A month after the sale, Death Cycle disappeared from discussions on social networking sites.
I recently found out when I was going to recycle on a whim. I wanted to search the game forums for some relevant game discussions and found that there were less than ten posts about Death Loop since October.
It's not just me who should be "not surprised." Players who know a little about their studio Arkane should do the same. "Death Cycle" received good reviews, but in the end it failed to break through its inherent circle of players and became a niche carnival. The 3354 is just like its predecessor.
In recent years, there have been posts on gaming forums discussing Arkane Studios every once in a while. In addition to praising the levels design of the Dishonored series and Predator, the most frequently asked question for players is: Why is Arkane's game so well done, but always unpopular?
This time, we can try to find the answer in The Death Cycle.
Cycle of Death is a first-person action-adventure game released by Arkane Studios in September this year. This is Wikipedia's definition of The Cycle of Death. But in the eyes of most gamers like me who have suffered a lot in the game, these simple words are far from telling what kind of game Death Loop is.
In an easy-to-understand way, the entire gameplay of Death Loop is the story of a person trapped in a loop who wants to break the loop and get out of the cage, as you see in many movies.
In the game, the player assumes the role of a protagonist named Colt, who lives on a small island that is reset every day. The ultimate goal of the game is to kill seven prophets from different places in the same day, break the loop and escape the island each day according to the information gathered in the previous cycle.
In the game, Death Loop is designed with a few variables: the entire game has four maps, and there are four time periods in the morning, noon and evening. Any combination of any time and place. The game will show you completely different levels depending on the development of the story, and will produce more variables due to your previous choices.
For example, in the morning in the city center, you can see two people digging a corner. If you don't kill them, when you choose to come downtown in the afternoon, you will see that they have dug a tunnel that can be passed. Similarly, some items in the game can only interact during certain time periods. They didn't arrive earlier, and later, everything was ruined.
So it may seem like the game is a repetition day after day, but in reality the player will only have "more areas to explore" to drive you into the next loop.
Death Loop received its first double score review of the year for IGN and Gamespot before it was released, so much so that by the time the game announced that it had just met Death Cycle, most players were already wearing the label of "Top Score". Later, more media ratings came out, giving Death Loop more aura: PS5's highest-rated media game, one of the strongest contenders for Game of the Year. It's something Arkane Studios has never seen before. There seems to be a multi-year effort for the public to see that the day is coming.
But it turns out that high scores in the media don't make the game more alive. The "high-scoring announcement" eventually became the most exposed part of the game, plummeting in the bad reviews that followed the game's release, draining the game's fresh popularity.
Only once during this period caused a small discussion among gamers: Chinese version of the embedded font of the game's Death Cycle. Every player who has just opened the game will scan it at first glance. In the game, this font is used to express the player's monologue and also as a mission guide, but it looks a bit ... It was so cute.
Especially in a hardcore shooter game.
But today, if you search for Death Loop, you'll see that this high-quality game is the most discussed and widely disseminated topic, and it has nothing to do with any game content. Or its font.
The balances at both ends of the Death Cycle
The threshold for the game of Death Loop is still too high. If you've been exposed to other Arkane Studio games before, the familiar superpower setting and the familiar narrative style will soon get you through the awkward period of the game and experience the fun of the game wholeheartedly. If you haven't played Dishonored or Predator, what awaits you is a painful two-hour start-up period.
When you enter the game, the settings are almost thrown at you. Waking up, being hunted down, getting caught in a cycle again, the appearance of your own doppelganger, the floating narration, the walkie-talkie, all kinds of weapons, clues from all directions, can easily crush the storage space in your mind.
In addition, the weak who do not get good weapons need to carefully hunt down your enemies in all directions. Bring a small pistol and infiltrate the local bases. The slightly better weapons early in the game are hidden in the library, but there are a dozen heavily armed enemies patrolling back and forth on the second floor. Fortunately, the game's characters have two resurrection opportunities in each time period, which shows Arkane's rare kindness.
When the first round of missions is completed, 10,000 possible routes begin to unfold before your eyes, weapons begin to join the indoctrination system (weapon inheritance system), and the nasty Juliana begins to invade your game.
While many people don't think so, I've always thought that Juliana's invasion was the second difficulty in the game. It's hard to understand the game's mechanics and what you can do. This mortal enemy, which can be played by other players, will suddenly break into your game and hunt you down at any time of the day.
She may have been waiting for you with an orange weapon and superpowers, and you may have been killed in half before you could figure out your escape route.
But in reality, Death Loop is Arkane's biggest compromise for players. All the clues collected throughout the game end up with only one correct answer, and you don't need to arrange it yourself. The collected clues and the location of the target are even listed as clear tree diagrams for the player to see. After finding all the routes, follow them once on the table, and finally you can smoothly get out of the loop and change to "Predator" DLC, which belongs to "one of the clearance routes". However, this well-made and free enough DLC was tossed around without even a media rating.
If Arkane's previous games have been adding layers to the level design, Death Loop is about finding a balance between a not-so-high threshold and a high level of design.
