On July 17 at 4 p.m. UTC, The Otherside, a gamified metaverse project connected to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, will launch a technological presentation of the first phase of its roadmap.
The Otherside describes the First Trip event as a “celebration of what’s to come and an occasion for Voyagers to gather, explore, and plan” and notes that it will only be available to Otherdeed land owners, also known as Voyagers.
Through a token-gated asset validation, otherdeed land owners, referred to as Voyagers, will be allowed to take part in the experience.
The company said that thousands of users could take part in the test, moving through the specially created play area and testing out unique features like a “private, tokengated live feed” and “3D, hi-res Voyager prototypes that can walk, run, leap, and emote.”
Over the past few weeks, an Otherdeed asset for the Otherside has maintained a floor price of about 2.9 ETH, with 100,000 assets available and 35,000 owners as of this writing.
The goal of the First Trip demo is to evaluate the technical limits of the Otherside platform as well as the dynamics of collaboration with the Improbable team. It takes place less than a week after the two load tests that took place on July 6 and 9.
Frenetic masses of faceless avatars with overhead name tags and angry emojis ran, danced, and flipped acrobatically throughout the events as enormous moderators towered over them and shouted directions.
Before choirs of degenerates relayed calls of “Otherside” and “We adore Koda,” users were advised to engage in tasks to assess the gaming experience, such as inputting their age, experience score, and goals for their playtime.
Both Sandbox ambassador allo.eth and Twitter user and owner of BAYC #8412 null.eth posted videos on Twitter that accurately portrayed the experience of the test event.
The community praised the visual rendering quality, spatial audio, and overall experience despite the load tests’ visually comical appearance of ant hills and crabs in buckets. There are high expectations for the impending First Trip and upcoming full-scale rollouts.
Benito, a co-founder of the online clothing retailer RTFKT Studios, responded, “2.5K people were connected and moving live. That’s a big deal; the technology has been tested in real life with gated access and actual individuals.
As for the neutral zone, it had roughly 2.5k concurrent users moving around, according to BAYC co-founder Gargamel, also known as Garga in the community. We have gathered a ton of excellent information to ensure that First Trip runs smoothly, and we are also accepting all of your Discord notes.
Less positively, others compared the start-up templates offered by game engines like Unreal Engine to the uncanny design resemblances. It is unclear whether Yuga Labs plans to create and develop their own game engine to introduce the Otherside and advance metaverse gaming, or just use an existing framework.
The gas-war minting fiasco and the ensuing financial unhappiness in late April may still be associated with the Otherside for many members of the NFT ecosystem. The release of an eight-part plan for the Obelisk mission, along with routinely run testnets, have since helped to build a more positive perception of the metaverse project.