Among miHoYo's game products in recent years, "Jeopardy Zero" is a special existence. When it comes to it, players tend to talk less about it and focus more on the action gameplay at the heart of the game.
The hot reviews of players on the Haoyou Kuaibang platform basically revolve around the action gameplay
This set of action gameplay mechanics that focuses on dealing with enemy unit attacks, and players frequently switch roles to defend/dodge/counterattack/combo and other countermeasures, and its experience characteristics are easy to master and difficult to master, which is one of the most impressive highlights for players in many tests.
When switching characters, the previous character will stay in the screen because the action is not completed, which is also a major feature of the game's action gameplay
However, the advantages of the game are not limited to this, and the author also feels that the construction of the game's sense of urban life is quite bright in the experience of the recent noisy test. However, this advantage is often overlooked by many players, which is surprising.
The reason for this may be that the size of the game's box garden map is limited, so players don't care much about how its world is structured. After all, nowadays is an era when big manufacturers go hand in hand and compete together on the open world track, and miHoYo is the leader of this track, so it is easier for everyone to pay attention to the world structure of those open world games under it.
However, small scale doesn't mean there's no room for design. The game is based on the near future and street culture to polish the framework and enrich a lot of information and stories in every corner of the world, so that players seem to live in this "six-point street", and every moment of the game has a realistic effect.
The city is small, but it is interesting and full of life
How does this work?Relying on the box-themed packaging and the filling of a large amount of informational details, the world of the game is brought to life.
Raise the upper limit of the box garden map from more dimensions and reshape the sense of life
In the game of Jeopardy Zero, the design of the Hakoniwa map is very different from the mainstream direction.
Generally speaking, the best way to enrich the experience of the minimap community is to pile up a large number of functional buildings along the "T" or "one" shaped streets, so that players can see them all and interact with them easily. However, miHoYo did not do this, on the contrary, the overall space of the map is relatively relaxed, the streets are wide, there are not many NPCs and they are not crowded, and with the occasional sunset of the game, it is even a bit lazy and leisurely.
The absence of a functional community map is what sets the game apart. The game has been trying to improve the interactive space of the minimap in a more special way, for which the game has made the following three designs:
(1) Implantation of the concept of time lapse
The sense of time is a very ethereal and ethereal interactive concept with a huge experience improvement. On the one hand, when the player is in a world and watches it evolve over time, the feeling that the world is alive can be quickly revealed
On the other hand, when the experience of the game is added to the scale of time, then the player's game logic will also be changed, and the game behavior of any player will be limited by time, whether the player is performing a task, fighting or running a map, the player must make a reasonable overall arrangement within the specified time to maximize the benefits of the game, and can no longer do as he did in the past.
In order to achieve such an effect, in the game, time is made into a set of large covering mechanisms, and the game divides the time into four periods: morning, afternoon, night and early morning, directly dividing the community into multiple time dimensions. Different time periods not only affect the look and feel of the scene, resulting in significant differences in the light and shadow effects and street landscapes under different sunlight, but more importantly, the time when NPCs appear and teammates will have their own time plans for each time period, and the appearance time will be different.
Even the game's quest mechanics are time-matched, with different schedules, and some special quests have special time slots.
This practice actually uses the concept of time to stagger the game's tasks and characters' behaviors, allowing players to take one more step to find the interaction point of time. The end result of this step is to provide the game with an extended effect that is different from the sense of space. This design scheme can cut the time into the world of the game, so that the space of the game becomes a superimposed state, so that the same space has different experiences in different time periods, and the minimap is invisibly expanded.
(2) A community that is not centered on the protagonist and the core gameplay, with a strong sense of realism
The extended design that shapes the space can not only make use of the perception of time, but also highlight the experiential effect of the sense of the world.
In the game's community map, there are not only ramen noodles that provide combat buffs, coffee to restore stamina, but also video game stores that provide additional mini-games, including other features that will be added in the future, such as Guangying Plaza. The facilities and functions of these communities are not simply designed to serve the protagonists played by players, nor are they simply designed for the core gameplay, but an interactive logic for the expansion of the city, which is built based on the needs of the city.
