【Miscellaneous Talk】Talk about the update of Yuanshin 4.0 from the perspective of game development

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Hello, Mina-san, this is Junxi_, combined with the recent learning content and my own goals in the future, today I opened a new pit of miscellaneous talks, sharing my growth in learning game development and my own understanding of games, of course now It’s still a novice, and it may not be professional enough. In the early stage, it is at most some immature views and opinions of gamers. Welcome to point out the fallacies in the article or share your own opinions

foreword

The main purpose of this column is to share my personal understanding and opinions on the game. Of course, because it is a personal opinion, it is not to follow the trend. If it is different or inconsistent with your opinion, it is your right. This article is all yours. For tea time, the main plan at present is to share the game insights of "Yuanshin" and "Star Railway". After all, bloggers are not cloud players. I always think that only those who have played it by themselves are worthy of talking and understanding rather than copying others. So for the time being, I will only share the games that the blogger is currently playing.

• Regarding the update, the current plan is to update one version once. If there is a major version change or update, it may be updated several times. The update time is probably in the middle or after the end of each version.

1. Analysis of update environment

• Periodically updated games like Yuanshen have a certain version update plan. The large version is generally built in the early stage of the game and there will be basically no major changes. Secondly, each updated small version will be due to The influence of running water, heat, etc. will change to a certain extent, so what is the general environment for the major version update of the original god here?
• Even many players who don’t play Yuanshen games can see that Yuanshen’s update is almost in a state of failure in the middle and late stages of the last major version, especially after Mihayou’s new game "Star Railway" came out. , there are very few new maps and new activities launched, and even the up characters are mainly re-engraved characters. In fact, this is understandable, always make way for the new game! ! Different from competitive games, if there is no fresh content for games like Genshin Impact, it is difficult to retain players, which will lead to the loss of a large number of players. Unless you love it, it is difficult for someone to spare time to repeat it day after day Old things, playing games is to relax rather than let the game play you, so the loss of players and popularity is a normal phenomenon. Let players return at a certain point, which is one of the peak points of the game's popularity-a major version update, and the new version 4.0 of Yuanshen was updated in this environment where everything is waiting to be done. With the above understanding of the update environment, we can further analyze the update of the game version and figure out the deep intentions of the original God development team

(Many of my friends have not logged in to the game for a long time)

• Here I will talk about the difference between Yuanshinshin and other competitive games. Why there is no new content will cause a large number of players to lose (personal understanding).
  From a professional point of view, it is the difference in the nature of the game. The gameplay of competitive games lies in competition. Increase the player's satisfaction and competitiveness by winning or losing. Players want to win if they lose, and want to win if they win, so as to maintain this type of game and increase the daily activity and number of players. Yuanshin is an open world exploration game. For games, if there is no new content for players to experience, it will naturally be difficult to maintain daily activity, resulting in the loss of a large number of players.

2. Updated content and analysis

1. New content

• The focus of this update is on the new map and new gameplay - diving. At the same time, a new mainline mission has been opened around the new country of Fontaine, as well as new combat elements, barren and awn. As for the characters, follow the mainline A series of new characters have been introduced, and the new characters Lin Ni and Lin Nit who act as guides on the new map have been up.
  The new event has not been released yet, so I won’t say much here. If the data in this blog is not bad, I will publish a separate article to talk about the new event and some thoughts of the project team behind the event.

2. Talking about the new content

Diving and underwater scenes

• Let me talk about the biggest update first, which is undoubtedly the update of the gameplay. Let’s put a few pictures of the actual game machine
  
  

• The biggest change in game operation this time is undoubtedly in order to have a better underwater experience. The developers of the Yuanshen project team released the lock on the Y axis (as shown below) and no longer fixed the viewing angle, which deepened the game. The realism of mid-diving can also enable players to better experience the underwater scenery carefully built by developers.

• When it comes to the construction of underwater scenes, it is enough to experience the intentions of the project team through the actual game. In fact, in the preview program of 4.0 Fontaine, the developers also mentioned their underwater design concepts and ideas. In fact, the real Underwater is undoubtedly dark and quiet, and the wonderful biosphere and beautiful scenery of the seabed can only be seen in the deeper seabed. However, in order to consider the player's game experience, I believe that the project team also spent a lot of time to find The balance between realism and gaming experience, and finally choose the current version of the program:

• Brighten up the environment of the seabed as a whole. The dark and narrow environment often makes people fearful and frightening, which will undoubtedly greatly reduce the underwater experience. The player's desire to explore, so he chose to increase the overall height of the entire seabed, so that the player can jump into the water and the seabed scenery can be seen vividly. For the exploration of deeper places, ocean currents and deep pits in the sea are used on the map. Ocean currents allow players to experience underwater without losing their direction. At the same time, ocean currents also bring players to the location of tasks and treasure chests. Great simplification It improves the player's exploration process, and the deep pit plays the role of connecting deeper, but in the deep pit, the player will not be allowed to explore in a narrow environment for a long time.
  

