Over the years, Tencent has been continuously laying out the SLG track, and will come up with 1-3 new products almost every year.
In addition to the dozen or so models that continue to operate on the table, Tencent also has a number of SLG projects in research, including agents and self-research. Whether it is from the absolute number of product deployments, or the strategy of external cooperation and internal self-development, it can be seen that Tencent attaches great importance to the SLG track.
"Return to The Empire", which was released on March 29, is the latest reflection of Tencent Tianmei on the SLG track after years of precipitation. And the direction they explore is what the product Slogan says: make the strategy come alive.
What is "living"?
Now in the slogan of the SLG category, the real feature is repeatedly emphasized. More and more products are refining the combat performance, using weather, terrain, and fog to restore the real ancient war atmosphere in everyone's eyes. What is the difference between "Return to the Empire", which focuses on the concept of "living"?
In my opinion, this difference is mainly reflected in three aspects.
First, the strategic dimension is deepened, making the battlefield more in-depth.
Terrain, though, is a design that all SLGs will talk about. But many times, due to the difficulty of execution and design ideas, the terrain is actually weakened, and its influence on victory and defeat is not high. This also leads to the fact that wild encounters are often very monotonous, because victory and defeat are already doomed.
In order to fill this gap and enrich the variability of the battlefield, "Return to the Empire" in addition to truly restoring the impact of terrain such as mountains and rivers on the marching strategy, but also designed a strategic gameplay with a field of view - most of the woods on the large map can hide the player's troops, and the enemy has no vision. This means that players can implement MOBA-like "crouching tactics" in the SLG battlefield.
In the wild, because of the emergence of "grass", the battle situation has become uncontrollable, and the combat strength of the enemy and us is no longer what you see is what you get. And how much the opponent's real combat strength is, where the hidden combat power is placed, how many people are hidden in the grass, and what they intend to do, these new strategy points further reflect the difference between the living terrain and the real terrain.
When the city is defended, the special feature of "Return to the Empire" is that the city is no longer just a simple coordinate point on the big map, but a three-dimensional city.
Mega City Attack and Defense is the largest battle in the game. The mega-city has four gates, several inner-city buildings, and a large enough area of action within the city.
This gives players a high degree of freedom of play. Players can choose to use catapults, arrow towers and other siege equipment to directly destroy the city wall, or they can attack the west, pull the enemy troops, and complete the raid; after the city gate is breached, the player turns to the street battle, at this time, not only to control the direction of attack of the troops, but also to pay attention to the occupation of functional buildings in the city to increase the winning rate of attacking the town center.
These designs not only make the city become three-dimensional at the visual level, but also increase the decision-making dimension of the player in the actual attack and defense.
The second is flexible tactical operation design.
Return to Empire eliminates paving to further enliven the battlefield, allowing troops to run wild on large maps and dragging in a way that is more intuitive. And the game visualizes the battle content that has been hastily simplified by several lines of battle reports in the past. After the two troops exchanged fire, it is no longer based on the numerical value to instantly divide the victory and defeat, but has a certain amount of time to play.
And this set aside "game time" has also become the player's "operating space".
In Return to the Empire, we rarely see countless lines of marching strands stuck at a point. The players' marching route, more like an RTS game, is a marching phalanx that slowly advances. When the player encounters an enemy situation, he can adjust the formation immediately, and put the restraint class and general where he is most needed. Classic tactics such as cheating and pulling, or sneaking attacks in the bag clip, can be achieved through the player's actions.
When two men and horses are caught in a scuffle, the player can also manually release the master skill to change the tide of the battle. Don't underestimate the main skill, in addition to the basic numerical damage skill, some control skills such as stun, silent release timing is also critical - whether you can hit, whether the timing of the hit is correct, will affect the victory or defeat. In large-scale chaotic battles, the effective range of skills also makes the player's operation more meaningful. These designs improve the sense of participation of players at different levels, and even give players the possibility of playing less and more, and winning the strong with the weak.
The third is the realistic art performance that is separated from similar products in the past.
