There's more adventure than survival
The mobile game adaptation of classic terminal games can be said to be one of the key directions of Tencent Games' self-development and product selection today.
Following "Metal Slug Awakening", "Stone Age: Awakening", and "Maplestorystory: The Legend of Maple", the sandbox survival mobile game "Don't Starve: New Home" (hereinafter referred to as "New Home") developed based on the PC game "Don't Starve: Online Version" has also recently opened the last test before launch. However, among these products, except for the alloy warhead, which is self-developed by Tencent, the rest of the products are agents. The new home is developed by Shengqu, and Tencent Games is responsible for its domestic market distribution.
For the IP of "Don't Starve", I believe everyone is familiar with it, the global sales of this series of works have already exceeded 25 million, and there are also a large number of loyal players in China. Based on this, the mobile game version has also attracted much attention, and the number of pre-orders for the game on the whole network has reached nearly 10 million as of press time.
However, after experiencing it for a period of time, the author found that the new home is still the skin of the absurd gothic style compared to the terminal game version, but the actual game experience has changed a lot.
The first step is to reduce the difficulty
Even if you haven't played the PC version before, you can probably feel its core challenge from the title (Don't Starve) - survival. In the game, the player's various behaviors are ultimately to live longer, and the game also gives it a quantitative indicator - the number of days to survive.
Correspondingly, the new home inherits the three core indicators of terminal games: life, hunger, and sanity. Life is well understood, and when health is emptied, it means the end of a game. There are many reasons for the loss of HP, such as being attacked, extreme weather, spoiled food, and so on. The hunger bar is also straightforward, all of the player's activities will cause hunger, and once it reaches zero, it will start to continuously deplete health.
As for sanity, it is more mysterious, and players also like to call it san value or brain wreckage value. Sanity continues to decrease at dusk and night, as well as when on contact with hostile mobs. When sanity is too low, the interface will become unreal and shaky, but the deadliest thing is that shadow monsters will be spawned to attack the player.
The three-dimensional attribute composed of these three is the lowest mechanism of the game's survival gameplay. However, it should be pointed out that the three-dimensional attribute will be reduced for many reasons, and there are not many means of recovery. Hunger is one of the easiest to recover from, and it is mainly replenished by food. Life and Sanity, on the other hand, only a few items can be restored, and the amount of recovery is also small.
In order to ensure the health of Sanwei, players need to explore the map, find food, and build a home, which is also the most important gameplay component of the game. In the author's opinion, the reason why "Don't Starve" can make people addicted is due to the close coordination of the core mechanics and the main gameplay. Players are always under pressure to encounter problems and solve them.
It's like most newbies will experience their first experience of death on the first night, because they will continue to deal damage when the night is dark. After suffering a loss, the player will naturally know to make lighting equipment such as torches in the next round. Then you start to actively learn the recipes of the Xi crafting interface, and explore and collect them in a targeted manner.
However, as the game progresses, the pressure of survival will increase, and the frustration of dying will increase. Often, before the previous problem has been resolved, a new crisis arises. The player's subjective emotions are like springs, which are constantly compressed under various pressures. It is not until the right solution is found and the phased respite is obtained that the compressed emotions are released and transformed into dopamine, which brings happiness and a sense of accomplishment.
In fact, if you only consider the experience in the sandbox, the survival gameplay of the new home is like bringing the entire box of the terminal game version to the mobile phone. Maps, monsters, recipes, and even numerical systems are highly restored to the PC experience. For example, the petals return a little blood, the unarmored hound bites a bite and deducts 20 points of blood, etc., old players can have an obvious sense of familiarity as soon as they get started.
However, it should be pointed out that while all the elements of the mobile game are the same as the desktop version, there are big differences in the experience. The main reason behind this may be that the production team wants to lower the threshold for getting started with terminal games.
Objectively speaking, Don't Starve is not friendly to novice players. The pressure to survive at the beginning of the game is quite high, and the game encourages players to explore and grow on their own, so there are not many guides and hints on the interface. This requires players to have a certain degree of self-motivation and resistance to frustration. Many players are dissuaded by a series of failures before they feel a sense of accomplishment.
Specifically, every season in the PC game is a player filter, especially in the first winter. Since ground plants stop growing during the winter, berries and flowers, which were very important in the early stages, become a finite resource with one less and one less. The change in the time of day and night means less time to explore and collect, and more material consumption. Not to mention that there is a low-temperature mechanism in winter, hypothermia will quickly lose blood, and sprouts often die quickly in the unknown.