• Talking about underwater combat is undoubtedly an important part of underwater exploration, how to design monsters? How can players defeat them? How to control the strength of the monster so that the player can feel the fun of underwater combat without affecting the actual underwater experience of the player? In fact, many games on the market have given their own answers. The answer given by the Yuanshin project team is as follows:

• If underwater players can freely use skills and attacks like on land, it will undoubtedly greatly affect the realism of underwater exploration, and various bugs in releasing skills due to different environments are also a headache. The project team chose the simplest and most direct solution - unifying underwater skills, which is a trouble-saving method. At the same time, due to the consistency of skills, the balance of monster strength will also become very well designed. It is shown today What is given to the player is the ability to extract skills from several fixed sea creatures to achieve the purpose of attack and defense. At the same time, in the decryption and exploration of the seabed, this attack method can also facilitate the player's exploration. I believe that there will be more designs similar to marine life in the future to further increase the player's underwater exploration experience
  

• Judging from the feedback from a large number of players on the Internet and the actual experience of the blogger himself, the design of Yuanshen’s underwater exploration can score at least 80 points or more, but in addition to the above-mentioned excellent design, there are still many optimizations. In space, let me briefly talk about the places where I think underwater exploration is not good enough

• The first is the design of underwater elite-level bosses. Many difficulties are actually not small, or the fight is more torturous, because you can only fight with that skill. This kind of boss blood design is really thick. When fighting the BOSS, you can’t increase blood and have no shield (I personally don’t take medicine and I’m used to using Zhongli, and I have to stand still when I attack and can’t hide skills, which is really unfriendly)

• I also encountered a lot of obstacles during several challenges. At the same time, the attack logic of the boss seems a bit monotonous. What impressed me the most is a boss that needs you to bounce back to cause damage. Its attack logic is generally to spit bubbles first. Pao attacks you, then opens the shield (this shield must bounce back to break), then rolls towards the player’s face, and then it’s a cycle. The logic of most bosses is almost unchanged. It’s okay if the battle time is shorter, but This kind of BOSS blood is very thick and the player's attack method is certain, so it takes a very long time to fight. . .

If it was designed by me, can several skills be used in combination? The combination of different skills can cause different effects (for example, after a successful rebound, the BOSS can be paralyzed. At this time, the player can use the water wave attack to cause more damage). First, it can increase the diversity of BOSS battles. It can reduce the difficulty for the player to defeat the BOSS (of course, personal opinion, don’t hate it if you don’t like it)

• The underwater scenes are not diverse enough. Of course, it is also possible that this is the first version. There will definitely be more other underwater areas in the future. Nowadays, after players have experienced certain plots and decrypted scenes, they will basically not go there again. In these places, most of the subsequent daily entrusted tasks are fixed in certain underwater areas. These areas are actually a bit the same, that is, they are not diverse enough, so can you do it in those underwater areas that players do not often go to? How about designing some interesting daily commissions in the next area? In this way, the range of player activities is not limited to those few sea areas with almost the same scene, which can not only greatly slow down the speed at which players lose their sense of novelty in underwater exploration, but also I believe that those mission sea areas that took a lot of thought and time to design can also Effective use is not it? (It’s just a personal immature opinion, there should be reasons why the officials don’t do this)

Fontaine's design

• The design of the Fontaine map is also of the same high standard as before. Due to the space, it is no longer introduced in detail like the underwater part. Generally speaking, the design of the map is very close to the style of the plot, or in other words, the design of the plot makes people I think it is very appropriate to have this kind of story in the country of Fontaine, that is, the region and the plot are closely integrated. Mi——wisdom), so the plots in this country are like detective novels, justice is maintained and evil is judged, but the court of trial is actually the Opera House. The plot experienced by our players is also very dramatic. In short, I personally think that Fontaine's regional design, plot design, and character portrayal are very good. I won't make spoilers here. Interested students can experience it by themselves.

