On March 29, the much-watched "Return to Empire" was officially launched, and soon after, it won the top of the Free Games List in the App Store and broke into the top 10 of the best-selling list.
As a player who has experienced the game continuously since the test, Star Boy himself is not surprised that "Return to the Empire" can achieve its current results, nor does he question its gold content.
In fact, Star Boy first paid attention to this product, stemming from the slogan of "make the strategy come alive" in its official publicity, and many products that emphasize "real", "Return to the Empire" brings a set of quite new and smooth SLG war fun through innovation and integration, and "live" is indeed the best summary of this fun.
In recent years, new games have emerged on the SLG track, but there are not many eye-catching products that can combine "innovative iteration and SLG experience fun", and this is where "Return to Empire" attracts many players.
Today, Star Boy would like to combine his personal feelings and talk about the game experience brought to me by "Return to the Empire".
Previously, due to the limitation of technology and hardware performance, SLG did not deliberately pursue the so-called sense of quality. At that time, the more mainstream argument was that too high an artistic performance would not only lead to too large a game package to affect the promotion, but also complex graphic information would interfere with players' decision-making.
But in recent years, almost all categories have started an art "arms race." On the one hand, the Internet dividend has long faded, the market has entered the era of stock competition, and it is difficult to maintain long-term development of the rapid sweeping model; on the other hand, the fact that SLG has a strong life cycle, high gold absorption capacity and continuous explosions has stimulated a batch of new products to join the competition, and you chase me to bring inevitable track internal rolls.
From simple art upgrades to creating a real and believable battlefield, in order to attract more players with higher quality. The question is, every game is looking for quality upgrades, but what difference is Return to Empire's pursuit of quality?
After reaching a strategic partnership with Xbox Game Studios, "Return to Empire" is a good technical interpretation of what "industrial standard quality" is.
To make the world come alive, the production team carved 10,000 mountains and nearly 10 million trees in it, which are distributed across 6.25 million square kilometers of battlefield.
What is even more rare is that the game is not satisfied with rough technical crushing, but continues to deepen, promoting quality upgrades from the lower technology to a more advanced design, so that the world that is shaped is not only real, but also more vivid in line with intuitive cognition.
For example, in the game, as the times change, the player's inner city will gradually grow in size and become more and more vibrant: villagers come and go to farm, soldiers patrol around the city; small bridges cross streams, sailboats moored in the harbor; fish flocks jump in the water, seagulls flutter in the sky; the breeze blows, the branches sway, and the flag flutters...
Return to Empire has an almost "paranoid" quest for these details. You know, in the current pursuit of a sense of quality, there are still many games that are not willing to spend their efforts on these details, after all, the actual benefits are difficult to measure.
But in the process of experiencing the game, I have a stronger understanding of "the city is becoming more and more prosperous under my leadership", because these details create a "fireworks" that has never been seen before, making players believe that the people inside are living individuals who exist in that world, and they also have their own lives. This is a realm that cannot be achieved by pursuing art upgrades alone, and it is also the gap between technology and design mentioned earlier.
On the other hand, "Return to the Empire" also tries to restore the scene through elaborate scene restoration, so that players can feel the cultural accumulation of different civilizations, so that the development process of civilization is more real and credible.
The existing four civilizations in the game have faithfully restored the style characteristics of their respective periods in terms of architectural style. For example, Chinese-style palaces, carved beams and painted columns, decorative materials are mostly wood-based, extraordinary and elegant; such as Byzantine style, arch dome, magnificent and so on.
As the story progressed, the production team added a large number of large-scale scenes to create a pre-war atmosphere of dark tides and waves. There are as many as 9 large scenes that need to be arranged and displayed - Roman City, Egyptian Temple, Greek City, Frankish City-State, Grand Palace of Tendipoh, Great Wall, Daming Palace, Sandbox Room, and Final Battlefield.
△ The city of Rome
△ Roman City Square
These exquisite scene performances allow players in the game to experience that when the whole world trembles under the iron hooves of the barbarians, the trumpet of resistance blows, every corner of the world is filled with smoke, and the pre-war dormancy and planning hide the turbulence and killing machine:
△ Frankish city-state - interior view
△ Frankish city-state - exterior view
△ Grand Palace Square, Tandimburg
● Roman Forum
Although there is no battlefield of Jingo Iron Horse, the smoke of war after the war is filled with indictments of the relentless fire.
