Lead
| I'm going to attack in the form of a mech! |
In recent years, various game manufacturers have begun to rack their brains to pick out details, think about how to play, and touch preferences.
The reason is that the current game market has entered the stock era, for players, there are too many products to choose from on the market, a game is not appetizing, I just give up the game and change the home, manufacturers can no longer lose a shoddy product like the previous wild years to come up to make money, it is an absolutely good era.
The pressure naturally came to the manufacturer's side, there is no way, you can't live if you don't roll. But to be honest, the game industry has developed to this day, and the gameplay crossover between games is too common, just like I wrote a paper before, I just came up with a new idea, and I checked it on the Internet, "10023 results have been found", and it is even more difficult for manufacturers to make a product that has no strong competitors on the market.
However, there is a but, on April 5th, after I was fortunate enough to be invited by Xishanju to go to Zhuhai to participate in the offline trial activity of "Solving the Limit Machine", I have two feelings, one is that Xishanju, a manufacturer specializing in "martial arts", has "opened a sect" and really made a product that makes it impossible for players to find meal replacements, and the other is that Guo Weiwei and the "Limit Solving Machine" project team are really understanding mechas.
01
"Hardcore" demos
The offline trial of "Solving the Limit" is located in Zhuhai Jinshan Park, which is also the base camp of the project team. The entire trial arena is designed with a very mechanical aesthetic, and the engineering beams erected at the entrance of the arena are painted in the color of the surface markings, and anyone who has touched Koichi will know that this is a warning sign to remind the driver, and when I stepped into this entrance, the atmosphere that rose up really made me feel a sense of excitement before the Gundam driver went to Gnaku.
On both sides of the entrance corridor is written the product concept of "Limit Relief Machine", which is full of line drawings of the body design. On these original cases, Flame Heavy Industries clearly explained the unique design language and inspiration of the game's airframes, such as some of the structure of the airframes were born from the flaps and spoiler designs of real-life fourth-generation aircraft, and the lines of some external armor were inspired by the armor of main battle tanks such as the Leopard 2A7 and 99A.
On the one hand, the design of these real-life weapons gives the body of "Limit Breaker" a kind of industrial heaviness, and I personally prefer this more realistic style than the fantasy body with full-body light particles and supernatural components. On the other hand, these designs also distinguish the visual expression of different mechs, allowing players to roughly see their characteristics from the appearance of armor, body lines, etc.
With the jewel in the previous verandah in front of me, I walked into the venue with quite high expectations, and this expectation was also oversatisfied: in order to carry out the atmosphere of mecha driving to the end, Flame Heavy Industries directly put the half-body of the "protagonist machine" Long Yuan in the game.
At the beginning of the trial, with a flash of sparks, the eyes of the body lit up, and the audience was very happy.
By the way, the trial equipment provided by Xishanju is also unambiguous, and the whole set of alien machines is neatly lined up in the Gnaku-like venue, which has a kind of beauty that if you want to do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools.
02
"Unlimiting" the "Unlimiting" Machine Again
The venue layout is already so "hardcore", so what is the quality of the game itself? In my personal experience, there is no other word to describe it better than hearty. Compared with the last test, this offline trial has added a new 6v6 map "Glacillin Sky City", two new mechs and a new mode "Mashmark", although there are still some systems that have not been implemented, but the main gameplay framework and content of the game have a considerable volume, at least for me, one day is not enough for in-depth experience.
The two newly added airframes are "Sky Raider" and "Hurricane", the former is a deformable air combat body similar to the ultra-high-speed attack aircraft "Spear Falcon" that is very out of the circle in the upper test, but it is different from the "Spear Falcon" that is good at breaking through and decapitating in the back row, the function of "Sky Raider" is more fire suppression and interception, and its main armament is a missile type that implements wide-area strikes and jamming, and its role is to suppress firepower and invalidate the opponent's self-aiming, and the main weapon is also a heavy cannon with a slower rate of fire and higher damage per shot.
It is roughly equivalent to the difference between a fighter aircraft that ensures air supremacy and clears high-value enemy targets in reality, and an attack aircraft that performs close air support (commonly known as licking the floor) and shallow close air interdiction.
