Published on: 25/10/2022

The Sims lead designer Will Wright working on blockchain game

The Sims game designer Will Wright is working with Gala Games on an NFT game titled VoxVerse. Other than The Sims, he led the development of many popular games such as SimCity and Raid on Bungeling Bay. The last big video game Wright worked on was Spore in 2008.

VoxVerse is a blockchain game developed by the Indie game studio Gallium Studios, co-founded by Wright and Lauren Elliott. The game is a social game where players can mine resources and build things while interacting with others. Players can also create businesses and employ other players.

“Almost everything in this world is actually going to be constructed by the players,” Wright said during an interview with Axios. “We’re going to have very simple tools for the players to construct buildings, objects, vehicles, etc. There’ll be a whole economy, resources you can mine, plots that you can own, plus a social side of the game where you build a social network [with] the other Voxes that you meet.

“One of the interesting things here is that even when you’re offline your Vox is still going to be online as an NPC, so when I’m offline my Vox can still be working at a job and earning me money.”

Gala Games is selling Vox NFTs and recently announced that they would sell NFTs inspired by Dreamworks’ Trolls. Players use Voxes as their characters in VoxVerse, with which they can also enter other Gala games through portals. Despite making an NFT game, Wright said that he didn’t have any interest in selling NFTs.

“I don’t care how you do it,” Wright said. “I want to have secure transactions for content creators.”

Gallium studio is also working on another game called Proxi, an AI simulation game for mobile devices. Proxi has been in development for several years.

Criticism against VoxVerse

Despite being newly announced, VoxVerse has already received a fair amount of criticism. PC Gamer’s Andy Chalk said the game did not offer a compelling gaming experience, adding that VoxVerse sounded like any other blockchain game on the market.

“Ownership and economics are clearly at the core of the experience, but Wright told Axios(opens in new tab) that he’s “much more interested in attracting a million free-to-play players than, you know, 10,000 rich whales, although we could use those rich whales”,” Chalk wrote.

Chalk also criticized Wright’s move in downplaying the role of NFTs in the game while highlighting the need for “secure transactions,” saying that the two conflicted with each other.

“While Wright may be someone with some actually interesting ideas for a metaverse, a lot of what he’s describing here sounds like The Sims with a real-world nine-to-five grind attached to it,” Chalk added.

Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett also raised criticism in his article about VoxVerse. He said the game felt like it was created to impress “the kind of dudes sitting at a Web3 startup’s boardroom table.”

Plunkett said he would give VoxVerse a chance and see how Wright could bring life to the gameplay. However, he was still skeptical about the game, saying that he was bummed out after hearing Wright repeating “hollow blockchain gaming bullet points.”