Text/Fish and Dunes
If you want to choose a game that has had a profound impact on the industry in the past decade, then The Killing Minaret undoubtedly has a place, especially for the indie game industry.
Since the release of The Killing Spire in 2017, you've seen some similar card games on Steam almost every once in a while in 2017, enough to describe it as "mushrooming."
"Tower Climbing Like" is enough to be regarded as a genre like "SoulLike"
For DBG (card building games) and even electronic board games, "Killing Spire" is the "spring rain" - it has cultivated a loyal audience of players, but also for many small and medium-sized production teams to set up a template to build their own "tower climbing like" game.
It's not hard to imagine that if The Killing Spire hadn't gone viral, the development of this type of card strategy game would have been a different story.
But if we look back a little bit on the journey, we will find that all this may have been an accident.
1
After the game's popularity, many players believed that the prototype of "Killing Spire" came from an earlier independent mobile game, Dream Quest.
Dream Quest was produced entirely by developer Peter Whalen, as evidenced by the game's "soul drawing style"
Dream Quest is one of the first video games to combine "Meat Pigeon Dungeon" and "DBG Card Game", players need to "explore the grid" on the immediately generated map, encounter enemies and treasures, build and upgrade their decks, and challenge difficult boss battles, once they fail halfway, the whole game has to start over. The class elements and the derivation direction of the deck are indeed very similar to the prototype of the Killing Spire.
Randomly generated dungeons form the main content of Dream Quest
But the differences between The Killing Spire and Dream Quest are also obvious. In Dream Quest, enemies also appear as "players", attacks and skills are carried out in the way of "card playing", and players also have some means to interfere with and destroy each other's hands and decks.
The Killing Spire, on the other hand, almost abandons this "playing cards" scene, where the enemy has no hands, the action of each turn is predictable, and the player side discards all the hands in each round, allowing the player to focus on the current situation, which is quite unconventional design for traditional card games. "Killing Spire" is more like expressing the various "attacks", "magic", "skills" and "props" in traditional turn-based RPGs as cards.
And this content is precisely the core of the inheritance of many later "tower climbing like" games.
The developers of "Killing Spire" also mentioned in interviews that what really inspired them was the meat pigeon game that was closer to RPG such as "Beyond the Speed of Light" and "Dark Dungeon", and the effect and numerical design of the cards were deeply influenced by DBG board games such as "Assassination God" and "Territory".
If there is any similarity between "The Killing Spire" and "Dream Quest", it is probably the tragic situation when it first appeared on Steam.
"Killing Spire" was released in the form of "early access" in 2017, and the two producers studied a lot of community operation experience at the beginning of the game's release, prepared a set of player opinion collection and feedback systems, and waited to meet their first players, only to find that everything was in vain - "Killing Spire" did not sell a few copies in the first two weeks of the shelves, and often suffered refunds due to its simple art style and high difficulty.
Producer Casey Yano introduced the sales curve for the first two weeks of The Killing Spire in his talk
Seeing that their first game was going to be so cold, the only thing the producers could do was to find some game streamers and give them the game's key, hoping that the other party would try their own work.
It is indeed the game streamer industry that has brought a twist to the fate of the game, but it first occurred in the market that developers did not expect - China.
Driven by anchors such as Wang Laoju and The Voice of Enigma, "The Killing Spire" ushered in the real first batch of players, and the game was even topped the global hot list nearly a month after its release, which then attracted the attention of some anchors in other countries.
After the game sold more than 1.5 million, more than half of the purchases from China are still made. Today, 1/3 of the game's Steam reviews are still Chinese
In fact, even at this stage, when the two developers excitedly went to the live rooms that were broadcasting The Killing Spire and left a message saying that everyone was welcome to come to our Discord to participate in the discussion, there was still no one to take care of it, until more and more people bought the game themselves.
After "The Killing Spire" became a hit, the game industry has been keen to review why the game can be successful, but in addition to "sending a key to the community" and "seeking anchor exposure", which everyone has become accustomed to promoting, the experience that can be summarized seems to be nothing more than "gold will always shine".
