This article is written by #StarCom#Ming Zero
preface
It's coming, it's coming!
Almost at the same time that Ubisoft announced that Far Cry 6 was free to play for a limited time, the dream linkage missions of Far Cry 6 and Stranger Things were also launched at the same time.
Since Netflix is suspected of recovering the "Stranger Things" linkage copyright given to "Dawn Killing" because the fourth season is about to be broadcast, this linkage is likely to be creating momentum for the fourth season of "Stranger Things".
As can be seen from the "limited time free play" alone, Ubisoft has set aside enough time for players to complete the prologue island and then go up to the yala inland to experience the linkage level.
This kind of marketing is like "Detective Chinatown 3" launching an independent short film in "My Hometown and Me", but it is actually to create momentum for the upcoming movie.
However, since it is marketing, the big scene must be indispensable, and the plot must also keep up. At this point, Ubisoft has simply achieved a "textbook-level" linkage.
The Kill by Daylight linkage was hugely popular because of its introduction of maps, skins, and popular characters. Why did the linkage of "Far Cry 6", which had no original characters and no popular skin, become so successful?
Danny's epic linkage with "Old Six"
Whether it's the last Danny Trejo or this Time Stranger Things linkage, when the player opens the game for the first time after the relevant mission is launched, Juan Courtez will release the mission for us in the form of a walkie-talkie.
The linkage mission with First Blood is not directly linked to Rambo played by Stallone, but only with a fan of First Blood, and the initiator of the mission becomes a Silvio fan, but in general, there is no difference between other linkages.
As soon as players go online, they will receive a message from Juan.
He claimed that a guerrilla squad had disappeared in a village in the west, along with a large number of C4s that had been freely armed. In order to investigate the safety of the guerrillas and at the same time recover C4, Danny embarked on the road to the village.
When the player arrives at the scene according to the location of the "Mysterious Disappearance" mission instructions, the weather in Yala will automatically become a thunderous day, arranging a gloomy beginning for the story.
The village was empty, only the faint radios emitting Russian voices. The player can speculate on what might have happened here through a mysterious note left in the village.
And when the player follows the sound of the radio into the house, he can find a corpse lying on the ground.
(There's a bug here that even if the player doesn't see anything across a wall, as long as he's close to the range where the body is, Danny will trigger a "really miserable death" line in advance.) ）
Seeing the TV set in the house, and then thinking of the scene in "Stranger Things", Xiao Eleven used the frequency of the TV radio to find people through his mind, I thought that this linkage would have an unusual opening.
But I was wrong, it was just a broken TV.
But the real linkage, that's where it starts.
Just after touching the TV, a mysterious voice connected to Danny's brain, telling us to hurry to a bunker on the east side to join her, otherwise "more people in Yala will die."
On the way, she introduced herself as "Šest", who had been brought in by the Russians for experiments. However, the men unleashed monsters in Yala called the Devourers, which needed Danny to stop them, or they would kill more Yalas.
Combined with the note the player has previously found in the village, it is not difficult to guess that this "Devourer" is the iconic species "Demon King" in Stranger Things.
As for the use of "Devourer" instead of "Demon King" as its title in this plot, it is not a "failure", but reflects its rigorous setting.
In the TV series, the name "Demogorgon" comes from the "DND Running Group" played by the protagonist group of the junior group.
"Running Group" is a common name for TRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game). Games tend to consist of three or five people, one of whom acts as the host of the game and several others as the player. Two of the main branches are the DND Run (Dungeons & Dragons) and the COC Run (Call of Cthulhu). The former's gameplay is more westernly magical, while the latter contains a series of Cthulhu system stories that take place either in the Middle Ages or in modern times or even in the future.
Although the elements of Stranger Things seem to be a tribute to Cthulhu, the COC running group, in fact, a lot of the nouns and even the source of the setting in the TV series come from another branch of the running group, "DND".
The concepts of "Demon King", "Reverse World" and even the "Heart-Conquering Demon" that appeared in the second season came from the running group rulebook in the hands of the junior group. The children were given names based on their similarity, and since these children were the first to be discovered, the Hawkins adults used them (in fact, because they had no spare time arguing about the naming rights of these things).
