Holybread is an rpg game that will released on January 27th 2020. It incorporates several aspects of the Steem blockchain into it. In this game, you level and gear up heroes to send them off on quests and battle in the arena.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be a tester for a little while now with a small group of others. I’m rather thrilled to see different genres of games starting to pop up all over the place in the blockchain space. I look forward to seeing how 2020 shapes up for this game and many others in the blockchain space.
Log In Options
Holybread has been tested on and will be released as a browser game on the PC to start with. There are two main options of logging in with a Steem account. After release, the game developers have stated they will be working on a mobile option.
You will be able to log in using Steem Keychain which is a wallet management browser extension for Google Chrome, Brave or Firefox. Further information can be found from the Steem keychain Github page in how their app works.
The other option is SteemConnect which does not require downloading anything unless you want to have their Google Chrome extension or desktop app. This is the more standard option most people who have been using Steem have been accustom to using over the past couple of years.
Either of these two options can be used to sign transactions for buying, selling or other manners of the game.
Mobile
As far as the mobile option no date has been given when they think that will be out.
While you “might” be able to use SteemConnect to play from a browser on a mobile device that was not tested and the game developer is not promising that will work or even be an enjoyable playing experience.
The game developers have started the game can have multiple servers. As such mobile users are not expected to show up and be competing against already established and max out PC accounts if they go in that direction.
I myself do not game on my business phone. So I cannot provide any further information than this for those who prefer to play these types of games on a phone. I also won’t be providing any further updates regarding mobile unless it happens to coincide with the PC version of the game moving forwarding.
Classes And Heroes
Holybread has three base types of classes to choose from. You can level them up in quests. You can also acquire gear to make them stronger. Along with doing things like spending gold to increase their individual stats but that gets costly. Finally, you can have up to three heroes your team.
At the start of the game, you can pick a Warrior, a Mage, or an Archer hero. Later on, in the game, you have a very small chance of finding random heroes as drops from running quests which could have better rarity as well or even non-standard bonus buffs. You can also buy heroes with a premium currency called bread. Finally, you can buy heroes from other players from the in-game player market.
With this being an RPG classes do play a role. For the most part, they are as expected that you would find in other games but there is a twist to them as well. Each class has a main attribute that affects their damage. Such as, Warriors use Strength, Mages use Intelligence, and Archers use Dexterity. That is nothing new and rather standard in most games out there now a day.
What is a bit different than most out there is those attributes can also be used for defense to reduce income damage in the arena by up to 50%. For instance, if you want to defend against a Ranger you would want to increase a hero's Dexterity.
While each class at their basic rarity rolls standard bonus that would be expected for that class. Like warriors having 5% more life or Mages dealing 5% more damage. You can also find higher quality heroes that could provide 10% more damage to the entire team and not just themselves. They're also ones that give gold or experience boost as well. These could end up fetching quite a nice amount on the market.
As far as a team goes you can have up to three heroes on a single team. You start off with only one slot unlocked and you earn the other two slots by playing the game. They require you to spend a certain amount of energy and have enough fights in the arena to unlock.
At least during the testing phase of this game, it did not take too long to unlock all hero slots in a team which consists of three heroes. I myself was able to unlock my second hero slot in a couple of days of playing. By around the week mark, I had the third slot unlocked.
Like anything in this game, it could be subject to change after the closed testing phase has ended. So that is something to keep in mind.
Gear
As far as gear goes while you tend to focus on getting the main attribute for damage and constitution for life. Picking up other stats for defending or Luck for critical damage chance can also go a long way. Some items you might find can be quite powerful if you have found an epic item for instance that gives all stats such as the item in the screenshot above.
Gear has a very low chance of dropping from running quests. Before you even start a quest it will display if there an unknown drop. From the picture, you can guess some information about it like an item slot. Most of the time you won’t have any quests that have an item drop. So it’s something to be on the lookout for but not expected to see.
My main way of gearing up my heroes was from the item store where you can buy and sell items for gold. The NPC run store resets once a day for free. Beyond that every time you buy an item a new item will replace that slot in the store.
You can also use perineum currency bread to refresh the store’s inventory. That, however, can get quite costly as each refresh costs an additional bread till the daily reset. As such, I found myself only refreshing the store a couple of times a day.
There is also the player in-game market. That is where you can buy items with Steem from other players.
The tricky part when it comes to finding the right gear is having good RNG. The higher the items level requirement the higher the range of stats it can roll. However, you can get a warrior item with no strength on it. You could find items with only luck stat on it. Sometimes saving an item for use in a certain situation is helpful other times you just sell for some gold.
The game does have a very nice breakdown of information for each item. Everything has a unique ID, it has a little lore, and you can find out other information like when it was found and who the current owner is.
For testing, items were being posted to the blockchain on their test account that players were acquiring. There will be a full reset before release so goodbye to the nice items I found!
Questing And Energy
Holybread does use an energy resource system when it comes to performing quests for their PvE content. This also does mean they are auto-completed and you just need to send your team off on a quest. They return sometime later with experience and gold for the most part.
You generate ten energy per hour and can hold without penalty 100 energy. Beyond that, if you can’t log in daily they do prove some leeway with a saved energy tank. That tank can hold up to 500 energy. The catch, however, is it only fills your main energy bar with five energy every hour to be spent on top of the 10 you are naturally getting. Best to not keep it near full otherwise you will have a hard time spending it all!
As far as each quest itself it can consume between five to fifteen energy. Each quest also takes the same amount of time to complete as per the energy costs such as fifteen minutes. This does mean you will need to log in quite a few times a day to spend the 240 energy you get daily.
