Helloooo once again! I'm back. I also happen to be back from a trip I went on with my family. I don't travel much, and especially now with the pandemic it was pretty weird to be going different places, but it actually went well! I saw some cool cactuses, birds and lizards in the desert. Once I move the photos over to my laptop, I'll post a couple here in case you might wanna see c:
For this post, I wanted to talk about some WildWorks related things I've been thinking about.
But first of all, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, happy Spring!!
Flowers haven't really started blooming yet where I am and it's still kinda cold, but it'll be nice when plants do decide to start springing back.
Now, let's jump right into this...
After less than two years of being in the beta stage, Fer.al has shut down.
It was something the player base was fearing, but not totally expecting. Shortly after WildWorks began promoting Cinder, the CEO said this in an interview:
"Stacey wrote that Cinder will be 'drawing upon the scaffolding of Feral,' a Wildworks game where players control their own mythical animals. Feral won’t be adopting NFT and blockchain gaming, as 'the Feral community deserves to evolve on its own path, and crypto-gaming isn’t what its members signed up for.' Cinder may visually resemble Feral in some aspects, 'but the resemblance ends there.'"
– quote from this article
That article was published on January 14th of this year. On February 18th, WildWorks announced Fer.al's shut down.
I personally wasn't as drawn to Fer.al as Animal Jam Classic, but with all the time and artistic effort put into that game, PLUS the community that grew from it, it really does feel like a waste.
This makes me think that there might be a few possibilities:
1. Fer.al was meant from the start to only be active until Cinder was done.
2. The huge negative backlash to Cinder's release made WildWorks realize that it was gonna be a struggle to get anyone excited about it. So... they shut Fer.al down in the hopes that the players most sad about the shutdown would migrate to Cinder to experience the same aesthetic.
3. Too expensive to keep both games going at the same time?
I don't know, the idea that Fer.al was always just testing grounds for Cinder just feels weird to me.
WildWorks having pretty much just copy-pasted Fer.al's Shattered Bay into Cinder (see screenshots above), makes me feel like Cinder was mostly just stitched together out of assets originally meant for Fer.al.
The Cinder homepage mentions that Cinder has been in production for about two years, but I wonder...
This screenshot which I posted a couple of months ago was from a Jamaa Journal page in AJPW from April 2021. If this page echoes WildWorks' viewpoint at that time... then maybe the concept for Cinder is actually a lot more recent.
Maybe the 'two years in production' refers to Fer.al's production. That game did serve as the foundation Cinder was built off of.
Eh... not just built off of. That's literally the blood lake from Fer.al on the Cinder homepage.
As I've been writing this post, I've been doing a lot of research and I stumbled upon something that might give some more clarity:
According to this article, WildWorks invested 6 million dollars in Fer.al over its two-year development, and they didn't think the game was making enough money for that investment.
Now I'm thinking that Cinder came about for a simple reason: WildWorks just needed money, and they thought an NFT game would be the way to get it.
I found this on the Cinder homepage:
('Coffers' means funds btw)
Pre-production of Cinder probably mostly refers to the production of Fer.al. So, the money players spend on NFTs in the game is needed to raise the money to keep Cinder in development.
I don't know much about game development, so I don't know if that actually means anything... but it seems to me that, yeah, Cinder was thought up more recently than two years ago.
...
This is tiring to write about...
I'm gonna go eat something now, and I hope you do too.
This was a long post >.<
Byeeee
