This article is written by #StarCom#Beard
preface
Mr. Lu Xun once said: There are no ghosts in the world, and the more people who are afraid, the more ghosts there are.
In fact, the original words come from the "New Book of Tang": "There is no ghost in the world, and the mediocre people disturb themselves."
But in a recent action-adventure RPG game, I saw the existence of ghosts - he was created by WolfEye Studios and released by Devolver (Weird West)
You may not have heard of WolfEye, but you must have heard of their creator Raphael, who was a member of the previous Aken Studio, who had participated in the production of "Predator" and "Shame".
After playing, I also have to sigh: the quality of the game is indeed guaranteed.
Although western-themed games have long been common, the special feature of this game is that the makers have well integrated the fantasy style into it
So, in addition to the traditional revolver, revenge, bounty hunters and other familiar classic elements, you can also enjoy a variety of strange folklore and anecdotes in the western background
Shadowy, boisterous land
Although the game was still in the beta stage when I played it, after more than ten hours of experience, the overall level of the game was unbelievable that this was the result of a small workshop.
The painting style and music complement each other
The first time any game is opened, the first thing that catches the eye is the overall interface layout and screen style, at this point, "Wild West" is undoubtedly very passable.
Rough lines, neat shapes, heavy colors... Directly bringing a lifelike magical Westworld to the players, people can't help but be fascinated and infinite.
In fact, this style of painting also reminds me of another game, The Wolf Around Us.
Whether it is a beautiful picture or a theme that integrates folk strange things, it gives me a god-like texture.
(If you haven't heard of it, then you should have heard of its developer masterpiece", "The Walking Dead", which is also a similar comic style)
Screenshot of the in-game gameplay of The Wolves Around Us
In the choice of game soundtrack and sound effects, although the variety is not rich, it complements the environment and atmosphere in which you are located.
Whenever you enter a specific scene, the corresponding background music will play:
For example, after descending to the mine, the dense and eerie drum beat will be "Qinse and Chime" with your banging heartbeat, so that the already tense atmosphere will be set off to a further climax.
In the usual wandering or daily towns, the only thing that can be heard around is simple sound effects, wind, thunder, rain, real, appropriate, not boring.
It is worth mentioning that "Wild West" also has a very authentic Sinicization, although it may not be comparable to "Borderlands 3" and other "street slips", but various idioms are also easy to use, which is commendable.
The plot is bizarre and the gameplay is diverse
In terms of the plot and gameplay that most deserve players' attention, as a member of the former Aken Studio, from the big framework of design, the classic and familiar style is obvious:
Wild West weaves immersive simulation and strong story-driven design ideas, each of which complements each other, ultimately bringing players a free and open gaming experience.
Twists and turns in the plot:
The first character played by the player in the game is a bounty hunter who has been in hiding for many years.
In the opening scene, the enemy kills your son while you are resting and kidnaps your husband, forcing you to return to the old road of many years away and embark on a western-style journey of revenge.
Thieves have attacked your village
And after going through a thousand turns, finally finding a husband, thinking that the main line of the game is over, you will find that the good drama has just begun.
The search for a husband is at best an episode at the beginning of the game, and Jane Bell, as a bounty hunter, is not the only protagonist at all.
The main line that really runs through the entire game is actually the urgent need for you to explore the life of each character you are pursuing, and the secrets hidden behind this strange western continent.
The animation at the beginning of the game lays suspense for the lives of each protagonist
In this way, the journey of the first protagonist may just help players get used to this difficult to guess and deviant Westworld?
Eclectic gameplay:
In addition to the main line, the huge network of quests composed of branch lines scattered in all corners of the map, supplemented by open dynamic worlds, has become the biggest charm of this game.
In the game world of Wild West, the makers encourage players to be eclectic and try various means to achieve their goals.
For example, in order to make money, you can choose to take tasks to get paid, or collect resources to sell in the store; you can also directly sneak into other people's private territory to steal, and even take advantage of the black wind of the moon to do some house robbery and bribery.
When interrogating the enemy, you can pretend to be friendly in questioning, or you can directly and rudely extract confessions
For example, in order to reach a mission location, you can get intelligence from the mouth of an NPC or by eavesdropping on enemy conversations to find shortcuts; you can also carpet search every corner of the neighborhood to find more than one entrance.
In the same cellar, you can use the rope to descend from the entrance, or you can find the secret passage in the enemy's room
This is true of banks in towns and villages, people's houses, etc. Of course, you can walk in from the main entrance in the daytime, or you can take a sword and go sideways, through the side windows or the skylights on the roof.
