Xishan Ju has been ushering in the time of frequent new products for a long time. In the next 2 months, the company plans to launch 3 new products, including "The Other World", "Dusty White Forbidden Zone" and "Dawnlands", and the existence of "Dawnlands" is particularly special.
According to Xishanju's previous project ideas, most expansion projects have traces to follow. For example, relying on the long-term accumulation of Chinese style content in "Sword Network III", the company has extended the category to self-propelled chess, women's orientation, and even independent games; After expanding to the two-dimensional track with the "Girl Coffee Gun" series in the early years, the recent launch of "Dusty White Forbidden Zone" and "The Other World" also reflects the company's desire to pay attention to the two-dimensional category again.
In recent years, Xishanju has become more bold in expanding categories. The mech battle game "code b.r.e.a.k" will be an attempt at industrial creation, and the sandbox game "Dawnlands" represents the company's desire to try to compete in the open world category. Even now, these products are not mainstream categories, not to mention that Xishanju's most famous game category is martial arts MMORPG.
At present, "Dawnlands" should be the first new category product to be verified on the market.
This game has actually been exposed for a while. Last year, the game was tested overseas under the name "Newdawn", and there are currently more than 1.5 million pre-orders, and it is planned to officially launch on mobile and PC on August 9. Recently, the game has undergone a new round of invitation testing, and the game content has been produced if there are no surprises.
Dawnlands hasn't been much discussed in the domestic market, perhaps because the category is relatively niche, but more likely, the game is ready to make a splash in overseas markets from the start.
A type that is both familiar and unfamiliar
For a long time, there are not many products in the sandbox category, and the gameplay framework has not undergone too thorough innovation. The most basic genre takes "Minecraft" as an example, the game focuses on single-player gameplay and pursues pure survival and building fun; More common now is Create! Our Planet" and other products not only emphasize social content, but also add task systems and other sections, and the color of online games is more intense.
If you enter Dawnlands, the game seems to be taking its own strengths and innovating in the inherent framework, and these innovations all stem from the integration with the open world category. For example, the game is also based on single-player gameplay, and does not choose to do forced socialization; In terms of content, the online game design is retained, providing enough guidance through the plot and tasks, hoping to meet the player's game habits.
Compared to previous sandbox games, Dawnlands' target audience overlaps. After integrating into the open world framework, the user base that the game can reach is also the opportunity to become wider, so that players familiar with single-player and online games have a better game experience.
The main gameplay of the game revolves around a single-player adventure, where players need to create their own character and experience the adventure content alone. Perhaps Genshin has laid a paradigm for the open world, and Dawnlands can reach a larger group of players with this design idea, and players who do not prefer social networking can also get a more complete game experience.
Multiplayer adventures are expanded on the basis of single-player mode. Party sizes are limited to 4 players, and progression depends on the owner's solo adventure. In order to promote player socialization, the game will give rewards according to the number of active players in multiplayer adventures, including higher upgrade efficiency, lower equipment consumption, etc.
In particular, players need to consume props once a month to experience multiplayer gameplay in the game, which may become one of the paid points after the game is officially launched, which is a bit like building a server in Minecraft.
In the game, it can be further discovered that the data content generated by the player's play is only generated locally. So while Dawnlands is available for both mobile and PC (scheduled to be available on Steam, locked in the country), if players need to experience the game across devices, they need to upload the game data to the cloud before exiting the game.
The loading of resources in the game is not smooth. For example, players can look down on the terrain when they are high in the terrain, but they cannot directly observe the buildings, monsters, and resource points on the map. Players need to enter new areas before nearby content such as buildings and monsters will spawn.
In addition to taking into account the gameplay design, this will not cause too much burden on the player's hardware equipment. In this test version on the PC side, including the game launcher and the game itself, only occupy less than 2G of storage space (for reference, "Egg Party" occupies close to 3G space in mobile phones). As the last test of the official launch, it is estimated that the game will not have reservations.
Since Dawnlands has a plan to go to sea, it needs to take into account the game conditions of most players. It can be speculated that the game can have a relatively smooth game experience on low-end models, and may even attract some players who want to experience open-world games, but are limited by hardware conditions.
With sandbox gameplay at its core
"Open World" and "Sandbox Gameplay" both focus on high freedom, and "Dawnlands" experimented with genre integration based on this. However, we still have to think about whether the two are really high enough.
At present, "Dawnlands" is driven by sandbox as the core gameplay, and the common process of sandbox gameplay can include "resource gathering", "building" and "survival".
First of all, in terms of "resource gathering", the game greatly reduces the difficulty of collection. The game directly increases the density of resource distribution, ensures that there are enough interactive objects in the player's field of vision, and shortens the process of resource collection in the early stage.
This may be done for player retention. In sandbox gameplay, resource collection provides the main positive feedback in the early stage of gameplay, and players gain a sense of growth in the process of collecting resources and building tools, shortening this process makes players' sense of achievement come faster, reducing the possibility of players losing in the early stage.
Collecting gameplay in Dawnlands is basically the same as a survival sandbox game - collect basic resources, use resources to build tools, and accumulate more resources by logging and mining.
After incorporating open-world elements, the game inevitably presents certain design challenges. For example, as mentioned above, the game is unlikely to show all the interactive content in the top-down view, in part because the dense distribution of resources clutters the graphics; For example, monsters that are too densely distributed will affect the player's exploration experience, and there is no way to fully show the fun of the open world.
