The season system seems a bit of a liver, but the experience is more liberating
Not to mention, although the focus of NetEase Games is not in the field of shooting, the two shooting products tested this year, "Codename: 56" and "Seven Days World", have brought me a lot of surprises.
For "Codename: 56", Competitive Core has carried out a simple excavation in the previous manuscript, whether it is the vertical gameplay with equipment drive as the core, adding BD construction and resource management, or the AI design of human enemies that will react according to the player's behavior, or the visual performance of the next era, so that the author can experience the core experience that the next generation of PVE shooter mobile games should have.
But it's a pity that Codename: 56 doesn't achieve a seamless open map - the big map exploration is replaced by a top-down perspective, which also makes the author more or less regretful.
Coincidentally, NetEase's other shooting game "Seven Days World" recently opened the test, which made up for the regret of the former experience. I also happened to take this opportunity to take a plate with you about this "Seven Days World" with new weird stories + open-world shooting genes.
New Strange Talk + Open World, Is There a Head?
If you want to talk about "Seven Days World", you can't avoid the new weird theme of the game.
Looking back at games with new weird themes, it may no longer be a novelty, and the well-known new weird stories that started with SCP-173 have rapidly grown from discussion threads on niche vertical community forums to the SCP Foundation, a co-creation platform with hundreds of thousands of users, in a few years. Even today, there is a steady stream of new content and fanworks (for example, the domestic indie horror game "Containment: The Secret Archive", which had a good reputation the year before, is based on the theme of SCP).
This also seems to prove that the new weird story contains the power of horror to spread.
The successor to SCP - "Backrooms", which has become a popular IP in the new weird talk circle for a few years, and you can see the same games of this IP on steam. Even in China, the number of video views of Station B's "Backrooms" has exceeded 340W.
The origin of "Backrooms" is just a slightly eerie picture on social networking sites
On the one hand, it naturally stems from the natural curiosity of human beings to hunt for the unknown, and on the other hand, thanks to the changes in user media in the Internet era, the new strange stories have a stronger interactivity than the traditional paper text expression, and this interactivity has a higher compatibility with the theme form of imagination and artistic expression.
To put it simply, even those who will be attracted by new weird things will naturally have a strong drive to "continue to dig → expand their imagination", and the media touch of the Internet is also an effective interactive tool for players to further explore, and then gradually become senior users of new weird stories.
If we start from this hypothesis, we can also extend to another point of view, that is, the expression of a more interactive experience - video games are more suitable as a vehicle for new weird stories.
In the field of video games, in addition to the derivative fanworks around the above two popular IPs, there are also many more "popular" works, such as remedy Studio's new weird talk products - "Alan Wake Killer Series", "Control", etc.
Even the atompunk theme "Atomic Heart", which became popular due to the "refrigerator succubus" at the beginning of this year, is also a new kind of weirdness. The "Metro Series" and "Stalker Series" with the same theme are also the inheritors and promoters of the theme.
Even when you come to China, new weird themes also appear from time to time on the second tour with a more free choice of themes, such as Funplus's "Returning to the Dragon Tide", Candlepay Network's "New Moon Companion", etc.
Through video games, new weird stories have ushered in a new stage of development, and the protagonist we are going to discuss, "Seven Days World", is also one of them.
Pulling the perspective back into the game, the opening phase is filled with a lot of new weird elements, such as the scientist being turned into powder by an unknown red glowing energy body, or the mysterious portal that can travel through the world inside and outside. Although "Seven Days World" can be subtlely found in the expression of new strange stories, the shadow of "SCP" and "Control" can be found in the expression of new weirdness, but in terms of the first experience, it does attract the author to continue to experience the content of the game - just as the author is curious about the strange world in "Control" and experiences the game on his own.
But the addition of the open world casts a shadow of uncertainty over this new weird experience.
In the article "The Two-Dimensional Open World, Entering a New Stage of the Arms Race", the competition briefly analyzed the open world as the purpose of the content stage. Corresponding to the "big stage" is the "huge amount of content".
