At its core, legacy is the impact of past actions that carry on into the future. The most common examples of these are family inheritances, like a house or an heirloom. Scholars leave behind their bodies of work to educate and inspire the next generation. Artists leave lasting marks on society through their creations. To these ends, legacy consists of two separate but equally important components: an action worth remembering and someone to remember it.
How does this translate to entertainment and gaming? Legacy in these fields is often created by a writer or director. Movies, comics, games, and novels are works of creatives that offer their vision to the masses. Games and other interactive media offer a unique chance to empower legacy by providing players with choices. However, for many games, the application of legacy is often relegated to leaderboards — meaningful to some but not exactly world-changing.
There have been some instances where legacy was applied, like in the Mass Effect trilogy, where player decisions mattered in future installations. Some online games have released limited-edition items as a form of legacy, marking a moment in time, but never developed them beyond that.
As with all things, the truth of feasibility is nuanced. On a root level, truly meaningful and world-changing legacies in entertainment have a direct correlation with production. The more choices and legacies you want to empower users with, the more systems have to be produced to support them, all at a rapidly scaling cost. Legacy has also been limited technologically. In-game items were always bound by the game, platform, or local ecosystem. Once they shut down, those items are lost, and their value disappears.
Through Collaborative Entertainment (CE), Confiction Labs is introducing new ways for communities to expand on each other’s ideas, build worlds, and shape stories together — creating a shared legacy.
Defining Legacy in Gaming
One of the big defining characteristics that make most single-player, story-based games appealing is the fact that, as a player, your actions have consequences on the world around you. You decide to antagonize an NPC instead of helping them, and they become a recurring villain later on. You opt to chase after a side quest that grants you a legendary weapon, and it changes how you approach future encounters. Granted, you are still bound by the confines of the story. When the story ends, you are left with a finished book, or you have to wait for a sequel to come out.
Legacy in multiplayer games often falls into one of two scenarios. There are sandbox games like Minecraft or Rust where you can build a house and it stays in that game for as long as players want it to. You also have games with instances, such as Final Fantasy XIV or Path of Exile, where you create your own pocket ecosystem in a larger world. Your actions affect that specific pocket. In either case, legacy doesn’t persist. A server wipe, an instance reset, or a game shutting down — it all falls apart.
Imagine a scenario where the actions you take persist in a multiplayer world. This is one of the ways Collaborative Entertainment (CE) is changing legacy in gaming. Players can leave behind their mark with their actions, stories, ideas, and items. They discover a legendary weapon in a game and customize it to fit their character. Then, as the item goes on to kill monsters and conquer bosses, it adds more to its legacy. When the player decides to part with the weapon, its legacy remains. Other players can inherit this legacy and add to it. Web3 makes it possible for legacy to retain its permanence. Even if the game is gone, the item still exists on-chain.
That’s how legacy should be — something you can build upon, recall its history, and interact with. Other players can also build on top of the legacy you’ve created. Imagine telling expansive stories where a chapter defined by one player is continued by another. A player can log in to a game after being gone for a few years and see the town he named still in the game. You’ll have a game with weapons, landmarks, and items rich with history.
Legacy in Riftstorm
There are multiple ways players can add their legacy to Riftstorm and interact with the legacy of others. One of them is through Flashpoint events. These events collectively log the successes and failures of players, with the final outcome affecting how the world’s story moves forward.
In Riftstorm, and throughout the FICT ONE: Occultical universe, Flashpoint events serve as a nexus of canonized action. For Riftstorm specifically, the team has been testing multiple actions that can affect the universe. Starting with the first Riftstorm public playtest in 2023, the team sought to measure massed data points — specifically in the case of mythic kills during the playtest. What began as an off-the-cuff challenge for players to eliminate an “unfeasibly large number” of kills to achieve during the playtest resulted in a tongue-in-cheek story that helped to flesh out the “realities” of the Occultical world in a comic called “The Cleanup.” This further added to the consequences of these players’ actions by building bigger, badder, and meaner mythic variants of these creatures for players to face in future playtests.
Emboldened by the unexpected success of the gamers in 2023, the team set out to give players a more narratively impactful legacy in the world with the second Riftstorm playtest in March of 2024. In the events of the Shade Resurgence, players were taken on a small 3-mission story arc that culminated in Operation Tombstone. Collective success would result in a diminished M-0031 threat the next year, which would give our writers a chance to expand on the mysterious nature of the phantasmal entities. However, the majority of the player base ended up failing the mission, resulting in the writing staff scrambling to explore new ways to stretch the Shade Resurgence storyline beyond the arc.
“In hindsight, it was the best thing that could have happened. From a design perspective, we got to see the edge cases of what the most hardcore players can achieve and learn from it to create more balanced encounters,” says Igor Tanzil, Chief Creative Officer at Confiction Labs. “From a writing perspective, the outcome of that mission actually pushed us to explore new stories with really interesting constraints. We couldn’t quite kill off our characters — too much production time and all that — so we had to create a scenario that would allow us to expand on the failed mission in new and interesting ways.”
The results of this event have been repackaged in a follow-up comic titled “Operation Tombstone,” which will be shared with players in September as a lead-up to the new stories that will be introduced in the next playtest.
Another way players influence the Occultical world in which they play is through user-generated content (UGC). A quick search of your favorite game or franchise and you’ll see hundreds of works of art, fanfics, videos, forum posts, and all other types of media. What makes Riftstorm different is that players can submit these creations to the game’s Repository, the database where they are collected and organized by a protocol called the ConFict Data Layer (CDL). The Repository serves as a gathering point for all ideas, UGC, and canonized content that will then be reviewed and potentially integrated into the larger universe through media once that content is formally canonized on the CDL.
One of the key differences between Occultical and other IPs is the desire for user input on a foundational layer. Confiction Labs sees the core building blocks for this universe in three parts: concepts (mythics), characters (dossiers), and stories (case files), all of which come with Occultical’s formulaic structure that is designed to allow creatives, creators, and fans from all walks to life to partake.
In this scenario, a person with an interesting concept for a new mythic can write an entry, following the system’s rules and guidelines, and that entry can be reviewed and potentially integrated into Riftstorm or other media by the Confiction Labs team or other collaborators. Others can take a character or mythic entry they like and expand on it by submitting additional materials in the form of fanart or new case files to expand on the story.
FICT ONE: Occultical’s fundamental belief in the creative potential of the consumer audience is one that will serve to empower its audiences and collaborators to create an IP that can scale and evolve at scale.
Legacy Through Collaborative Entertainment
Collaborative Entertainment is the celebration of creator, consumer, and collaboration. It empowers and enables legacy, it scales with input, and it evolves through the combined power of all its participants. All of these factors combine to create the idealized use case for technologies that work to enable and secure trust and input — it is the very essence of what web3 should be and can be. Through technological solutions like the CDL, collaborative functions of the Repository, and the eventual integration of NFT items, Collaborative Entertainment presents the first true vision of a web3 entertainment franchise. A franchise that is built on the consensus of multiple legacies, branching out from and intersecting across multiple products, actors, and media.
Imagine a future of games where players’ collective stories, histories, and actions combine to create something truly unique. With the limitless imagination of a passionate player base, a game can continue running for years, with new ideas springing up to create interesting and memorable experiences. We may truly be on the precipice of creating a legacy that lasts forever, and it begins here with Collaborative Entertainment.
Join the Confiction Labs Portal to begin your journey in FICT ONE: Occultical.
To read more about Collaborative Entertainment, click here.
To learn more about Riftstorm, click here.
Read more about how AI and web3 will enable the next wave of gaming innovation here.
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