On March 10, a official certified account called "Ark of Tomorrow: The End" (hereinafter referred to as "The End") appeared quietly on the social platforms such as Weibo, and no content was posted on the account, and the valid information was only an avatar with a LOGO and the ID of "The End".
Then, after the netizens' Shunteng touched the melon, it was found that not only on the domestic platform, Eagle Point also registered the official authentication account of "The End of the End" in different regions on major overseas social platforms. This Ark IP new work instantly ignited the passion of players at home and abroad, some people said that it was animation, some people said that it was a new tour, but there was no definite answer.
With a period of fermentation, on March 16, the official account finally released the first pilot trailer PV. On the same day, the official website of "The End" was also launched, opening a countdown page that pointed to 11 o'clock on March 18, and the game's reservation page also revealed the identity of "The End" as a new tour of the "Ark of Tomorrow" series.
However, in the pilot PV, a 35-second "trailer in the trailer" video is mostly a pattern of unknown significance and two scenes that have been modeled, which is elusive, and the "boat scientists" who see this scene begin to be uneasy. "Boat scholars" out!
During that time, the PV of "End of The End" has become the most widely discussed topic among players. Players who have played "Ark of Tomorrow" know that its game plot has a huge amount of content, but it has always been very obscure and fragmented, and there are a lot of details buried in the game and Easter egg foreshadowing, and there is a certain threshold for ordinary players to clearly understand the background and world view of the story.
Picture source B station Ark player "handsome guy Isis buy pants"
The existence of "boat scholars" helps ordinary players solve this problem, they are keen to dig up the hidden information of the story in the game, extract and integrate all the plots and information in the operator files, piece together a complete story line, and help ordinary players intuitively understand the background of the story. In China, there is a creator organization jointly established by the Egyptian Research Institute and the Valletta Society, which is a "boat scholar", and they are indispensable to the popularization and dissemination of the background of the story of "Ark of Tomorrow".
The first exposure of "The End" PV continues the tradition of "Riddle Man" and once again arouses the carnival of "boat scholars" around the world. For example, the domestic B station UP master "Y5neKO", he crawled keyword information from the front-end source code meta tag, and found several keywords related to the game, such as Terminal, Tawei, light science fiction, 3D real-time strategy RPG, etc.
Then the video is imported into the PR for frame-by-frame analysis, replacing the color scale, and analyzing whether the animation of the LOGO can form a two-dimensional code, etc., in an attempt to find a little clue from it.
Foreign "boat scholars" are not idle, and there are even more scholars who use the knowledge points of geometric analysis to analyze the contour topographic map at the beginning.
Image source "Youkensha"
Although in the end, they could not dig out some earth-shattering secrets from the pilot PV of this half-minute, but this spontaneous mobilization of puzzle solving activities brought a very high degree of discussion heat to the "End of the End" during this time, and in a short period of time, it rushed to the first hot search of the B station, and Weibo and forums were full of topics related to "The End". As of today, the video views of the concept CG have risen to 3.81 million, which has been ridiculed by players as a "teaser's trailer PV" and successfully warmed up the main course in advance.
With the countdown page pointing to 0, the game trailer CG and real machine demo content officially brought by "End of The End" on March 18 far exceeded the pilot PV, and the research enthusiasm of "Boat Scholars" rose to a new peak again, so what can be seen in the first concept CG video and real machine demonstration released by "End of The End"?
Or the "boat smell" of that eagle horn
"Ark of Tomorrow" brilliant art style in the domestic two-dimensional mobile game market has long been advertised as the existence of the first echelon, in order to give "Tomorrow's Ark" this independent and diverse aesthetic style to a name, players call it "Boat Flavor", and then the coverage of "Boat Flavor" is more extensive, extending to music, text content and other fields, and as a series of new works "End of the End" continues the "Ark of Tomorrow" world view at the same time, the entire style is also full of familiar "Boat Flavor".
The main stage of "End of the End" will no longer be the familiar "Terra Continent", but a world called "Tavira", which can be seen from the space technology at the beginning of the film and the higher level of technology compared to the "Ark of Tomorrow" era, which is not in the same timeline as "Tomorrow's Ark". The concept PV of "The End" still follows the unique art style of Eagle Horn, the desert with wind and sand, the color scheme based on yellow and black is very industrial, and a smell of wasteland of the end of the world comes to the face, and it is inevitable to see from the visual point of view that the work involves the theme of war, the end of the world, and science fiction.
