Despite the onslaught of various blockbusters since February, including phenomenal works such as Eldon's Ring of Law, the number of people online for Fear of Famine has maintained a firm upward curve. In addition to the excellent game content, it is also related to the fact that it has a certain social game element in it.
The simplest and most core original intention of the werewolf killing game derived from the board game is social. I think back to when I first came into contact with werewolves to kill, I was led into the pit by my friends, and when I had time, I would play a few rounds, and it was easy to stay up all night. At that time, being a werewolf with friends, Ming Xiu Zhan Dao darkened Chen Cang, and even felt that he had grasped the situation, and the result was naturally educated by the old players, but the old players at that time were still willing to take care of the new people, and the game was also very patient.
"What is a barbed wolf?"
"A barbed wolf is a wolf that explodes the identity of a teammate's werewolf."
The presentation phase is all about the basic questions asked.
But later, as the game content becomes more and more abundant, newcomer players need to understand more and more nouns, not to mention those old players who say logical clichés, genre learning "police badge stream", "position science", "gold mercury water", etc., often a game of werewolf killing and playing, just these obscure terms are listening to the clouds and fog, and the game experience is even more shadowless.
Redundant and complicated rules of black talk not only make new people look away, many old players also feel that the head is big, in my opinion, this is also the main reason why domestic werewolf killing quickly fell silent after a short period of time out of the circle. But if you want to have some experience in werewolf killing, you have to understand these things.
As the hottest werewolf killing game at present, "Fear of Famine" has only been released for less than two months, and it has also developed its own set of rules.
Unsound mechanics and player "village rules"
"Fear of Famine" has a very complicated survival element compared to some werewolf killing games with "just do it" missions. A large part of the game's flow is related to survival, where players need to eat, dress warmly, and arm themselves before protecting the ocean-going ship to the end. In terms of the "black words" of werewolves killing players, in "Fear of Famine", players grab rounds by relying on game understanding and operational proficiency during survival challenges.
This also makes the game, although it seems to be simple rules, it is actually not so easy to hand. First of all, the game's novice tutorial to carry a small pot, it only teaches the player some basic operations, but such a short tutorial is not enough for the player to understand the game. So much so that although I was already a veteran player of werewolf killing, I still didn't understand anything when I first started playing Famine fear.
At the beginning of a game, players used to collect coal in one place and give it to the engineer for resource scheduling. If you play a good person, you can listen to your teammates and hand over coal to collect supplies, but werewolf players are different. At this time, many people will teach you to "press C to hand over coal", if there is a werewolf who believes the advice of the old player, then press c to hand over not coal, but will call up the knife used to release the skill, completely exposing the identity.
（？）
The first time I met someone who said "press C for coal" and just played nice guys, perfectly avoiding harm (laughs). In fact, this kind of small trap on the key has actually been around for a long time, and players familiar with online games may have sniffed out a smell of déjà vu: in the early years, in "League of Legends" and "CS:GO", there was a classic old terrier of pressing "alt+f4" to refresh the skill (in fact, it was a shutdown program).
But behind this more joyful terrier, there are actually some players who are controversial in it.
In Fear of Famine, if the good guy camp wants to win, it has to rush to the end of the ship, so it is more important to keep the ship at full speed. At the beginning of the game, each person will have a piece of coal, 8 pieces of coal can just make the ship to full load speed, so in order to avoid the wasted time of 8 people going to coal together, it is a good way to give coal to the engineer.
Importantly, doing so also monitors who doesn't want to add coal — he's a werewolf.
From the perspective of a good guy, of course, this is fine, but then I played werewolf and found another way of thinking: since the werewolf's goal is to sabotage the expedition, can I not hand over the coal from the beginning, and throw my own coal into the sea? Or choose an engineer and deceive 8 people into turning their heads and jumping into the sea...
Yang Coal Boy
This is completely fine from the game mechanics, but after asking the werewolf teammates, the answer is not good: throwing coal at the beginning makes it difficult for good people to survive, and it is easy to reach the end, whether good people or werewolves have no game experience, so there is a "start can not dirty coal" rule among some players.
Of course, there are more than one rules set by the player.
Good guys are weak in the early stages, but it is necessary to go out to collect materials, and it is easy to accidentally be targeted by werewolf players, and then chased and killed by the ghouls released by werewolves. Only when you have saved enough passwords to open the box and get a big gun and have a firepower advantage, can good people export their evil spirits.