The "Hurricane" is the main position defense of the body, belongs to the point of defense of the specialized body, which can release interference UAVs to attract enemy firepower, while deploying the force field shield that blocks live ammunition and beams, it can also release autonomous UAVs to form a diffusion firepower network with high thermal beams to suppress the enemy's formation, which is the best choice to protect their own crispy skin and weaken the enemy's propulsion efficiency.
These two distinctive mechs, together with the melee specialized mech "Black Panther" and the support specialized mech "Luminar", which have been released by various media and beta players, together form the body structure of "Unrestricted Machine", which is based on light, medium, heavy, and super heavy, and has different functions of attack, combat, defense, sniping, and support. Although I only stopped at the beginning of each body this time, I can still intuitively experience the differentiated design made by Xishanju for each body.
Their role in different types of combat maps is very distinct, for example, the super heavy defense machine "Triceratops" + "Hurricane" that can be turned into a fixed-point heavy artillery This combination of stakes is very suitable for maps such as guarding points and carts, while the combination of light attack aircraft "Gyrfalcon" and medium fighting machine "Panther" with high attack and high mobility is more practical in chaotic maps that need to snatch and transport data packages.
The only problem is that the importance of the only support machine, the nurse "Luminal", is too supermodel. This is especially evident in the new model "Mashmark".
"Mashmark" is the finale of this offline trial, and as a new model, many of Xishanju's ideas for making mecha have been expressed on it. Roughly speaking, it is a super large PVEVP battlefield that can accommodate 60 people at the same time, and if the conventional 6V6 and 3V3 are local small-scale hot battles, "Mashmark" is a serious "battle" level.
Players are divided into teams of 6 and 10 teams in the large map, and after descending and landing, they need to defeat the AI enemies scattered throughout the map, collect "Enhancement Chips" to enhance the performance of the mech, and finally defeat all the other teams under the influence of the gradually spreading EIC pulse burst.
This mode can be roughly said to be a "mecha battle royale", but because the player is operating the body, although the flight is limited by the "energy slot" (physical strength), but after all, it has the mobility of the sky and the earth, and the Xishanju has been able to be more free in the map design, and the production team has done a lot of terrain and landforms in the large map of "Mashmark": magma, snow-capped mountains, Canyons and so on, even if you put aside the combat experience, the realistic map rendered by VirtualGeometry technology and the "poison circle" that intuitively shows the earth-shattering power - EIC storm is very visually impactful, in the face of huge mountains and storms, even if you operate the thickest "Triceratops" will emerge with a sense of insignificance.
In addition, due to the popularity of flying ability, Nishiyamaju should have strengthened the depth of the map, and there are many elevation differences in the map, and a mecha vehicle similar to the "meteor device" installed on the outside of the body in Gundam SEED has been placed on the map, and the proportion of air combat time is very considerable.
Unrestricted aircraft
So why do I say that the nurse "Luminar" is too important, because the loss caused by the attrition in "Mashmark" is too significant, and the means of recovery are very limited.
As I said above, the characteristics of each body in "Limit Solving Machine" are very distinct, and the "Black Panther" is close to the "Narujin", and the latter can only hide, in the same way, the "Spear Falcon" fights the "Triceratops" is pure scraping. The strengths of each body are obvious, and the shortcomings will be very prominent, and the importance of cooperation is even more significant in team battles.
If a team's defensive mech falls, it will be difficult for that team to resist enemy fire and block the oncoming dog's charge, and if the output body falls, the team will not have enough DPS. You must know that "Liberating Machine" has weakened the shooting threshold to a certain extent, and players only need to put the hostile body in the "aiming ring" in the center of the screen to shoot, and six cannons will hit five or less, which is stronger and which is weaker. The crippled team, unless the technology is crushed and the tacit understanding is cooperated, there is almost no possibility of winning against the whole team.
In addition to the recovery means of the body from the nurse "Luminal", there is only the recovery Dot in the resource point, not to mention the poor efficiency, and it may not be encountered. Although there are also "resurrection points" scattered on the map, each resurrection point can only be used once, and it is divided into ten teams, which can be said to be "hard to find".
