Cancel Cinder Save Fer.al - Tumblr Posts

Hey remember how I’m paranoid if any series I know of like Digimon succumb to NFTs? They didn’t, but a MMO that I play named Fer.al is said to be like a “testing grounds” for a blockchain game named Cinder and is developed by the same developers WildWorks.

Here, I’ll link up everything I’ve discovered about it:

Google Doc About the Controversy

Twitter posts by users who know about it:

https://twitter.com/hello_satellite/status/1466597061567016963 

https://twitter.com/Senswii/status/1464738384421830662

https://twitter.com/StarlessHour/status/1465785886033911813

I didn’t expect this game to fall under as the victim of this scam my gawn... I want other people to know about this and spread it around please.

Been on a Digimon binge, and the other night I had a dream where a new baddie was invading the real world by disguising evil Digimon as NFT’s that eventually broke through the real world, and aside from some chaos and fighting, I remember Elon Musk died, so I guess it wasn’t a nightmare :>

A new NFT launched called DigiCoin, and Musk being Himself bought a shitton, and since one coin was one evil Digimon, when the villain initiated the takeover, Digimon literally burst out of servers and started attacking, and Musk was killed from collapsing debris and shrapnel

Other than that, it was a hodgepodge of running from evil Digimon in downtown Seattle/New York/LA (????? idk it was a Big City) with Henry from Tamers as we tried to fight them off. Apparently my dream Digimon partner is Armadillomon (would’ve preferred hawkmon or guilmon but w/e brain…)

The best choice is to resort to archiving everything from game code to the game’s assets, I’ve always feared the day something like that will happen.

Game preservation is greatly important, especially the fact when it comes to the MMOs in very vulnerable situations being close to shutting down.

I’ve always have to be like an “echo” of sorts to remind certain users that ripping from games like these is always important, if there’s people somewhere to create a rewritten version of such games.

I can feel the hopelessness and denial from users who felt what WildWorks did, feeling like their world is collapsing. I want to help in relieving the pain, but ripping certain things are beyond my reach such as models, as I don’t want to put too much pressure to my computer.

I can rip audio from Play Wild, but Fer.al seems to have the files “encrypted” as I tried to rip an audio file from it, it just displayed garbled text in the preview.

Reading about all this NFT stuff with WW really sucks. I'm in my 20s but I grew up playing AJC. I've been seeing a trend of virtual worlds dying over the years, and seeing how WW seems to be steadfast on this NFT bs I get the feeling that not only are the games gonna flunk, but they're probably gonna shut down everything.

My hope for them to fix anything was already at an all time low, but after the utter hellfire that was raised last night... yeah it's below zero now

Under the sardonic amusement I've been having I am actually sad for the fate of Fer.al and AJ - I spent the latter half of last decade totally immersed in AJC and its community and the game itself really meant a lot to me

We can only pray they decide to sell off their properties now, I think

It’s just depressing that they had to get into the stupid NFT stuff and reuse assets from a game that’s still in a early access and buggy state where it’s fate is debatable if it dies and takes the AJ series with it that WildWorks also developed.

This game had potential, the gameplay, the lore, etc. but all of it feels like it was thrown out to the trash due to how the CEO felt like it didn’t met the company’s expectations as in that it couldn’t hit mainstream.

i simply refuse to believe tht fer.al was a testing ground for a shitty NFT game because:

NFT shit didn’t have a huge focus back when feral was created.

it’s only until recent that corporations and brands are suddenly snorting it like cocaine. 

the old dirt bags at wildworks, being faceless corps as well, decided to follow suit.

The part about Latchkey intrigues me, I remember doing the Unbound Souls quest, and reading Private Roslyn dialogue about how The Puppetmaster had to extract souls to put into the “dolls”. Which looking back at that quest, pretty much means that he put those extracted souls into the robots he created.

Strangely enough, this is starting to sound like the Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, even though I never played any games from that series at all but I do know some info about it.

It makes me wonder if the concept of cyborg Sparks in-universe exists, like this gives me the idea if that technology was implemented on them. Would they become “more” advance than ever was before and use it for good? Or “too advance for their own good?” This advancement from the cybernetics in them makes the power go over their heads and made them become “hungry” for world domination?

Who knows, but I remember fondly enough how I had a second saved look for my werewolf simply titled “Cyborg Cosplay”. I tried to make him look like one, but the pattern limitations prevented me from adding more robotic looking details.

final messages from sam.

