Today, strategy games have become an important category that cannot be ignored in the mobile game market, and they are also a must for major manufacturers.
In the "2021 China Game Industry Report", the strategy category accounts for 9% of the top 100 products in China's mobile game revenue, second only to role-playing and card games; and among China's self-developed mobile game products, the strategy revenue occupies the first place, accounting for 41.40%.
As the competition in the strategic track becomes more and more fierce, Gamelook believes that the upgrade of the strategic dimension has become an important symbol of whether the new strategic tour can break through. From the perspective of testing the real machine experience, the strategic new game "Return to Empire" strategically cooperated by Tianmei Studio Group and Xbox Game Studios is likely to become another breaker in the domestic strategic category.
Put it this way, Gamelook found in the experience process that this "full freedom real-time strategy mobile game" does enhance the gameplay design of strategic freedom through real-time operation and other enhancements, so that players can feel the rapid changes of war, and also give more operability space, really making the battlefield strategy "alive"; at the same time, the differentiated investment in the theme and quality of this product also makes it build its own competitive segment in the domestic market with the theme of the Three Kingdoms.
Even at the moment when new strategic products are frequently released and the gameplay is deepening, this "Return to Empire" is likely to become a phenomenon-level product of the domestic strategic category.
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"Live Strategy" creates a full-freedom real-time battlefield
To be honest, although there has been no lack of attention to "Return to the Empire" before, Because of the opportunity to miss the experience by chance, GameLook's understanding of the official definition of "full free real-time production strategy mobile game" has been a bit vague. Until participating in this test, the game refreshed the author's understanding of strategic mobile games:
Compared with the "plaid sandbox" design of the classic SLG mobile game rough numerical competition in the past, "live strategy" is the most iconic gameplay feature of "Return to Empire", which can be further dismantled from the two dimensions of space and time.
In the spatial dimension, the game creates a truly free battlefield.
As soon as it entered the game, GameLook found that "Return to the Empire" adopted a whole large map design, and the player's town, resource field, and neutral buildings such as towns, cities, and super famous cities that can compete for ownership are distributed on this vast map in real time.
Neutral buildings vary according to their importance, their size and number of buildings have changed accordingly, such as the super famous city that can significantly affect the alliance forces, the outpost towers outside the city are lined up, and the garrison patrols back and forth, while the famous city itself refers to the characteristics of the ancient city pool, and innovatively adds 4 gates that can be attacked and defended, and the city has a series of functional buildings such as city halls and treasuries. This makes the famous city no longer just a simple "point" on the big map, but a three-dimensional and real city.
Different from the traditional strategy mobile game of the city battle, the siege battle in "Return to the Empire" is not a swing outside the city, focusing on a designated plot of land, but can flexibly choose the siege strategy according to the actual situation: it can solve the outposts and garrisons outside the city under the cover of siege equipment such as catapults, and break through the gates of the enemy's main defense; it can also arrange multiple troops to attack the west and drive from a city gate with the weakest defense.
And the breach of the city gate does not mean the end of the siege battle, the attacking side also has to sweep the defenders in the city, carry out "street battles" with the enemy, and launch a general attack on the capital building in the center of the famous city, restoring the vivid experience of the real siege war.
Compared with the previous strategy mobile games that let players compete for cities built on one or two plots with only appearance stickers, it can be said that "Return to Empire" has truly created a free and realistic three-dimensional battlefield on the large map.
In the time dimension, a truly instantaneous war experience is realized.
Of course, the freedom of "living strategy" is not only limited to the change of battlefield space, but also reflected in the real-time marching gameplay of "Return to Empire".
Intuitively, the current "free march" of many strategy games, in fact, did not get rid of the shackles of "walking the grid", although the player can make some adjustments to the marching route, but the range of movement of the troops will be limited by physical strength, and the final battle often only occurs in a moment, the player can only retaliate against the pre-war strategy provided by the system.
In contrast, Return to the Empire really allows troops to move freely on the large map, clicking on any of the troops that are out to drag to a specific location, and will immediately start marching, and only when attacking a specific object, the troops will incur physical exertion.
This design means a significant increase in the mobility of the troops. Players can move flexibly like RTS games, cooperate with allies to adjust the formation to form a circle, or detour back behind the enemy to attack them unprepared... Tactics such as enticing the enemy to go deep, dividing the troops into three roads, and copying two breads also really have the possibility of landing.
If you make reasonable use of the various terrains of the game's large map, you can also bring more offensive and defensive strategies according to local conditions. For example, combined with the shade of the woods, ambushes are set up on the opponent's marching route, and Leng Buding suddenly launches a sneak attack to statically damage the opponent's living forces. This tactic, which is a bit like the "squat grass" in MOBA games, rarely appears in past strategy mobile games.
It is worth mentioning that the master of each unit will have skills that can be actively released (the game also provides the option to automatically release skills), some skills can deal range damage in a certain direction, some can provide continuous buffs for troops, and some can interrupt the enemy master's skill release or cause the enemy troops to stun... In the alliance war of flexible team pulling and pulling, if certain skills are released at the right time, players have the opportunity to win more with less and win strong with weak, and turn the tide of the war at key moments.
"Living tactics" greatly enriched the conduct of war
In GameLook's view, these gameplay designs add infinite variables to the choice of in-game war behavior, greatly expand the space of war strategy, enhance the sense of substitution, and maximize the initiative of "people", so that different types of players can play their role in the alliance battle, and improve the polarized experience of the strong brainless value crushing and the weak acting as cannon fodder in the past strategy mobile games.