What's even more interesting is that the player's every move will have a corresponding impact in the game world.
If one day you suddenly go on a beastly attack and slaughter the inhabitants of a town, the next time you arrive, you will find that the town may have been occupied by other forces; of course, it may also decay into a deserted ghost town.
And if you leave a living mouth while killing, you will also form a hatred because of it, and when you meet again on the journey later, it will be a situation of swords facing each other
In addition to auto-archiving, you can also press F5 to quickly archive, it is recommended that you archive more, convenient to experience different trends
In this regard, the game also specially added the honor value setting, to help NPCs complete tasks or save villagers from the enemy will make your reputation rise; killing innocents will make you infamous.
The level of honor affects the price of things sold in the store, and when the honor value is too low, you will also be wanted, and you will easily become the target of other bounty hunters in the process of rushing, and even the deputies you recruit will rebel against you.
Each character gets stats after their journey
Meticulous details:
A variety of meticulous details also add a lot to the huge dynamic world.
In particular, each scene of the game contains a large number of objects that can interact with the player
For example, using a hammer to destroy a reinforced wooden door and break into it; using explosives to blow up loose rocks to find secret passages; moving the barrel to a higher place as a stepping stone...
Many interesting tips when loading will also allow you to discover more details
Almost every item that exists has a wonderful effect that you don't expect.
Even empty buckets can be replenished with pumps or rainwater, but not directly with river water — the reason is because during the Industrial Revolution in the United States, a large amount of sewage was discharged into the river, so people rarely took water directly from the river.
"Strange Wild West" has had a ticket jump before, which is said to be caused by the producers in order to be able to test more details and directions, and now it seems that the polished results are indeed amazing.
Real-time battle mode in isometric perspective
In terms of combat systems, Wild West opted for a mode similar to Shadow Tactics: General's Blade real-time strategy.
In Shadow Tactics: The General's Blade you'll need careful planning to get through the level
If you think about it, after all, both games use an isometric perspective design in terms of perspective, and it is not surprising that they are similar in battle.
In contrast, the battles in Wild West are not so hardcore and the means are more diverse.
Recruitment system
For example, the existence of a recruitment system in the game, as long as you spend a certain amount of money, you can hire a deputy to fight for your life. After the journey of the new character is started, you can also recruit the previous character as a teammate for free, and the presence of teammates not only greatly reduces the difficulty of your frontal combat, but also provides more space for you to store materials.
Friends of life and death
During the journey, you will also encounter strangers whose lives hang in the balance, asking you for help, and it is only up to you to save or not to save.
Once you successfully save it, in addition to increasing your prestige, you will also receive a "Friend of Life and Death".
Unlike recruited deputies, friends of life and death will come to your aid when you are in a battle and fight with you. (This setting reminds me of Far Cry 2)
Of course, in addition to "shaking people", you can also face everything alone and be a lone brave.
Making good use of a wide variety of skills and props in the scene will help you better subdue your enemies, greatly improving the player's fault tolerance rate.
Oil lamps, fires, explosive barrels, etc. in the scene can become your magic weapon to win
Silent stealth, single-handed, group fight to win, you can always find your own way to defeat the enemy, and no matter which way you choose, a variety of props and skills, slow-motion shots when killing enemies, etc. are believed to bring you a lively game experience.
Skills similar to Bullet Time and partial kills have a slow death
Shrunken pentagonal warrior?
Having said a lot, "Wild West" seems to be doing a good job in terms of graphic music, plot flow, mission system, battle mode, and detail setting, is he a pentagonal warrior?
My answer is: If you ask for it by general standards, Wild West is really good at everything. But the various settings in the game will make you unconsciously associate with the figure of each masterpiece, thus raising the standard to more than one standard, and once judged by a higher standard, then "Wild West" is still very lacking in many aspects.
(As a fan of Dengge, it suddenly occurred to me that "if you ask Harden for 20 points, he will let you know what is really efficient" Dengge has indeed been a bit pulled recently, rationally watching the ball, please do not open the group, thank you very much)
For example, according to the setting, it can be seen that "Wild West" itself has a huge worldview and a slightly obscure plot, which requires players to supplement it by collecting more key information such as newspapers, books and other text materials at various locations during the game (a bit like "Control", but not as good as "Control")
However, the amount of text in the game does not seem to be enough to support this fictional Westworld.
Including the dialogue of the characters in the game, although it has an authentic Sinicization and humor, it is still very weak compared with the serious and tortuous plot.