The Soviets, on the other hand, were different, and since they didn't share a brain with the protagonists, and even dramatically, so many of the soviet union's top scientists didn't even have as good research on the world as Hawkins's children, so they must have their own naming conventions.
It's like saying that if there were aliens in the universe, they wouldn't call us humans. Or if we could translate the language of animals, our dogs would not call us by the word "master", and the "demon king" would become a devourer when it reached the mouths of the Yalas and Russians.
Unlike the previous linkage mission, when we come to the fortress, we will directly access a plot CG.
The gist of it is that Danny sees Jozo, who somehow sneaked into the fortress early, and the corpse of a soldier who was killed by the Demon King.
The tone of the red lighting is more in favor of the title and poster of Stranger Things, because the impression is very different from that of Hawkins' laboratory in Stranger Things or the underground laboratory of the Soviets. But it is this design that adds a bit of eerie atmosphere to the underground scene.
Just after Danny was attacked by the Demon King and fell into a coma, accompanied by familiar music, the most exciting part of this linkage mission began.
The title of the story, like the title of the TV series, appears in the picture part by part.
From here, the entire mission pays homage to and even implements the setting of Stranger Things all the time.
Even in order to pay tribute to the chapter titles of each episode of "Stranger Things", even the chapters were divided in just ten minutes of linkage tasks.
When Danny wakes up, Jozo is missing, and because the weapons on her body have been taken away, we have to find the weapons under Cherst's guidance, and find her as well.
Chester, who has superpowers, "officially" meets Danny for the first time by controlling the surveillance footage. The reason why she asked Danny was because she wanted to close the door to the real world against the world, completely seal the monsters on the other side, and stop them from being the curse of Yara.
But before blowing up the passage, Danny has to go to the Reverse World to find the missing Jozo.
This grandmother, who is dressed with a full sense of technology, is the protagonist of this linkage.
Due to the large "06" on the chest device, at first I thought she was the "subject number six" in the Worldview of Stranger Things.
But this argument doesn't really hold up at all.
Because in Stranger Things, although there are also "experimental subjects" named after numbers, including Little 11, that is, super-powered people, they (they?). Without exception, they were all from the hands of the former Hawkins Lab in the United States (the first people in hawkins lab all died after the first season, and the people who followed were the government).
Chester, on the other hand, was the subject of Russian research.
Another proof that she is not "Subject Six" is that this "Subject Six" does have someone.
In one of the officially released prequel comics, Subject Six, Francine appears once as "Six" who can briefly predict the future.
As a child, Francine showed her superpowers in front of her mother, and was later used by her parents as a money-making tool. When she made a mistake in predicting the lottery, she was also beaten by her father.
In order to avoid her parents and figure out her abilities, Francine joined Dr. Brenner's experiments. Here she discovers that her best friend Ricky is also a super-powered person, and also meets Jamie Nine and Nine's sister Marcy.
After experiencing the illusion of the upside-down world and the accident of number nine, Francine decides to escape, but is shot by the guards to protect Ricky and Marcy.
The game's "Old Six" Chester's abilities are even more powerful: mind communication, remote sensing, manipulating electronic devices, teleporting inorganic objects, and telekinesis.
On the way to find weapons, we can also find notes left by the Russians. Through the contents of the note, it can be known that Jozo has somehow accidentally hit and entered the bunker for many days.
There is also another note in the game that says in a commanding tone that in order not to distract the soldiers from their work, they are forbidden to contact Jozo, and violators will be transferred to another stronghold "never see the puppy again".
Presumably, this is also a tribute to the serious story of "Stranger Things", and some jokes will occur.
Since Jozo is missing and the player has taken away his equipment, we can't use our partners and our weapons in this mission, and can only arm ourselves by picking up equipment from the map. Similarly, in a lab illuminated by a dim and eye-changing red light, we can't turn on a flashlight.
While the actual difficulty of the mission isn't great, the extremely low visibility, scarce bullets, and threatening enemies also give Far Cry 6 a sense of oppression from Resident Evil 2 Remake.