Originating from the innovation of time and space dimensions, on the basis of restoring the real war strategy dimension, the in-game gameplay has been three-dimensionally upgraded, which jointly supports the unique "living strategy" game experience of "Return to Empire".
It is not difficult to find that in the past, the emphasis on "reality" in SLG mobile games only stayed in real-time weather, day and night seasonal changes, terrain obstacles such as mountains and rivers, and moving different distances to combat would consume the corresponding time and physical strength.
On the basis of restoring the "shape", "Return to the Empire" continues to restore the "god" of real war through the characteristic gameplay of real-time marching on the large map, three-dimensional city attack and defense, etc., fully extending the strategic dimension of the game, not only creating a realistic and vivid three-dimensional battlefield, but also releasing the player's imagination space, so that the strategy is truly "alive".
Shaping the Hard Quality "Living Battlefield"
What also impressed GameLook in the test was the hard quality "living battlefield" of "Return to the Empire", which made the sense of substitution between the battlefield and the world truly realized.
In fact, with the diversification of SLG players in recent years, strategic products have paid more and more attention to the visual presentation of the combat process and battlefield. But in fact, most of the current SLG mobile game characters still use the form of LIVE 2D, and the warriors and soldiers in "Return to the Empire" use high-definition realistic style 3D modeling. While the character armor and costumes are full of texture, they also lose the pattern details with the characteristics of the camp, combined with the smooth movements of the real-life motion capture technology, and the crushing artistic expression of the game can be seen just from the dynamic display of the hero.
Once inside the game, it's hard not to be amazed by the lifelike battlefield. Although the domestic SLG mobile games have generally carried out 3D upgrades in the past two years, the battlefields of most games still lack enough realism at the microscopic level, while "Return to the Empire" meticulously restores the real terrain such as plains, hills, deserts, rivers, and oceans, and the vivid details are displayed under the macro perspective, deeply rendering the battlefield atmosphere, and greatly improving the player's sense of substitution at the visual level.
The game also visually shows the architectural styles of different factions and the differentiated performance of the classes. Players can change the city buildings to Chinese-style pavilions with carved beams and paintings or Frankish buildings with towering minarets according to their own preferences, and different factions have their own characteristic attribute bonuses and characteristic classes, and have different emphases on development ideas. These designs, in the current Three Kingdoms theme of the strategic mobile game market, can also bring different feelings to players who love strategy games.
A closer look at the graphics quality of "Return to Empire" is not only because the game uses 3D engine realism, PBR rendering, and even infrared optical motion capture, which have rarely been used in the SLG category in the past, but also because Xbox Game Studios as a consultant, the continuous guidance for restoring the taste of empire, and the help of Craig Mullins, the artistic visual consultant of "Return to Empire" and the "father of CG painting", who has created a lot of players for the "Age of Empires" classic series. Original illustrations that practitioners relish.
In the illustration for "Return to The Empire", Craig Mullins uses the highly generalized blocks and rich colors that he is best at to create the light and shadow effects of the picture, blending traditional and technological creation methods, and drawing inspiration from the multicultural living environment to interpret the most realistic Chinese and foreign hero images in the game.
"Return to Empire" is also based on the gene of the game's high-quality art, and cooperated with the game's top art professional competition GGAC to launch a creation competition to attract more high-quality artists around the world to participate in the discussion of art style, and continue to break through the upper limit of picture quality. Behind this design, it is also through the visual level to render the most exciting strategic war atmosphere, so as to attract more players' attention.
Strategic freedom, or SLG's future trend of breaking the limits
Since a number of SLG products gathered at the top of the iOS best-seller list in 2020, this classic category has truly broken the encirclement of emerging categories such as the second dimension and has become more and more favored by peers and players.
This grand situation is not difficult to understand, looking back at the development process of the SLG category, it can be found that from COK-like to sloppy-like, such products have gradually got rid of the ancient impression of pure numerical competition, and strategic freedom has become the experience element that more and more SLG players focus on.
Especially as the strategy player group becomes more and more diverse, they are no longer satisfied with the pure numerical competition of past products, but instead pursue a more flexible and free strategic gameplay design in the game. The new strategic products that have risen in recent years are often new attempts in terms of strategic freedom.
GameLook found that in the past two years, the combination of the gameplay characteristics of classic real-time strategy games and the strategy mobile game method has become a breakthrough for many manufacturers to focus on exploration, the typical of which is this "Return to the Empire".
In cooperation with Xbox Game Studios, the product selectively draws inspiration from classic real-time strategy games, innovates the player's strategic experience through the "living strategy" design in the dimension of time and space, and raises the strategic freedom of the SLG category to a new height; while continuing to polish the depth of strategy, the game has also built a new benchmark in the picture quality dimension, bringing the category competition into a new stage of both strategic and visual quality.
The above factors have also made "Return to the Empire" gain the recognition of many players in the past tests, some players have bluntly expressed their love for the quality and strategy of the game: "the details are vivid, the hair and skin are real, and the art is powerful"; and the details party sighed: "The design of the game's city is alive, and the villagers who can zoom in can also see the working villagers." ”
GameLook mentioned in last year's report that despite fierce product competition, strategic categories still have the potential to appear blockbuster new products.
Whether it is from the test experience of GameLook or the feedback of actual players, "Return to Empire", which innovates the existing strategy gameplay, undoubtedly has the potential to break through. It is foreseeable that "Return to Empire" will inevitably break the existing SLG category in the future, which is difficult not to look forward to the market performance of the game when it is officially launched.
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GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
Global vision / depth is material