Recently, the AAA masterpiece "Eldon's Ring of Law" launched by the well-known game producer Hidego Miyazaki has swept the world and has nearly full scores on major game rating websites. Because "Eldon" has the meaning of the elder in English, this game is jokingly called "Old Man Ring" by domestic netizens, and in Station B, "Old Man Ring" has also become a popular theme for the game UP master.
Although it is a Japanese game, the game presents a strong European medieval style, which is also the guarantee that the game can be marketed worldwide. It is reported that George Martin, a well-known writer and screenwriter who created "A Song of Ice and Fire", participated in the screenwriting of the game. Can you ask a big-name film and television screenwriter to create a high-quality game?
Before the puzzle is finished, I don't know what the story is
During the stay-at-home period, the citizen Xiao Lei has a new identity - "Fader", which is the protagonist of the game "Eldon's Circle of Law". In the game, people live in a place called "Junction", where the faded person is banished because he has not been blessed by the Golden Tree of "Junction", but now that the Golden Tree has lost its ability to bless, he needs to come and save it.
"The first NPC I met (non-player character) mysteriously said to me: Follow the light..." Little Ray saw a light faintly facing one direction, which was his only guide when he first came to this world, and the rest of the place was pitch black. Watch your fingers. The NPC said mysteriously, as if to remind him of the danger ahead.
Without clear mission guidance, the plot is fragmented and scattered in various corners of the open world, which is a major feature of the "Soul System" game. "Eldon's Ring of Law" producer Hidetaka Miyazaki was the founder of the "Soul System" at that time. In the game he made, Dark Souls, the story is not told through the characters, but hidden in each scene design, attack methods and props, and what kind of story can be seen depends on each person's ability to find information and cognitive level.
"Knowing only one direction in such a large map will force you to involuntarily walk around the map and actively explore the plot information, but it also brings a problem." Xiao Lei found that the fragmented narrative of the soul game is like a puzzle, although the player gets a lot of puzzle pieces, but until the puzzle is finished, there is no way to know what the puzzle draws. Even though he's been playing for nearly 100 hours, he still doesn't understand what The Ring of Eldon is telling.
In the eyes of many people, the high popularity and reputation of "Eldon's French Ring" in the world is due to the cooperation of Hidetaka Miyazaki and George Martin, author and screenwriter of "A Song of Ice and Fire". George Martin said in a 2021 interview with the media that he mainly wrote the backstory for Eldon's Ring of Law, which was completed a few years ago. "This kind of game is like a movie, and the production cycle is generally longer. They want to learn fantasy and science fiction, focusing on building the worldview of games. ”
As Martin says, in Eldon's Ring of Law, not only the characters and the storyline, but also the setting are important. By building an open world with rich elements, players can get pleasure in exploration even if they don't know the story. "In my opinion, the game has a high rating and has little to do with the story. The reason I keep playing comes from the worldview and the fun of the map itself. Little Ray said.
There are young screenwriters in the game who have "industry opportunities"
At present, there are many film and game linkages. Shi Yun, a senior lecturer at the Vancouver Film Academy in Shanghai, believes that games and film and television narratives are different, and if the screenwriters themselves are not familiar with games, it is difficult to control two different narrative methods. Like "Eldon's Law Ring", it is more feasible for the film and television screenwriter to build the story framework and the game screenwriter to fill in the specific content.
In foreign countries, there are "cross-media narrative" professional fields, such as "Star Wars" involves movies, games, comics and other media types, and screenwriters also need to cross between various genres. "Cross-media storytelling requires building a universe and planning ahead how to complement, connect, and deepen stories across genres." Shi Yun believes that the "IP" that has become popular in China in recent years is actually developing in the direction of cross-media narrative, but practitioners are often pulled by the market and capital, and there are phenomena such as film and television screenwriters writing scripts killing, script killing screenwriters writing games, and lacking "overall universe" planning.
With the strengthening of the trend of high-quality games in recent years, more and more games have movie-level quality, and there is also more demand for film and television talents. Recently, Shanghai Wenying cooperated with Xiaoguo Culture and Lilith Games to open a script killing screenwriting training camp, and Lin Weishun, a senior technical planner of Lilith Games who came to teach, said, "I hope to find a good story here." ”
"Professional film and television screenwriters have strong ability to structure the story, which can theoretically bring improvements to the quality of content to the game, but the premise is to understand the game." Shi Yun is also responsible for the career planning class of the screenwriting major, and she will tell the students that there are many subdivisions of screenwriting at present, and popular short videos, script killing, games and other fields can become their career choices.
"For the traditional film and television drama industry, young screenwriters who have just come out of colleges and universities need to slowly understand, familiarize themselves with, and temper, which requires a period of growth, and the length is difficult to say, but in the field of games, they may have advantages." Because they are usually more familiar with the game context and short video context, so directly engaged in the emerging segments of the screenwriter, such as games, short videos, etc., may be seen faster, and even become famous in one fell swoop, which is also the so-called 'industry opportunity'. Shi Yun said.