The only bug in the game is the issue of age. The story of "Stranger Things" takes place during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, so the people who sneak into Hawkins' underground secret experiments are all Soviets, but the timeline of the story of "Far Cry 6" is 2021, when the game was released, and the Soviet Union has long since collapsed.
So Ubisoft just took it lightly by saying , "It seems these guys are still alive in the Cold War."
In order to travel back in time to find Jozo before blowing up the Gate, we must first open it.
Similarly, since this is a Russian facility, its internal equipment is modeled after the Soviet underground base in the third season of Stranger Things instead of the Hawkins Laboratory in the first season.
Danny, who was eager to save Jozo, collected the necessary keys and fuel to open the gate, and went straight without wearing a protective suit.
Although at the end of the first season, Joy and Hope were fully armed to pass through the portal, and both the Hawkins laboratory researchers in the film and the Russians in the game were able to travel to the reverse world with the blessing of protective clothing.
But in fact, direct crossing is not impossible.
The victim of the first season, Will, needless to say, nancy of the protagonist group youth group, in order to find Barbara, also spent a period of time alone in the reverse world without protection.
In the reverse world, Danny is no longer facing Russians with guns and flamethrowers, but "dolls" controlled by huge monsters in the sky.
For a moment, "puppets" with blue eyes and attacks with various melee weapons were everywhere. Even when the player looks up at the sky, they can see a huge heart-stealing demon.
The Heartbreaker is an important character in the second season's inverse world.
The new boyfriend of Will's mother, Joey, who died in the second season, is an empathetic character, but it is this "empathy" that makes him the key to driving the plot.
In the first season, Will, who returned to reality from the Reverse World, gained the ability to travel back to the Reverse World for a brief period of time. And it was the monster he described, his future new dad Bob, who was treated like a child's nightmare.
This leads to Will successfully being possessed by the Heart-Reaper.
The "Heart-Reaper" is a monster known to the Russians as the "God of Darkness". It is a cluster of mist-like creatures that, in the first season, possessed and manipulated Will, giving him the side effect of sharing his senses with other manipulated objects.
In addition to Dustin's d'Artagnan, the juvenile demon "Demon Dog" that appears in the second season is controlled by the Heart Demon to come to the real world.
In the TV series, Max's brother Billy is a small-town man who was infected after Will.
In the third season, due to the small portal opened by the Soviets, the Heart Reaper cannot pass directly, but instead finds more hosts by manipulating Billy, who is possessed by the isolated ontology group, and finally uses flesh and blood to build a giant puppet modeled on the entity in the real world.
Due to the setting problem, the "puppets" in the game are obviously those Yala people who are directly controlled by the body, and it is likely that they are missing people in the village and guerrillas.
Like zombies in Resident Evil 2 Reset, "puppets" have a high amount of health, requiring two shots if attacked with incendiary bullets, and multiple attacks if used with normal bullets. In the early stage, players are very scarce in the front of obtaining the flamethrower, and it is recommended to use an incendiary bullet for the "puppet" and then quickly switch to a pistol to make up for it, so that you can kill a "puppet" with the least consumption and effectively save bullet reserves.
And in a "tower defense" station that the player experienced before retrieving Jozo's imminent return to the real world, every time the player defeats a wave of "puppets", the celestial heart demon will make an attacking action, and the whole scene will shake. This is also a rigorous embodiment of the setting in which all the manipulated creatures in the play share a brain.
This is also the most exciting part of this linkage mission: Ubisoft is really moving.
Not only are the vines on the map really moving (unlike the flesh-and-blood flesh of Song of Saya, these "tentacles" and "pieces of flesh" that appear in the reverse world are theoretically closer to fungi and plants).
Even the bridge where Danny finds Jozo is like the way Joey and Hope found Will in the reverse world in the first season.
Although the huge heart-stealing demon in the sky can already reflect Ubisoft's sincerity, what is even more exciting is that the most classic "demon king" in Stranger Things has finally appeared!
After finding Jozo, the player goes through a tense escape battle.
The reason is that for the sake of the plot, the demon king in the game seems to have done a blood lock treatment.
