The Beacon First Look – Play to Earn

In this article, we will cover The Beacon and do our first look at the project. The Beacon is a fantasy action roguelite RPG on the Arbitrum Blockchain and it will hook all the old-school gamers to their computers the whole day with its pixelated retro graphics. The team already launched a demo which was a success and released a few NFT collections like the founding characters and the pet eggs.

The Beacon is the latest hit among the retro Web3 games. It belongs to the TreasureDAO ecosystem that includes other Web3 Games like Tales of Elleria and Knights of the Ether. In this top-down RPG, players must adventure into dark dungeons filled with gruesome monsters and survive all the dangers. Dungeons are randomized so no instance will feel the same. By slaying all the monsters and surviving their traps players earn loot.

Even though this is an RPG, it is entirely different than other games of the same genre. Characters can be upgraded during a run, but, these upgrades do not carry over after the run is complete! This makes The Beacon entirely skill-based. Also, available upgrades on each instance will be randomized increasing the replayability of the game.

Fast reflexes and good timing are vital to ensure success in the game. Players will often feel overwhelmed by the number of dangers that pop up every second in an instance. Skeletons jumping at the character, arrows crossing the screen, traps, and explosions are just some examples of occurrences that may happen, sometimes all at the same time! The Beacon is not for the faint of heart!

Game Modes

The Beacon will have three game modes. Single-player PvE, co-op PvE, and MMO-like social gameplay. I got a bit disappointed because there is no PvP mentioned so far. Hopefully, the team will develop it at a later stage.

In PvE players go into a dungeon, slay the monsters, kill the boss and grab all the loot. The difference is that in Single-Player PvE players go alone and in co-op they form a party. When it comes to the social game mode, there is a tavern where players can meet and virtually hang out.

Is The Beacon a Paid to Play Game?

Not at all. The Beacon is a free-to-play game that will be available for desktop and browser. Nevertheless, players who own NFT characters will have certain advantages in the ecosystem. There will be three types of players. F2P players, paid players, and blessed players.

F2P players as the name suggests are those who do not invest any money in the ecosystem. They will be able to earn non-NFT cosmetics and some tokens. This is for those who just want to play the game and do not care about earning.

Paid players are those who own a founding character. They will have access to all F2P players with a few extras like being able to earn NFT cosmetics, more rewards, and they also start with a set of character cosmetics.

Then, Blessed players are those who own a founding character and a pet and they will access everything paid players have with more extras. These extras include early access to the versions of The Beacon and higher rewards. Pets can be purchased from the secondary market, and founding characters will start being traded on January 30th. There are only 4096 pets while Founding characters have no limit.

Every player will always get 1 character and 1 house. The difference in housing is that Paid and Blessed players start with NFT cosmetics and F2P players do not.

Last Thoughts on The Beacon

The Beacon seems like an amusing game for its genre. Unfortunately, I did not play it but I liked what I saw in a few videos. It looks like a really dynamic and fast-paced game. The graphics are old school and bring me some nostalgic feelings from when I used to play games on the PlayStation X. If you have played Tollan Worlds it has the same style and vibe.

If you are into retro RPGs then I definitely recommend it. When it comes to “play-and-earn” it is too soon to talk about its tokenomics and ecosystem sustainability, so what I can tell you is only invest what you can afford to lose and always do your own research. I will leave you a video with some gameplay so you can have a clearer picture of The Beacon.