"Die Again"
It is Arkane's unique temperament that determines the audience positioning of the final "Death Cycle". Players who have played Arkane games may also feel that their game is trying to give you a "tacit pleasure" from start to finish. So when many people talk about Arkane's games being fun or not, they always habitually add the second half of the sentence to the "fun" answer: if it matches the radio waves.
This means having the patience to read paper materials and long and short recorded messages, having enough desire to explore the game's map, being good at stealth, and being able to invade violently. In Death Cycle, you have to endure the torment of sudden death.
The Cycle of Death is designed to encourage you to die by trial and error. In the early stages of the game, if you are not familiar with the route, do not have good skills and weapons, it is easy to die. At the same time, the targets you kill, the new weapons you touch, the new routes you plan, will all be cleared on the spot. Too many times, missed missions at night, and the last man was overwhelmed by the progress lost all day.
Steam's game introduction lets you "die again"
This design is rare in mainstream business games on the market. Most games will design "instant feedback" rewards for players. As soon as the player takes the right step, there will be a treasure chest, a collection, or the next guide to tell you congratulations. Go find the next secret!
But in Arkane, players first learn to delay gratification, as most clues may not be answered in the next three loops. After waiting for a few cycles, you finally find the other end of the clue and open a brand new door to get complete and strong exploration feedback.
So, you can find the mystery of only existing in the open world in Death Cycle, but at the same time, you have to endure the torment of "dying". You could also argue that under the constraints of a series of mechanics, it is Arkane's game that screens out the most suitable players for it.
It is a pity that "Death Cycle" did not continue to write the glory of double full points after its release, all the way up and down. The impact of the long tail after sales is even far less than before.
On the day the game was launched, the player rating of the PC version of the MC "Death Loop" fell to more than three points, and most players could not enter the game normally. Optimization issues are imminent, and even the 30 Series graphics card has a precious avatar on the front. Bad reviews are far more than positive reviews, and most of them score zero.
Although the official quickly gave a preliminary update plan, the wave of heat that could best earn word of mouth for "Death Cycle" has long since dissipated, and Steam's evaluation of the game is still weak. Judging from the number of people reviewed by Steam, after ten days, "Death Cycle" can be regarded as the completion of the life cycle.
At this point, its older predecessor, Dishonored 2, did a better job of logging into Steam, and the 3354 was at least that way in terms of player reviews.
"Spring is Bright"
To make matters worse, after a slight improvement in the game's optimizations, a group of players driving the moonlight wind broke into the game.
"Lingfeng Yueying" refers to a single player game modifier. In most contexts, it represents the game's "open hanging", giving your character omnipotent superpowers such as walking like a bird, keeping a blood lock to death, killing each other's family with one shot, and so on. In Death Loop, players can play as the protagonist's nemesis, Julian, to protect the loop by invading someone else's game. As a result, the windy and full Julian invaded the world of ordinary players.
They come and go without a trace, and will not fall no matter how they shoot, leaving a group of ordinary players on the way to guard the reincarnation. Later, no one was willing to open the door of "Online Invasion", and if he played Julian himself, no other player would be willing to open the door.
"Bring a better gaming experience to players"
FPS online games are difficult to handle plug-ins. Achieving a balance between game fluency and fairness requires sophisticated validation and analysis strategies. But Death Cycle clearly doesn't put much effort into that. Most of its data settlement is done directly on-premises, almost no longer validated by the server cloud. Therefore, even the most basic game modification software "cheatengine", the results of its modifications can be applied directly to the online mode, affecting the experience of other players.
A month has passed, and the official still has not made a statement on the opening and hanging problem, leaving only a group of players who still can't open the game, but dare not go online, although they have been online.
label
Remember the aforementioned "Cycle of Death" getting the first double score review of this year's IGN and Gamespot? Knowing these facts mentioned above, it is not difficult to understand why there is such a big difference between the media and the players.
In a sense, Death Loop is a very "idealized" game. The idealization here does not refer to the ideal sentiment common in the indie game circle, but to the fact that the game needs an ideal experience environment to show all its advantages: to play on a suitable hardware platform, you need to know the consistent tone of Arkane's game, know the shining point of their products, and actively explore. Where can there be such ideal conditions? If you want to "rate" this game, such conditions are not difficult to find. I believe that when evaluating media such as Gamespot or IGN, they should find players who are familiar with the Arkane series (otherwise find someone who does not understand to review?). ), if you play on the best experience of the next generation console, you will never encounter any plug-ins. Under such conditions, the two media outlets gave a perfect score of 10, which is an understandable result.
However, in reality, only a small number of players have such an ideal environment. Most people are doomed to fail to fully appreciate the wonderful experience that exists in the designer's philosophy. Especially for PC gamers, the online confrontational interactions they pride themselves on have almost become a figment of the show. In the face of the experience of mass players, the shortcomings of this game are rapidly magnified.
Hopefully, this time the "Death Loop" will allow Arcane to learn some experience about the "user experience" so that they can really bring us a game that is both good and popular next time.