"A test activation code is at least thousand, and it's just a rental number, and you can only play for a few days. ”
On December 29th, Perfect World's blockbuster product "Zhuxian World" opened the second test, and many big anchors including Douyu including PPD entered the game, rushing the game to the first place in the popularity of Douyu's terminal game.
The test code of the game has also been sold at a sky-high price, and it costs thousands of yuan to rent an account to experience the second test for 10 days, and there are very few accounts that can be bought out in the market.
The familiar slogan of "carrying the banner of domestic MMO terminal games" sounded again.
But on the first day of the opening of the second test, the reputation of "Zhuxian World" took a sharp turn and became the last "thunder" in 2023.
Fatal rollover
Often, players are tolerant of playtesting, because playtesting is a process of finding problems and solving them.
The reason why "Zhuxian World" is in a deep crisis of public opinion this time has attracted players to spontaneously go to Station B, Weibo and other platforms to post and complain, in the view of Eye Entertainment, mainly because there are several fatal thunder points buried in the game experience.
There is a "layer by layer" relationship between these lightning points in the process of player experience. After a whole set, it is difficult for players not to explode their mentality because of this.
First of all, the pre-marketing of "Zhuxian World" has been done very well, including "big anchors grab test codes for trial play", "test codes are fried to sky-high prices", "after more than a year of the first test, it took more than a year of research and development to conduct the second test", and "the first MMO terminal game created with Unreal Engine 5 in China" The gimmicks have whetted the appetite of players.
Then on the first day of the second test stage, it continued to maintain a "high profile", and it was necessary to spend 42 yuan to buy a monthly card to experience the game.
Finally, when the player enters, they find that they still can't play. On social platforms, "card", "not smooth" and "pasty picture quality" have become the core comment words. Since the game was developed with Unreal Engine 5 but had not yet been effectively optimized, the configuration requirements were extremely high.
As early as 2022, when "Zhuxian World" was tested for the first time, the minimum configuration requirements for the game were "i7 7700CPU+GTX1060+12G memory+solid-state drive", and if the ray tracing was fully turned on, at least "i7 10700CPU+RTX3060ti+16G memory" was required.
Since then, players have begun to diverge. The vast majority of gamers who can't afford to improve their hardware have to lower the graphics and turn off various special effects renderings to play, leaving only plastic graphics and rigid modeling in mind. The "graphics created by Unreal Engine 5" and "weather AI calculation and 3D volumetric cloud technology" that were highlighted in the early stage of the game have nothing to do with this part of the game.
The other part of the players who gritted their teeth and upgraded the accessories got an even worse experience.
On station B, some Up owners who participated in the second test shared their bad experiences: first, they flashed back 3 times in 5 minutes after going online, and then the Up master closed the live broadcast, and the game still reported errors. In order to experience the game content as soon as possible, the Up master ordered two 16G memory sticks with Hours, but it still couldn't play smoothly.
The most fatal thing is that in the limited experience of the Up master, this game built with Unreal Engine 5 has not been able to open much gap with terminal games such as "Ancient Sword and Strange Tales Online Version" on the actual machine screen.
Under this video with 230,000 views, most of the players in the comment area who have experienced the second test have expressed the same feelings as the Up master.
It's not just the graphics that are disappointing, but also the gameplay. After playing the second test of "Zhuxian World", the main "Mango Ice OL" of the top 100 games at station B, released the experience video "Try it out of Zhuxian World: Is this really a 23-year-old game?".
In addition to the graphics, the focus is on the game's current combat gameplay.
"Zhuxian World" adopts a very retro "tactics of pastoral" setting, with a large combination of professions to form a PVE experience, and individual operations are composed of small cooperation between skills, which is basically similar to "World of Warcraft".
But after more than ten years of baptism of various games, this classic gameplay is obviously not interesting in the eyes of players.
Especially when "Zhuxian World" has a low level in the early stage, only a limited number of skills are opened for players to use, which aggravates the boredom of this gameplay. In the process of fighting monsters in "Mango Ice OL", most of the time I was repeatedly pressing a key to stand on the pile and rub the fireball.
"Mango Ice OL" also suggested: If there are skills obtained in the later stage that can achieve more routines, can this part of the experience be pre-empted?
From being highly anticipated to being ridiculed by the crowd
In this year's game test, like "Zhuxian World", the first test is highly anticipated, but there are many cases that are immediately ridiculed by the group as soon as they enter the large-scale test or go online.
Among them, the mobile game "Girls' Frontline 2: Pursuit", which was launched in December, and "Beast Party" in October, are the most rhythmic.
Why is there such a phenomenon that the first test is expected and the second test is ridiculed by the group?
Eye Entertainment believes that there are three main reasons:
One of them is that the problems of small-scale testing are not fully exposed, but the test is used to promote the highlights of the game, which raises the expectations of players.
Including the first test of "Zhuxian World" and the fourth test of "Girls' Frontline 2: Chasing", all small-scale tests were conducted with a limited number of people.
In this link, those who can get the test qualification are undoubtedly fans of the game, and even if they give feedback questions, they are extremely neutral and objective, and they are mainly encouraged. This gives the game development team the illusion of security, turning a blind eye to an existing problem, or thinking that it is not a big problem and can defer the solution.
For example, under the Zhihu question of the third and fourth tests of "Girls' Frontline 2: Chasing and Release", the answers below the two questions are very different from each other for the same gacha welfare mechanism.
In addition, there is also a tendency to promote the game, and the production team likes to use the high scores of some players in the first test to promote the highlights of the game and raise the expectations of players. However, at the moment when social platforms are highly developed, when the actual experience is less than expected, this will undoubtedly cause catastrophic public opinion.
