If there is any unique theme in the domestic game industry, then martial arts, kung fu, and xian xia should be imprinted in the memory of all players. After so many years of development, a variety of games of this genre are also emerging, not only in China, such as the work "Master" launched by a French game studio some time ago, but it is full of the taste of Hong Kong-style martial arts, and the quality is extremely high and sincere.
Then the question is, "Master" or "Blood Rogue", or even "True Three Kingdoms Matchless", these are foreign-made games, is there any pure martial arts or kung fu games in China now?
Unfortunately, not at all!
However, many years ago, there was such a game in China, which was known as the peak of domestic martial arts online games, but it ended up with a good ending, and finally drifted away on the road of pit money fraud, this game is the sword series.
When it comes to the sword series, it starts with a person named Liu Kun, who came from a company called Target Software before founding Pixel. If you have an understanding of early domestic games, you should have heard that in the era of domestic single-player games, there was once a birth of "Qin Yan", a game that caused a huge sensation at home and abroad, and "Qin Yan" is the work of the target software.
After Liu Kun left the target software, he founded Pixel and decided to make a stand-alone game to enter the market, which is the pioneering work of the sword series "Sword Sealing Magic Record". The development of "Sword Seal Demon Record" referred to the world-famous "Diablo 2", but at that time, this was not a big deal, the success of "Diablo 2" inspired many domestic developers, the dark game was also one of the most popular game types more than ten years ago, there are many imitations of dark games on the market, such as "Three Kingdoms Zhao Yun Biography", "Swordsman Love" and so on, and "Sword Seal Magic Record" is what it is?
At first glance, it seems to be similar to "Diablo 2", but in fact, the hand will find that the combat ideas of the two games are simply very different, because the combat logic of "Sword Seal" is completely designed according to the arcade action game, not only adding a combo system, but also sharp value settings and limb strikes and other elements, even now it is still not backward.
But in addition to the ancestral hardcore combat system, the sword series also has a consistent feature, that is, the aesthetic of violence. The lack of arms and legs in battle is simply too normal, and large-scale pictures are endless, and this dark style that is close to darkness is basically drawn by Liu Kun, the boss of pixels.
Inside the company, Liu Kun is known as a pixel maniac, because he often enlarges to the pixel size when painting scenes, pursuing the ultimate in the picture, and the name of the pixel company is also derived from this. At that time, the violent aesthetic style of the single-player game era had not caused too many problems, but Liu Kun may not have imagined that his own art style had become the biggest stumbling block on the road to the development of his own games later.
Although the quality of "Sword Sealing Magic Record" was good in that year, because of its hardcore difficulty, it still blocked many players who were interested in it, and the results obtained were also unsatisfactory. Although the beginning of the headwind, but the pixel is not dead hearted, Liu Kun in order to continue to save money to develop the game, and even once opened a hotel for a period of time, after successfully accumulating a certain amount of funds, pixel smoothly transformed the online game, developed the "Sword OL", and chose Sohu as the boss to represent, but soon the two companies had a big disagreement because of the game's charging system. In order to escape, Pixel could only sell the copyright of "Sword OL" to Sohu and redeem its own shares.
After two consecutive defeats, Pixel still did not give up its game dream. Just around 2010, a wave of action online games was set off in China, and Pixel also met its next gold penguin at this time. In 2010, Penguin attached great importance to the action online game market, and successively brought back games such as "The Ninth Continent" and "Sword Spirit" from South Korea, while also preparing for self-research, and the valuable development experience of Pixel naturally attracted the attention of Penguin.
This cooperation with the penguin is obviously a lot smoother, the rich penguin did not interfere with the development of too many pixels, just give money, so that it can let go to achieve all the martial arts dreams, pixels did not waste this opportunity, will be their lifelong learning and the ideal of the game, all instilled into the body of "Sword 2", then "Sword 2" what is the game in the end?
In Liu Kun's dream, a true Chinese-style martial arts game should have two standards, the first is a hardcore and deep action system, and the second is to truly reflect the ancient style and martial arts environment. Specifically implemented into the game "Sword 2" is like this;
The first is the action system, at that time, many MMO online game combat system no matter what kind of skin was put on, the battle process was basically standing pile output throwing skills, there was no big difference between each other, but "Sword 2" said that it was going to target the old players such as "Samurai Shodown" and "Legend of the Hungry Wolf". To this end, the combat logic of "Sword 2" is completely different from the general MMO online game, adding the standard elements of fighting games such as blocking, forward shaking, grabbing, and breaking defense.
