A few days ago, GameLook just reported that Tencent intends to launch the "Rainbow Six" mobile game with Ubisoft, and the heavy shooting track. Today, another domestic giant, ChaoXi Lightyear, also released a bombshell on the track.
On March 25, the "Codename: Spark" doomsday survival mobile game developed by Yanlong Game Studio and represented by Chaoxi Lightyear was quietly launched tapTap, and opened the Android channel reservation.
For players familiar with shooting mobile games, Yanlong Game Studio may not be unfamiliar. As a manufacturer focusing on soC categories, Yanlong Studio was first established in 2013, and has participated in the production of two FPS mobile games, both of which are mainly open world survival sandbox gameplay, and its "Ace Wars" series of games was awarded the "Best Competitive Game of the Year" at the Vivo Developer Conference. Codename: Spark is a new round of exploration for the team in the direction of the open world survival sandbox.
But looking at the current survival track, before NetEase "After Tomorrow" firmly led, and then there are Tencent's "Dawn Awakening", "Dark Zone Breakout" and other blockbuster new works continue to catch up, "Codename: Spark" what exactly relies on to compete with veteran rookies?
Game PV:
The "SOC hybrid" developed by UE5 gets a ticket to the UE5 game
The highlight of Codename: Spark is obviously its background as one of the first mobile games developed using Unreal Engine 5. In the team's words, the development of the next-generation engine was "for better graphics and a smoother game experience", but considering that the UE5 engine is still in its early stages, GameLook believes that the game will take several years to go to market.
Judging from the PV announced, with the blessing of Unreal Engine 5, the performance of the game has made significant progress compared to the previous "Ace War: Civilization Restart", not only the modeling of the characters is more delicate, but also the environmental performance is more realistic, especially the real camera screen of the meteorite hitting the ground at the beginning, which can be said to fill the visual sense of the movie.
With the impact of the meteorite, the story of the game also officially begins. It is understood that the background of the game is set in the new yuan 2030, a mysterious huge meteorite fell from the sky, breaking the peaceful life, and the crisis has spread since then. Players will play as survivors in virtual space, meet unknown challenges in the apocalypse, and continue the fire of civilization.
The game continues the core gameplay of large single-game and free exploration and construction of previous works, focusing on FPS sandbox competition. Although there is not much information revealed, we can still see zombies, mysterious cubes, human hostile forces and other settings from the PV, which seems to imply that the game will have PVP, PVE, puzzle solving and other ways to play.
In addition, an interesting detail in the PV is that the game also incorporates a day and night system and random weather, and the zombies are almost always in the night, while the human infighting is concentrated during the day, which may mean that the occurrence and advancement of certain events in the game also depend on the passage of time.
Different from the traditional doomsday survival mobile game that separates PVP and PVE gameplay and sets up a war zone and a peace zone, Codename: Spark is more about combining survival construction with PVE and PVP, and adopts a single-game system similar to eating chicken, which as a whole looks more like a mixture of RTS + FPS + eating chicken.
After the game begins, the game will be settled in a 7-day dynamic mode, where players need to collect resources, build territories, craft weapons and continue to explore the map in the seamless world, constantly strengthening personal and team strengths, dealing with the challenges of beasts, zombies and hostile forces, and eventually becoming a minority of survivors, and receiving rewards according to the cycle point ranking.
On the basis of a single-game system, the game also adds rich terrain and landforms, a variety of resources, and a weapon system with a high degree of freedom that is highly associated with resources, expanding the tolerance of different players. Players with strong hard power can choose to start directly with a gun or directly "raid the house" in the middle of the game to grab resources to quickly upgrade equipment; while ordinary players can choose easy to defend, difficult to attack, resource-rich locations to develop obscenely, upgrade powerful equipment by exploring the wilderness, collect resources, and rely on numerical crushing to win.
It is not difficult to see that the biggest feature of the game is to combine the construction, exploration and survival confrontation in an overall framework, bringing a richer and lower-level content gameplay expansion and choice, with the title of "the first Batch of Unreal Engine 5 Next Generation Mobile Games", making its own differentiation in the crowded survival track.
Self-developed agent walks on two legs and grabs the beach survival track in the morning and night light years
In recent years, the popularity of the survival track has become a well-known fact in the industry. Sensor tower data shows that in the first half of 2021, the global gold of doomsday survival mobile games attracted more than 1.1 billion US dollars, an increase of 167% compared with the first half of 2019, which is the highest-revenue mobile game theme.
In the face of such a tempting market, the big manufacturers are naturally not idle, before Tencent's "Dawn Awakening", "Dark Zone Breakout", and 2A games "Rebirth Edge" and other covering the end of the mobile game released, after the survival track "carry handle" NetEase launched the marine survival theme mobile game "Codename: Atlas", even Lilith, who has always been known as SLG, also announced that she is studying a survival competitive mobile game "Doomsday Afterglow".
At the moment when the big factory frequently enters the survival track, the lightyear is a bit low-key. But in fact, seeing that peers are stronger one by one, it is not indifferent to the light years. In July last year, a survival mobile game called Codename: Arrival attracted the attention of insiders, and the game's development team, MMC SOCIETY, belonged to Asahi Lightyear.
Different from the survival mobile games on the market that mostly adopt the setting of zombie doomsday, it is regarded as the first self-developed next-generation mobile game "Codename: Advent" of the morning lightyear, which aims at the science fiction theme and sets the time in the near future of 2112, in retaining the framework of the doomsday gameplay that has been verified by the market, and using the global research and development team to build a differentiated and high-quality science fiction world.
The emergence of "Codename: Advent" actually represents a different way for the "post-entry" of the "late entry" in the direction of self-research: instead of fighting with the peers who have occupied the first-mover advantage of the track, it is better to seize the market vacancy with high-quality and differentiated theme content.
As one of the most widely served literary subjects in the world, the audience of science fiction themes is objectively not inferior to that of zombies. Compared with the latter, the former has a broader creative space, and the setting is not easy to fall into the conventional fixed plot. "Codename: Arrival" takes the science fiction theme as the starting point, obviously trying to play a corner overtaking on the theme.
From this point of view, the emergence of Codename: Spark is also the embodiment of "a different path" in the lightyear, but compared to the innovation of "Codename: Arrival", the "Codename: Spark" developed by Unreal Engine 5 is more inclined to make market differences in gameplay and quality. And self-development, agency and two aspects of the joint efforts, it is not difficult to see the ambition of the latecomer light-year to survive the track.
epilogue:
From the women's category to the leisure category to today's survival track, the steps of the day and night are getting bigger and bigger. At the same time, judging from the thinking contained in its various choices, its steps are becoming more and more stable. This is the result of its superimposed identity as a domestic giant and a game rookie.
This time choosing to enter the survival track with "Codename: Spark", although it did not expose too much content, but from the existing information, it may be another product that can set off a lot of waves.
····· End ·····
GameLook Daily Game Industry Report
Global vision / depth is material