If you are here, chances are you were impressed by the stunning Wilder World cyberpunk visuals and want to know more about this intriguing metaverse. This is no easy task, as the information is very scattered and hard to find in some cases.
After 2 days of complete immersion in the project, I created this article, where I aim to provide an overview of Wilder World, including its goals to revolutionize the metaverse, key features of the game, the anonymous team behind the project, the tokenomics, and the active community.
Get ready for a wild ride as we discover the secrets of Wilder World and uncover what makes this project truly one-of-a-kind.
Exploring the Ambitions of Wilder World's Virtual Nation State
Wilder World is a revolutionary project that is set to change the gaming industry. With its use of Ethereum, Unreal Engine 5, and Zero, it aims to create a new form of virtual reality that empowers creatives and rewards its citizens for their participation in the ecosystem. The goal is to establish a virtual nation state powered by AAA-quality NFTs, with a long-term vision of having millions of active citizens.
The first city in the Wilder World metaverse, Wiami, serves as a showcase for the project's capabilities. It is designed to be interoperable and open to the Web3 space, with everything from avatars to clothing and land being fully tradable NFTs on the Wilder World Metaverse Market (WWMM). The NFTs are structured as community-run DAOs, providing a foundation for the prosperity of the Network State.
From Concept to Reality: The Progress of Wilder World
There has been quite a bit of progress so far on the project, with three different roadmaps mentioned on their website. Each brings exciting updates: NFT platform, World Origin Wilder (WOW) animated comic series, Wilder Wheels street racing NFT vehicles, Wilder Concept Studio, Wilder Artist Guild, and AirWild Kicks NFT sneaker line are a few.
While the general idea of the 5d photorealistic metaverse remains constant, the path to get there changed repeatedly, with adjustments in objectives and timelines, as they openly admit on their website.
From the earliest roadmap above, it is relevant to note that while the racing minigame was set to launch in December 2021, it is still not out in February 2023, although they are still planning to release it.
It is easy to get confused by the lack of structure in the roadmap and timeline, with no estimated launch date for the final game. I got to ask Frank Wilder, one of the founders, about this. His reply:
‘We're not planning on releasing a roadmap, rather sharing frequent progress on the development of Wilder World.
We've found that it's easy to get caught in the trap of setting expectations and talking about what will come, which can naturally change. Our new plan is to actually show where we're at and what's been accomplished through frequent demo releases opposed to saying we will do X by a certain date.’
They are doing a good job of that with the latest gameplay release, frequent updates and community interaction.
The Eccentric Visionaries Driving Wilder World Forward
The team members were not easily found on the main pages like you would expect. Instead I found out from their community that they are mostly anonymous with only a few members being publicly known. For example, co-founders Frank Wilder and n3o have chosen to remain anonymous throughout their careers.
To say the Wilder World is lead by an eccentric team is an understatement.
This anonymous component and flashy appearance do give the project some mystique and in a way create a special identity to separate it from other projects. On the other hand, it can reduce the level of trust as there is limited accountability in the event of any negative impact on the project.
Fortunately, the anonymous members of the Wilder World team are bolstered by the credibility of the public members, including a former director of digital design at Nike, a former lead architect at Zaha Hadid Studio, the highly regarded young architect and designer Oleg Soroko, and David Waslen, CEO of a web3 investment and advisory firm.
Overall, the founding team comes across as visionaries with brilliant creative inclinations and talent but lacks in showing how much experience they have in the gaming industry, something critical to such a project’s success.
A First Look at the 5D Photorealistic Metaverse of Wilder World
The pre-alpha gameplay teaser of Wilder World shows stunning visuals with a lot of attention to detail and a seamless bridge between reality and futuristic technologies. Set in the first city of Wilder World, Wiami, a topographical 1/1 digital copy of Miami, the game promises to be a 5d photorealistic metaverse:
In terms of mechanics, the game seems to have a GTA5 vibe. The art style and animation of the game are top-notch, with a cyberpunk theme, adding to the overall aesthetic appeal of the game. You will be able to have your own house, car, bike, (very nice) pairs of shoes, ability to transform into a wolf or a ‘wape’, and more, all as NFTs.
There is no clear information about the gameplay objective at this point, making it difficult to pinpoint the game’s genre. From a recent post, we see that “citizens of the Wilder Nation will be able to explore unbound creativity, form alliances to battle dark forces, build a metaverse arsenal, and attend exciting social events.” Some discord members see it as an MMORPG, Sims, or GTA 5. Some all of that and more.
