Since the middle of last year, Heartbeat has held a big parade on a number of products under its own research, and games such as Party Star, T3, and Torchlight: Infinity have opened large-scale tests or launched online around the world.
(On taptap overseas edition, the number of downloads of "T3" has exceeded 440,000)
Due to their relatively rare gameplay types and high quality, these games have received critical acclaim in several regions around the world. In Japan, "Party Star" topped the free list for a few days; in North America, the darklike "Torchlight" also had some improvement.
While these "parade" products didn't generate much revenue for the heart, they did show players around the world their R&D prowess and spark interest in their next large-scale test product.
On April 14, Heartbeat opened a new round of closed testing of "Sword of Suzuran: For this Peaceful World" (hereinafter referred to as "Sword of Suzuran") in China.
For "The Sword of Suzuran", domestic friends will not feel strange. Because this product is more traditional Japanese wargame gameplay and exquisite pixel painting style, it has already gained a lot of attention in the research and development stage.
In the second half of last year, such a heat was once again pushed up. On the one hand, the reason is that "The Sword of Suzuran" received good reviews in the small-scale test at that time; on the other hand, because the game received positive reviews from the well-known wargame producer, Yasuko Matsuno, which also appeared in many domestic media reports.
After the last test, the wargame gameplay of The Sword of Suzuran has been widely affirmed. In this test, in addition to testing the new gameplay content, the production team also has to test and tune the long-term content such as cultivation, challenge, and payment.
With the game's single-player gameplay and long-term content gradually improved, "Suzuran Sword" is one step closer to the real launch. In addition to "The Sword of Suzuran", the batch of self-developed products with "differentiated content" as the selling point are also being released one after another, and their release has reached a key step.
So can this heartbeat withstand the test of the market? We may be able to find some clues in the second test of "The Sword of Suzuran".
01
A prerequisite for a hardcore wargame
Maybe you can't wait to see the specific gameplay of Suzuran Sword, but I think you should get to know the team of Suzuran Sword first, because this production lineup is as "hardcore" as the game content.
Speaking of the research and development team of "Sword of Suzuran", the Extreme Heart Society, the average person should feel relatively unfamiliar.
But in fact, they are already a seasoned team that has developed two products, and the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "General God" under the heart are all from their hands. Although neither product has achieved a large market response, the user rating has remained above 9 points.
According to The Pole Society, they are a group of game developers who have been in the industry for more than a decade. The core members of its team are not simple, many of them are veterans from well-known Japanese factories, who have worked in well-known projects such as the Super Robot Wars series, Final Fantasy, and Resident Evil.
Wargames developed by such a group of industry "old cannons" will naturally have a more traditional hardcore wargame atmosphere.
The game's music is composed by the well-known game composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, who has a richer resume, and he has his own handwriting in large and small Japanese games such as the Final Fantasy series, The Dragon's Crown, and the Battlefield Valkyrie series. It's no exaggeration to say that every player who loves Japanese games is bound to meet his soundtrack in one game.
In Sword of Suzuran, Sakimoto also showed his personal soundtrack creation, and I believe that most of the old players will surely have a lot of game memories in their minds when they hear the orchestra in the battle bgm.
"HD-2D" technology is an important technology to help pixel games rise again in recent years, which relies on high-definition graphic performance and delicate light and shadow effects, so that pixel graphics get rid of the "cheap" impression it gave people in the past, and is not inferior to other screen styles in terms of aesthetics.
Naturally, the Extreme Heart Society chose a style similar to "HD-2D" for "Sword of Suzuran" and came up with good results. For example, in the following long-range picture, we can see that the outline and color of the scene in the picture are clearly expressed by the high-definition pixel particles, and the sunlight sprinkled above the picture is also handled very beautifully.
With a strong and quite single-player game research and development team sitting, the wargame gameplay and graphics performance of "The Sword of Suzuran" are inevitable to be on par with the traditional Japanese wargames, and such high-quality game content also makes many players who love wargames have high expectations for "The Sword of Suzuran".