In the design of the building, the grotesque shape of the building structure is full of industrial style and light science fiction wind, which contrasts with the desert of the former, and the thick wasteland science fiction wind brings a strong visual sensory impact to the player.
In addition, the CG clips are broadcast in 3D throughout the process, and with an off-site monologue, a short two-minute video can bring players deep memory points. The motorcycles that shuttle through the convoy, the basement with dark red lights, the timely background music that greatly mobilizes nervous emotions, the mysterious plot and the portrayal of indoor and outdoor details have all aroused the strong desire of "boat scholars".
Among them, the UI displayed in the real machine demonstration is also eye-catching. Players through the bracelet device to develop a pair of technology-filled stereoscopic 3D projection, there is no traditional two-dimensional mobile game of the Kanban lady, but by the contour map occupies the center, sci-fi UI interface and flat design and "Ark of Tomorrow" has the same magic.
In terms of character design, the characters of the protagonist group of this work still inherit the setting of the half-beast sub-person, the protagonist team that appears in the concept CG at present is only 3 people, the character's costume color is mostly based on black and white, and the embellishment design of the wear and accessories continues the fashion sense of functional wind and industrial style, and can clearly feel the consistent artistic characteristics of Eagle Horn in the design of the two-dimensional character.
The composition, style, and even theme of the game CG continue the consistent high-level standards of Eagle Horn, and are still the "boat flavor" we know. However, compared with the art style and theme that can be intuitively felt, players are more expectant of the vague gameplay explanation of "End Of The End". 3D real-time strategy RPG gameplay
For the gameplay of "The End", the official definition of its gameplay as "3D real-time strategy RPG", real-time system, strategy, RPG, for a while can not imagine what kind of gameplay these three will be combined together, and this gameplay feature is not directly displayed in the real machine demonstration. The definition of "real-time strategy RPG" in "End Of The End" gives people a feeling of RTS gameplay similar to "Warcraft" and "StarCraft", but this type of game is difficult to get a good experience on mobile platforms, and the final real-life screen demonstration seems to break this conjecture. In the concept PV, there is a picture and monologue that target the term "integrated industrial system", the integrated industrial building system that rises from the ground, the large industrial building complex, and the golden line connecting the various infrastructures, which may mean that infrastructure and simulated operation will be one of the core gameplay of the game.
At the same time, the procurement options on the right side of the UI interface, the name of the factory marked in the lower left corner, and the icons of electricity and resources are similar to the simulated business game, and the industrial system and resource projects inevitably associate it with the simulated business game.
In addition, maps with marked contours indicate that there will be large map exploration content, but do not mean that they are linked to the open world. It's worth noting that the "Deploy" option in the middle section may be used for a similar role in determining level selection, meaning that Endgame will most likely not be an open world, or it may be a box game.
At present, there is not much scene content shown in the real machine demonstration, but the scene composition presented is very rich, the staggered terrain is poor, the complete biological ecosystem, the player explores in the scene in the form of a squad, one of which demonstrates the operation of the character to avoid the mechanism, which is enough to see that there will be many scene interaction events in the exploration area.
In terms of combat system, the real machine demonstration is not shown, from the perspective of the timing screen to make real-time action of the type of battle seems to be a bit awkward, but today's real-time system is not necessarily only reflected in the same set of operations, such as "Lesha's Alchemy Workshop" similar gameplay, in the exploration phase can be free exploration action, and when entering the combat state is another set of different set of combat operation logic.
In conclusion, under the bold speculation, the gameplay of "The End" may involve RPG, third-person world exploration, and simulated management, obtain resources through map exploration, and then invest in the construction of base production and operation, and the battle is a semi-real-time operation similar to the above-mentioned "Lesha's Alchemy Workshop". It can only be said that the "big cake" thrown by Eagle Horn this time can arouse the curiosity of players from all aspects. epilogue:
"End of The End" continues the unique visual style of "Ark of Tomorrow", from the transformation of 2.5D to 3D, from two-dimensional tower defense to real-time strategy RPG, Eagle Horn's every action is constantly breaking through innovation, from which to see another possibility of Ark IP.
At present, the game is still in its early stages, and it will log on to PCs and mobile platforms in the future. The official website officially began to recruit project personnel on March 18, and now the content of the preview CG and real machine demonstration has given players a forced injection, perhaps in the future, "The End" will be another phenomenon product of Eagle Horn.