At the beginning of February this year, a work created by the French independent game company Sloclap Studios caused great controversy in China, mainly because the work has a very high standard of Chinese culture, so it has won the love of Chinese players around the world.
Not long ago, the sales of this game also exceeded one million, and Chinese players accounted for a huge proportion of the purchase, and many Chinese players can also see many Chinese players giving high praise to this game on Steam.
In fact, there has been no shortage of such games for foreigners to express Chinese culture before, but most of them are mediocre, and it is extremely rare to achieve the point of "Master".
The sales of "Master" can exceed one million, in addition to being particularly excellent at expressing Chinese culture, other innovations such as the innovation of the action system, the use of low-poly style, and the design of roguelite have a lot to analyze and discuss.
As a hit of this year's indie games, this work has a certain inspirational significance for the entire indie game field.
How do foreigners express Chinese culture?
One of the biggest features of this "Master" is that it can be said that it has reached a very high level in the expression of Chinese culture.
In the past few years, games like this have actually appeared occasionally, for example, "Emerald Empire" launched by Bioware in 2008 is a often mentioned work, which is a Chinese martial arts style role-playing action game, which also caused a lot of hot discussion in that year, because before this, foreign game companies rarely touched this genre.
"Emerald Empire" is successful in representing the landscape of Chinese culture: although it adopts an elevated world view in order to be able to "be more flexible in the expression of game content", the buildings, scenes, and character costumes in the game are carefully considered, and each has its own prototype. Crowded inns, mansions with deep courtyards, and temples of the ancient Buddhas with green lanterns are all carved beams and paintings, green bricks and tiles; these beautiful buildings containing national style are mainly born from the house style of the Song Dynasty, but add the architectural characteristics of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Although it seems to be quite outdated from the current point of view, it is also a first-class picture performance more than a decade ago, and with the carefully created scenery, there is still a different kind of beauty to this day.
In addition, the action system of "Emerald Empire" is also quite the essence of Chinese martial arts, the combat system of ordinary attacks, breaking defense heavy blows, defensive frame moves, flexible dodge have their own uses and pros and cons, not rushing up to solve the battle without brainless press, in addition to the blue bar design of internal qi.
But "Emerald Empire" did not finally get the recognition of the majority of Chinese players around the world, this is because the game and most Hollywood movies in the performance of Chinese culture has the same sense of no difference, in "Emerald Empire", players can use the so-called spell is just the skin of the Western magic, in addition to the ghosts and undead monsters and other common enemies of Western fantasy themes, the design of the game character is more like the kind of squinting eyes Chinese faces recognized by the mainstream Western perspective. This makes the whole game world seem too mixed and matched and becomes very strange.
After the launch of "Emerald Empire", it received a lot of high media evaluations, but because of this kind of indifference, the final sales have been relatively dismal, which also led to the end of BioWare's later acquisition by EA.
In contrast, "Master" has made great progress compared to the "Emerald Empire" of that year.
From the scenery to the scene to the music to the one-on-one-sight moves in "Master", it can be said that the Chinese culture is studied extremely thoroughly.
The scenes in the game are full of pure Chinese cultural elements such as martial arts, bamboo forests, courtyards, and ink styles. The production team also buried a lot of details in these scenes, such as the daily elements of battery cars and electric fans, as well as elements of traditional culture such as yin and yang gossip diagrams and couplets. In one of the endings in the game, the design of the mirror is borrowed from the movie "Huo Yuanjia". The level design in the game is also very eye-catching - the theme of the five levels and the underlying concept of boss design all use the five elements concept of Chinese culture, namely gold, wood, water, fire, and earth.
The Chinese philosophical connotations presented in "Master" are one of its most eye-catching contents. After the first level, players can choose the "Wude" line in the second week, and players can choose to let them live after defeating the boss. The so-called martial virtue means that "those who do not have tenacity and perseverance can rarely have great success; those who are not loyal and pure, rarely have great achievements; those who are not humble and respectful, it is rare to have a good and good death." This is consistent with the ancient connotation pursued by the production team in the "Wude" line.
The reason for this is that the team's own love and research of Chinese culture is the key.
A game made by Sloclap Studios before "The Master" called "The Pardon" is also an action game in itself, they have some accumulation in how to make this game, and then they have created "Master" in order to create a unique martial arts experience, in the process they reference a lot of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan kung fu films, and the creative director and several main creative members have studied the white eyebrow boxing with the martial artist Benjamin Colussi for a long time in a Martial Arts Hall in France. Benjamin practiced for many years with Liu Weixin, a descendant of Baimei Boxing, in Foshan, Guangdong Province, and then brought his master's kung fu and heritage back to France.