Not only will the player not be able to experience the feeling of killing the Demon King with their own hands, they will also appear in the area in front of the player through the portal.
Accompanied by a more exciting Far Cry 6 theme song than the original, in this mission, you can not only deal with a large number of the most difficult creeps in the entire game, but also experience the most refreshing battles you can fight with (and not) super-powered people.
Finally, when we return to the real world, in addition to finally meeting Chester himself, we will also find that the previous demon king has also followed.
It turns out that the missing C4 was stolen by Chester in order to blow up the portal connecting the two worlds here.
Two consecutive teleportations (the first to deliver weapons to Danny, the second to send Jozo back to the real world) left her already exhausted, and for The sake of Yara, we had to detonate the bomb at her request.
Chester was sacrificed, and we were sent back to the free armed base.
At the end of the chapter, another original setting appears.
Jozo, who was once captured by the Demon King for nourishment, spat out a Demon King larvae like Will at the end of the first season of the TV series.
But just when we thought that Stranger Things was not over in Yara's story, Jozo simply chewed up this little life twice and swallowed it.
This kind of startling and somewhat humorous ending design is as interesting as the Easter egg at the end of the first season of "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D."
Quest rewards
As with the "Double Dane" mission, at the end of that linkage, we got Danny Trejo's car.
And this time, we got four weapons from the official.
These four weapons can be obtained sequentially with the progress of the story of the mission in the linkage mission that can only use fixed weapons, that is, these four.
First of all, it is this "silent winter" equipped with a silencer.
The name of the weapon may be in homage to the famous Silent Spring. As for performance, although this pistol is equipped with a more official military silencer, it is not much different from the gun equipped with a silencer through the "wild road" modification, and the number of consecutive fires is too much, and the barrel will still heat up.
The second weapon is this cool gun with incendiary bombs.
In addition to firing incendiary bombs that can set multiple enemies on fire at the same time, the muzzle of the gun emits a faint fluorescence in a dark environment.
Please, something that will glow is cool and good.
The third is a cool thing that not only can fire continuously, but also has two scopes that can be switched at any time.
Although the weapon hit rate is a bit low, this shape is really top.
Finally, it's this wild road grill with a unique skin.
That's right, it's no different from our original Noroko Grill, just a new set of "weapon skins" added.
The linkage also brought two sets of skins that needed to be purchased, "Hawkins Police Uniform" and "Billy's Lifeguard Uniform".
postscript
Although in some player experiences, this linkage mission may give people a bit of a high-open-low experience. But I'll say it again, it's definitely an epic linkage.
Because an excellent linkage is not only to see the restoration of the original setting scene of the work, but also to see the fit of the two plots.
The linkage between "Dawn Kill" and "Resident Evil" is very conscientious, but the previous call of Duty and "Attack on Titan" hades linkage, which is a standard negative textbook.
Even the Lyon skin launched in conjunction with "Rainbow Six" and "Resident Evil" is somewhat ugly compared to Lyon himself.
However, this linkage has advantages, and naturally there are shortcomings.
In addition to the age of the game and the TV series, "Mysterious Disappearance" has a great sense of separation compared with the plot of "Far Cry 6" itself due to the access to a large number of CGs.
When players play, they experience more the mystery and charm of "Stranger Things" than "Far Cry 6".
Chester's sacrifice not only pays tribute to the "sacrifice" of Officer Hope in the third season, but also makes the linkage plot born out of "Stranger Things" itself "have nothing to do" with the main story. After all, no TV series hides the key plot in a game that not everyone can play.
As I said at the beginning, this time the linkage that is more hardcore than "Dawn Killing Machine" is obviously creating momentum for the broadcast of the TV series.
And this "Stranger Things" season four trailer, undoubtedly can play the best effect.
PS. Since there are still many super-powered people in the worldview of "Stranger Things", the focus of the story of the fourth season will most likely shift to these more ordinary science fiction plots, and the scenes about monsters are likely to be reduced.
So please don't expect too much from the plot of the fourth season, otherwise the greater the expectations, the greater the disappointment at that time.