On April 26th, the EA version of a medieval construction simulation game called "Manor Lords" was released, and it sold millions of dollars on the day of its launch, which is a miracle.
This can be said to be the most popular stand-alone game in recent times,The work has a rich and huge construction and combat content gameplay,Integrate the characteristics of multiple games,And the picture and details have reached the "quasi-3A" level,With the game will continue to be updated in the future,The future achievements are limitless。
And such an amazing game is actually created by a novel development model such as "single developer + outsourcing", which may have an extremely important impact on the development of the game industry in the future.
Why is the heat so high?
According to the game's official announcement, the number of Steam wishlists (pre-registered players) before the launch of "Manor Lords" was as high as 3 million, ranking first in the whole Steam, overpowering the much-watched "Hades 2", "Black Myth: Wukong", "Hollow Knight: Song of Silk" and other upcoming new games.
The performance of the EA version of this game after its release is also quite amazing, with sales reaching the million level in one day, and the number of concurrent online users on Steam has soared to nearly 170,000, and has been climbing ever since.
Tim Bender, CEO of the game's publisher, Hooded Horse, was also surprised in a recent media interview:
"No one would have imagined that the number of concurrent players in the game's launch would surpass the launch of Total War: Warhammer 3 and Civilization 6 to 173,000. This was unexpected. It far exceeded our expectations and now has a large number of players. ”
So, why is this game so popular? It even exceeds the number of online users of some recent triple-A masterpieces.
First of all, the genre of this game is very unique.
It's not easy to say what the genre is, and according to the official description, it's a medieval-style simulation building game.
It may seem unremarkable, but what's interesting is that it combines a lot of city-building gameplay with a lot of RTS gameplay.
According to the game's producer, Greg Styczeń, he wanted to make such a game because he had invested a lot of time playing Stronghold: Crusades before, and earlier played games like Lord of the Rings: Middle-earth War, Knights and Merchant, The Settlers, and Age of Empires.
Stronghold: Crusades is a classic RTS game
In addition, many people pointed out that many of the design elements in the game can be seen in the shadow of "Exiled City", "Circle of Worlds" and the Total War series, especially the Total War series.
And we can also see some of the designs of "Crusader King" and "Mount and Blade" in the game, and some players have pointed out that this game is very similar to a classic PC game "Dragon Rise" released in 2002.
Of course, the biggest feature of the game is that it perfectly blends the two sets of construction and combat gameplay, and it is quite complex and deep.
In terms of construction, the work of construction workers, the production of farms and pastures, the sweat of sawmills and blacksmiths, and even the rest, drinking, and eating of the villagers are all placed in front of the stage, so that players can clearly see how a medieval bunker was built, and players can also track the transportation and production of raw materials for wood, clay and iron ore throughout the process, and even as long as all the work is scheduled in advance, players can freely switch between first-person and third-person views throughout the process.
Combat is similar to many RTS gameplay, in addition to the troops, formations, and combat types, fatigue, weather conditions, and equipment must be taken into account, with proper command to defeat the crowd, physical strength will decrease sharply with fast movement, fatigue will have a negative impact on combat performance, and there will be differences in marching styles, walking in the woods will reduce morale, and high points will increase the team's overall advantage.
Of course, the above is only an overview of the two gameplay methods of building and combat, in fact, the relevant gameplay details in the game are quite complex and huge, bringing players a super rich experience, and the price of the game is only 109 yuan.
And building and fighting complement each other, as long as you put more effort into building, you can make the battle smoother, and the smoother the battle, the faster the construction.
It's rare for a game to blend the two genres, because they're already quite complex and so difficult to design together, and many companies don't dare to try something so difficult.
Secondly, the scenes and graphics of this work are quite amazing.
For example, from the most intuitive art, this work chooses the most "money-burning" realistic painting style. The game has a large open map, from the clouds, mountains, and trees in the distance, to the cooking smoke in the village, and the building materials are full of realism.
Unlike regular RTS or 4X games, players can even pull the camera behind the characters and take the lord on a tour of the manor in third person. Even if you zoom in on the image, the details of the houses and livestock in the village, the characters walking, and the animations of clothes and fabrics fluttering can stand up to scrutiny, and the overall look is quite comfortable.