It always felt off why people assume that Fer.al was an “actual prototype” to Cinder, despite at the past during it’s development, the ideas of NFTs didn’t exist(?) back then for it to be a “prototype” for that game.

ive been seeing a lot of misinfo going around here and in the server about feral being a secret beta test for cinder or something like that and i just want to clear some things up because ive been following this closely for a while and the ama, while vague, cleared some things up for me.

ferals development started way before people cared about nfts, and certainly before anyone cared abt blockchain integrated gaming. remember: feral opened its beta to select testers during the pandemic in around april of 2020, and was in development for far, far longer. at the very very least a year seems likely, and the earliest announcement of feral i could find was in december of 2019, so itd be long before that.

the actual timeline, how i understand it, is that feral was in development and was open for new players for some time, and then late (very recently, i suspect around summer of last year) they made the decision that feral was not financially viable and looked for other options.

they then decided that taking ferals assets and shifting to an nft game instead was the best option. since they had invested so much into feral and its various assets, this makes sense because its a lot to just abandon. they had one (monetarily) failing project, but it could be used to jumpstart their new more lucrative one.

so no, feral was meant to be something to stand on its own, and the decision to shift to cinder was a recent development.

that being said, wildworks is absolutely still scummy in this situation. there was NO transparency about this shift, and they even went as far as to lie and say they were keeping development going, just to milk more money out of people. not only that, but they actively tried to guilt trip their players into thinking they needed to financially support them to keep feral afloat, which is just... insanely shitty to do, especially when you know ferals going under eventually and MADE that decision. looking at you clark >://

EDIT: I've found the screenshots from Twitter:

Read the text that’s marked with red lines at the bottom, wwadmin mentions about how Tag With Ryan basically “inherits the DNA” of Dash Tag was meant to be, noticed.

I sometimes wondered if this is the “sole reason” for why AJ couldn’t go mainstream like those series mentioned in the post.

IMO, AJ stood out to me, not because it had a trading system (it wouldn’t make them unique anyway since Neopets has a trading system too) but because of the avatar switching (Neopets has something like this, switching between pets, but the limiting amount of slots makes it different to what AJ’s switching animals have.)

What stood out to me the most for the AJ series in general is that it wasn’t playing only one species of animal. Example: playing as a penguin in Club Penguin and playing as a panda in Panfu, though that’s cause’ of both games focus around those two specific species, as the games themselves were never meant to involve other animal species as playable avatars. Club Penguin is kind of an exception, but those transformations, such as the dinosaurs, were only temporarily, not like something you keep for a long time and can freely switch between it and penguin.

And the second thing that stood out to me the most of the AJ series in general, is that you weren’t playing a fictitious creature that is either modeled off a real creature, be that of a dog, cat, mouse, bird etc. Though I know Webkinz lets you play/raise a non-fictional creature, but there’s also mythical creatures among them, like a dragon or a unicorn. Though this is mostly because AJ is meant to be educational, even though they’ve introduced some fictional creatures as pets the Pet Flying Pig in Classic and the Pet Lovebug that’s present in both Classic and Play Wild. And the fact that the main antagonists are ghost-like creatures who are metaphors for environmental destruction.

I like switching between avatars, depending whoever I felt like I wanted to play as. If I feel like to play as my cyborg-inspired Brachiosaurus in PW, I switch into him, if I feel like to play as my hot pink Triceratops, I switch into her. I never forget how I loved to make original characters out of my avatars in AJC, I still come up with ideas for the OCs I’ve make in PW too.

I hope Jampack (or Modstorm? I can’t tell if Jampack or Modstorm is the company or upcoming game’s title), that company formed by former workers of WildWorks would implement a feature in Modstorm, to switch in between human avatars and creature-based ones (if they’re planning to add creature-based avatars, but hey, if they do so, it’ll make it stand out in a way.)

now that izzyzzz mentioned it... i think feral was doomed from the start. they built it with a million very awesome bells and whistles but no real core gameplay. every game that's popular has some sort of core feature that, even with everything else stripped away, makes it fun to play. minecraft has building and exploring in an infinite world, fornite has robust pvp, pokemon has battling and catching pokemon.

feral didn't have anything like that. the main "gameplay" i guess was exploring and collecting items and ingredients, which isnt as fun when you've explored the whole map to the point of memorizing every location and decorated your available avatars and sanctuary. and i feel like this is something that shouldve been addressed before anyone ever touched a keyboard to start working on the game. it's something the character customization and item collection should've been built on top of, not as a substitute for.