Lead
It is better to let the two-dimensional beautiful girl shoot the gun
Yesterday, the first "Tarkov-like" hardcore tactical mobile game "Dark Zone Breakout" developed by Tencent's Rubik's Cube Studio was launched. The 24,800 people of Haoyou Quick Explosion gave 7.9 points, and on the TapTap platform, where users are slightly picky, the "Dark Zone Breakout" with more than 520,000 downloads also got a score of 7.6.
The first day of the airborne iOS free list first, the player rating is medium to high, at first glance as the first domestic "Tarkov-like" game "Dark Zone Breakout" is a good start. However, what makes the tea house curious is that the current end game "Escape from Tarkov" has a serious loss of players, and the "Dark Zone Breakout" that has just been launched is a bit "late". On the other hand, for the mobile game market that is accustomed to "fast-paced" products, it is also debatable whether this "hardcore slow-paced" product can break the current pattern of the FPS market.
01
Looting evacuation new gameplay
Different from the previous fire-eating chicken game, the core logic of "Dark Zone Breakout" is "small and broad", and there is no clear purpose in the gameplay. In simple terms, players need to enter the war zone at the lowest cost, obtain higher-value weapons or supplies by exploring looting or "fighting in groups", and take them out of the battlefield, gradually growing their strength by snowballing. The basic logic of preparing, exploring, and withdrawing constitutes the main gameplay of Dark Zone Breakout, giving players the freedom to play with a large sandbox-style map.
That is to say, you can either carry out a carpet search on the large map with full armament, people blocking the killing of the Buddha, or you can lightly pack and search for a specific area to receive it when it is good. As I said above, Dark Zone Breakout is a "garbage picking" game with little clear purpose, as long as you can gain something on the battlefield and retire, then you will earn it.
Dark Zone Breakout offers two main gameplay options, tactical action and camouflage infiltration. In the tactical action gameplay, players can play as task forces to form a 4-person squad, carry their own equipment to the war zone to raid, and fight against the IN-game NPCs. The camouflage embedding gameplay will provide players with random equipment props, and the player will play as an NPC in the game, although it is also a scavenging of equipment materials, but the AI in the game will not attack the player, greatly reducing the risk of death.
It is worth mentioning that once you die in "Dark Zone Breakout", all the equipment on the player's body will be dropped, and this combination of risk and opportunity greatly enhances the excitement of the game and is also regarded as the essence of the "Takov-like" game. Big guys can fight for the battlefield every day, Meng Xin can slowly develop in obscene corners, and for players of different technical levels, "Dark Zone Breakout" provides their own fun.
02
Hardcore = high barrier to entry
To be honest, as a newcomer who has not been exposed to the "Tarkov-like" game, the most intuitive feeling that "Dark Zone Breakout" gives me is that it is very "hardcore realism", and on another level, this hardcore is also a double-edged sword.
From the preparation stage, the player needs to carry out a complete set of screening from basic defense equipment to guns, magazines, bullets, and first aid drugs, and each type has a certain learning cost. To take a simple example, in the "Dark Zone Breakout" game, each gun needs to be equipped not only with the corresponding cartridge, but also with the appropriate bullet, and according to different damage, armor piercing, rate of fire, there are as many as 6 types of light bullets.
In addition, the game is also designed with two different functions of the bounce hanging (quick use function) and backpack (storage function) of the storage space, the player needs to put the full bullet clip in the bounce hanging, in order to achieve the function of rapid change of bullets. Therefore, compared with the chicken eating game of "take the gun and do it", "Dark Zone Breakout" distinguishes the concept of cartridge and bullet, and the previous simple bullet change was disassembled into the corresponding bullet into the magazine, and the clip was loaded on the bullet hanging, and finally the three steps of the bullet change could be completed. Although the "immersive" game experience has been improved to some extent, for most players who are just getting started, scavenging for 10 minutes and preparing for 1 hour may be a more common phenomenon.
In addition to equipment options, survival is another hardcore point of Dark Zone Breakout. In the game, the player's health level is not limited by a single health bar, but is divided into seven different areas such as chest, head, abdomen, limbs, etc., and the damage in different areas will bring different negative effects to the player. Wanting to treat is very "simple", as long as you find the corresponding medicine from dozens of drugs to use, but the reality is often that I am injured, the system prompts me to take medicine, I use it in a vacuum.
After entering the battlefield, there is no aiming, no health, and no bullet count, which often makes players who have just entered the game a little uncomfortable. Aiming requires machine sight or equipment scope, health needs to observe the body state at any time, the number of bullets requires the player to pay attention to the state of the cartridge and then change the bullet, hardcore brings a realistic game experience, but also with a large number of learning costs are equated.
03
Everyone is a "shopping master"
In addition to being too hardcore, another big feeling that "Dark Zone Breakout" gave me was that the pace of gameplay was too slow.
On the one hand, the lack of a clear purpose does give Dark Breakout a more free play, but it also raises another question, what exactly are players playing when they enter the game? Compared to eating chicken and shrinking circles to force players to gather together to shoot for life and death, the living environment of "Dark Zone Breakout" is really too good.
NPCs are one by one stroke masters, human flesh airdrops almost make players without any survival pressure, and other players often can't meet each other because the map is too large, which also leads to an increasing number of "street skates" in the game. It is common to encounter teammates who rush out after visiting a few rooms, as if to say, "Today this broken street is here." Although THE GAME PROVIDES NPC MISSIONS, most of them are one-time tutorials, making it difficult for players to truly feel accomplished.
On the other hand, the design of the search function consumes almost a lot of time for the player. In the game, search is a very important function, all items found for the first time will not show all the information, only after the player explores, it will show the original appearance. Whether it is a safe or a suitcase, it takes the player a certain amount of time to search. Especially for such a popular entertainment activity as licking bags, after a fierce battle, it takes a lot of time to search for loot, and intermittent positive feedback often brings a strong sense of separation.
It can be said that nearly half an hour of time in a round, in addition to running, half of the time is spent on touching the bag, which is obviously extremely unfriendly to mobile gamers who are accustomed to fragmented time.
epilogue
Seeing this, some people may say that "hardcore realism" and "slow pace" are the characteristics of "Tarkov-like" games, and you just don't understand anything at first glance. Yes, I'm very much in agreement that most of the endgame players are probably playing against these features, because they are obviously more hardcore and more inclusive. But in contrast, after the mobile game player group is accustomed to a fast-paced business model, will this product that overemphasizes "hardcore" appear to be a bit unsatisfactory?
Overall, "Dark Zone Breakout" did not cater to the original core players, such as the "safety box" that could have been obtained by the mission (the items put in will not fall with death) as a mandatory kryptonite point, which was madly complained by fans. It also did not go to please the mobile game players, and it was obviously very unwise to rigidly set the original too hardcore play logic and force it to adapt to the high threshold for getting started.
Without the original IP blessing of "Tarkov", nor has there been a major innovative change in the gameplay of "APEX" to the "Eat Chicken" game, it may take more time to test if you want to break the pattern of the mobile game FPS market with "hardcore gameplay". At least from the rankings that still hover around the 40 on the best-seller list, it seems to illustrate some of the problems.