Therefore, in order to survive the winter, warm equipment and warm stones are essential, and both of them need to unlock two technologies (i.e., build an alchemy engine), which will inevitably involve a series of collections, construction, and battles along the way. As a result, players who are able to enter this stage will have already experienced 4 or 5 death reopenings and are already familiar with the basic mechanics.
But this is still not the final killer move of winter, "Don't Starve" also designed a very aggressive boss "Deerclops". It spawns around the player at the end of winter and has a higher aggro rating for buildings. Watching it destroy the hard-built base as easily as breaking cookies, the frustration in the player's heart can be imagined. And the continuous reaction after the destruction of the base will also make it difficult to survive in the future.
Of course, you can also lure it out of the base for battle, but the area of the attack is not small, and the huge sanity value drops require the player to have good control over the attack frequency of the monsters and the relative position of each other. But even if the player masters the combat rhythm of "fight two and go one", it is easy to make mistakes in the panic operation of adding firewood to keep warm.
Just like there are always discouraged brothers in souls-based games who persuade players to give up, Deerclops is also a retreat in Don't Starve. In this way, the designers indicated to the players that this was a brave game for a few.
It's more like a simulation than a survival game
Isn't Don't Starve Worry About the loss of the entire game? In fact, these designs may not have much impact on the commercial revenue of the PC version.
First, users of platforms such as Steam already have a certain game foundation, and a good community atmosphere also allows them to have psychological expectations about the difficulty of the game before they start. The second is that the revenue has been pocketed in the upfront fees of the buyout system, and the excellent gameplay has also ensured a continuous inflow of new players.
However, for the new home for mobile players, the difference in user market and charging model makes it impossible to set such a high threshold for players to get started. Therefore, in addition to this box of restoring the gameplay, the new home is wrapped with an additional design that reduces the difficulty of the game.
It can be seen that the most important design in the mobile game version is the home system that has been reflected in the name of the game. Unlike in PC games, you have to build a base in a dangerous sandbox. The mobile version offers an absolutely safe area of home. It connects the player's various sandbox worlds, and players can return home at any time and in any place during the sandbox adventure (including in battle, but cannot be attacked in the process), with no CD or number of times.
Of course, security alone is not enough, and the home also provides players with comprehensive assistance in recovery, production, and storage. Players can go home to sleep when they are in poor shape, and consume hunger to restore health and sanity. As we mentioned above, these two are more difficult to restore, while hunger can be more easily satisfied with food.
In addition, the home also provides a large-capacity upgradeable warehouse, so players can return to the city to store all their supplies in the warehouse when they find that the backpack is full during the sandbox adventure. It is worth mentioning that time in the warehouse is stagnant, and materials such as food, flower petals, ice cubes, etc., which are aged, can be stored in it permanently.
As for production, all production equipment in the sandbox mode can be built in the home, such as cooking pots, meat drying racks, etc. At the same time, players can also transplant the plants in the sandbox to their homes, realizing the complete process from raw materials to finished products to storage. Of course, in order to avoid the overabundance of resources in the home, the growth of animals and plants in the homestead will be greatly slowed down due to the flow of time.
Such a carry-on, worry-free home makes the player's difficulty in survival plummet. Collect supplies in the sandbox and return to your homeland for production and construction, and the survival gameplay of Don't Starve has become a simulation management game under this homeland system. The construction of a lifelong unlocked technology building also allows players to start with high-level armor and weapons, and the sandbox experience has directly changed from survival to colonization in another world.
In addition, the design of building grades and technology grades in the simulation business category has also been integrated. The portal that connects the sandboxes is the main city, and its level determines the level limit of other buildings in the area. Similarly, leveling up unlocks more buildings and features, and the tech level related to backpack capacity, gathering efficiency, and item durability is tied to the main city level.
The game even provides a mod-like sandbox customization option, where players can define a sandbox with only autumn and no active monsters as a resource copy, and empty it like a hamster to enrich their home. In addition, even if a player dies in the sandbox, the items in their backpack will be retained.
This means that there is an inheritance relationship between independent sandboxes that are not related to each other. Every defeat can make the next game easier and the process faster on a material level.
Let's take winter survival as an example, even if you lose to the Cyclops this time, the winter hat, warm stone and other equipment that have been created can allow you not to be dragged down by survival problems in the next game. The large amount of materials in the backpack allows players to skip the initial primitive accumulation and set off for a higher technology tree and better equipment.
As long as it's not a big injustice like the author (the golden weapon and a bag of supplies that the novice pool just drawn, turned around and was blown clean by the horned frog rain at night), the overall difficulty curve of the game will be greatly slowed down under this home system, and the overall experience will have a sense of gradual development.