(The number of reservations for "Sword of Suzuran" has exceeded 600,000)
It is no wonder that Huang Yimeng will promote "The Sword of Suzuran", and Matsuno Taiji can highly praise it.
02
With a differentiated experience and details, "The Sword of Suzuran" is perhaps the most special wargame mobile game at the moment
After the influence of mature domestic wargames on the market in recent years, most mobile users are no longer unfamiliar with wargames, so compared with the existing products on the market, what will be the difference in the wargame gameplay of "Sword of Suzuran"?
If you pay attention to what the Suzuran Sword team says on various platforms, you'll notice that they often mention the impact of the Knights Royal series on the R&D team.
The Royal Knights series is a classic in Japanese wargames. Maps with a large number of terrain differences, "height" settings that affect character attacks, the "Wait Time" system that determines the order of character actions, and the multi-week plot are all hallmarks of this series of games.
And these features are well inherited by The Sword of Suzuran in its own game.
The terrain of the height difference can be described as the main theme of the game map of The Sword of Suzuran, and it is also an important factor for players to consider in making decisions, because the difference in terrain will have a greater impact on the character's actions and attack behavior.
The impact on movement is easier to understand. Due to the drop in terrain, some enemy positions require the character to reach through small and narrow places with small drops. Such terrain naturally limits the distance of the units, and also divides the battlefield, so that friendly units in different gaps cannot watch each other. This requires the player to think more about the movement of units, as once a single unit passes through the terrain and is in danger, it will be difficult for other friendly forces to reach out.
The impact on the attack can be said in conjunction with the "height" characteristic.
In the game, the attack of ranged units is set at a high level. If an archer is adjacent to a higher terrain or friendly unit, the archer will not be able to launch a direct attack, and the archer will have to climb to another higher terrain to allow his direct attack to cross the obstacles in front of him and friendly forces.
It can be seen that the terrain gap and the design of the attack height put forward requirements for how the player plans the movement of the unit, to attack the enemy, it is necessary to reach the appropriate position first, and to reach the appropriate position, it is necessary to plan a relatively safe movement route.
This complicates the game goal of "how to destroy enemies" and there is no standard solution, and finding an efficient way to destroy enemies in these demanding requirements becomes the fun of challenging Suzuran Sword.
In addition to building a tactical enough wargame gameplay, the Polar Society has added a lot of interactive content to the game. For example, players can use the shield soldier's ability to push objects off a cliff; they can also use an archer to ignite a powder keg around an enemy; and they can also have a magician ignite the grass terrain to continuously inflict damage on the enemies above.
(Each terrain also has details, some terrains cannot be affected by elemental attacks)
Overall, in the current wargame market, The Sword of Suzuran is almost the only wargame that adopts the Framework of the Royal Knights and polishes the details of battlefield interaction. Its appearance is bound to bring a refreshing experience to domestic wargame and mobile game enthusiasts.
(Even for the worldwide wargame mobile game market, the experience of "Sword of Suzuran" is unique)
Reducing the burden is one of the problems that every wargame R&D team has to face, after all, the single game time of wargames in the past is long, which is not in line with the habits of mobile platform users.
Therefore, the design of speeding up the game process, such as compressing the size of the battlefield and reducing the health of the enemy, has been made into their own wargames by each team.
In addition to some common designs, they also added a regret system and a "Wait Time" system to the game.
The penitential chess system is well understood, that is, players can withdraw their wrong actions in the game. It is worth mentioning that the sword of Suzuran's chess system is very functional, and players can withdraw their operations for several consecutive rounds.
The "Wait Time" system means that the sequence of character actions in "Suzuran Sword" is not the traditional wargame mode of "one unit is all finished, and then the other unit begins to act", but will be the same as the RPG by the size of the unit's attribute size to determine the order of action of each turn, which allows the units of both enemies and enemies to alternately start to act.