For example, the video store has very little meaning for the protagonist and the core gameplay, but for the city, it is very important
Correspondingly, NPCs are also free to change within the city, with their own living conditions and habits. In order to make it easier for players to feel the self-operation of the city and residents, the game also abandons the one-click operation logic of traditional mobile games in many repetitive mechanisms such as receiving and sending tasks, running map interaction and improving team friendliness, but encourages players to run more to the city and interact with NPCs and facilities to feel the quiet changes of these carriers in different times and different locations, and these changes are also a set of logic for the characters to run themselves, not completely follow the gameplay and the protagonist.
Exploring the city, meeting teammates, and living her life (buying snacks), we can also observe the information and personality of other characters from these interactions
When everything in the city is no longer driven by the player's ideas, it also means that many times you lack prediction of the next behavior of the city and the character, and then feel that the whole world is full of freshness and unknown for the player, and the player's subjective initiative is also mobilized out of the mentality of wanting to understand.
(3) Massive amounts of information keep the world running
Jeopardy Zero is a game with a bit of cyberpunk characteristics, and many of the game's basic elements, including the visual effects style and performance form, have a strong information flow characteristic. For example, the "empty" mode of the game running map simulates the process of virtualized data shuttling in the TV screen, realizing the effect of connecting the two worlds.
The game's running diagram is the process of running from one screen to another
The TV screen has also become the most prominent symbol of the game, such as the game's card gacha animation, which is also expressed by the transmission of TV and digital signals.
In addition, the game does not stop at the art and visual effects style of the information flow, and the game puts a lot of information into all aspects of the game. For example, on the streets of the game, you can not only see daily newspaper news bulletins, but also a large number of posters and graffiti from the current pop culture of New Eridu, as well as posters and posters of popular idols, promotional images of different gang characters, stickers of popular goods, and so on.
Real-time feeds of newspaper news
Graphic information is everywhere in the scene
What's more prominent is that the game's interface for accepting free tasks is still digital and made into a waterfall anonymous post community with a lot of information. In this interface, in addition to the task information related to the player, it also contains a large number of events and news that are happening in the game world during this period, and the game relies on the massive information that is updated synchronously to consolidate the player's cognition, that is, in addition to the player, the whole world is still happening a lot of things that the player does not know, and the game has also made an interactive mechanism, the player can interact with the news that happens in these worlds, Comments and messages make players participate in the dissemination of information, which further enhances the player's sense of substitution and makes the player feel that he is a part of the world.
Players can not only see a variety of real-time updated information on the anonymous version, but also leave messages and interact as participants and commenters
The massive amount of content built by this information is also the final footnote to the realism of the world. Even if the player does not go out of the small six-point street area, all the real-time information that happens in the entire New Avery in the setting, the player can also know it well, and this information transmission is also a kind of early display of future expectations, when the game expands the map area with the update in the future, the events in other neighborhoods can also be corresponded to one by one, and finally form a closed loop of information cognition.
What's more, these kinds of information push and update to graphics-based, are relatively low-cost practices, the game can be updated at a high frequency, push more information to the player, when the amount of information is piled up, players need to start screening the information in the face, the whole game world becomes more huge, each player picks up the information to understand the new Alley will be completely different, the game world has become complex and multifaceted, unexpectedly to achieve the goal of "thousands of people, thousands of faces" in the open world.
Write at the end
Even if you don't play the open world, miHoYo still has a strong demonstration effect, and it shapes a community design that is different from the open world at a lower cost.
Games aren't just a design route, and there are many ways that a good game can improve the gaming experience. "Jeopardy Zero" has found the design angle it wants, using the characteristics of the theme, the game has increased the implantation of information content, so that the world is surrounded by a larger amount of information, and invisibly expands the sense of space and depth of the game, and the game also attaches importance to the operation of the concept of time, so that players can more easily perceive the changes in the world whether in the time of leisure shopping or in the process of core battles, and then expand their understanding of the world.
Being in the middle of such a new Eridu, watching the city run in an orderly manner and the residents entertaining themselves, even though it is only a small city a few streets away, still makes players feel extremely realistic and immersive. As the open beta gets closer, the surprise of the game staying on Six Minutes Street will eventually become a new shock after the new Erido is fully restored. (Text/Maruko)