Second, in the follow-up development process, the player's opinion was shelved, and the development team worked behind closed doors, resulting in the development work going in the opposite direction.
After the first test in August 2022 was expected by players due to its excellent image quality and super large map, the second test will be conducted on December 29, 2023, after a full 14-month development cycle.
However, according to the game's official account, such a long period of development is mainly just to upgrade the engine, which inevitably makes players feel a little "picking up sesame seeds and losing watermelons".
This is also evidenced by the evaluation of the follow-up second test player experience: Unreal Engine 5 made a game that was at the level of 10 years ago.
The same situation also appeared in "Beast Party", after the game DEMO exploded on the live broadcast platform, countless players requested that the game be launched as soon as possible, but the official spent a full three years to refine the texture of the characters, and increased the price of the game to make players pay for the research and development costs, resulting in a reversal of word-of-mouth.
Third, the goods are not right, "Zhuxian World" said that "monthly card charges" are good, but there is a hidden mystery to anger players.
As the most successful MMO game of the year, "Zhuxian World" has Xi learned their experience in many places, such as "pricing".
On November 30, the official official account of Perfect World Games announced that the payment model of "Zhuxian World" is "monthly card system", which will never sell values, and learned Xi from "Against the Cold" to hand over the pricing power of monthly cards to players.
But in the actual voting interface, it played a trick, among the five price options: 54 yuan against "Against the Cold", 60 yuan against "Sword Network III", 75 yuan against "World of Warcraft", 88 yuan against "Final Fantasy 14", after paying tribute to friends, the lowest 42 yuan is actually the price set in "Zhuxian World".
At this point, although players found it greasy, they did not feel disgusted, but strengthened the perception of the low price of the monthly card of "Zhuxian World".
But after actually entering the game, players find that although the game doesn't sell values, everything else that can be sold is sold.
Open the game recharge page, it is the familiar 648. Open the game store, there are familiar "horns" and other props.
It's not surprising that some mall-specific explicit props are charged, but the innovative thinking is that even the "extra special effects slot" needs to be purchased for 198 yuan, which is equivalent to spending money to buy a fashion slot.
After further experience, players found that the official claim of not selling values was also not worthy of the name.
One of the major cultivation points in "Zhuxian World" to improve combat power is the "Star Spirit System", which is the gem system of traditional games. Players can place and activate the corresponding color star in a fixed slot to get the entry effect. Under normal circumstances, "Star Spirit" can only be dropped through PVE dungeons, but local tyrant players can recharge and exchange for a large number of circulating currencies for purification, which quickly widens the gap with civilian players.
This kind of business model of collecting money from monthly cards also induces local tyrants to consume, so that players who have already paid for monthly cards become local tyrants' foils, and it has also become a point for players to focus on complaining.
The survival puzzle of MMO terminal games
From an objective point of view, there are many problems in "Zhuxian World", but some problems are not the problems of a single game, but also the common dilemma of domestic MMO terminal games.
MMO, Multiplayer Online Game. Originally, "multiplayer" referred to the game genre, but in the current game environment, "multiplayer" has become a hard indicator for the establishment of MMO games.
"Only when the MAU reaches a certain level can the monthly card model support the profitability of the project. Mu Zi, a senior practitioner in the game industry, said. She believes that at a time when the supply of games was far richer than ten years ago, and the game category is still being refined, it is difficult to cover R&D and operating costs with only monthly cards, as it was more than ten years ago. The dual-fee model of monthly card props in the terminal game of "Against the Cold" and "Zhuxian World" is a business model that has to be adopted as a last resort in the current situation of shrinking MMO player base.
At the moment, there are two situations in which the game can get out of this dilemma.
One is an early terminal game similar to "World of Warcraft" or "Fantasy Journey to the West", whose R&D costs have long been recovered, and only a monthly card is needed to cover the operating costs of the game and the development cost of new versions.
The other is the mobile game "Against the Cold", which sacrifices the two sharp weapons of "season system" + "different paths to the same destination", which lays down the degree of "liver" of MMO games and greatly reduces the game threshold for players. With the two advantages of "mobile" and "low liver", the heyday of MMO has been reproduced on DOU. Therefore, even if there is no monthly card fee, with low-cost fashion, "Against the Cold" has achieved a high turnover like this.
Muzi believes that "Zhuxian World" needs to think thoroughly about the game business model compared to the problems that players complained about during the test period.
"The season system is suitable for the mobile game "Against the Cold", but it is not necessarily suitable for the "Zhuxian World" as a terminal game. In Muzi's view, as a terminal game, the core players of "Zhuxian World" are destined to be heavy users of MMOs from the beginning, and they will spend a long time in the game.
The season system is a balancing mechanism adopted by the mobile game "Against the Cold" to ensure that mobile game players will not fall behind because they do not play for a long time.
Thou art honey, thy arsenic. For a large number of mobile gamers, the season system is an antidote to players' concerns about the game, but for the core MMO players, the season system is an inhibitor that restricts them from investing more in the game.
At present, the specific mode of the season system of "Zhuxian World" has not yet been determined, but many contradictions have been exposed in some cultivation content. For example, will the aforementioned star spirit system used to make local tyrants quickly increase their combat power reset with the season? If it is reset, it will inevitably seriously hit the willingness of local tyrants to kryptonite, and if it is not reset, then there will be no fairness at all in the "Zhuxian World" that adopts a monthly card fee.
This question is not only for "Zhuxian World", but also for all new games that claim to be "the light of the next domestic MMO terminal game".