Once, when playing cook, he beat seals to get meat and open boxes to pick up resources, and finally waited until he could get a big gun, but he was stopped by his teammates: "We decided not to hit the wolf with a big gun." ”
what? Don't hold a gun?
I had ten thousand question marks in my mind at that time, if it weren't for the fact that both wolves knew that they had entered the wolf's den, I slowly understood that this was a kind of "tacit understanding" of the players: in order to take care of the werewolf game experience, the good people gave up the big gun and chose the most difficult road to fight the werewolf only with a bow and arrow...
But if there are rules, there must be people who do not recognize the rules, just as many people in the traditional werewolf kill do not feel that "the prophet must be on the police", they feel that the "rules" is some kind of destruction of the playability of the game. Therefore, in the Tieba and Steam communities, it is often seen that there are two factions of players arguing, one side thinks that throwing coal at the beginning is the goal of completing the werewolf's sabotage expedition, which is normal game behavior, and the other side is against doing so.
In fact, these differences between players, "yang coal" or "no yang coal", "take the gun" or "do not take the gun", trace back to the source or the players' goals are different, some people want to win, some people do not care so much about winning or losing; and in many games, some players are very high-level, but some players are still cute...
A large part of the reason for this result is also due to the game itself: "Fear of Famine" as a small-scale work with more than 60,000 online users on the Steam platform (30,000 in the usual light 2), and it is an online game, until now there is no suitable matching mechanism, or use the old mode of joining the online room to enter the game. The imbalance between the strong werewolves in the game but the weak in the later stages also makes the experience of different players more different.
"Can't kill bears with bugs"
Of course, there are some rules because of bugs in the game. As we all know, bugs are really a topic that every game can't avoid, but for the two different game types of single-player and multiplayer, the impact of bugs is still very different.
Just when you are immersed in the fantasy world created by the game developer, but suddenly encounter the situation of "character wearing a mold" and "texture collapse", which is really unpleasant. But for single-player gamers, the bug is actually not too big a thing, as long as it is not like the famous "Black Dream" bug of cyberpunk 2077, which is so serious that it is impossible to play the game at all; if a bug can make the brushing faster / fighting monsters becomes simple, such as the suffering game "Only Wolf" can hit the boss can card some terrain bugs, the newly released "Elden Ring of Law" can repeatedly brush crows, etc., it is even more popular for players.
However, for multiplayer games, especially competitive games, some bugs appear that affect the game experience of both players.
Take the card bear bug in Fear of Famine: the good guy camp needs to kill the bears in the wild, get nitroglycerin and blow up the iceberg, so that the ship can be navigated smoothly. The difficulty of the game is that this process of killing bears is generally in the middle and late stages of the game process, when the werewolves have developed, and it is more difficult for good people to kill bears under the secret destruction of werewolves. But through the card bug, the hunter player can kill the bear alone early, shortening the original 20-minute game flow by half, and the werewolf player has no way to stop it (the card bear's bug point can also be the ghoul recruited by the werewolf), and can only watch the good guy camp win.
Hit the bear bug bit
This kind of gameplay is almost miserable for werewolf players. Obviously there is no problem with playing, even developing very well, the hunter on the other side will fail to operate on his own, which is too unfair. This smoothly leads to a second established rule: "You can't kill bears with bugs." ”
In addition to the bug of killing bears, the game can also use the slow speed of bears in the water to seduce bears to break the ice, and then smash them with props; there is also "butterfly swimming" in the water, which can reduce the reduction of the warmth value in the water, these bugs will more or less affect the progress of the game, and the rules set by players are also very helpless.
At last
In fact, a large part of the attraction of traditional werewolf killing is to provide a fun social framework (the game process of constantly "killing", discussing, voting), so that players can continue to communicate and interact, and participants can experience the fun of social interaction without having to bear the burden of finding and answering calls in pure chat social.
Now werewolf killing games such as "Fear of Famine" have more or less reduced some reasoning/social attributes, but pay more attention to the playability of the game, which is not a problem in itself, but they add other game elements at the same time, but also left a lot of rules, mechanics loopholes, which makes players have to rely on their tacit understanding, rules to improve the game experience.
In my opinion, werewolf killing genre games such as "Fear of Famine" are actually very distinct from other online games. Because the whole process is full of people-to-people exchanges and interactions, it will naturally promote community settlements, and it will naturally bring out batches of "village rules". How to better balance the needs of players, especially between new and old players, under the shroud of the community atmosphere, is what Digital Confectioners Studios needs to consider next. After all, relying only on the rules and regulations set by the player, many simple things often become complicated. At the very least, let's refine the tutorial first, right?