"Each character adds love and soul. I can feel that the producers really value the culture of their own country, and now I am interested in that culture. ”
"Goddess Split Is the most crying game clip I've ever cried. Is this a unique Chinese singing voice? So beautiful! ”
These two comments are from American and Japanese gamers. The "Goddess Splitting View" mentioned in the review is a video of opera singing in a game developed by a local company in Shanghai.
"Qu Gao may not be unknown to everyone, but he has his own voice and clear words." The unique drama sung by the game characters full of Chinese style, singing and sighing, laughing and laughing, set off a wave of enthusiasm on overseas social platforms.
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The wonderful collision of traditional arts and video games, opera singing segments and overseas players has released new energy of Shanghai's digital economy, and the overseas influence of China's digital economy is increasing day by day.
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A grind for 3 years, omni-channel force in the global market
Miha you, a local company that grew up and incubated from a dormitory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, created an open-world adventure game, Original God. In the past year since its launch, it has topped the best-seller list in 68 countries and regions.
On Youtube, one foreign player commented: "It's shocking that the sheer amount of design detail involved in the creative process not only covers characters and monsters, but even the entire scene." The whole team brought us this beautiful game through a long production polish. ”
Initially, Mihayou planned to spend two years with a team of 150 people to complete the production of "Original God", and was ready to launch on all platforms such as mobile phones, computers, and consoles, but the development difficulty of the open world far exceeded expectations, and finally after 3 and a half years from the establishment of the project to the release, the R & D team when the game was launched exceeded 400 people, and by the end of 2020, the research and development cost of the entire game project has exceeded 100 million US dollars.
Today, that number is constantly being refreshed. MihaYou has to update the version every 6 weeks, and this year's newly launched character "Yunyo" has been 3D production as early as 2018, and then carefully polished and iterated many times.
"Technology has long been engraved in the dna of Mihayou's products. When Miha Tours was founded, we had a slogan, 'Techno House Saves the World'. Our cartoon rendering technology has always maintained a leading position in the hand parade industry. Liu Wei, founder and president of Shanghai Mihayou Network Technology Co., Ltd., said that 3 years ago, Mihayou set up a "reverse entropy" research team, on the one hand, to learn and catch up with the industrialization level of 3A (high cost, high volume, high quality) level manufacturers, on the other hand, to continuously explore and research new technologies. Some original technologies and tools have been explored and applied in the Protosthesis project. For example, in order to improve the intuitiveness and accuracy of production, the production team and the tool team jointly developed a tool that can synchronize images with the engine in real time, helping designers to observe the final visual effects in the real game environment in time while modifying the model. Technology optimization drastically reduces the cost of communication and modification, making the subsequent design and production process more efficient and accurate.
The thousand mountains towering and the mist-shrouded Zhangjiajie blend into the scene of the glass moon
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One scene and one song, the charm of traditional culture crosses the mountains and seas
Mihayou's team is young. This group of young people, who love the second dimension, also love the landscape and traditional culture of the motherland.
As an open-world game, "Original God" is set in 7 city-states with different characteristics, different natural features and humanistic styles, of which the prototype of "Liyue" is full of oriental meaning. The first stop, "Hagi Flower Island", with a large sea of flowers born with water and a looming Stone Forest of Shifeng, wants to express the aesthetic mood of "Maple Leaf Hagi Flower Autumn", which is freehand and free, and is the designer's fantasy carrier for "Chinese beauty", "hometown beauty" and "land beauty".
The terrain of Liyue is taken from Huanglong, Zhangjiajie and Guilin. This digital beauty based on the real Natural Landscape of China is beautiful and full of charm for both Chinese and overseas players. Many foreign players know the regional "Huaguang Forest" in the game "Original God", and there is exactly the same place in reality, and they all express their hope to go to Zhangjiajie to punch in the field.
Huanglong's iconic calcified waterfall is the prototype of the Liyue Huahua Pond
Musically, the fusion of East and West, the collision of tradition and modernity is even more sparkly. The theme music of "Original God" invites the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and folk music players to perform together. At the beginning of the year, the opera singing section "Goddess Split View" performed by the new character "Yunyan" of "Original God" broke the circle of fire. The project team invited voice actor He Wenxiao and professional opera performer Yang Yang, who interpreted the character's lines and singing segments respectively, and passed on the tension of the opera to the players as much as possible.
This video of only 2 minutes and 49 seconds long, sung by game characters singing traditional opera, has made many players at home and abroad addicted. Artists in the opera circle began to compose a second time about it, covering their own versions of "Goddess Splitting View". Kunqu version, Yue opera version, Huangmei opera version, Yu opera version, Sichuan opera version, Pingtan version, etc., various versions are colorful.
During the Spring Festival, more than 700,000 overseas netizens watched the "Original God" "Ying Chun HuaZhang" concert held by Mihayou through social platforms, and its performance repertoire has rich traditional Chinese music elements, such as guzheng, pipa, flute, erhu and other traditional folk music. The "Goddess Split" song also received 4.3 million views on YouTube.