So this is actually a wonderful and moving story of cultural fusion influence, and it is no wonder that so many Chinese players can feel a strong sense of cultural familiarity in the game, and then have a high degree of identification with the work.
In particular, the kung fu film-style tricks and tricks shown in "Master", the sense of fighting between you and me, the flowing clouds and waters, can be said to have achieved a major breakthrough, and the essence of Hong Kong's golden age action movies has been restored in the game, which is amazing.
And "Master" adopts a realistic theme, which avoids the indifference of this game like "Emerald Empire", the protagonist in "Master" can only use his own kung fu to fight the enemy, he can not suddenly release a fire magic or whirlwind spell, and the opponents are also human.
Looking further, there may be more foreign game companies in the future who choose Chinese themes or integrate Chinese culture into a game.
This is because after so many years of baptism of Western fantasy themes and science fiction themes, if game companies want to make new ideas in the theme, Chinese culture is a good choice.
For example, we can see that the popular AAA masterpieces such as "World of Warcraft" and "The Witcher 3" are Western fantasy themes, and the recently popular "Eldon's Ring of Law" is also the essence of a large number of Japanese RPG in Japan.
In addition to "Master", not long ago Nintendo announced a trailer for "Blade of alienity 3" at a game conference, which opened with a Chinese-style character playing the bamboo flute, in addition to Falcom's "Li Zhi Trajectory" also has a lot of performance of Chinese culture, the republic in the game is derived from the real China.
The success of "Master" in adopting Chinese culture has a double implication for domestic game developers.
One revelation is that French independent game companies can express Chinese culture to this point, then Chinese game companies need to work harder, in fact, it is easier to do in terms of architecture and music, but the action system is still a big problem, it is true that there are a few games in China that can show this kind of kung fu duel to a certain extent, such as "Sword Sealing Magic Record", "Meteor Butterfly Sword", "Eternal Destruction" and other works, but such games are still too few after all.
And in the current context, the current domestic government to the people are advocating to tell the Chinese story well, better to spread Chinese culture to the world, and the game is one of the means of displaying the soft power of this culture, how to better do these things, for game developers need to work harder to dig deeper and break through a traditional culture from a deeper level such as martial arts and kung fu.
What French game companies can do, Chinese game companies should also do, exaggerated this is a sense of cultural responsibility.
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Another revelation is that since the French can express Chinese culture, then Chinese can also express Egyptian culture, South American culture and even African culture.
Today's world is the era of cultural integration, domestic game companies actually have similar designs, such as the "Yin and Yang Division" game is based on Japan's famous story of the same name, "Original God" in addition to the real Chinese culture of the Rizuki region, there are also from the real Europe of Mond, Inato is from the reality of Japan, it is said that the future will appear to the Winter Country may be a reference to the real Russia.
Perhaps in the future, domestic game companies will show more cases of other civilizations around the world like this.
Low polygon style
As mentioned earlier, Sloclap Studios has launched The Pardon, which, like Master, uses a low-poly style.
Low polygon is actually a forced choice when the 3D performance of the console and PC was not developed enough in the early years, and later with the rapid development of 3D technology, this practice gradually disappeared in the game field, but at the moment it has a retro aesthetic, and it is also an excellent option for many independent game companies that lack sufficient funds.
In recent terms, tunic is the style of action-adventure games featuring the cute little fox, and the acclaimed ASHEN, which imitated the Dark Souls style a few years ago, is also the same style, and the most famous low-poly style game in the game industry may be the phenomenon mobile game "Monument Valley" many years ago.
This style not only saves costs, requires a lot less polygon modeling than the high-precision modeling of the AAA masterpiece, and can also show an abstract artistic beauty.
The modeling of high-precision high-polygons is closer to our view of the real world, but the modeling style of low-polygons requires designers themselves to be able to better grasp the soul of objects, abstract reality into design, and present it to the player. From this point of view, the low-poly style is a bit like Impressionism.
The scenes that appear in "Master" are actually many and the details are also very rich, if such a world is presented through high-precision 3D technology, the development cost may be several times higher, and the development time may take a long time.
The low-poly style does not actually reduce the appeal of Master, and the cityscape outside the room where the protagonist is located in the game looks so stunning that it does not appear to be tarnished by the low-poly style, precisely because the creators have grasped the core elements of such scenes in reality.
The same is true of the face of the character, although the accuracy of facial modeling is not high, but through the most important facial organs such as the face, nose, eyebrows, hair, mouth and other aspects of the design effort, so that the difference between important characters is still very high, but also played a role in the player's impressive effect.
A breakthrough in the action system of European and American games
As mentioned earlier, the action system of "Master" is a breakthrough, in addition to this system highly restores the essence of Hong Kong action films, as far as European and American games are concerned, this set of action systems is a new development based on the previous gameplay.
