Crafting the Elder’s Grace World

I’ve been friends with some of my Meta Monkey colleagues for over 20 years. Two key pillars of our life-long friendships have always been gaming and crafting stories.

Whether it was late nights spent playing Halo, writing and filming movies with our friends, or developing other inventive gaming projects, we’ve always worked best when we were collaborating. That’s why when they approached me with the idea to create a narrative for Elder’s Grace, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. Working in a medium I love as much as games and crafting a narrative on top of that was a dream come true.

The initial pitch for the game was something like “cute fantasy creatures exploring dungeons” so I had a fairly blank state to work with. We knew we wanted to have an immersive narrative experience so that the world of Elder’s Grace was something players could really get lost in and make their own. One of the things that inspired me was the popular browser based game, Blaseball. There’s not much to the actual gameplay, players can bet on the outcomes of a match, but the community that sprung up around it was dedicated and passionate. Players created original artwork, entire backstories were created for characters based on nothing but their names, even musicians recorded whole albums based around their favorite teams. In Elder’s Grace, players can own their own Mobley through web3 technology, but we also wanted to create enough of a world that they could also take ownership over their characters' unique stories. We wanted them to have a say over how their adventures play out.

From the moment Sephiroth raced towards Aerith with his sword drawn in Final Fantasy VII, I’ve known narrative in games was something that had the ability to affect the player in ways that rivals that of any other form of entertainment. As we’ve touched on before, early blockchain games seem to lack many of the features that make games enjoyable.  They’re missing that rewarding experience that draws players back for more. Players don’t want to just mindlessly click buttons on a screen, they want to become emotionally invested in their characters and immersed in their world. They even want to help create that world.

The story of the Mobley is about choice and empowerment. Through their unique abilities, players will fight to take back the home that has been lost to them. This theme resonates with the way we’ve approached the design of the game. Whether it’s owning digital assets and directing the fortunes of your own characters through web3 or choosing to play in a more traditional manner, empowering the player to choose how they play is something that resonates with the entire team at Meta Monkey.