From the characters to the architectural wonders, the development team used the unique oil painting texture of the empire as a visual presentation of the multi-civilization style, which successfully distinguished it from the realistic Three Kingdoms and American cartoons on the market.
Not only that, "Return to the Empire" has also made new breakthroughs in artistic quality and technical realization. The most obvious perception I have when I play with it is that there are more things moving in the picture, and the movements are more refined.
Flames, birds, mountains, swaying palm trees, windmills, farmers ploughing the fields, soldiers patrolling the city. Honestly, with or without these things, it won't have much of an impact on the actual gameplay of SLG games, but when these seemingly useless details pile up, it becomes a visual competitiveness that makes Return to Empire stand out.
Whether it is an infrared optical motion capture scheme, high-precision modeling and mapping, or a smooth real-time operation, a deepening strategic dimension, from the perspective of Tianmei, they hope that through these content designs, they can finally create a vivid feeling that the "civilized world" is close at hand and within reach.
How to understand "living"?
I think "Return to Empire" under the slogan "Let the strategy come alive" shows Tenmi's insight into the next step on the SLG track.
Recall how it felt when we said a game was "alive"? vivid? energetic? Feeling realistic? This actually points to a comprehensive experience that conforms to the user's intuition.
The reason why we say that a character is alive is because his human story makes us believe that there will indeed be such a person, and his behavior logic and storyline are real and believable; the reason why we say that a game world is alive is because the trees here can be cut down and the fire can be extinguished, it does not have to be how realistic the picture is, but its logic must be in line with the player's intuition.
Intuition is a kind of existence based on human instincts and experiences, and does not require analytical reasoning. It must be intuitive to make the user believe, and once the user believes, it does not matter whether the world looks different from reality, whether its painting style is 2D cartoons or 3D realism. It is just alive.
Specific to the SLG product of "Return to The Empire", Tianmei's strategy is to continuously raise the basic quality of the category, and push the existing modules to the extreme of the present, so that they are more in line with the player's intuition: real-time marching, where to fight, is the operation intuition; the city attack and defense, there are backs and forths, is the strategic intuition.
And it's these intuitive designs that allow players to believe that ancient warfare was fought like this.
Why do "work"?
Having said that, in fact, the concept of "living" is no longer mysterious, it is actually describing a user experience, a feeling.
And this feeling, as I said above, does not necessarily require the picture to be more and more realistic, so that the operation is more and more like RTS. You know, we want to make the game logic of the product conform to the player's intuition, not just visual expression. There are many ways and means, and "Return to the Empire" is just one of the solutions.
Game weather effect recording
However, the cruel thing is that the iterative direction of the SLG "in line with intuition" may be known to many people, but the real difficulty is that few have the strength to pay for this ticket to the next stage; because the SLG iteration cycle is long, it needs a long period of test data support, in the initial data is not satisfactory, how to judge the direction of the product, behind which a large amount of user data and development resources are required as a guarantee.
As a result, Return to Empire not only shows Tenmi's insights, but also their determination to the SLG track.
The SLG track is indeed highly competitive, and that's true. The revenue curve of the head product is strong and there is more than one, and several large buyers have not stopped. At the product design level, several mature games have been continuously iteratively updated, and there is not much room for upgrading. If it is only the enhancement of the same generation of products, it is not enough to attract users to migrate on a large scale. It must be a breakthrough and the next generation of products to have a chance to win.
But the superior attributes of the SLG track are also worth fighting for tianmei. SLG has the envy of all categories of user quality, strong payment ability, high stickiness, long product vitality cycle, not only in the country to absorb gold, overseas is also a very strong category. The social networks, channels, user operations, and e-sports events required by this category all belong to tencent Tianmei's advantages.
Luo Yonghao served as the overall officer of the strategy of "Return to The Empire"
The product "Return to Empire" shows its reflections on the evolution of the SLG category, its judgment of the likes and dislikes of users, and what kind of changes it can ultimately bring to this market.
Original content source: Love Game Grape Jun Game Grapes