When I woke up this morning, a woman with three arms and leggeds was not walking in my camp. She must be freezing in only her underwear, and she doesn't look like a threat. She was so fascinated by my cabin that she was always circling around it, and I wondered if she was asking me for help...
This bizarre scene takes place in the recently released "Children of the Forest", which is highly anticipated by players, with the high-quality survival horror experience of the previous "Forest" as the foundation, "Children of the Forest" became a big hit as soon as it was released.
The previous game, The Forest, achieved excellent results, and as a four-player indie game with a cost budget of only $125,000, it has sold more than 10 million copies.
And "Children of the Forest" looks even more powerful, selling 2 million copies within a day of its release, and quickly reaching a peak of 350,000 simultaneous online users, and even squeezing out the recently popular Hogwarts Relics in some time periods.
For an indie game, the speed of sales is really amazing.
Children of the Forest builds on the success of combining the popular wilderness survival genre with first-person thriller.
The most obvious difference between Children of the Forest and its predecessor is that although it is still in an environment similar to the Pacific Northwest, the world area has expanded fourfold, and as the territory has expanded, the types of trees and flowers in the game have become greatly abundant. In addition to the surface content, the cave mechanics of the previous game have also been preserved, and there is a new world underground waiting to be explored.
In terms of actual performance, the multiplication of the map actually has a negative effect, that is, the time to run the map is too long, resulting in a lower density of game content, after all, the production team did not design mechanisms such as fast travel in a realistic style.
One interesting detail is that the location of "Children of the Forest" has already been hinted at in the previous game "The Forest". In one of the Forest's endings, players will see a map labeled "Site2" on a wall, which shows actually where Children of the Forest is located.
In the world shaped by this game, the production team made a new attempt, adding dynamic seasonal changes.
Each season's environment will be different, which will also affect the player's gameplay decisions and experience.
In summer, salmon are abundant and swim upstream, easily fished out of streams, and turtles also lay their eggs on the beach. In winter, when all food is thinner, berries are bare, and the lake is frozen, food needs to be stored in advance, otherwise players may be forced to join the ranks of the local natives and feed on the local natives.
In addition to the overall changes in the world, the production team Endnight Studios also paid attention to many gameplay details.
The process of building and crafting objects is now more realistic and immersive.
In The Forest, the process of crafting items is very rudimentary and they appear out of nowhere, while in Children of the Forest, you'll see characters putting all the ingredients together and combining, such as stuffing cloth into a bottle of vodka to make a "Molotov cocktail".
By showing this process, the game becomes more interesting and easy to understand.
However, not all elements of the previous game have been improved, and some systems have been drastically cut, such as the production team's decision to abandon the "sanity point" setting altogether, because they can't reasonably arrange an interesting gameplay for this system.
In terms of narrative, similar to its predecessor, Children of the Forest also adopts a minimalist fragmented narrative to tell the story, and players often piece together what happened in the world from the scene.
"We don't like long-form cutscenes, it's important for players to discover the story, not being tied to a chair and forced to watch too many animations, so our storytelling is very short, intuitive and straightforward," the production team said. ”
The production team revealed that the story actually takes place some time after the events of the previous game, and hints that several familiar characters will return in subsequent updates.
Timmy's toy in the previous game
In addition to the return of familiar characters, this game also adds a completely different mechanic, and players also have other characters offline to accompany.
The production team opened the game by sending players a "Friday". In the plot of the crash, a second person survives, a young man with bleeding ears, his name is Kelvin.
He looks as if he has undergone some kind of lobotomy-like surgery, and the whole person looks dumbfounded, but he will also gleefully carry out some of your simple instructions, such as saving you some tedious groundwork of collecting materials when you start assembling your cute cabin.
Of course, not only this young guy, but also the three-armed and three-legged female character mentioned above can also become our partner.
In order to make these NPC characters work well, the production team also developed a new AI tool specifically for Children of the Forest, called VAIL.
This tool also applies to the player-controlled character itself, who will now become scared, tired, angry, or bored due to changes in their underlying state. These state changes affect the character's attribute state and affect the player's gameplay experience.
This AI system has also made enemies smarter, and enemies will now react to your multiple actions. For example, if you are outnumbered in a melee, you can cut off the head of an enemy and use it to intimidate other enemies to scare them away.
Especially different from its predecessor, this one has its own ecosystem. Dangerous mutants may leave the cave to feed, and if the player continues to clear the cave to kill the mutant monsters underground, the number of cannibal tribes on the ground will be correspondingly higher.
Of course, these can only be regarded as changes to the basic framework, and as the EA version update progresses, the production team promises to update more content with player feedback, which is a good thing to wait and see, after all, "Forest" has also been updated for several years to reach the richness of playability it is now.
epilogue
I think everyone will be a little puzzled when they see the title of the sequel "Children of the Forest", why is this game not called "Forest 2" but called this name, IGN asked Endnight this question in an interview.
The Endnight production team responded: "We thought this was a cool title that would give people a certain amount of anticipation for the plot of the game. The title "Forest 2" was boring for us, and we wanted to make something new instead of following the rules. ”
Not conformist, that's exactly what Endnight has done when making games, and that's what Kids of the Forest gives me overall.
Although the content of the game is not rich enough right now, with this new framework, we might as well look forward to what new wild adventures Endnight will bring us in future updates.