On January 14, Lingxi Interactive Entertainment held a preview tasting of "Three Kingdoms: War Chess Edition" in Guangzhou. At the meeting, R&D producer Xiaoliu and distribution producer Xiaobei shared the game's ideas on the R&D and publishing side, as well as the main design differences.
Xiaoliu said that they refer to a lot of MOBA's hero design routines, refuse to substitute for the upper position, refuse to match the official national team, refuse to plan to teach players to play games, and finally he hopes to make a balanced and fun skill design, allowing players to study the combination of characters and skills.
Xiaobei shared with everyone the game's future plans for user operations: there will be an alliance activity fund to support offline gatherings of allied allies; There will be an alliance taixue program, inviting outstanding alliance managers and even corporate executives to share management experience with the alliance owner; As well as one-on-one alliance housekeepers, so that all problems encountered by the alliance can be seamlessly communicated to the official in the first time, etc.
The following is the main content of the sharing, and the content has been adjusted for ease of reading:
P6: I am a Three Kingdoms lover, I have seen a lot of novels, TV series, film and television works, and the first SLG game I came into contact with was "Three Kingdoms 1", "Three Kingdoms 2" I have also played for a long time, and I am still online with my brother. Now I'm also a hardcore player of SLG, Three Kingdoms series, Heroes Invincible, Civilization, P Society... The combined playtime of these games is basically more than 10,000 hours. My wife often complains, saying why is it a colorful map every time she looks at your computer? Not sure what you're playing.
Since 2012, I have been playing mobile games. At that time, I was playing "World War II", this game is very hardcore, if it is not online for half a day, the generals I charged thousands of dollars to obtain may be snatched away by others. I will try every mainstream SLG mobile game in the back. However, the homogenization of SLG on the market is now very serious, either the bottom layer of COK/ROK, or the season-based SLG, and then attract new users by changing the theme.
Once I played a game and it was a great early experience, but after playing it for a while, I found it to be a complete COKlike, and I abandoned it - because I could see at a glance what I would play for the next month, half year, year, and this has been repeated too many times before.
So when I first made "Three Kingdoms: Warchess Edition", I decided to make a product that was different from the mainstream model on the market. I wanted to make a game where players could command the battle themselves and let them decide the outcome of the battle themselves. I wanted the combat to be very strategic and fun, like the experience of Invincible, Fantasy Sim, Fire Emblem: Wind and Snow.
We want to give players plenty of freedom to mix and match. First, we reject the national team and the fixed genre of official matching. "Three Kingdoms: Warchess Edition" did a three-month test, and I asked everyone what the strongest lineup was, and no one could say it, because each lineup was strong.
Second, we reject the substitution, each military general is unique. For example, the three shooters of the Wei Kingdom, Pound can deal single high damage; Xiahou Yuan can attack three units; And Sima Zhao is a mage-type shooter, and the lower the opponent's intelligence, the higher the strategic damage. There is no substitute relationship between them, and you need to choose which shooter to match according to the needs of the lineup.
Third, refuse to plan to teach you to play the game. When I play games, I don't like to plan and design a certain routine, and players have to play according to this routine. So there was a player before, with 10,000 soldiers to fight 50,000 soldiers, and can still achieve zero losses, this routine we are also stunned.
Then in terms of hero design, in addition to wargames, we also refer to the design concept of MOBA: each hero must have obvious differences, and the characteristics must conform to the image of historical figures of the three countries.
For example, Liu Bei, he is best known for Taoyuan Yueyi, so we gave Liu Bei a sentient skill that allows him to connect with another person and share the healing and damage with each other.
Another example is Sima Yi, this person is very smart, very lewd, 2 years older than Zhuge Liang, but he burned Zhuge Liang to death. So in our design, the more heroes are defeated on the field, the stronger his blood-sucking ability. In later stages, he can often even reap the endgame 1v3.
At the same time, we also retain the fun of "Three Kingdoms - Strategy Edition", and you can match your own genre with the same warrior. Like around Sima Yi, the player created control flow, burst flow, meat shield flow, and so on.
In actual battles, we also refer to a lot of MOBA routines. For example, Gongsun Zhan, which is like the Mongol cavalry in civilization, can attack while moving, constantly consuming opponents by flying kites. Why does it have a range of -1? Because we have seen a lot of information about ancient weapons, it is difficult to shoot arrows on horseback. So he is restrained in melee combat, but fears other ranged heroes.
Let's talk about the arms. I've played a lot of SLG mobile games, and the class is just a restrained relationship in it, and there is not much difference in itself. And we try to bring the characteristics of the classes to life. For example, shield soldiers have weak attacks but strong defenses, which are suitable for carrying damage in front; Cavalry can rely on strong movement and range to achieve "kite flying"; With a slightly higher attack range, the pikemen can hide behind the shield soldiers and "fight cattle across the mountain".