• The exploration of the big map this time has been well received by most people. After experiencing it myself, I really feel that Fontaine’s map exploration experience is much more optimized than Sumeru. There is no need to climb up and down, and the rewards of the treasure chest have increased a lot. There is no special point and decryption of the underworld, and the design team's intentions can be seen everywhere, but there is one thing that is not very friendly to players who are exploring in the early stage-a large number of barren elements added to the map exploration.
• In some decryption and missions, you must use energy blocks with wild awn energy to unlock them, and the places where these energy blocks are hidden are relatively hidden, which leads to drawing new characters (the wild awn attribute is only available to Fontaine characters) and no The large map exploration experience of players who draw new characters is very different. For players with new characters, they only need to switch characters to solve the problem, while players without new characters have to search for energy blocks all over the place, and sometimes they even fail to decrypt. Had to go find it again. . .

New Elements - Mount and Barren

• In addition to the above updates, what has caused the most controversy among players is nothing more than the addition of the two elements of wild awn. Many players have been worried since the big world. What about monsters that can only break shields with wild awn elements? Does this mean that the game ushered in a new expansion of characters after entering the new major version?

Explain what character inflation is:
Newly released characters are stronger than old characters in terms of value and mechanism, which leads to a very different game experience from drawing new characters and old characters, and leads to the phenomenon of depreciation of old characters.

• In fact, this highlights a contradiction in card-drawing games:
  the new characters are weaker than the old ones, so whoever draws new characters except the XP party, the new characters are similar to the old ones, and many players have already formed a formed character team and system. They are naturally unwilling to spend money but cannot get an improvement in the game experience. If the new character is much better than the old character, it will undoubtedly cause a great psychological imbalance for those players who spend money on the old character. The new character is so much stronger for the same price? It will greatly affect the atmosphere of the game community, and it will also bring a large group of waiting parties - the new characters are better than the old ones, so why should I still smoke the old ones? At the same time, those old characters will naturally not bring much turnover when they are re-enacted, which means that a character designed by the project team can only be sold once. Therefore, balancing the strength of new characters and old characters is undoubtedly a focus of design.
  

• The solution for most companies is this - make a difference between old and new roles.
  In some scenes or under normal circumstances, the new characters are better than the old ones (often, when a new character is released, the planning will also design a scene that makes him perform well), but they often have places where they are not as good as the old ones, rather than surpassing them in an all-round way , such as the operating feel. For example, the required team formation and the difficulty of character development. In some special scenarios, old characters can even perform better. In this way, since the new and old characters have their own advantages and disadvantages, players have to choose, even if the XP is not right, they have to draw because of the excellent performance of the new characters in certain scenes. In other words, in addition to the strength of the character itself, the player's experience also depends on the game scene, and the game scene, isn't the game planning the final say? When the new character comes out, I will set a specific scene to make him appear stronger. When the old character is engraved, I will change the game scene so that the old character can drink soup and look not inferior to the new character. This is what I understand. The logic behind the characters

• With the basis of the character design logic I mentioned above, it is not difficult to solve the problem of whether new elements will destroy the game environment and cause character expansion: new characters are definitely stronger than old characters in this environment, but old characters It's definitely not to the point that it can't be played, but the game experience may not be as comfortable as the new character.

music

• The music design of Yuanshen must be highly praised! ! ! I have to say, Mihayou, are you really not a music company? Among them, the music in ordinary scenes is peaceful and quiet, making people enjoy the fun of exploring the big map, while the battle music is magnificent, like a grand epic praising heroes' battles, making it hard not to immerse themselves in it. In short, there is nothing to say about music. Yes, absolutely top-middle-top (by the way, Yuanshen’s offline concert will also be performed in the city where I live. I don’t know if I can get tickets. I must go to listen to it offline once in my lifetime!!!)
  

Summarize

• In general, in the current environment where Yuanshen’s popularity and turnover continue to decline, the Yuanshen project team has handed over a very good answer sheet to all players in 4.0, but there are still many areas that can be optimized and improved. I look forward to Yuanshin bringing more high-quality content in future versions! !
  
  ps: From the new version of this experience collection activity and the activity of inviting players to return to the original stone, the long-term popularity of Yuanshen and the number of online people are relatively low. The planners are really in a hurry. If you have paid attention to the content of operations, you can It can be seen that the popularity of Yuanshen has returned after the new version was updated, but the flow is still relatively sluggish, not even as good as the first version of Xumi (you know, the new character up in the first version of Xumi is a resident character, And Lin Ni is not only a limited character but also very strong online), I am a little looking forward to what characters will be up and what activities will be launched by the Yuanshen Anniversary to increase the turnover hh, after all, the low turnover is actually a good thing for players, But for the project team, if the turnover continues to drop after a new version is launched, I’m afraid Viagra won’t give them year-end bonuses hah

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