2
Whether in China or overseas, those who are influenced by the anchor and buy "Killing Spire" often mention that they are because they see the blood pressure increased by watching the anchor operation, and feel that they can easily form a powerful Build to buy the game, but in fact, after the hand, they find that it is far less easy than imagined.
In fact, even these anchors themselves think so. Northern, the anchor who drove the overseas sales of The Killing Spire, said after the first live broadcast of the game: "I think I can play through six episodes, but in fact I may need to broadcast six hundred episodes." ”
"Looking simple and difficult to play" is the first impression left by "The Killing Spire" to players, players are easy to form a decent routine during the game, sweeping the mobs along the way, but in fact, in front of the boss with exaggerated attribute values, they may still be vulnerable.
The variety of effects between cards and relics, the mobs in the way that serve the player's growth, and the oppressive boss together form an exquisite difficulty curve, giving the player the experience of riding a roller coaster.
It's hard to say whether pigeon card strategy games would still be all the rage without The Killing Spire, because these are ready-made gameplay that the gaming world has accumulated over the years, and sooner or later someone will combine them. But the makers of The Killing Spire have discovered a proportional formula for the rational allocation of these elements, and many of today's "tower-like" games still inherit the success of The Killing Spire.
There are also some more hidden effects of The Killing Spire.
When The Killing Spire came out, games that tried to electronically modernize traditional board games were still in the "electronic simulator" stage. For example, "Assassination God", which inspired the creators, although it was on Steam early, its interface and gameplay are obviously not for novice players who have never touched the original version.
Like Assassin, most of the game adaptations based on board games at that time were still in the "simulator" stage
And "The Killing Spire" breaks through this design inertia, showing that "the electronicization of card games does not necessarily have to be like playing cards."
Also getting rid of the shackles is the design of the card effect. There are many routines in "Killing Spire" based on the "frequency of attacks", the player character can repeatedly attack in one action, accompanied by the side effects of stacking armor, stacking Buff, and increasing damage, which is naturally simple and easy under the automatic calculation of the computer, but it is a difficult design to execute in traditional physical board games.
In reality, it is difficult to perform such fast-paced and large-scale calculations by manual recording, and the fast-forward button has become standard for "tower climbing like"
Like Hearthstone, which the producers admired, The Killing Spires has also opened up many new design ideas for electronic card games and has been absorbed by other games.
3
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the works that have been produced under the influence of "The Killing Spire" in recent years can be described as a hundred flowers, many of which come from well-known producers.
For example, Klei, the development team of "Famine", made "Land of Fraud", adding more storytelling to "Tower Climbing Like", providing more opportunities to improve the player's deck, including side quests.
Book of Magic, designed by Magic Creator Richard Garfield, changed the simple route map to a grid map with fog, requiring players to plan their own routes to collect the resources they want.
Obviously, most of these latecomers added to the Killing Spire, not only putting more effort into map exploration, but also a trend that players can often arrange multiple characters of different classes to play at the same time, and Monster Train, which is regarded by many as the best successor to The Killing Spire, directly makes the characters into cards.
Monster Train divides the battle into three vertical battlefields
These all make the "tower-like" card game more in-depth at the gameplay level, but it is not necessarily the direction that players expect.
In the Workshop of The Killing Spire, the hottest mods are often character mods from other titles, and the matching decks of these original classes are usually stronger than the original, and they are more enjoyable to play.
"Beware of the Quadratic Element"
In addition to indie games, there have been similar phenomena among mobile games that borrow the tower-climbing elements of The Killing Spire.
The "ElementAl Tip" launched in 2020 is a domestic mobile game that "climbs the tower like". Its core gameplay draws on the combination of "Meat Pigeon Exploration Chart + DBG Card", and the player can decide to bring in the characters and initial cards of the random dungeon, but the specific decks still have to be truly perfected in the process of pushing the map.