△ The Roman Forum filled with smoke
● Frankish city-states
The rise of buildings from the ground, is the rise of hope like a mushroom? Or is it the quiet arrival of another civilization?
△ Frankish city-state architecture
● Oath of the Byzantine monarch
It is a declaration of turning crisis into safety, and it is also a turning point in the revival of the bottom.
The production team POPIC said that in order to achieve a solemn atmosphere, this part of the scene had to work hard in the layout link, and also faced three major problems to be solved: first of all, the adjustment of the picture composition needed to highlight the sense of space of the entire square; the second was to strengthen the depth of the high platform, to extend the length of the high platform; third, in order to enrich the cluster effect, the center of the square added a water column for space division.
△ Oath of the Byzantine monarch
Regarding the details of the game's big scene, the technical director of the POPIC production team said that based on the principles adhered to by the team to ensure great effects, the assets were selectively streamlined.
△ Dismantling of the Frankish city-state
For example, the construction shot of the Frankish city-state, when planning the content of the picture in the early stage, consciously designed a small slope that formed a barrier in the foreground, and divided the entire picture into three areas (foreground hillside, behind the hillside, and castle) for polishing.
First of all, the displacement map is used a lot in the scene to enrich the model details (roof, wall, ground), because this practice not only avoids the problem of insufficient memory, but also can meet the deconstructed details of the final picture resolution.
As for the production of the ground material, it was also decided after continuous consideration that the ground was divided into multiple parts and painted to achieve enough details to meet the picture.
In order to solve the close-up of multiple parts of the lens, it was necessary to develop a procedural material production system. The result is that the ground material is in the lens frame, which can be rendered with the precision of the original texture material.
Not only that, in addition to the high-precision models with more than 60,000 faces, advanced motion capture technology and PBR physical rendering, the team also referred to the classic legendary characters and created a heroic character with a distinct image.
Even in terms of classes, "Return to the Empire" not only equipped each civilization with its own special classes, but also made stylized distinctions between common classes, and the weapons and armor of soldiers of different civilizations were restored with reference to real history.
Relying on all of the above, "Return to the Empire" pushes the pursuit of reality to a new level, allowing players to enter the game and feel a living experience within reach of the world.
As a strong competitor of the SLG track, it is not difficult for us to see their determination to deepen the cultivation of this category from Tianmei's intensive cultivation on "Return to the Empire"; on the other hand, Tianmei also has a deep research and development accumulation for the SLG category, entering this track when the domestic SLG is in the ascendant, has successful product operation experience, witnessed the development and change of the category all the way, and has a deeper understanding of the tone of SLG products, competitive situation, player preferences, etc.
At the same time, with the experience and resources accumulated in the continuous operation of the SLG track over the past many years, Tianmei should be more comfortable in follow-up content updates and player community construction.
With its own quality and operation guaranteed, "Return to Empire" may really become the force that changes the pattern of the track - while raising the threshold of technical competition, it goes deep into the aesthetic, experience and other internal levels, driving the entire category to a new level.
The high-tech competition threshold means that the demand for high-end technical talents in the game industry is increasing, especially after a cold winter, on April 11, the game industry finally waited for a new batch of version numbers.
Pragmatically speaking, the "home economy" represented by games has indeed provided some boost to the economy in this year's treacherous epidemic environment. According to the statistics of the data agency Sensor Tower, in March 2022, in the global App Store and Google Play revenue rankings, a total of 38 Chinese manufacturers were shortlisted in the top 100 of the global mobile game publisher revenue list, with a total revenue of more than 2.22 billion US dollars, accounting for nearly 40.2% of the global TOP100 mobile game publisher revenue.
This achievement was achieved almost exclusively by old games and overseas operations after the discontinuation of the version number. If the version number is liberalized, the vitality of the domestic game market will rise, and it will obviously create more economic value.
In this regard, Xingzai wants to tell those students who are concerned about the game industry but are discouraged by the cold winter of the industry, and now, the time to seize the opportunity has arrived - the 3D model professional course of the Mars Era Game Academy to help you master the professional "salary" skills:
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