The system depth of European and American action games has been difficult to compare with the Japanese Devil May Cry series and the Ninja Dragon Sword Series, for example, the breakthrough of "God of War 4" in the God of War series is more successful in the exploration and cultivation of semi-open worlds, the complexity and depth of the system and even the design difficulty are very large compared to "Devil May Cry 5", of course, "God of War 4" avoids the depth of the action system by using its strengths and avoiding weaknesses.
As for most European and American action games, they actually prefer to use the unique action system created by Batman: Arkham Asylum.
In this game, the battle system is divided into two parts, head-on combat using freeflow Combat (FreeflowCombat): Batman can attack, confuse and attack the enemy to attack the chain, when the enemy makes an attack, he can counterattack to maintain the chain without interruption, when the number of attack combo reaches a certain number, he can use special ambush skills to quickly knock down the enemy, the more he carries and the higher the score of the more moves he uses; the round-up battle emphasizes maintaining secrecy, using the commanding heights, Ambush the enemy one by one in the corner or from behind.
For ordinary players, as long as they are timely to see the timing of the enemy's attack and press the counterattack button, they can easily cope, and the master can play a very ornamental set of combos through the continuous attack accumulation of high combos.
This system was later adopted by many European and American action games, among which the more famous ones are "Bloody Rogue" and "Marvel Spider-Man".
The Master system largely follows the design of Batman: Arkham Asylum, but has evolved on top of it.
In the game, the protagonist can face the enemy's attacks and can have four ways to deal with them, namely defense, avoidance, steering/shooting, and dodging.
Defense is to hold down the defense button to block the enemy's normal attacks from being damaged, but will cut the slot of its own system; avoidance is to hold down the defense button and flick the left stick at the right time, you can swing the upper body in place or raise your legs to avoid the enemy's upper or lower attacks, successfully avoid the success of the system to restore a part of the system, trigger the perfect avoidance can also enter a short bullet time, at this time any attack can make the enemy stunned. Steering/flapping is the equivalent of a perfect block, triggered by pressing a defense button the moment before being hit by an enemy, interrupting their current move and making subsequent combos unable to fire, and drastically reducing its system; dodging is a regular retreat that can be used to dodge enemy attacks without any additional benefits.
This system is actually the anti-reaction design of "Batman: Arkham Madhouse" plus elements such as the posture bar and perfect defense in "Only Wolf", and then makes more changes, and the system slot in "Master" is actually similar to the posture slot in "Only Wolf".
The difficulty of the game is also here, although it seems that dealing with the enemy is a simple thing, but in fact it is not easy to fight, because the protagonist has to remember a lot of moves (of course, these moves are much simpler than the fighting game), and because the game uses a certain Roguelite element, so that the player in the process of repeated levels to obtain the skills obtained in the last round may need to be re-acquired.
The most interesting thing is that the game shows the kind of situation in the martial arts novel that remembers the recipe but deals with the situation on the spot, because the players in the game need a period of time to train and become familiar, and many of the enemy's elite characters are very fast, and the player often remembers the recipe but when he really responds to the enemy, he presses the wrong time or judges the timing of the enemy's shot.
And in "Only Wolves", the protagonist only needs to focus on a few core factors to face any enemy, that is, perfect defense and dodge, or to face the upper and lower parts of the enemy's attack to make a response, and then use the fog crow and other props to play a juggling.
In "Master", the protagonist needs to consider more factors in the face of the enemy's attack, whether it is defense or avoidance, or turning or dodging, and many enemies shoot particularly fast, there is no hint of forward shaking, and the player is not given time to react, especially the timing of the shooting block is particularly strict, and the player must also remember those moves, master the timing of the move response.
So the difficulty of "Master" is actually higher than that of "Batman: Arkham Madhouse", and may be more difficult for some players than "Only Wolf", to some extent, this is very similar to the real martial arts duel, that is, it is necessary to see the moves, random response, only fast and not broken, look at the eight directions and so on to meet the enemy perfectly.
Of course, the designers also considered that these designs may be too difficult for some players, so the game added the element of Roguelite, coupled with the enemy's moves have certain rules and routines, so that the player can repeatedly liver can also finally pass the level, but this element is also a double-edged sword, so that players have to repeatedly experience those fixed process of the level to finally pass the level, the experience process is extremely repetitive.
epilogue
"Master" can be said to be a typical case of the spirit of independent games, the development company through limited resources and conditions through low polygon style to save costs, and in the theme and gameplay to achieve some breakthrough design, although the game itself is still somewhat less perfect, but the overall playability is actually much higher than many AAA masterpieces.
Creativity is always the fundamental engine of long-term development in any field.