"Yuan Shen" was translated into many Chinese and distributed worldwide, but the parts involving Chinese opera music were all dubbed Chinese, and the characters in the Liyue region of the game also insisted on using Chinese names instead of English names, which made overseas players set off a wave of learning Hanyu Pinyin.
Liyue Wangshu Inn combines the architectural features of Guilin, where the creation of Hagi Huazhou was originally inspired by the landscape of Guilin
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Based on cultural creativity, global talents are used by me
Will players like traditional opera singing segments? Will overseas markets be dissatisfied? For Miha You, who wants to conquer the global market, singing with the "cloud viola" that has been polished for 3 years is a bit of a risky decision.
But the team never hesitated. "Because it is not to cater to the market and integrate a certain cultural element into the product, but the traditional culture is the background of the product." Based on the elements of opera, "Goddess Splitting" interprets traditional content in an innovative form to arouse the audience's enthusiasm for traditional culture. ”
The talents recruited by Mihayou in china need to have a global vision and an international mindset. "Our core team comes from top universities and well-known technology companies around the world. More than half of the fresh graduates who join Miha Tour now have an international background, but at the same time, he must also have strong cultural self-confidence, self-confidence and love, which will support us to continuously innovate content and show the charm of traditional culture to users around the world in a new way. ”
Liu Wei, a "technical house" who graduated from the Computer Department of Jiaotong University, is still fighting in the front line of technology, playing games every day and exploring in the open world. "70 percent of the team is the one who does R&D. We must have the confidence to participate in global competition, and we must continue to explore and maintain a leading position in technology. As long as you invest enough time to focus on this, you have the opportunity to make breakthroughs in the field of segmentation. ”
Liu Wei stressed that Mihayou began to expand its global business as early as 2015. "Now in addition to the headquarters in Xuhui, Shanghai, we have our own branches or R&D centers in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Canada and the United States to attract global scientific research talents, build industrial pipelines, and improve product quality and production efficiency."
In Liu Wei's view, Mihayou has never been a simple game company. "Our positioning is to take root in Shanghai, lay out the world, develop the whole industry chain, and fly with both wings of science and technology."
Around the original IP, Mihayou is building a whole industry chain covering animation, comics, games, music, novels and animation peripherals. "In the past 10 years, Mihayou has only made 3 product lines, each with a long life cycle, and due to the development of the whole industry chain, the sustainable development ability of the product is very strong."
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Test the waters of the meta-universe and explore the new ecology of the digital economy
At the end of last year, "Original God" won the 2021 Best Mobile Game Award at The Game Awards, known as the "Oscar of the Game Industry", which is also the first original IP game developed by a Chinese development team to receive this honor.
Once upon a time, chinese players played games from world-class game manufacturers in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea, such as Blizzard, Ubisoft, Nintendo, and Sony.
But now, the "Original God" and "Awakening of All Nations" on overseas players' mobile phones are all from Shanghai companies. With the mobile Internet, cloud computing and other technologies, Chinese enterprises represented by Mihayou are rapidly realizing the globalization of game products and breaking through the overseas game market.
The increase in the awareness of Chinese cultural IP overseas, the improvement of the self-research strength of Shanghai game enterprises, and the escort of relevant policies in Shanghai have jointly promoted the Shanghai game industry to stand out in the global market.
And Mihayou's ambitions aren't just games. The open world created by Protosthesis is, in a sense, the prototype of the metaverse. Games have a lot of commercial experience in basic technologies such as communications, cloud computing, and graphics processing. The game naturally has the genes to create a metacosm, providing fertile soil for the birth of the metacosm. Not long ago, Miha Tours launched the forward-looking brand HoYoverse, which aims to create and deliver immersive virtual world experiences to players around the world through a variety of entertainment services. "We will continue to conduct technology research and continue to innovate in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and industrialization capabilities to ensure that enough content is created to meet the expectations of players around the world for the virtual world experience."
Shanghai is accelerating the layout of a new track of the digital economy, closely following the digital transformation of the city, laying out a new track of the meta-universe, developing application scenarios, and cultivating key enterprises. By 2023, Shanghai will strive to break through more than 100 key technologies, cultivate more than 100 intelligent hardware products, introduce more than 100 new-generation Internet enterprises and leading digital economy enterprises, and create more than 50 traffic enterprises with a market value of more than 10 billion yuan. In the new track of the meta-universe, Shanghai has also gathered about 50% of the country's 5G talents, 40% of the chip talents and 30% of the AI talents, the meta-universe related industries are prosperous, the industrial chain layout is perfect, and the enterprises represented by Mihayou are accelerating the industrial "meta-universe" layout.
New People's Eye Studio
Author | Ye Wei
Edit | Gu Yingying