| Do "blockbuster puzzles" exist? |
Text/Repair
Three years ago, when "Escape from Tarkov" first became popular, Grape Jun reported and analyzed it. At that time, the industry was also full of curiosity and anticipation about the product from the Russian team - what impact will it have on the game market and category next? Will it be the next big thing in the gaming industry? For example, Zhihu author Necromanov proposed that "Escape from Tarkov" is an attempt to combine the advantages of three important genres: MMORPGs, multiplayer battle games and open-world games, and it is also the first set of pieces of the next-generation blockbuster puzzle. Whoever can truly complete the design puzzle of this category may become an emerging gaming giant in the next decade. However, it is sad that after the explosion, "Escape from Tarkov" has been due to various problems such as iteration, plug-ins, rhythm, and international situation, resulting in the continuous loss of players' trust and patience, and is now in a state of chronic decline. And the difficulty of completing the "next-generation explosive puzzle" is obviously much higher than everyone imagined. NetEase's exploration on Tarkov like can be described as radical, and it has launched a number of products in different directions overseas: "Lost Light" that restores the hardcore route, "ZOZ: Final Hour" (ZOZ) with a zombie theme, "Rules of Survival" (after the 2.0 revision) born from the Terminator, and "Badlanders" (Extraordinary Pioneer) that takes the lightweight RPG route. But these products are also relatively average overseas, among which the relatively good one is "Lost Light", which has topped the free list of 19 countries and regions such as Russia and Ukraine. The worst may be "Rules of Survival", which according to Diandian data has been discontinued and removed from shelves in April last year.
"Extraordinary Pioneer" took the lead in opening paid testing today because it got the version number at the beginning of the year, which means that it will be the first game in this batch of products to land on the national server. Grape Jun has also reported on it before, and the current game has reached 15 million reservations on all platforms. However, unlike the situation in 2021, now the game has lost its first-mover advantage, and "Dark Zone Breakout" has snatched the position of the first officially launched Tarkov like mobile game in China, and has gained a firm foothold and circled a group of its own core users. Frankly speaking, the long-term results of "Dark Zone Breakout" exceeded Grape Jun's expectations. The game has been online for 9 months, basically staying in the range of the best-selling list Top50 and the free list Top30 or so. Of course, this is still a certain distance from everyone's imagination of the next era of explosive models.
So the opportunity of "Extraordinary Vanguard" lies in whether it can be closer to the so-called "explosive puzzle" as the second Tarkov like mobile game in the domestic market. Judging from the content of this test, the core gameplay logic of the game is not much different from the previous versions, and the team still intends to make product differences through RPGIZATION, lightweight and other designs. For example, warehouses and backpacks no longer need space management, and all weapons, items, accessories, ammunition, etc. occupy only one compartment. And when searching for resources, new weapons and accessories will be directly and automatically replaced. In addition, the bullet does not need to be manually loaded and loaded with magazines, and it can be used directly when it is picked up.
In terms of game experience, in the shooting operation part, "Amazing Vanguard" is actually very close to the chicken-eating game that users are very familiar with and accustomed to. It removes many of the hardcore cumbersome designs in "Escape from Tarkov", and the magazine capacity, map identification, and route forward are clear at a glance.
In addition, survival elements such as moisture, hunger value, and part damage have been deleted, and the customization range of gun parts modification has been significantly reduced.
For example, the game distinguishes the value of different levels of items, and adopts the design of orange, purple, blue and green, which everyone has long been accustomed to. This greatly reduces the threshold for players to pick up and sift through equipment during battle, and increases the efficiency of players when scavenging for items.
Corresponding to their quality, the weapons in The Amazing Vanguard also have a variety of entries for different levels. All these measures can be said to greatly reduce the difficult and obscure impression of Tarkov like.
In view of the problems of plugins and transaction deception that Tarkov games are prone to encounter, the team also gave certain solutions, such as the introduction of AI automatic recognition and player inspector mechanism to strengthen anti-plug-in capabilities; Another example is to access NetEase's official trading platform "Treasure Pavilion", to a certain extent to avoid the risk of being deceived and damaged when players trade freely.
The game recently started a public beta co-research activity, and judging from the player suggestions on display, strengthening PVE gameplay may indeed be one of the breakthroughs in the future of the game. In fact, in terms of the personal experience of this test, "Amazing Vanguard" is more like a chicken and treasure game that uses Tarkov's most core rule (permanent loss). And it is worth noting that in this test, the game also launched the daily brick withdrawal gameplay: each time the player completes the task, he can get a certain amount of gold bricks and withdrawal amount, which is converted according to the ratio of 100 gold bricks = 1 yuan, and directly withdrawn to the Alipay account bound by the player.
Although it is uncertain whether the design will be carried over to the public beta version, according to the game's access to official trading platforms such as the Treasure Cabinet, "Amazing Vanguard" may indeed become a new generation of "brick moving" games in the future. And even better, this is actually quite in line with the core concept of "blood earning" in "Escape from Tarkov".
Finally, I want to say that because of the recent decentralization of several batches of edition numbers, many people will think that this year will be a two-dimensional big year, but it cannot be ignored that this year may also be called a big year for shooting categories: "Extraordinary Vanguard", "Valorant", "The Division 2", "Edge of Rebirth", "Kalapichu", "Dust White Forbidden Zone"....... Back to the "next-generation blockbuster puzzle" mentioned at the beginning of the article: MMORPGs + multiplayer battles + open world, these products seem to have a chance to work in this direction, and even track head products like "Peace Elite" have long been on the road in this direction. And what I'm more curious about is, in the end, will anyone really be able to put together these puzzle pieces and form a new generation of era blockbusters? Or does it not exist at all?
Game Grape Recruitment Content Editor,
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