In Brief:
- Onchain Heroes released an explainer covering MoG 2.0, a from-scratch rebuild of Maze of Gains that the studio sums up as “Not a patch – a whole new game.”
- Rooms, progression and combat have all been reworked, and the game has gone through two playtests since July 1 — the second one removing the NFT requirement the first had.
- Traffic is running at roughly 10 times what the team planned for, according to the studio, and its CTO is drawing up a new backend to handle it.
Onchain Heroes has rebuilt Maze of Gains from the ground up, publishing a thread that runs through everything different about the release it is calling MoG 2.0.
“Not a patch – a whole new game,” the team said. “New combat, new progression, new rooms.”
Curious about what's in store for DoM 2.0?
The OCH team recently wrote an explainer thread going through everything that's changed, and you can expect all the learnings along the way to go into DoM 2.0Axie: Den of MysteriesView on X ↗
What changed
Combat has been rebuilt so that surviving a run depends on learning enemy patterns instead of luck. Progression hands out persistent upgrades that follow a player through a run, meaning early choices stack up the further anyone gets. Biomes, one-off rooms and new items have been added on top.
What hasn’t moved is the core loop. Players enter a maze, fight, pick up upgrades, and choose the moment to leave with their loot rather than gamble on another push.
Two playtests, one gate removed
MoG 2.0’s first playtest began on July 1 with 250 Arcade Keys in the pool, and getting in meant holding either a Ringbearer NFT or an Expedition Pass.
That barrier is gone in the second round, which is open to everyone, with keys earned by submitting feedback. No date has been given by Onchain Heroes for the full release.
Traffic outran the plan
The team’s fourth devlog, titled “MoG Momentum & What’s Next,” put current MoG traffic at about 10 times the level the game was originally built to handle. A new backend architecture, designed by the studio’s CTO, is meant to scale the game and make it run faster.
The team also said two partnerships are in discussion and may be finalised within weeks. Beyond that, it wants MoG to reach past its current crypto audience and, in time, web2 players.
MoG is first in line to connect to OCH World, billed by Onchain Heroes as the economic center of its universe — a persistent, player-driven world resting on resource production, crafting and markets. The two are set to share an economy, and the plan is for every OCH game that follows to hook into it.
The Ronin reskin
A second game is already running on the same engine: Axie: Den of Mysteries, made by the Onchain Heroes team and released on Ronin on April 30, is a reskin of Maze of Gains.
The economics differ. A key runs about $2 and is payable in ETH, AXS, RON or USDC, with 90% of key revenue flowing back to players via prize pools. The pool was seeded by Onchain Heroes with $20,000 in bAXS. Treasures build up weekly and pay in USDC; Shards have their own scoring plus a bonus pool covering the first four weeks; and Blessings hand out instant USDC to anyone who kills the rare Werewolf boss.
A run there takes three to five minutes. Each begins with 100 Stamina, with one point spent per move, and the run is over once it hits zero. The playable character is named Buba. The game also collected eight bounties on June 1 across four rarity tiers on the App.axie Bounty Board, becoming the fifth Axie title listed there.
According to the Den of Mysteries account, the MoG 2.0 work is feeding into its own next version. “The OCH team recently wrote an explainer thread going through everything that’s changed, and you can expect all the learnings along the way to go into DoM 2.0,” it said.
Background
Maze of Gains shares a roster with the Onchain Heroes idle RPG, a game centred on Genesis Hero NFTs and $HERO rewards. That title runs on Abstract, with in-game transactions settled in $HERO, an ERC-20 deployed on Abstract Mainnet. Valor, a stablecoin purchased with USDC on Abstract Mainnet, was introduced by the studio in April to firm up its economic design.
The game was created by Skarly, formerly a designer at Wolf Game.
Behind the rebuild is a wider pullback from how the studio first built things. Onchain Heroes originally pushed most actions through contracts before switching to a hybrid setup, having found the original approach slow and costly to maintain, with development cycles that dragged, updates that were harder to ship and audit bills that kept climbing. Payments remained onchain while gameplay logic moved off it. Rewriting the indexing system brought indexing time down from four hours to roughly 20 minutes.