Game development is an unforgiving business that puts huge investments at stake. Yes, there’s serious cash to be made in gaming but there is a whole lot to lose too. If it crashes and burns on release, investors lose millions of dollars, mass layoffs happen, and the studio closes.  It’s a common occurrence in the P2E sphere where many small independent studios release games that flopped, and then they will quietly disband but some P2E games are so hyped that when they fail, everyone notices. So what really happened to Untamed Isles?

DEVELOPMENT HISTORY

Untamed Isles is a Pokémon-inspired massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with "optional" play-to-earn features. Developed by a New Zealand indie team, Phat Loot Studios which was founded in 2020. Untamed Isles was supposed to be the studios’ flagship title. The game has a Kickstarter success story, raising over $841k NZD or £420k – making it one of the most funded games of 2021.

Originally set for an early access release date on October 6 that will no longer be happening since Phat Loot Studios announced that they’ll be having an indefinite hiatus. The development of Untamed Isles started over 2 years ago and even though the project raised almost $1 million from backers, it barely scratched the surface of the costs and investments that Untamed Isles had been sinking whilst in development.

According to Joshua Grant, CEO of Phat Loot Studios, they were unable to financially keep up with the demands of what they had set out to do. Bringing more than 70 staff members onboard and working relentlessly for the past 2 years to build the game. Aside from the high cost of development, the economic landscape has also changed dramatically both generally and specifically for cryptocurrency, leaving them unconfident in the current market. In the end, they ran out of financial resources and can’t carry on with the development at this moment.

GAMEPLAY OVERVIEW

Untamed Isles is a monster hunting and taming turn-based MMORPG. Giving the player the task of taming and hunting monsters called “Tames” across different islands that the player is free to explore. In short, the goal of the player is to turn the untamed isles into tamed isles. It’s also focused on social engagement where there are areas for friends to practice PvP in a turn-based encounter, trade, breed monsters, clear dungeons and play through the story of untamed isles socially with open voice communication.

Untamed Isles offers an unmatched variety of monsters to encounter and tame. Each monster species or “Tame” is made up of 7 body parts, these parts are mixed and matched creating endless possibilities for unique Tame species. Tames also take on a subtype, there are 15 subtypes known as “moods” which are largely dependent on the environment they are encountered in. This can include the season, time of day, and the weather. These moods have strengths and weaknesses and unique battle applications.

There will also be breeding mechanics in the game where players can mix body parts, genetic-based attributes, and mood types. These tames then can be used for battle or sold and traded to other players.

OVERALL THOUGHTS

Just by watching Untamed Isles’ gameplay trailer, I instantly knew that this game had huge potential in the P2E space. The visuals of the game reminds me of The Legend of Zelda mixed with Pokémon because of its gameplay mechanic where the player can catch different kinds of monsters. It would’ve been an evocative and exhilarating open-world adventure game.

I think one of the problems that led to the current state of this game was its ever-widening scope that led to shortage in funding. Untamed Isles promised a huge open-world MMORPG with almost a million possible combinations of monsters to tame. There was also PvP, breeding mechanics, dungeon raids, dynamic weather system, new islands, and a physical book series. The small indie team’s first project became so ambitious that its scope continued to grow until everything went out of control.

They also boasted having a partnership with Direwolf in the past that would have “tokenized” most of the items and monsters in the game that could’ve finally introduced the play-to-earn feature. The team thought that the crypto funds from crypto investors could keep the game afloat but the commitment to crypto is where it all went wrong. That’s why it’s really important to develop a P2E project that will originally be a game first and crypto-second.

Now is not the time to release Untamed Isles due to the negative sales figures and lack of press coverage. Without any assurance of revenue, I think planning a game release would just increase the likelihood that it’d incur larger costs. As of now, this project is on hiatus and there’s no sign of when it will wake up again.