(In the upper left corner of the game screen, there will be the order of action of enemy and enemy units)
The advantage of this design is that players can find loopholes in the team position in time and stop losses in time. In the case of a traditional sequence of actions, where the player sends a unit to the wrong position and ends their turn, they can only watch as successive enemies destroy the unit little by little.
How to make the game content withstand long-term consumption is a problem that every mobile game with a single-player gameplay must face. Polar Heart Society solves this problem from the perspective of throttling and open source.
In terms of throttling, the game's single-player mainline adopts a multi-cycle rotation design. Each main chapter has a branching route and ending, and if the player does not reach the true ending, the game will not move on to the next chapter, but will return to the beginning of the cycle of the week. Each cycle of events will not take too long, which not only matches the habits of mobile users, but also slows down the consumption of game content.
(The stand-alone part of Sword of Suzuran can be interrupted at any time)
In terms of open source, "Sword of Suzuran" has added a large number of challenge levels, which basically have no plot and animation performances, and players only need to complete the level objectives to get rewards. The design of the Challenge Level makes it easy to mass-produce and attractive enough for players.
(It's worth mentioning that the system background for the Challenge Level uses tarot design elements, which is also a tribute to the Royal Knights series.) ）
The characters used by the player in the challenge level are not the characters cultivated by the player in the main line of the single player, but the characters obtained and cultivated through the card drawing system. Needless to say, the card drawing system is an important paid content for "Sword of Suzuran" in the future.
It should be emphasized that the character acquisition and cultivation of the main line of the single-player part of the game are relatively independent, and the paid content will not affect the single-player part of the "Sword of Suzuran".
(As in the Royal Knights series, players can recruit characters through the main line and taverns)
03
Will the Sword of Suzuran be a blow to the heart-pounding game?
2022 is already the third year of The Heartbeat's self-developed "differentiated game", but except for "Party Star", which has received a good response in the Japanese market, other products under research cannot bring tangible market returns to Heartbeat.
The products under development can not be transfused, the revenue capacity of the old products has begun to decline, and the revenue capacity of the heartbeat in the past two years is not optimistic, and at the end of last year, the news of the layoffs of the heartbeat is even more hazy for the prospects of its self-developed business. Under such circumstances, can we still have confidence in the prospect of self-developed differentiated products?
I'm optimistic.
First of all, it is natural because the quality of these products under research is very high, so high that it breaks through the original target group. Both Party Star and Sword of Suzuran have attracted users other than mobile game players, and the potential user base of these products may be much larger than we currently expected.
(In the test set of Sword of Suzuran, you can see relatively rare "older" players)
Secondly, in my opinion, the "loss-making game" in these years is a very discerning platform marketing advertisement.
For a platform, the user is the cornerstone of the development of the platform, in the past, TapTap relied on its own player-based scoring system, as well as more efficient user and developer communication channels and gained a lot of attention.
Users are here precisely because TapTap is more "know the player" and "know the game" brand image than other channels. Now, with the beginning of the development of the heartbeat differentiated game, users find that the image of the heartbeat platform has changed from a "manager who understands the game" to a "manager who understands the game and a developer who can meet the needs of the player", which will inevitably make the player have a greater sense of goodwill and closeness to the brand of the heartbeat, and can also enhance the player's recognition of the Tap platform and products, and even the stickiness.
Such a situation is undoubtedly conducive to the long-term development of the TapTap platform, even if it will bring short-term financial pressure to TapTap.
From the perspective of actual revenue, the current research products represented by "The Sword of Suzuran" are not the key to reversing revenue.
If you observe the paid content of "T3" and "Sword of Suzuran", you will find that these products will have very mature paid designs such as passes and cards drawn. Whether it is an FPS track or a wargame track, there have been successful commercial mobile game precedents. Mature paid design and excellent game content, coupled with TapTap's growing user base, these self-developed products can not become the pillar of revenue in the future.