nWay soft launches Power Rangers: Morphin Legends

nWay has started a soft launch for its third mobile game in a series dubbed Power Rangers: Morphin Legends.

The San Francisco game studio, a division of Animoca Brands, is releasing the game in Vietname and the Philippines next week, with a worldwide launch coming within months.

The company has previously been tapped by Hasbro to develop Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid and Power Rangers: Legacy Wars.

Power Rangers: Morphin Legends is a mobile character-collection role-playing game that lets players collect, strategize, battle and level up iconic Rangers and villains across the seasons to assemble the ultimate Power Rangers team.

Power Rangers: Morphin Legends is the team’s latest entry, featuring turn-based action, event-driven meta, and a narrative experience never seen before on mobile.

“When you’re working with such a well-loved franchise like Power Rangers, it’s important to preserve the story the fans know and love while still creating unique ways to engage with the characters,” said Taehoon Kim, CEO of nWay, in a statement. “Bringing the Power Rangers franchise to life in new ways has been incredibly fun for the team at nWay, and we’re thrilled to do it again with Power Rangers: Morphin Legends.”

Power Rangers: Morphin Legends enters soft launch on iOS and Android today. The goal is to test, collect feedback, and improve the in-game systems and features in order to prepare a polished product by worldwide launch.

In an email to GamesBeat, Kim said the game is different from the predecessors.

“With Power Rangers: Legacy Wars and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, we felt like we were able to scratch the itch of Power Rangers fans who like faster paced action games with emphasis on PvP. With Power Rangers: Morphin Legends, we want to provide to the fans what they want in a mobile RPG, especially those who are into the Battle-Collect-RPG genre,” Kim said. “The game places a lot more emphasis on strategy, building out teams and tech tree, as well as the joy of character progression. We were not able to find Power Rangers games in the past that were really dedicated to this side of play.”

The company has about 80 to 90 people and it continues to hire aggressively across engineering, product, data, art, design and marketing. A big chunk of those are working on blockchain games, Kim said.

While nWay continues to invest in both traditional and web3 games in its portfolio, Morphin Legends is more of a traditional free-to-play mobile game that doesn’t include NFTs in its gameplay mechanics. Kim said that his parent company is a big supporter of NFT games and that it believes in making titles where the NFTs have strong utility. Those that don’t have strong utility, he said, will likely be wiped out. His firm remains focused on making web 3 games for the future.

Earlier this year, nWay collaborated with the Internatioanl Olympic Committee to launch the play-to-earn mobile game Olympic Games Jam: Beijing 2022. nWay was also tapped by Yuga Labs for Bored Ape Yacht Club’s upcoming play-to-earn game featuring ApeCoin. Most recently, nWay partnered with The Sandbox to bring selected Apex Athletes to the Sandbox metaverse. nWay also released a token to go with the Olympics game.

“I think this is going to be a really fun project,” Kim said.

As for the audience for blockchain games, Kim thinks they will eventually go mainstream, but he said the first bowling pin has to be the crypto community.