Of course, players can still choose not to use the "cheat software" of Homestead and experience pure survival gameplay in the sandbox. But in a mobile game that focuses on online, cooperative, and social interactions, it's hard not to be influenced by other players. Therefore, in the author's opinion, although the mobile game version and the terminal game version use the same gameplay and even values, the actual experience of the two is very different.
A combat adventure with co-op multiplayer
To some extent, although the new home is a genuine authorized adaptation, it may not be the platform porting imagined by the old players of the terminal game. What the game wants to win and please is actually those non-core players who have tried it at a shallow level and haven't even played Don't Starve. After all, the game is all about "multiplayer survival adventure" from start to finish.
Under such a product idea, in order to provide a more friendly experience for more pan-players, it is just necessary to reduce the difficulty. On top of that, cooperation and socialization between players is obviously a big deal.
Different from the free choice of multiple characters in the PC version, players need to create a fixed character in their new home, and are given three weakened career directions: "Promiscuous" Piper, Bestiary, and Apothecary. Among them, the Piper can play the flute to summon animal assistants to collect supplies, and the Fabler can clear the surrounding monster hatred. As for the Apothecary, there are potions that restore health, sanity, and short night vision that can be used.
It should be pointed out that the characteristics of the three classes are not locked, and players who choose the Fabler can also make potions in the game, and the ability to clear hatred can also be replaced by equipment such as pan flute. The difference and peculiarity of the classes lies more in the timing that can be used at the beginning, and the game tries to encourage players to team up to survive. On top of that, dungeons like the Hunting Ground require a team challenge.
And the more obvious social push is the resurrection mechanism of the characters. The game provides a free resurrection to prevent a novice from dying violently. After using this opportunity, the player will have two ways to resurrect it: items and rescues. Among them, the cooperation of resurrection items is more difficult, and the more convenient resurrection is to ask friends and world channels for help. When other players see it, they can enter your sandbox with one click and resurrect you with half of the measurements. Such a cost can be easily borne by almost everyone when there is a home.
Judging from the current experience, the atmosphere of mutual assistance in the game is quite good, although there are also cases where people come in and scavenge resources to save people, but the overall atmosphere is still friendly and friendly. Many players will simply fight bosses together and add friends after saving people, which should also be the development that the project team hopes to see.
However, combined with the gameplay of the homeland and the commercial content currently shown, the author is a little worried that there may be experience deviations in the long-term stage of the game.
Judging from the experience of the PC game version, the stage with the highest level of fun and player interest is actually the first four seasons of the game. The constant emergence of new mechanics and new challenges also brings a constant sense of freshness and urgency. It is also a watershed moment that distinguishes whether a player is a newbie or an old bird. And when the game enters the middle and late stages, and the player's survival is no longer an issue, the sense of purpose and fun will start to decline.
To this end, the PC version has designed the underground world to provide challenge objectives with more resources and rewards, while the environmental mechanics of the underground eternal night and more powerful monsters provide survival pressure. In this way, the player is brought back to the sense of urgency at the beginning of the game.
However, it should be pointed out that the experience at this stage also inevitably shifts from survival to adventure. Prepare material plans in a mature base, pull friends to challenge the underground world to get higher rewards, and calculate the time to return to the base to prepare again. This is not very familiar, the current game experience of the mobile game version is quite similar, and because the home is safe and stable, the sense of adventure is stronger than the sense of survival.
This means that the game may continue to introduce more difficult challenges in the future to meet the needs of players. And judging from its commercial content, the more difficult challenges may be more focused on the combat level. Currently, players can draw high-quality weapons from the card pool. At the same time, these weapons also have a cultivation link, and repeated acquisition can be used to upgrade their stars and strengthen the skill effects that come with the weapons.
In terms of actual effect, the damage of the purple weapon has already spilled over a bit in the sandbox. In the PC version, the siege of multi-hounds that can only escape, and the tentacle whip with purple quality can basically be solved by releasing 2 skills. It is foreseeable that with the continuous improvement of players' weapon training, the difficulty of the combat link is also decreasing, and the difficulty of survival is also decreasing.
In order for these weapons to be useful and to keep players motivated to pay, there is an increasingly strong need for more powerful bosses that require more players to work together. At that time, the mode of surviving without pressure and fighting bosses online may be more like a monster hunt under the style of famine. In addition, the emergence of systems such as trading houses, leaderboards, and guilds also has a flavor of MMORPG.
Overall, Don't Starve: A New Home may not be a fan-oriented adaptation, and its goal may be to become a mass product with a wider audience and stronger revenue. New players can get a more online survival gameplay experience, while veteran players can also relive their PC game memories in the sandbox. This may also be a new way of thinking about the future end of the game.