Little Orbit Will Take A ‘Hybrid Approach’ To Blockchain In Its Sci-fi Shooter STFU
APB Reloaded developer Little Orbit will be taking a tentative step into the world of blockchain gaming in its upcoming online sci-fi first-person shooter Ships That Fight Underground, commonly referred to as STFU.
The studio acknowledges the gaming community’s negative sentiments on Web3 and anything remotely related to blockchain or NFTs which is why they’ll be going with a hybrid approach. “If you ask a hard core gamer about NFTs, it’s highly likely they will end up melting down. The hate for NFTs is real,” said Little Orbit. “With STFU, we will be implementing what we are calling Web 2.5: core game design and development by a dedicated and talented team, revenue distribution that rewards the community, and players having the choice over owning tradable assets and blockchain interactions.”
“In the end, our goal is to marry the successes of Web 2 with the ideals of Web 3 in a sustainable and fair way that brings both communities together.”
Little Orbit says that STFU will be their first experiment into this approach but failed to mention whether they will be implementing it in APB Reloaded and Fallen Earth in the future. The studio also offers their insight into Web 3 and blockchain technology and the reasons why it’s getting a lot of hate, especially from the general gaming community.
Meanwhile, the studio has decided to drop its planned Unreal Engine upgrade for APB Reloaded in favor of simply upgrading the multiplayer third-person shooter to a 64-bit infrastructure. “In comparison to the Engine Upgrade, this is a much smaller scope project with various individual tasks that we can complete in a shorter amount of time,” explained Little Orbit CEO Matt Smith. “The end goal of 1.3x is to deliver something that players can actually ‘feel’ in terms of performance, while not changing too many ‘moving parts’ of the original Unreal 3.0 Engine.”
You can find out more about that on the CEO’s new developer update on the APB Reloaded website.