The cool thing about questing as mention before is you get to see what most of the rewards are before sending your heroes off on one of them. Besides just seeing if there is an item drop they tend to be focused more towards experience, gold, or both.
So if you just wanted to farm gold to buy an expensive item or perhaps you need some for repairs you can check what quests you have that provides the best gold to energy spent ratio. It resets each time you go out on quest so don’t expect those offers to be around.
You also get a very small amount of breadcrumbs from questing. It’s such a low amount however as it one per energy spent. This at least gives all players the opportunity to earn some of that currency that can be traded on Steem-Engine even if they are not a high ranking player in the Arena.
Arena
As far as PvP content goes in Holybread the arena is where it is at. This is not a game where you need to worry about losing gear or anything like that. What is however at stake is how many breadcrumbs you are earning per a fifteen-minute window. The higher the rank you are the more you could earn!
Once every fifteen minutes you can choose to attack another player if you wish. If you attack a higher ranking player and are able to defeat them you take their rank in the arena. You, however, can be attacked at any time. The pool of players you can attack or attack from is limited to just a couple at a time.
When it comes to strategy in Holybread this is the part of the game where you will find it the most. Some people choose to have a mixed team of heroes. While others might choose to have the same class for all their slots. Even what order you choose to have heroes fight in can make an impactful on the outcome of the fight.
While you do have a team of up to three heroes that will fight for you. They each fight one at a time until they win or are killed. Then the next one takes there place till one side loses. So picking your fighting order and even what gear you want an individual hero to be wearing becomes quite key. Since you already know the order at which you will face each of the opponent's heroes by just looking at what the other player has before attacking.
Beyond that combat is auto. You also do not need to be online to be attacked in the arena. You, however, should attack another player from time to time. Otherwise, you are considered inactive and stop earning any breadcrumbs from the rank you are holding.
The arena has been quite a fun part of the game. I almost dare say all my choices made in other parts of the game were done with the arena in mind. With that said if PvP is not your thing, the game developer does have further plans to expand out the PvE content in Holybread. That, however, will be much later down the road as they have more pressing matters to work on after releasing like mobile.
Premium Currency Bread
Ah, the P-word or in this game's case B! Bread is there a premium currency that can be used to buy instant speedups, refresh the item store page, and heroes from the recruiter. Other than those cases that are all I’ve seen while testing the game. You can even earn a little each day as well which is neat.
The nice thing here is they tried to limit what impacts Bread has for the most part. If you can help speed some things up but it can’t buy what is needed for that action in most cases. For instance, bread can’t buy you is more energy. So while you can speed up quests if you don’t have the time to come back to use up all your energy. Once you are out of energy for the day that is it.
Another big factor is how much gold you even have to buy items from the item shop. You can refresh that store page all you want with bread and it's going get costly after a while. What it can’t buy you is that 10,000 or more gold you need to buy a crazy item if spawns on the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper also has a limited amount of gold for it to buy items from you. So even buying stuff from players to sell at 50% of the gold value back to the shopkeeper is going have its limitation.
Even if you used bread to reset the area cooldown to be able to attack again that is going have demisting returns. Unless you are really close to beating someone and don’t want to wait for another go. The arena also does not give a lot of gold and has to dismiss returns if someone just wants to sit there and farm someone within their range.
During testing, we were also getting a little bit of bread from doing daily tasks for free. For the moment they are quite simple. Finish a number of quests or buy an item from the store kind of tasks. Over time I’m sure we will see them evolve with the game. They also seem to give a genius amount as you can save up to buy heroes from the recruiter if you wanted or just use it when you need to hurry up a little.
Finally, you can earn bread if you refer people who then buy some in the store as a little extra bonus for doing so. While you can’t play the game yet at the time of writing this. If you would like to use my referral link I’d appreciate it.
Overall I’m rather happy with how they have handled this part of the game. You do get some benefits from being spender which helps found their operations without it going overboard.
Rewards
One of the fun aspects of blockchain gaming is a possibility to earn from playing. There will be a couple of options some of which I’ve already covered a little bit regarding this element of the game. Before moving forward I do want to state the game developer has stated making the game fun is their main priory. As such expect any choice they make or will in the future to reflect that when it comes to the spirit of the game.
As you might have noticed I’ve talked a little bit about Breadcrumbs. This is going be one way for players to have an opportunity to earn. The game developer will be doing a buyback from what they have earned off the game. I won’t hold them to the percentage they have listed in the FAQ but that does seem to be there current thinking. There have also been hints in the future Breadcrumbs could have other uses to what end I’m not sure. As far as the frequency of the buyback program that is still unannounced.
There is also an in-game player market where you can sell items and heroes for Steem to other players. There are market fees charged if the item sells. They are using both a flat rate and a percentage to determine the selling fees. Depending on the rarity of rolling “perfect items” and demand there could be huge opportunities at the higher levels for an item to be worth a fair amount.
Final Thoughts
With closed testing ending tomorrow, I felt now was a good time to talk a bit about the game. All our progress during this time will be reset as we just played on the test server. Looks like I’ll be getting a few Steem for how high I’ve managed to say ranked in the arena which makes being a tester even more fun.
This was also the first time I got an interesting benefit from holding a scot tribe token. Those of us who held 1k GG or higher and where in the SteemAce gaming discord were given the opportunity to sign up for a couple of the testing slots open they had for this phase. Many of the people behind Holybread are also involved in that tribe.
I look forward to seeing it release on the 27th and playing it.
A special thank you to @Holybread for accepting me as a tester.
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Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about the game Holybread (non-referral link).
This game was in closed early access at the time of writing this. Changes could be made before release.
My Holybread Referral link. I get some bonus bread when you buy bread if you sign up using my referral.