It's not that it's hard to support the content filling of the open world, but the artistic expression of New Weird Tales relies more on the "customized" stage. Specifically, the game needs to be designed to better match the new tales in terms of scenes, narrative performances, and gameplay mechanics. For example, "Alan Wake 2" is interspersed with a cinematic narrative of "combining fiction and reality", creating a "surreal feeling" that is difficult to define between virtual and reality, and the combat revolves around light sources, requiring players to use a flashlight to "break the defense" of monsters before they can cause effective damage. Both reflect the theme of the game's new quirky story.
"Wake Killer 2" is a cinematic narrative that combines fiction and reality
There is no doubt that this kind of "customized" staging will take more effort from the production team, which is why the vast majority of new weird products use linear levels. On the one hand, it can effectively control the cost of R&D, and on the other hand, it can allow the production team to focus more on the construction of "customized" stages.
"Ghostwire: Tokyo", which also happens to be an open world + new weird story, has a highlight performance on several customized stages, which greatly increases the player's first experience, but this experience is then overshadowed by those boring open world content, which eventually leads to the game's "mixed" reviews.
This is the difficulty of the open world + new weird story, if the entire open world "big stage" is customized, its cost is far beyond imagination, but if it appears as a few highlights, the player's impression will soon be overshadowed by the exploration experience in the open world.
In this part, "Seven Days World" chooses a more eclectic route - a light "customization" in the open world, including monster settings, collectible settings (containment collection), some gameplay content, etc., and completely "custom stages" in some linear levels and some open world events to guide the player's experience to the highest point.
Examine... Charles? Why are you here to join in the fun?
Perhaps this method makes the game's "new weird" elements not as good as highly vertical works such as "Alan Wake 2", but at least it can be reasonably and consistently embedded in the big stage of the open world, so that players can feel the charm of the open world + new weird stories.
In the world where you can fall off SAN with a meal, can you survive smoothly?
Aside from the theme of "new weird talks", there is another design in "Seven Days World" that makes the author feel a "sense of oppression", that is, the slightly hardcore SOC (Open World Survival Construction) experience.
The first is the game's "SAN (sanity)" design, which will directly affect the player's current health limit, and even make the player's effective blood limit become "a trace", and then make the player character become "death at the touch of a button".
In addition to being attacked by "anomalous" monsters, even contaminated or spoiled diet can reduce the player's "SAN value". You read that right, the food made by players in "Seven Days World" will spoil, and only food that can be stored for a long time, such as canned food, will not spoil.
Echoing the "SAN value", it is the design of the game's "soul flavor" - if the player dies in the middle of the exploration, all the items of the exploration will be dropped, and the player needs to return to the place of death to retrieve these items.
Frankly speaking, this set of combo made the author's first experience not very "beautiful", and without knowing it, the author did not know how much "spoiled food" he had eaten, nor how many times he experienced the "pain of running corpses".
This is also one of the contents that corresponds to the light "customization" of "Seven Days World" in the open world mentioned above. By increasing the failure penalty, the "sense of oppression" of the player's initial exploration is increased, so that the player's experience of this mysterious and dangerous world echoes to enhance the sense of substitution in the game.
Another thing that affects the survival experience is the various ailments triggered by the player's behavior, including the common survival indicators in the SOC (thirst value, satiety value), as well as the negative states caused by various "damages".
For example, when a player jumps from a height, in addition to the fall damage, the "Fracture" debuff is added to reduce the player's movement speed, giving the player a "speed is not enough" experience.
This also means that in the boss battle, it is difficult for players to reduce the difficulty of the strategy through the kite play style of "King Qin circling the pillar, flashing and moving". This allows the level to not only test the player's attention and timing physics skills, but also include those strategic skills that players need to formulate according to the scene information and boss behavior.
When facing the Rot Hunter's high-health boss, the player needs to take down the Gatling in the boss's hand and use the Gatling for effective output
However, "Seven Days World" still gives players a trace of warmth, that is, in terms of thirst value, satiety value, basic survival attributes, and does not continue to use hardcore realistic design, when the player's survival attribute is too low, it will only produce a few negative states (for example: running speed decreases, etc.), otherwise the author's time in the "running corpse" link may be a few percentage points higher.