The reason may be because of the emotional lack of each character
To take a very simple example, the original character Jane Bell suffered a major change at the beginning, and the family was destroyed. However, whether it is in the early dialogue, or the attitude of only caring about the mystery of his own life after rescuing her husband in the later stage, it makes me feel extremely perfunctory, even counterintuitive.
In this regard, I even feel that the second character is more flesh and blood. (The second character is a pig man)
And the mode of manipulating the different character segmentation games is actually very uncomfortable for me. At this point, the first negative textbook I came up with was Wing Star Survival.
And this XX game is completely unzipped every time it is updated, and then the old one is deleted, one game takes up two copies of the space, and when it was first released, because there were too many problems, the updates continued, and I was drunk
As a survival sandbox game, it can be said that the most important source of happiness for most players is to witness the process of a character growing from scratch and slowly growing in their own hands.
However, "Wing Star Survival" cleverly turns the survival process into a training task, and when you reach the corresponding indicator, after the task is completed, it is replaced by the next task from scratch.
The result of this design is to destroy the players' hard-won satisfaction and sense of accomplishment.
In Wild West, character changes can lead to similar situations.
While you can exploit all of your previous supplies by recruiting your former character, the skills change and the hard-won familiarity are suddenly destroyed.
From the skill plus page, you can guess that there are five journeys, I just finished the second paragraph in more than ten hours, and if I go straight to the main line, the total length may be between 15-20 hours
In addition, I also had a brief discussion with my friends about the innovative aspects of the game.
He believes that the innovation of Wild West is the combination of the design concept of immersive simulation and the overhead view (isometric view), which is a very bold attempt, and the experience of RTT is the failure of the game.
But I don't think it's an innovation to just stick the two together, and the settings in Wild West remind me of many other masterpieces, and the innovation is really lackluster. (You can see that I have compared many games in the previous article, and there are many similar games that I will not list them all))
For example, Metal Gear Solid
Although in fact, immersive simulation games with a top-down view are indeed very rare, most games will use a first-person perspective design to enhance the sense of substitution.
But let's think differently and answer two questions first:
Is Wild West, a combination of overhead views and immersive simulation, fun? - The answer is yes: fun!
But is this "fun" because of the combination of the two? Or does the top-down view make immersive simulations better? - I don't think so.
Looking at Wild West, the design of the isometric perspective not only fails to have any beneficial effect on immersive simulation, but even in order to reduce the difficulty and improve the player experience, the game is forced to adopt a "perspective" design:
Inside the building, I can also clearly see the structure and movement of the next door through the walls; when fighting, the enemy's position will be clearly marked on the map.
In the upper right corner of the map, the red dot indicates the enemy, the green dot indicates the friendly army, the white dot indicates the passerby, the fork indicates the corpse, and the animal will also have its own mark
Therefore, we can clearly feel a contrast when playing, through stealth we can easily stun the enemy, but once the frontal battle starts, even in the case of better equipment, our damage is not as high as imagined.
Enemy health bars are thicker, including various settings where damage will be reduced after stealth exposure, in addition to countering the player's own equipment and skill growth, I am afraid that it is also a last resort to balance the enemy's position.
This may also be an important reason why the group believes that the combat part of the experience is poor.
The movement patterns, including map travel, are slightly boring (perhaps limited by performance); random events while traveling are actually slightly more repetitive
To put it simply, I personally think that Wild West can be seen as an all-round pentagon warrior in every way, but if viewed by a higher standard, every corner of this pentagon is not full.
In addition, there are many friends who say that they encountered many bugs that affected the game experience during the game, and since I did not encounter them in the process of playing, I will not study them here.
summary
Looking back, it seems that I spent a lot of effort to argue that "Wild West" is a good work, and I spent a lot of effort to overturn my own conclusions to show that he was not so good.
And the reason for all this is simply because I have actually had countless wonderful feelings of acquaintance in the process of playing, so I want to be able to describe my real experience as accurately as possible.
Perhaps just like in "Smiling Proud of the Rivers and Lakes", as the supreme sword method of the "Lonely Nine Swords", the pursuit is to return to the basics and the road to simplicity.
And "Wild West" is an arbitrary practice that has learned the Star Absorbing Dafa, although it can easily turn the skills of others into its own use, but if it cannot be integrated, it can only be tasted and stopped.
The more complex the tricks, the more flaws are often hidden, which is an unavoidable thing.
All in all, Wild West is like the "set of small masters" of the gameplay of many good games.
Fortunately, there is still time, the future can be expected, given time, or can be achieved.