The first place on the iOS free list on the day of unlimited numbers, 10 million registered players in 4 days, giving the game an additional 8 million player-built manors - this is the first answer sheet handed over by "Dawn Awakening: Life" after getting the version number online.
As Photonic's first key new game in 2023, and one of the iconic works that returned to the upward product cycle this year after the downturn of the game industry ended last year, the open-world survival game "Dawn Awakening: Life" has always attracted the attention of many industries and players from the testing stage to the official launch.
As of now, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has a score of 7.2 on TapTap, which is impressive enough compared to other survival games. As an open-world work with extremely high development specifications, there are few mature products that have been truly successful. In the face of feedback from different types of players, "Dawn Awakening: Life" is also constantly iterating with agility, and has carried out four rounds of optimization updates in just a few days.
So, as the inventor of the concept of SOC (Survival Open World Crafting), how does "Dawn Awakening: Life" interpret the "survival theme" with its own means?
1. "New production standards" for survival themes
The high specification of production is a factor often mentioned in the publicity of "Dawn Awakening: Life" from project establishment to launch. This is also evident in the official version of the product, whether it is a seamless large map of 100 square kilometers (10,000 * 10,000 dimensions) or a complex scene design that includes landforms such as woodlands, cities, deserts, and islands, which shows the heavy workload of this game in open world design.
With the addition of more than 8 weather and temperature systems, the complexity of world construction has been taken to a new level. It is believed that after ending the ruins of the ruined city level at the beginning, all players who come to "Dawn Awakening: Life" can feel the vastness of this open world.
Matching this art and scene design are high-precision models in the game's realistic style, as well as a large number of real scene materials corrected by PBR. Although limited to the display of models and optimizations, not all players can feel the workload of the game in terms of graphic details, but at least the realistic model has a clear impact on players:
Because of the excellent rendering effect of the character's skin and hair material, many players have "lingered in the face pinching link", and ""Dawn Awakening: Life" face pinching" has also become the most popular game-related content on the B station at the beginning of its launch.
However, the simple technical power and graphic performance are not the biggest difference between "Dawn Awakening: Life" and similar games, the real difficulty is how to compare a large number of similar games, new players can quickly get the fun of game content, and how old survival game enthusiasts can find new things in it.
2. How to balance the survival theme with the public?
The reason why Dawn Awakens: Life can gain tens of millions of players early in the release is because of the lower gameplay pressure and better initial guidance compared to similar games.
Whether it is a multiplayer game or a single-player game, survival games are actually a category that will have self-conflict in terms of gameplay content:
Its gameplay fun comes from a sufficiently deep gameplay system, but building a system with high complexity (such as multiple survival indicators) often brings too much pressure to survive, leaving players overwhelmed or exhausted. This is the problem of balancing the initial threshold of getting started and the depth of survival gameplay.
The survival game "SCUM", which was previously popular due to the "physiological system", is also famous for its high threshold in the early days
Once a virtuous resource cycle is established, players may feel "bored" with survival goals, and how to continue to provide enough playable content after players are familiar with the process and gameplay is the second problem.
The first point I believe players have a deep experience: whether it is in the relatively high development specification of "SCUM" or the simpler "Card Survival: Tropical Island", the huge and complex survival system has the fun of deep study for hardcore players, but it also increases the difficulty of learning when getting started, and the serious punishment in the early stage will also cause players to have the urge to "retreat".
In order to attract as many players as possible to experience the basic process in the early stage, the feedback curve of Dawn Awakening: Life is quite special: although a large number of survival indicators are designed, there are quite a few basic materials prepared in the initial process, which can provide players with the survival environment in less stressful situations.
In-game survival metrics monitoring details
For example, the basic melee weapon and gun design is provided in the beginning of the story, which is actually not much in similar games. Because the combat system is more complex (such as designing a throwing system, it also includes tactical actions such as sliding shovels and rolling), giving players enough weapons and materials to deal with emergencies earlier is also faster for players to familiarize themselves with the combat content and enter the subsequent plot process.