Another thing that surprises players is the building and development section. In this part, "Seven Days World" does not completely follow the mature design of "The Day After Tomorrow", but cancels the content of the phased stuck point nature (home upgrade), and retains those facilities with high practicality, high degree of freedom to build, build and build content, and gameplay content. It allows players to manually create their own home in this dangerous world (of course, cohabitation or something is naturally arranged).
Players can build infrastructure outside of their homes, such as high-utility facilities such as tents
It is worth mentioning that the game introduces asynchronous social content similar to Elden Ring, where players can set up a message interaction point anywhere on the map to interact with other players.
Combined with the game's large amount of content design in the open world (stronghold levels, towns, exploring hidden spots, etc.), this kind of asynchronous socialization can not only play a certain guiding role, but also strengthen the social nature of the game.
Conscience message, this must not be given a thumbs up
Although the SOC content is not the whole of the core experience of "Seven Days World", whether it is a slightly hardcore survival experience, a return to a functionally built system out of the framework of "The Day After Tomorrow", or a few friendly comments, it has brought me an impressive initial experience.
A sense of freedom to grow under the season system
In addition to the SOC, another core experience that runs through the game is the player's growth content.
This is also where Seven Days of World differentiates from the "Like After Tomorrow" experience - the game integrates player functional growth content into the "Tech Tree", and only when the player defeats the designated boss in the large world can the next level of tech tree content be unlocked.
This kind of cultivation path with combat verification rather than relying purely on resource accumulation can indeed bring players a stronger sense of freedom to grow. Without the constraints of massive resource demand, players can choose to improve step by step and complete the boss verification to unlock the next stage of content, or they can choose to go all the way and quickly upgrade to quickly complete the verification and consume the game content in a short time.
This design also sets the stage for the season-based setup that follows.
To get back to the point, the game's technology tree can be divided into 5 modules, which involve all aspects of the game (combat, exploration, and building), and players can customize the technology tree to match a set of preferred genre directions. This kind of design that breaks away from the traditional professional orientation may also be another embodiment of the game's "sense of freedom".
In terms of equipment acquisition, players can obtain blueprints by looking for weapon chests in the big world, and use the materials obtained from dungeons to build them. Weapon entries and genres complement each other and become key building blocks of the game.
The above content together constitutes the game's exploration-driven + equipment-driven genes, but the "degree of freedom" in growth is likely to make the development progress of different players uneven, so the season system unexpectedly appeared in "Seven Days World".
The benefits of the season system are simple here, it can effectively alleviate various drawbacks in long-term operation (such as numerical inflation, high repetition of gameplay, etc.), but this inevitably brings players a sense of "returning to the pre-liberation period overnight". Whether this can affect the player's motivation to develop will have to return to the core experience of the game.
During the Seven Days Season Update, all paid content such as Star Colour (paid tokens) and player costumes will be retained, while the Cultivation section will retain all weapon blueprints, but the player level, technology, foundation, and gameplay tokens will be reset.
In addition, different gameplay content will be introduced in different seasons (Containment collection refers to seasonal achievements, and different containments will be introduced in different seasons), taking into account the player's level growth and the differentiated experience of the content, and the purpose of each season is also different (for example, the main purpose of the first season is to "familiarize players with the gameplay content of the game", and the overall difficulty of obtaining containments is not particularly high).
Of course, considering that the game is still in the early stages of testing, there will inevitably be some optimization issues. During this period, the author encountered a bug that I could not continue to experience the game. It may be that you close the game in a hurry late at night, and open the game again the next day and prompt "the program cannot open more than one", even after restarting, clicking on the game again still prompts "the program cannot open more than one". This also led to the author's experience of "Seven Days World" coming to an end, and it is a pity that I did not experience the follow-up highlights of the game.
Still, the author still has great expectations for this game, hoping that the next "Seven Days World" will bring a more complete and smooth experience.