the Counter-Strike 2 market takes place outside of Steam. And the estimates that I’ve seen have that valued at $4 billion. It’s amazing.
So games are already selling items outside of Steam. That community exists. There’s already a market for it. So you can have a game that is pure and still have an ecosystem outside it. But the first thing you have to be able to do is convince users that you’re serious about these items not having any material difference in-game. We are not a pay-to-win game. We never will be. It’s all about skill.
But we also think that the ecosystem can be larger. Our belief is that while small at first – we think we’ll start with roughly 8% of our players participating on the crypto side – we think we can grow that over time by showing players that we are not those other web3 games. We are a game that takes this seriously and it’s optional. If you don’t want to touch it, cool.
Will there be some people who will be like, ‘screw you, you have crypto’. Absolutely. We’re not naive about that. But I can tell you with a straight face, when I went out to raise for this game, the people that were willing to take risks were some of the crypto investors – a company like Bitkraft, which does both web2 and web3 investments.
They saw what I wanted to build. And our team has been building for the last couple of years. And they were like, ‘hell yeah, let’s do this’. And so we’re excited about it. Hopefully players will be able to play the game and see for themselves.
Are you making a web3 game because that was the only way you could get the investment?
You know what it came down to is, I’ll call him out here, Carlos Pereira, who’s the partner from Bitkraft that I spent a lot of time with. He knew that I believed strongly in ownership from previous conversations that we’d had. And we started talking about a way to do this that would be palatable to investors. Trying to raise enough money to make a triple-A game like this when you’re an indie studio, it’s not easy.
He got me excited about it and looking at what we could do, a vision that could encompass both web2 and web3. I think we have that. I think we are pulling that off. I’m expecting some backlash, but it’s completely optional. You want to play on Steam. You’ll never even see it. So now what? Now what do you have as an argument? If your argument is ‘screw you. I’m not going to do it anyways’. Peace. All I can do is make a great game and hopefully let that do the talking.
Going back to the game, one of the main blockchain elements are bases. These are NFTs, right?
Yes. I like people to know exactly what we’re going to be monetizing. So in our game, your base is your entry into the world. We sell bases and we sell Reapers. We’ll also have a typical battle pass where there’ll be exclusive cosmetics. We’ll have the standard things.
Bases can be bought and sold, and that can be done on the Steam Community Market or that can be done with web3 on our website with a marketplace we’re developing in conjunction with Sequence. Our goal is to make it so that everything in the game, you can get by playing for free once you buy your first base.
We’re not selling power either. Bases do different things. Let me give you an example. Location, in the real world, it’s location, location, location, right? Well, it’s the same in our game. Do you want to have a bunker base that’s hidden off in the boonies or do you want an apartment base in the heart of one of the game’s cities Alaria. There’s no inherent advantage for one base type over another one. It’s more about how you want to play. For example, if you want to play with your buddies, get a bigger base. Get a warehouse base that can support 10 to 15 players, because the idea is a base in our game is like a deathmatch map where the defenders have set up their defenses.
It’s like playing Rainbow Six Siege, the original, where players can come in and penetrate your base. But if you’ve got defenses set up, you’re going to mow them down. We want the advantage to be with the defender.
But what we are also doing is we’re setting that up to be our end game. We’re trying to make it so that the outfit-on-outfit war is a big part of our end game. We think that’s going to be fun watching players raid each other’s bases. And we want those to get as large as 100 versus 100. These bases can get very large.
A small bunker base, one entrance, is super easy to defend. Large base, lots of entrances, much harder to defend, but has more defensive hard points. Some bases are better for manufacturing. A warehouse base is good for crafting and manufacturing because we have deep MMO elements that allow us to retain players better because they’re seeing real progression out of it, like in an MMO.
Why did you choose Tezos’ Etherlink EVM L2 as your blockchain?
It’s a super easy answer. We really liked the team. Arthur Breitman has a brilliant vision for where he wants to go with it, technically. Also the core people we’re dealing with are hardcore gamers. The three main people we deal with each have over 10,000 hours in Counter-Strike. That mattered a lot to us. That won us over. They’re also one of our largest investors. The relationship was great from the start. Sometimes it matters more that you’re in the foxhole with people that you’re super excited are there with you. From our standpoint, you know, like that it was just as simple as that.
These are our kind of people and it’s great to be making this game on Etherlink. Honestly, we think there’s a big bright vision. One of the things I like about them is they are very privacy-first. Arthur believes in the web3 ethos. This is not just a saying for him. It is a deep held belief. That resonated well with our team because he believes in what he’s saying and making things transparent. They’re very focused on their governance being something that the developers can vote for. I like that. That works for us in a really major way.
What can you say about Reaper Actual’s ETA?
Very simple. We will be releasing a version that we’re calling the Foundation Alpha in late September, and we’re going to be releasing limited copies for both the web2 and web3 versions of the game. Very deliberately, we’re going to be like letting in maybe 10,000 people in the first run.
Simply this is because we want to get water through the pipes. We want to get real users playing. We want to feel how good the game feels. How is the web3 economy working out?
We want to get creators in early. We want to get influencers streaming the game in early because I want users when we ultimately launch in early 2026. I want users to know what they’re buying and know what they’re getting into.
Learn more at the Reaper Actual website.
