In the past two years, Team RPG has become one of the hottest emerging tracks in Europe and the United States, and many overseas companies have also laid out. Such as Lilith's "Party of the Gods", "Codename: Dragon" with Love Entertainment, "Project W" from Hero Games, and "Chrono Legacy" from Sanqi Interactive Entertainment...
This Team RPG boom is derived from RAID: Shadow Legends, developed by Israeli game company Plarium.
The game not only maintains a monthly turnover of about 150 million, but three years after its release, its cumulative revenue also successfully exceeded the $1 billion mark last year. With outstanding results, "RAID" intuitively shows the European and American Team RPGs different from Chinese and Japanese card games, and is also regarded as the "pioneer" of this category.
The continuous development of head products and the all-out attack of Chinese manufacturers have long attracted the attention of Kabam, another established manufacturer in Europe and the United States.
Recently, at the EPIC event of GDC 2023, Kabam executives appeared and officially announced a cross-platform Team RPG "King Arthur: Legends Rise" built with UE5, and this next-generation cross-platform new game is now available for pre-order on Steam.
The decent gameplay can't cover the bright next-generation graphics
Although the game is currently not live, King Arthur: Legends Rise was beta tested last November under the name "Project Knights". The true quality of this new UE5 product can also be glimpsed from the test situation.
Overall, the theme and gameplay of "King Arthur: Legends Rise" do not have much highlights. For example, in terms of the theme story, the game basically copies the famous British legend "King Arthur and the Sword in the Stone".
During the Middle Ages, the High King Uther Pendragon was killed by King Lot while seeking the power of Excalibur, and the Excalibur was sealed as the "Sword of the Stone". A few years later, Uther's son "King Arthur" embarks on a journey to find Excalibur and restore the kingdom to its glory.
In terms of gameplay, "King Arthur: Legends Rise" basically continues the design of mainstream turn-based Team RPGs. For example, there are classes such as knights, mages, and thieves in the game, and different classes have their corresponding skill systems and equipment systems.
However, the number of parties is limited to four, and all members share an action energy slot. At the same time, a single class and character can only carry up to three skills, and the more powerful the skill, the higher the action value required, which ensures the strategic nature of the gameplay to a certain extent.
In addition, the big world exploration is another highlight of the game, where players can interact with many elements in the map, such as rummaging through chests and using cannons mounted on the mountain to smash boulders, causing landslides, and quickly destroy enemies at the foot of the mountain. Compared with traditional turn-based gameplay, there is more of a kind of exploration fun in RPGs.
In contrast, thanks to Unreal Engine 5, the game has a decent art and visual quality. In addition to the exquisite realistic standing painting and modeling that can be seen at a glance, the game's scene design is based on the medieval classical style and blends the fantasy style. And a lot of effort has been put into the details, and you can even see the corners of the character's clothes shaking with the wind.
This advantage is also intuitively displayed in the course of battle, and King Arthur: Legends Rise adds various attacks and close-ups of big moves to the screen, making the entire shot transition smooth, giving players a great visual shock.
"Han-Canada co-production", can the kimchi flavor satisfy European and American players?
GameLook remembers that using UE5 to make a cross-platform game is indeed quite rare for a European and American team. You know, most overseas manufacturers' use and understanding of Unreal Engine are still stuck in the host field.
In other words, is King Arthur: Legends Rise entirely by the European and American company? Inevitably, a question mark needs to be put first. Interestingly, GameLook found in a video of Kabam's executive live demonstration that a string of Korean appeared in the editor menu interface used by the developers in footage showing the production of in-game character animations.
To solve this puzzle, it is necessary to briefly review Kabam's history: the game company that has been in operation for nearly 20 years was first known in the industry for 4X SLG. However, as Chinese companies sing all the way on the overseas SLG track. Affected by this, it also became the first European and American company to switch to turn-based games.
In 2014, Kabam's turn-based card game "Marvel Contest of Champions" became its most popular product. Eight years after its launch, the monthly turnover of the game is still about 100 million, and it also created nearly 200 million monthly revenue in December last year.
Thanks to the outstanding performance of this evergreen product, Kabam was also selected by Netmarble in 2019.
However, Netstone only completed the acquisition of Kabam's Vancouver studio, which is the development team of Marvel: Super Battle, and also recruited some employees from Kabam's San Francisco headquarters and Austin studio's customer service team. Since then, the original Kabam Vancouver studio has been officially renamed Kabam Games and operates as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Netstone.
From the perspective of the character design of "King Arthur: Legends Rise", it is not difficult to find the shadow of Korean art with exquisite character models. At this point, it can be inferred that the technicians of Netstone are likely to actually participate in the development of this game. At least at the art level, there is the involvement of Korean companies, not purely the product of Kabam's Canadian team.
GameLook speculated that the performance of RAID: Shadow Legends in the European and American markets made Kabam determined to establish a Team RPG. But the team should have had a hard time with next-gen graphics, cross-platform game development, and UE5 adoption. On the other hand, Korean companies rooted in 3D MMORPGs have long been accustomed to using Unreal Engine for development. Finally, with the help of Netstone, they jointly completed the development of "King Arthur: Legends Rise".
Of course, this also creates a lot of risks: after the Korean company joins, if it brings Korean routines such as MMO krypton gold, it will inevitably make European and American players dissatisfied with this full "kimchi flavor". But what the final result is, it is still necessary to wait for the appearance of the finished product.
The Team RPG track is getting more and more volatile, how can Chinese companies break through?
For a long time, in the European and American RPG markets, it has long been the consensus in the industry that MMOs have no way out, and the only pure MMO product that has become popular in the past two years is "LOST ARK". The mobile game field also lacks MMO explosions, especially from the emergence of more and more new Team RPG products, the choices of European and American companies are becoming more and more similar, which seems to indicate that this has become one of the most marketable directions at present.
As mentioned earlier, this is largely due to RAID: Shadow Legends' evergreen performance. The game now wants to learn from the cross-media linkage of IP dramas launched by Asian companies to create the animation "RAID: Call of the Arbiter", showing the stronger vitality of the category.
Therefore, European and American manufacturers besieging Team RPG is the safest choice made from their perspective. For example, the new game "Final Fantasy 15: EOS Battle" cooperated by Machine Zone and Square Enix for the second time in European and American SLG mobile games is also an SLG with Team RPG gameplay.
Coupled with the fact that more and more Chinese companies are rushing to invest heavily in the art dimension and launch many hyper-realistic next-generation products, a Team RPG war is coming. In this environment, European and American companies have even appeared cross-platform new works created by UE5, making the track more and more volatile, and greatly raising the challenge threshold of Chinese manufacturers.
At the end of the day, Team RPG is turn-based at its core. However, compared with the single-player experience of traditional turn-based games, the former requires players to play a bunch of characters, and the gameplay form is more inclined to squad combat. However, unlike domestic card games, Team RPG also incorporates MMO's large map exploration, and it is not ARPG's real-time operation battle, but relies on strategy to win.
As European and American teams and domestic manufacturers continue to stage the "air fighting method" in the future, more and more products will be released in the future, and after the further development of Team RPG, Chinese companies accustomed to relying on SLG to go overseas may need to pick up their "old three" - turn-based, MMO and ARPG development capabilities to re-build their competitive advantage. But before that, you need to rearrange the gameplay with turn-based as the core.
Although it is said that change is the constant truth of the game circle, at least for now, the Team RPG track still has considerable room for development. Both Chinese and Korean manufacturers have technical advantages in this regard. But whether it can really snatch this cake from the mouth of European and American teams still needs to wait for the test of time.