In this way, "Luminal" has become the lower limit of a team. The team of the nurse who knows how to protect herself is often that you always feel that you are going to fall successfully, and the opponent runs out of your attack range with a few maneuvers, and then comes back to a full state, and your panther big drill roars and wants to explode the opposite support plane, but you can't find him.
There is a scene that I still remember vividly: at that time, my team had just cleared a resource point in the canyon, and suddenly two teams of enemy players emerged from the other side of the cliff, and the blue flames of the nozzles of the enemy plane's thrusters had just flashed, followed by the intensive fire bombardment from the "Hellfire" and "Aquinas", the charging of the "Black Panther" and "Red Sky", and the air superiority of high and low with "letting the dog" Tactics instantly knocked us to the ground, but we came back to our senses, and the shield skill I operated from the Black Panther allowed me to quickly rise into the air through dense explosions, evade enemy fire with tactical moves, and engage my teammates again.
All this, from the shadow of the enemy plane displayed on the radar to the outbreak of battle, was a blink of an eye.
At this point, I'm pretty much sure that the mecha experience provided by "Limit Breaker" is unique. Campaign-level battle scenes, unique and rich body design, and more importantly, mecha battles under the control of real people, and the upper limit of operations brought by micro-operations such as shield reversal are all rare shining points.
Truth be told, it can be stressful if you're playing with passers-by. For me, though, it's just a matter of balance, and as a pilot experience, "Mashmark" fully fulfills my fantasy of large-scale machine battles, and "Unlimited" has once again lifted its ceiling with this mode, which makes me look forward to its next evolution.
03
A "knowledgeable" mecha guy
Now that we're out of the way to activities and games, let's talk about people.
In between piloting the soldiers, Nishiyamaju invited us to visit the studio of Torch Heavy Industries, which is a paradise for rubber guys.
Models of "Daedric Z", "Gundam series", and even the old "Ressarion" appeared in every corner of the office area of Flame Heavy Industries, and almost everyone had a model of the body on their workstation.
And the leader of this gang of glue guys is Guo Weiwei, the producer of "Limit Relief Machine". Captain Guo's office is more like Gnaku than an office. The model of the whole wall surrounds this world, which is located in the depths of the office area of Xinhuo Heavy Industry.
In addition to models, there are also FS classics such as "Neon Genesis Evangelion", "Gun Dream", and "Armed Mecha".
Love is a prerequisite for understanding and a fundamental motivator for action. Many people in the outside world don't understand why Guo Weiwei doesn't let go of the martial arts that has been perfected, and for eight consecutive years, he has been stubbornly stumbling science fiction and mecha, which can be called a niche category in China, I think, this office environment is the answer.
In order to do "Solve the Limit", Xishanju almost recreated a rendering architecture, and they detailed this set of rendering logic for rendering virtual geometry at this year's GDC, namely the aforementioned VirtualGeometry. There will also be internal competitions and even leaderboards in the R&D team of Flame Heavy Industries, and it is hard not to realize that these mecha makers really like them.
What is the charm of mechas? Or, even if they know that strength and rationality are on the left, why do humans still want to stop humanoid weapons?
The answer to this question can be said to be the result of human society entering the age of reason in which God is dead after the Industrial Revolution. Today, machinery and technology have taken the place of God as new symbols.
It can also be said: it's handsome, for no other reason.
So what is the charm of "Unrestricted Machine"?
For the "PUBG" and "Battlefield" series, it is difficult for players to break free from the shackles of the human body, the aftermath of the explosion, the flying stray bullets are enough to kill people, "World of Warships" and "World of Tanks" Although you can experience the charm of armed vehicles, the fragile modern weapon armor cannot withstand the bombardment of 130mm shelling armor-piercing shells after all.
Only mechas, which have swords, guns, beams, and armor at the same time, can inspire the highest romance of breaking free from the heavy reality. The humanoid on the screen can withstand several cuts of beam sabers and the bombardment of electromagnetic acceleration cannons, and when you sit in it, you can suddenly forget about the weak body in reality, and in a trance, you think that you are enough to fight the storm with a mortal body.
I think this will be the emotion that "Limit Solver" will bring to every player in the future.