The map of each level of Elemental Obelisk is a randomly generated dungeon
As a long-term online mobile game, the main fun of "Elemental Obelisk" is to cultivate characters, players need to improve the basic training of team members to challenge the corresponding difficulty levels, but the introduction of "tower climbing like" gameplay has greatly improved the common problem of repeated brushing, which was still a relatively fresh attempt at the time.
On the one hand, "Elemental Obelisk" has a more eye-catching art style and characteristics of the "paper doll" system, and the appearance differences of different equipment in the game will be reflected in the character image, which can meet the needs of players for "climbing the tower to warm up". And the game also has many social scenes, including towns and taverns, allowing players to show these images, which is enough to bring the motivation to brush and push pictures.
The tavern in the game is a place for players to communicate
On the other hand, in addition to increasing the basic value, players can also unlock some more potential skill cards, so that they have the opportunity to touch these cards during the exploration process, so as to form a deck in this round.
After each round of battle in the game, players can choose one of three skill cards to join their deck
This is actually a development trend of the meat pigeon game after the popularity of "Killing Spire". Unlike the previous Roguelite games, where the difficulty of the level was basically fixed, but the player could unlock items to gain a little growth after each death, now this type of game not only improves the player's side of the ability, but also customizes the strength of the enemy.
In this way, the replayability of the game no longer depends on the randomness of "looking at the face and grabbing the cards", but "I am strong and strong", layer by layer to the higher difficulty of the sense of challenge, which is why the experience of this type of game is more like "climbing the tower" rather than "exploring the dungeon".
And this system is also unexpectedly suitable for long-term operation of mobile games. At the beginning of the service, "ElementAl Obelisk" was recognized by many domestic players, and also won the editor's recommendation of the App Store many times, although it is not well-known, but also has a group of loyal players.
However, with the lengthening of the operating time, the disadvantages of the "tower climbing like" gameplay relative to mobile games have also been exposed - in order to continue to provide new content, developers have opened up more difficult activity maps like traditional mobile games, and vertically expanded the depth of the game. However, when the game began to show the "high difficulty" characteristics of the traditional meat pigeon, for those who only want to easily get the event rewards, then using powerful characters to perform numerical crushing is the shortcut. From the player's point of view, such an operational strategy is very much like "krypton".
This contradiction is getting worse, but it's not what the developers of Elemental Tip wanted, so recently, they tried some new changes.
After two years of operation, ElementAlpin launched the "Initial Heart Version", the game returned to the simple and easy to understand gameplay at the beginning of the service, deleting the complicated and simplifying, while also retaining some convenient functional changes.
Such an operation is easily reminiscent of the "nostalgic suit" that is common now, and if the game is still updated as usual, the problems encountered before will obviously not be solved.
However, it can be seen that "Elemental Fangjian" is trying to find a new direction, and the first thing to be sacrificed is the "Linkage Dafa".
At the time of the initial version of the service, "Elemental Fangjian" will link the domestic animation "Westbound", introduce relevant plots and feature maps, and Sun Wukong will also become the first male character available in the game.
The same is "doing addition", compared to the previous knife to the gameplay, the initial version of "Elemental Spire" turns to broaden the cultural content of the game horizontally, trying to increase the freshness of the player from other angles. Although it is difficult to say whether players will buy it, the experience of "Elemental Minaret" is also an example of how to better integrate the "tower-like" gameplay into mobile games.
epilogue
It is said that the launch of the initial version of "Elemental Spire" has another background, that is, it was still in the "version number winter" since last year, and no one knows when the new mobile game will be available in China. This has led some game developers to re-examine their own work, and a small number of people have tried to open an "if line" for game operations, and Elemental Obelisk is one of them.
With the exception of a very small number of classic old games with loyal fans, few games have been able to get such a chance to "reincarnate", because on the one hand, it is necessary to bear the pressure from old players, and it is also difficult to attract new people as a new game. And with the release of the version numbers again, such a phenomenon may become rare again.
In the case of the gameplay content of the game is basically unchanged, what kind of changes can the completely different operating routes bring to the game? From this point of view, Elemental Obelisk is also a rare example.