The first closed beta for Wanderers opens on May 3rd. This beta playtest will only be open to accounts who hold RAM cards. Holders will have a chance to dive into this action-packed, sci-fi dungeon adventure to try and defeat the menacing, Dark Entity! Perhaps even with rewards for doing so!

Known as First Jump, this playtest is the first closed beta for Wanderers and open only to RAM Bundle holders.

The playtest runs from Friday, May 3rd 12pm ET to Tuesday May 7th 12pm ET. Players are tasked with finding and defeating the Dark Entity. Supposedly there will be some rewards, though what they are and how they are handed out has not been revealed. Though they do encourage you to try and defeat the Dark Entity as quickly as possible. So it sounds like there will be some sort of leaderboard involved.

To participate in this closed beta, you will need to burn a RAM Beta Bundle NFT. If you don’t have one already, they are available on Open Sea for a little under $100. Once you have your Bundle, head over to https://codex.wanderers.ai/firstjump to redeem it and receive your access code. Enter the access code at Epic Games and you are ready to download the game!

RAM bundles provide more than just access codes, though. They also contain packs of RAM cards. RAM cards are memory chips, allowing players to use the skills of past heroes. For now RAMs are account bound. But in the future, players will be able to mint and trade their RAM cards.

RAM Bundles also contain referral codes to invite your friends. Though for the First Jump playtest, this feature is locked. Only RAM holders may play.

RAM chips provide a deck building / customization option for players, allowing them to constantly tweak their character setup to find their preferred builds for dungeon runs.

What is Wanderers?

Wanderers is a free to play, top-down, action-based, roguelite, sci-fi shooter. Players head through wormholes to hostile planets, defeat enemies, find loot, and then do it again. Aside from the randomness of the dungeon generation, Wanderers also gives players plenty of options to customize their play sessions.

Players do this by building a deck of RAM cards, each representing a new skill or power-up. During a run, players may find RAM terminals where they can access a random selection of RAMs, including those from their deck and others based on the dungeon they’re running. Adding multiple copies of the same RAM to your deck will increase your odds of being able to access that particular RAM at the terminals.

Wanderers has received investment backing from Animoca Brands.

To learn more about Wanderers, visit their website, follow them on Twitter, and join their Discord server.

Life Beyond is back with an early access preview for those with Founder’s Watches NFTs in their wallets. And though the game is limted and somewhat basic at the moment, the gameplay is generally smooth and we also get our first view of the open world of Dolos!

This early access preview brings us to a new point in the space-time continuum of Life Beyond. After initially exploring the world during alpha back in July of 2022, Life Beyond has held a number of alpha playtests. But none before with an open world concept!

After losing our planetary base during a major conflict, we are back, after having apparently crash-landed on the planet (I couldn’t find a lore explanation of how this happened). Now players are waking up from cryo-sleep, learning to navigate the hostile environment, and tasked with quests to help our people get setup on this alien planet.

Only those with Founder’s Watches (current floor about about $530 on Open Sea) can access the game at the moment. Though I would expect this to open to a larger group of players sometime soon.

More About the Early Access Preview

This preview is somewhat limited at the moment. A series of tutorial quests walk you through the basics of harvesting and crafting. Players are also tasked with exploring the crater we have landed in. Along the way, players can level up their weapons, battle creatures, harvest, craft, and complete quests, all in an open world MMO environment with a day and night cycle. Not bad for a starting point! And, it’s important to remember that we are still in just an early alpha phase of the game.

But this gives us a first taste of the MMO world. Previous Life Beyond play sessions involved instanced adventures, though it did support multiplayer also.

In a recent AMA, the Life Beyond team revealed that part of the game development will be guided by community quests. For example, players will be able to upgrade their basic weapons from the start. But in order to access tier 2 weapons, the playerbase will need to complete a large community quest to get the fabrication machine up and running (or something like that). This not only helps build community and gives the playerbase a shared purpose, but it also provides the dev team with space to steadily drop out new features and updates to the game.

There are no announced rewards for participating in this playtest. And expect all progress to be wiped in the near future as well. But it is an opportunity to get a feel for what the open world gameplay will look like. And a chance to find and report bugs and issues to the team!

Download the game directly from the Life Beyond website.

What is Life Beyond?

Life Beyond is a free-to-play, play-and-earn, FPS-style MMORPG with a third-person view. In Life Beyond, players are citizens of the Dolos Planet, an alien world around a distant star. Sent to build a new society on the planet, the colonists discovered the planet infested with hostile wildlife. Now the players must work to help secure a spot for humans in this alien landscape!

The gameplay follows the lore, with reasoning for out of game events (such as server closures) written in as part of the storyline.

Players venture into the world to fight creatures and gather resources. Not only for themselves, but also to help complete community missions, larger quests that will open up new features and gameplay.

Life Beyond is currently in alpha testing, with game servers opened for special events on an irregular basis. They are also working on creating a token called BILF, a token for a ‘social consensus layer’ that connects to the Bitcoin network.

To learn more about Life Beyond, visit their website, follow them on Twitter, and join their Discord.

Arenas have arrived in Dimension X, bringing with them a chance for players to compete in evenly matched bouts for special prizes which could include crafting materials, power tokens, or even blockchain tokens!

Dimension X is free to play, so there is no barrier preventing you from jumping in and trying out their new arena mode. In fact, everyone has access to the same hero pool in arena competitions, so it doesn’t even matter if you are a brand new player!

Joining Arena quests is free. Just look for the quest with the arena icon with the X on it. Once you join, you recruit your team, place your heroes, and then wait for the results.

And while you’re waiting for the arena results, you might as well join in on some other quests! Quests in Dimension X are competitions with other players. Each quest has a time limit and a leaderboard. When the quest timer runs out, players are rewarded based on their placement on the leaderboard for that quest. Rewards are given based on overall placement, and percentage placement (ie, you get an extra reward for placing in the top 10% of players in regards to damage done). Some quests even give out rewards to all of the participants!

Players earn experience, faction points, and various resources when completing quests. This includes THUL tokens, used for minting new heroes, and Tech tokens, used to upgrade Hero powers.

Dimension X is free to play. And you can choose to play on either the Flow or the main Ethereum network. On the Flow network, you will need is a Dapper account, which can be easily set up with an Apple or Google login, or with an email address. The Ethereum side works with Metamask.

What is Dimension X?

Dimension X is a web-based strategy game that sees players setting up teams of heroes, to fight against fearsome creatures. Players assemble their teams, trying to generate the best damage combination possible and earn a spot on the quest leaderboard. Players can claim rewards based on their placement during these quest challenges.

New players start with a selection of free Heroes and can find more as they play. Heroes can only be active on one quest at a time. So checking in regularly and building a large stable of heroes will help you progress faster.

Players can earn resources, faction points, tokens, and hero experience from quests. That can also find and craft gear. Gear is bound to a hero once equipped. But it can be overwritten with new items. At the end of the season, all items and materials are deleted, but Heroes retain legacy bonuses from any equipped items as permanent enhancements to the character. This allows players to continue to grow their character power between seasons, even with item wipes!

And for those who want that extra edge, you can buy NFT heroes on both the Flow and Ethereum chains. NFT owners will need to stake their NFTs in order to use them in-game, though they can be unstaked at any time.

With character abilities, powers, affinities, gears, factions, linked squares, and more, Dimension X has plenty of room for strategic decision making and planning.

To learn more about Dimension X, visit their website, follow them on Twitter, and join their Discord chat.