At the beginning of the process, you can use the shotgun to familiarize yourself with how to fight monsters
This design that allows players to "quickly familiarize themselves with a certain part of the gameplay content and choose their own gameplay route as soon as possible" can be said to be reflected in the main gameplay of "Dawn Awakening: Life". Whether it's survival, combat and building, it's almost never too early in the game to make players feel a sense of want.
For example, for players who love to build, the initial resource collection and home construction costs of Dawn Awakening: Life are quite comfortable, the cost of upgrading conditions and required materials is relatively low, and the construction area and art style meet the needs of the builder.
The operation method of giving away structures and furniture, and even having templates and blueprints to "copy operations", while ensuring enough freedom, can also allow players who are enthusiastic about this to experience the content design of the game as soon as possible, rather than being limited by objective survival conditions to do some heavy and trivial work (such as repeated running maps).
Player reviews on TapTap
Similarly, in the traditional survival-exploration-combat link, "Dawn Awakening: Life" also has a lot of designs that lower the initial threshold and reduce repetitive work: for example, the gun system that will never be scrapped (permanently repairable), and the common use of gun accessories on different guns, are very obviously reducing negative feedback factors such as the player's possible "sense of loss".
However, the reduction in the initial gameplay pressure does not mean that the content depth of the game is not enough. In this regard, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has also made a lot of designs to prevent the rapid loss of players' freshness, such as gradually unlocking content and gameplay according to the main story, and more types of guns and dungeons and social links are released according to the progress of the game.
In this process of "little by little exploration", players can gradually experience the core content of the survival game itself, or the advantage of open-world gameplay: a large number of random events and story missions for players to understand the world they are in inch by inch.
On TapTap, many players said that the first day of playing felt like "no different from other survival games", but after gradually unlocking various content, they began to gradually feel the small details of the content in the open world, even if they did not pay, they could be experienced as a single-player game for free exploration.
Player reviews
During exploration, players who love combat can also experience a large number of strongholds and quests, providing enough initial PVE and PVP content, and the huge 10,000*10,000 map at the beginning of the game is enough for them to spend a good period of time. It is worth mentioning that although the main gameplay mode is survival, "Dawn Awakening: Life" introduces FPS-like PVP gameplay such as multiplayer matchmaking in the PVP link, which improves the viscosity of PVP players in retention.
The interweaving of many game contents in different links also creates enough discussion topics for the player community, which is equivalent to boosting the social needs of players on the side. For example, even players who only love to build, in order to get out of the "shelter" early and more satisfactory, need a higher manor level and construction space, which will create the need for further exploration and personal growth.
There are already a lot of exhaustive exploration videos on Station B
3. The future of survival tracks
In general, the long-term operation of the survival category is a difficult problem that needs to be well designed and guided at multiple content levels: this is both because the gameplay itself is mature enough and there are too many similar games to compare, but also because the content of the survival gameplay is quite complicated, once the content balance at the player level is not done well, players will reduce the freshness and exploration fun too early or too quickly.
And "Dawn Awakening: Life" is obviously not only a product aimed at completing the accumulation of technical power and industrialization, but also an exploration work of Photon Studio Group in large-scale open-world content design and user social networking. Judging from the initial results of the launch, survival gameplay is indeed a category full of possibilities and opportunities for larger users and young generation players.
Whether it can make progress in the post-apocalyptic theme and open-world content experience in the long-term operation link in the future, and make the new and old content further recognized by more players, requires "Dawn Awakening: Life" to make continuous adjustments and changes in the future. We also found that in the days after its launch, "Dawn Awakens: Life" was frequently optimized for the feel of the vehicle, backpack capacity, and frame rate of the picture quality that players complained about. This is both Dawn Awakening: Life's response to player demands and a long-term gesture of preparedness for higher-spec competitors that may emerge on the survival track in the future.