This brings some concerns. The visuals are indeed amazing, but that is not enough for a project to be widely adopted. You need to build a compelling experience for the user, a rewarding gameplay loop that keeps them coming back. And that is not easy to pull off. Especially without knowing the team’s experience in the gaming industry.
In the near future, the founders have mentioned that they will first release a micro game focused on racing with their Wilder Wheels collection, but there are no release dates given. Perhaps that will be a good preview of how engaging of an experience they can build.
Tokenomics of Wilder World: An In-Depth Analysis
The Wilder World platform uses the $WILD token, an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain with a fixed supply of 500,000,000. The token acts as the governance token for the Wilder World DAO and is used for various functions within the Wilder World Metaverse and Market. $WILD is also used for trading NFTs within the platform.
This is all we are told on their official info page (https://wiki.wilderworld.com/tokens/usdwild), which misses a lot of essential info.
After some digging and nice discord members discussions, I’ve found the following info:
From the metrics mentioned, this is from quite some time ago. Now the token price is $0.4 (a 10x increase since then), the market cap is $40M, with a fully diluted value of $200M.
The team has 25% of the tokens, which is on the high side but acceptable. It is not clear how much of the other parts they have under their control, but if the team would control more than 30% of the token, they could easily manipulate the price.
From the blog posts, it seems the game has been in serious development for 2 years and it doesn’t look like it will be out very soon. However, the NFTs and the main token ($WILD) have been out for quite some time. This can help raise funds needed for the development of such an ambitious project, and reward early believers, but it’s a double-edged sword: depending on the amounts raised, it can make the team less incentivized to deliver on their commitment to a 5+ year project, as the money is already there.
Low Barrier to Entry: Key to Fast Adoption in the NFT Gaming Market
The NFTs mentioned above (cars, kicks, wolves, wapes) and more are already released on the marketplace and they are not cheap: 0,5eth floor, which shows there is quite a bit of demand. This got me concerned: if you will need to dish out a few thousand dollars just to get some basic in-game stuff, how will people afford to play this?
After some chatting on the discord I’ve found out that these will be genesis NFTs, which means they will bring quite a few benefits in the game, like being part of the DAO of that industry. However, when they go for the mass market, those NFTs will be very cheap. Someone else mentioned you will need 1 $WILD to play.
This was good news, as a low barrier to entry is key for fast and widespread adoption. The more users can experience your product, the better and more valuable it becomes.
Building a Strong Community: The Power of Wilder World's Active Discord and Engaged Team
This is a significant strength of Wilder World. The discord community is very active, and a lot of passionate supporters of the project helped me out by pointing to articles and resources, which was very needed.
Even one of the founders, Frank Wilder, was in the chat and nice enough to answer some of my concerns about the project, which shows they stay very active and connected to the community. Together with the frequent updates, the team is doing a great job on the community side, which somewhat compensates for the lack of information on the documentation side.
Unleashing the Potential: A Final Take on Wilder World
In conclusion, Wilder World has a bold and innovative vision that has the potential to revolutionize the gaming industry. Its use of decentralized technologies and NFTs creates a new way of experiencing virtual worlds, its photorealistic graphics and play-to-earn developments make it a compelling option for users looking for a new form of entertainment.
The gameplay teaser showed they are able to deliver a very high-quality product and the community is loving it. There is a lot of complexity, nuances, and features which can make it remarkable in the future, but very hard to grasp for a newcomer.
Also, despite the amazing visuals and the engaging concept of a decentralized virtual nation state, some drawbacks still persist such as the lack of transparency regarding the team, hard to find important information like tokenomics. These drawbacks are offset to some extent by the vibrant and supportive discord community.
All in all, I see Wilder World as a high quality project, with a lot of potential. The lack of easily available information, and roadmap inconsistency bring some risk, but if they pull off their crazy vision, this will be the metaverse of choice and will break the industry as we know it.
Further Resources:
Even though I researched this project for 10h+, it still feels like this is just the tip of the iceberg that is Wilder World. So I will leave here some favorite resources recommended by the community.
Their blog where they post updates: https://zine.wilderworld.com/
The Wiki where a lot of the info is centralized: https://wiki.wilderworld.com/
Comprehensive guide to Zero and Wilder World: https://hackernoon.com/what-metaverse-is-and-what-it-could-be-going-from-zero-and-wilder-world
AMA with one of the founders, n3o: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGwN2JuSYMY
Me and my team at Gameonomics will certainly keep an eye on this project, so follow us if you want to stay up to date with key developments and summaries: