Bandai Namco Entertainment has announced the beta of the Gundam Metaverse, their online hub to connect fans of the popular mecha anime.
In today’s Gundam Conference, they announced that the Gundam Metaverse beta would release this October- as well as updating fans on the features it would have.
It should be noted that this would technically be a test of the Gunpla Colony- a small fraction of the entire Metaverse project which would also encompass anime and games.
There will be two primary ways to access the Gundam Metaverse- via the PC-based Metaverse app which gives you full features such as controlling your avatar to move around, as well as the Gundam Navi mobile app.
The app is said to be more focused on communications features, requiring less hardware to run than the PC metaverse client.
There’s also the Builder’s Note, a social platform for people to share photos of their builds and communicate with each other.
Here’s a description of the service, courtesy of Bandai Namco Entertainment:
“BUILDERS NOTE” will allow fans to post photos of Gunplas they’ve built and add comments to them. Additionally, it will enable fans to track and manage their Gunpla activities by providing access to a comprehensive list of Gunplas that are on sale and linking product information to their posts.
As was revealed last year, the Gundam Metaverse will also allow you to order kits online and have them delivered to your home. Chief Gundam Officer Koji Fujiwara has said that there’s no concrete details yet on how this service would work for overseas fans.
“We cannot disclose the details right now, but we will work on ways to distribute our kits in the most ideal way possible to all our fans from around the world”, he says.
The Gundam Metaverse is Bandai Namco’s tentpole service for connecting with Gundam fans, offering a social hub for fans to connect with each other.
It also aims to feature live translation, as well as a virtual assistant to entertain guests.
They also announced that a 10th anniversary special of the Gundam Build series would be released, focused on the Gundam Metaverse titled Gundam Build Metaverse.