Dawnlands, under the measure, can only guarantee the core gameplay of the sandbox, and abandons part of the open world experience.
Secondly, in terms of "building", Dawnlands leaves plenty of freedom. Players can build various forms of buildings, including houses, tool tables, storage boxes, and various decorative furniture in the house, etc., and the initial accumulation of resources can gradually grow into self-built houses.
After integrating the elements of the open world, the game sets up multiple towns according to the needs of the story, the towns can avoid the invasion of monsters, and the player's default spawn point is also in the town. The game does not limit the area to be built, and it is even recommended that players build from scratch in the wild.
Unexpectedly, Dawnlands also allows for terrain modifications, which provides a high degree of freedom in the construction process, and the placement of buildings has more room for creativity.
However, after adding the function of terrain modification, design difficulties have not arisen. For example, in the early stage of the game, only two functions of "flat terrain" and "elevated terrain" are provided, compared to abstract art styles such as "Minecraft", "Dawnlands" naturally cannot achieve intuitive operation feedback, and it will be difficult to get started if you want to transform the terrain.
In addition, after the game integrates open-world gameplay, there will always be a part of the terrain on the ground that will cause obstruction, and there is no way to completely eliminate it. As a result, there may even be situations where the player flattens the surface, but the original rock on the ground is still floating in the air.
Finally, at the level of "survival" gameplay, "Dawnlands" does not use the most hardcore genre.
The concept of date and time is added to the game, and every night there are exceptionally powerful monsters on the map, and players can go back to the spawn point to sleep to quickly spend the night. And because the game adds a map teleportation function based on open-world gameplay, the oppression caused to players is not obvious.
The game is designed with a satiety and stamina system, cooking food to restore satiety, and gradually restore health when the satiety is high enough. Dawnlands is slightly different in that health is not deducted when the stomach is too low, which only prevents the character from running. Although the satiety system is designed from survival sandbox gameplay, it does not really create an existential crisis.
Death drops, which are common in sandbox games, are retained, and characters can return to the place of death to retrieve backpack items after resurrection. The main items dropped are some of the resource items, and the equipment and main props will still be retained after death, and the death penalty will not be too hardcore, which can take care of the game experience of medium and light players.
In addition, the RPG cultivation system of "Dawnlands" is relatively conventional, based on sandbox gameplay to make an online game design. Characters have up to 12 equipment slots, which affect their health, attack power, and other values. Each tool and piece of equipment has a durability value that consumes materials to upgrade and repair.
In particular, the character's numerical growth is not entirely dependent on equipment. The game is designed with a proficiency system, for example, the more attacks and proficiency levels a player uses two-handed weapons, the higher the damage they can do. Similarly, players can even increase jump height, increase running speed, etc.
"Open world" is more of a means of drainage
Dawnlands attempts to enrich the player's gaming experience by adding content that is common in the open world framework. It's just that under the influence of sandbox gameplay, the open world elements appear to be a bit superficial.
The map is littered with different chests and challenges ranging from archery to target shooting, simple puzzle solving, and more. In addition to the time system mentioned above, the game also includes weather and temperature settings, and characters can become cold or wet under certain conditions. In addition, the game has made shield grass skating, horseback riding, stealth and other action systems, although it does not include climbing moves, but the overall is quite rich.
The overall open world design inevitably has a "sense of déjà vu", and most of the gameplay design does not directly affect the core cycle of the game, which is more like a gameplay selection used to attract players.
There are also some open world designs in the game that serve sandbox gameplay.
It should be mentioned that throughout the gameplay flow in Dawnlands are various "guides", or simply understood as blueprints in sandbox games. Whether players want to create new equipment, build new buildings, or craft new items, they need to unlock the corresponding booklet first. Including at the commercialization level, the Pokédex became the only card draw content in the game.
To unlock the book, you need to consume a certain number of key items "recipe fragments". At the same time, it means that if you want to fully experience the gameplay of sandbox building, you can't do without the collection of "recipe fragments", which has become one of the most important drivers for players.
In addition to being available for purchase, this key item basically comes from open-world gameplay rewards. One is to obtain from various treasure chests, but the rewards obtained are all one-time, and there is no means of continuous operation; The second is to collect monster drops first, and then redeem them through a series of gameplay processes, which are also designed with reference to other open-world games.
Through the content of "Pokédex", the game smoothly connects "open world" and "sandbox gameplay", and forms a gameplay loop that can operate for a long time.
However, there are still mutually exclusive places between these two gameplays. For example, players can only play one character in Dawnlands, and neither the plot nor the characterization is much malleable. Moreover, the only commercial content on the characters is the option of selling skins, and the social scale of the game is relatively small, so skin sales are almost unattractive to players.
Paid content can only revolve around sandbox buildings. Dawnlands is currently recruiting content creators overseas, encouraged to share their own buildings. It is expected that this will also be the main creative direction in the subsequent process of building the player ecology.
epilogue
At present, Xishanju's product reserves are not large, and the company is planning to break through overseas markets, such as "Dust White Forbidden Zone" has the intention of global synchronous launch. Before the completion of an industrialized product such as "code b.r.e.a.k", the launch of "Dawnlands" may further accumulate some experience at sea.