Ever since its reveal last week, Distinct Possibility Studios has been more than eager to call attention to Reaper Actual, the persistent war MMO or persistent PvPvE shooter, depending on how you read the information granted at the time. Well, we can now get a little more insight into the game’s actual feature set thanks to an early preview stream from Discord hosted by studio CEO John Smedley.

Smed first off confirms that Reaper Actual does have “extraction shooter elements” insofar as there’s a requirement to bring materials from the battlefield to an owned base. Players will be able to own multiple bases that come in various shapes and sizes, including bases specifically for clans, and while it can house goodies and be used to craft weapon, bases can be attacked by others and its vaults can be looted; it will be up to base owners to set up point defenses as well as other owned characters to defend their holdings, and Smedley calls each base “it’s own kind of deathmatch level” that’s designed in favor of defenders.

Base raiding is intrinsically tied to a heat mechanic that builds up during missions and dissipates when at a base: As players take on dynamic missions and gun people down, heat generates to the point when a bounty is placed on the player up to the point when their bases can be raided in what sounds like an attempt to stop zerging. The intended loop appears to be to kit out at base, deploy and complete missions enough to get new items without generating too much heat, and then find a way to an extraction zone in order to craft and do it all again, only it’s open world instead of lobby-based.

The stream closed with a Q&A segment where Smed talked at great length about the Web3 version. Here he promised that both the Steam and even EGS versions won’t sneakily include crypto elements and will be a separate ecosystem outside of the game where players can create skins or characters and sell them to one another not unlike what the Steam Marketplace does now. He also stressed that the crypto-focused investors in the game understand that DPS is trying to make a good game first.

While Smedley also said that he’s admittedly excited at Web3 integration, it’s mostly because he wants to see what players make and sell and not about the studio making bank, though he does point out that some player-made items could make its way into the regular shooter’s store after they’ve passed muster and with regulated pricing. “I think we found a good mix for it and I stand by what we’re doing,” he said in the Q&A. “Do I recognize that that’s negative to a lot of people? Absolutely. But that’s why it’s optional.”

The Q&A segment also confirmed the MMO-like crafting (input mats, get shiny, with better resources resulting in better output), confirmed plans of modding support, talked up a map that initially plans to support up to 200 players at once but with plans to add “a lot more,” and aspirations to bring the game to consoles after first developing and releasing on PC.

Speaking of Q&A, Smedley effectively went on a kind of Twitter-based AMA where he once again defended the crypto and blockchain integration as a necessary part of the player-created item marketplace that he wants to encourage, which he considers to be about adding fun instead of adding transactions. It also seems as if he’s dug his heels in on this integration; when one poster called him out on his corporate “crypto people behavior,” he simply shrugged it off as a difference of opinion while uplifting people who parrot his point about blockchain as a database and assuring people it’s not a scam.