At the same time, in order to make the characters' movements more realistic, "Sword 2" also specially explores the major martial arts masters in China, and invites them to perform motion capture for "Sword 2".
The combination of these two points makes the combat system of Sword 2 very realistic, and players need to find the flaws in the opponent's moves to strike, or rebound the opponent's moves in the process of active defense, a PK down, as if two martial arts masters are competing in another dimension.
In addition to the action, in the second point of the real martial arts environment, the understanding of pixels is also very unusual. In the pixel view, the jianghu is not the adventure of the young master, but is composed of ordinary people, and the peddlers and pawns called Hua Qi'er may be hidden martial arts masters, and these people as the protagonists are the real appearance of the jianghu.
In the scene, Pixel did not choose the locations of Chang'an, Kaifeng, Suzhou and Hangzhou, which are common to martial artists, but actually went to Jiuzhaigou, Pingyao Ancient City, Anhui Hongcun, Miaozhai and other regions for reference, and restored a somewhat rustic, but absolutely real martial arts world one-to-one.
Speaking of this, I believe that it is not difficult for players to feel that Pixel has poured its heart and soul into this game, which can be said to be full of sincerity. So why did such a good work fail?
In fact, the answer is very simple, the first is the style of persuasion, about this point in the "Sword Seal Magic Record" has planted seeds, "Sword 2" character modeling is mostly the original ecological people's appearance, although not ugly, but also and the mainstream aesthetic is very different, many want to experience the fast food game players into it, directly by the style of painting dissuadement, there is no chance to calm down to experience the game.
Even if someone really accepts the style, there is a second threshold waiting for light players, that is, the hardcore combat system. In the general online game, the novice village boss is often a symbolic test, and there is no difficulty, and in the "Sword 2", the bench work of the novice village boss does not know how many players have been ravaged, many players will not block, did not learn the game's combat system, and naturally uninstalled the game after two sentences of scolding.
It can be said that in a sense, it is also a deformed game market pit "Sword 2", players say that they want real hardcore games, and as a result, the hardcore comes, and the players give up after playing twice. Although Sword 2 had the most powerful sense of blow and combat system in the cabinet at that time, the commercial return it achieved could never be directly proportional to the painstaking efforts of Pixel.
When the ideal cannot support reality, it is often the beginning of the fall of a thing. In order to survive, Liu Kun can only renege on the promise of the past, he once promised in front of the media that "Sword 2" will never sell gems, the result naturally became a joke, since then, "Sword 2" began to fall, embarked on the most common kryptonite online game on the market, the gap between civilian players and local tycoon players gradually widened, the divine weapon gem enhancement has appeared one after another, and to this, in fact, the remaining players still have a lot of inclusive attitude towards "Sword 2", after all, everyone is from "Sword OL", They all understand the survival needs of pixels, until the emergence of horse warfare gameplay, which completely destroys "Sword 2".
The damage of this game is seriously unbalanced, civilian players can kill the local tycoons of the same level on horseback with a knife, the local tycoons are of course unhappy about this, they are charged with money and are abused by ordinary players, I don't want face? The failure of the horse war made the self-esteem of the local tycoon players humiliated, so a large number of local tycoons withdrew from the pit, although the pixel time was made up, but it was too late, but because of the modification of the horse war, some civilian players were disappointed in it, and finally chose to leave.
After that, "Sword 2" broke the can and broke, the planning became more and more pitted, more and more indifferent to the player's feelings, fashion, krypton gold weapons appeared in a big way, and a game set in the Shang Zhou period became "QQ Dance".
The strength of the explosion of the divine soldier appeared, the players who did not charge money could only be killed by the big kill, the players complained and retreated, and the once strongest action game in The country finally ended dismally, and could only rely on the remaining local tycoons to continuously launch the Krypton gold game to survive.
Pixel originally relied on love to develop a popular game, but then helplessly fell under reality, and the sword series is only a microcosm of countless domestic games, losing to reality.