Then talk about AI. We actually use a deep learning AI that can be advanced in the SLG field. By constantly training each other with the player, including the AI, he can learn a lot of maneuvers, terrain utilization, and skill release sequence/timing.
The reason for making wargame AI is because I don't want players to play some low-value battles repeatedly, but I want players to spend their energy on some key battles. Like endgame or crushing game, just leave it to the AI, and the player can also switch back to the world map to do something else.
Let's talk about our big map design. We have integrated a lot of real mountain terrain, river landforms, including scenes from famous battles, into the entire big sandbox. We also divided into several areas, fog in Bashu, snow in Hebei, wind in Xi'an, rain in Jiangnan, and so on.
But we want to do more. We have made great efforts to study the character stories in the history of the Three Kingdoms, and designed many character stories and hundreds of events, which not only restore the true history and interpretation, but also have some speculation and "new understanding" based on historical materials. Why did Elk Fang defect to Soochow? What was Cao Cao's state of mind when he "looked at the vicissitudes of the sea"? We look forward to players experiencing it in the game.
In addition to the character stories, referring to the single-player war chess gameplay of the glorious "Three Kingdoms", we also specially set up the "Romance " script gameplay, according to the plot in the main history and the act, a total of 35 levels were set, from the group of heroes to Dong, until Guan Yu defeated Maicheng. Each level is like the "story battle" of warchess games, integrating unique gameplay into the plot, including siege battles, chase battles, escape battles, ambush battles, and rescue battles.
Finally, a word about GVG and PVP. First of all, we decided very early on on the design to abandon paving. I want players to be able to find a personal PK as soon as they go online and go offline when they're done, rather than letting players spend their time paving roads or marching. So we did a lot of simplification in these relevant places.
Xiao Bei: I would like to talk to you about some of my thoughts on the operational level.
I think from the perspective of game operation, we have always insisted on not taking short-term profits, insisting on doing long-term operation strategies, and at the same time not imposing fixed gameplay discussions on players, and returning the choice of game fun to players. We want players to play as they want, at their own pace.
Because after three years of experience in "Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition", we have summed up a very important cognition: in the SLG category, we can only design rules, but the experience and fun are not designed, but played by players.
The unique charm of SLG is that we put the power of interpretation back to the player. We want to work with all players, especially allied players, to create a good user ecosystem. We've put a lot of effort into that.
For example, to reduce the burden on management. In fact, the management in the game is very hard, especially when the game mechanism is not perfect, many times you need to manually count attendance, pull battle merit tables, score, and finally learn how to distribute rewards. It's a very tedious hard work.
So we made a campaign system, and when the siege of the city, the management no longer needs to pull people in the WeChat group and send coordinates. Through this campaign system, players can project siege targets directly into the player's game interface. People will see what their task is and can respond: whether they want to participate or not. Administrators can also see how many players have signed up for the campaign in order to assess whether they can defeat the city. This greatly reduces the difficulty of managing repeated statistics and repeated communication.
At the same time, we will also work with players to build an offline alliance ecosystem. I know that organizing offline events has some practical difficulties, including funding and organizational issues, so we want to provide support in two ways.
In the first aspect, we will provide players with event funds, of course, it may require some thresholds, mainly depending on the size of the organization, and the specific details will be when the offline event starts; In the second aspect, we will also provide organizational support, because many friends have told me that they also want to do it, but they don't know how to do it, and they can't always call everyone out for a meal, and they don't know what to do after eating.
Therefore, we will share our past operation experience with players, teach everyone how to organize events, how to do offline gatherings, how to do celebration banquets, how to restore morale if you lose a battle, etc., including icebreaker trips, escape rooms, script kills, etc. We will help you design and organize.
This brings us to the Alliance's Tai Xue program. We will invite outstanding alliance managers and even corporate executives to share management experience with alliance owners. Sometimes there are external lecturers, for example, during the previous three wars, we invited Zhao Yuping, a teacher from hundreds of forums, to talk about how to manage and organize collective activities. We hope that through this repeated school training and practice, we can help everyone build a healthier alliance management echelon and reduce the pressure on player management.
Then we will also provide the service of a 1v1 alliance butler. If the alliance encounters some problems, we will make sure that everyone can find the corresponding classmates to solve the problem. The problems solved include both in-game and out-of-game, such as what I just mentioned, what should I do if I want to organize some online and offline activities? You can ask the alliance butler.
Finally, there is the Alliance Billboard. We will record the deeds of all the alliances in the history of the game and compile them into a list.
Of course, we are still thinking about the above specific methods, but I believe that you will see further details soon. We strongly believe that a good SLG experience is created by designers and players.
Now that Three Kingdoms Wargames is about to come out, we hope that it will bring players a fresher SLG and Three Kingdoms gaming experience, but we also know that the product definitely leaves a lot to be desired. I hope you can continue to guide this game so that we can continue to improve and make this game more in line with the expectations of players.