This is what shocked many players, because there is only one core member of this game, and then a lot of work such as art is done by outsourcing, and the result is a game similar to "quasi-3A", and the amount of detail is amazing.
Thirdly, there is only one core member of the game, that is, the producer Greg Styczeń, which maintains the overall authorship of the game and also gains a lot of attention.
在游戏的官网上写着这么一段话：“由一名开发者手工打造而成（Handcrafted by a solo developer.）”。
The developer's experience is legendary, as he tinkered with the RPG Maker 2000 engine with his friends in elementary school, and has since kept it as a hobby, making mini-games with engines such as Flash and Dark Basic.
THEN, LIKE KEIZO, THE PRODUCER OF THE FAMOUS INDIE GAME KAMINO NO KILO, WHICH WAS ALSO DEVELOPED BY ONE PERSON IN JAPAN, HE INITIALLY USED HIS SPARE TIME TO PRODUCE MANOR LORDS, AND IN THE EARLY STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT HE USED A PART-TIME MODEL, WORKING AS A FREELANCER FOR VIDEO PRODUCTION DURING THE DAY AND WORKING AT HIS DESK AT NIGHT, WHICH LASTED FOR AT LEAST THREE YEARS.
But Greg Styczeń was more fortunate than KEIZO, who spent 14 years making God's Scales because of this amateur development model, and Greg Styczeń shared his game development progress on Reddit after 2020, and opened an account on the crowdfunding site Patreon to get some sponsorship income from players.
It was only after that he received a MegaGrant from Epic Games that he finally had the opportunity to leave his job and work full-time game development. But judging from the development progress shared by Greg Styczeń in his early years, he has made considerable progress in the first three years of part-time R&D.
This is actually related to the different development differences in various regions, there are many large game companies in Europe and the United States like to support some potential independent game projects, and Japan has only begun to pay attention to this field gradually in recent years, such as the second GYAAR Studio independent game competition hosted by the famous Japanese game company Bandai Namco and its independent game brand GYAAR Studio announced the results in March this year. Valkyrie Squad: Break Out stands out; In addition, KONAMI has also held indie game competitions over the years to discover some potential indie game developers, and then authorize their classic old IPs to develop new works for them.
However, on the whole, Europe and the United States are more developed and large-scale in this regard, for example, the Epic MegaGrant has funded nearly 2,000 UE projects around the world free of charge.
In fact, there has been some progress in this area in China, not to mention that Sony's China Star Program has supported a number of projects, such as "Shadow Torch City" and "Lost Soul", and miHoYo's recent support of "Mountains and Rivers Travel" has also caused a lot of heated discussions, and there are many similar cases.
And Greg Styczeń, because he later solved the problem of R&D funding, and after switching to full-time development, it took 7 years to release the EA version of the game, which is 7 years less than the 14 years it took KEIZO to build "God's Scales".
Many people claim that the game was developed by one person, but in fact, a lot of the related work of the game was outsourced after it received sufficient funding.
The cast for Lords of the Manor includes two "additional programming" acknowledgements, as well as a number of 3D artists, animators, illustrators, concept artists, historical consultants, writers, and other contributors. In a recent interview, Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, the publisher of Lords of the Manor, described his development model as "one-man developer plus outsourcing", with Styczeń being the main creative force, but he also hires outside talent to help.
The core idea of this game comes from Greg Styczeń, so there is nothing wrong with "one-man developer plus outsourcing", like the original free version of "God's Scales" was completed by KEIZO alone, but after commercialization, some things like art and other things were also perfected by professional developers.
It's just that gamers are too obsessed with the problem of "one-person development", which has led to the dissatisfaction of developers of similar games recently.
Recently, for example, Arthur Bruno, CEO of Crate Entertainment, the developer of another construction game, The Farthest Frontier, said in an interview with the media that he is now annoyed to see that some players think that The Farthest Frontier was made by a large development team (in fact, there are only 7 people), especially when compared to the "single-player" development of Manor Lords.
"The Furthest Frontier"
"People seem to think that we have 60 people, or the entire Crate Entertainment team, working on 'Farthest Frontier', so we're moving slowly, and 'there's only one guy working on Manor Lords,' and that drives me crazy," Bruno said. Would you like to take a look at the list of credits for Lords of the Manor, which may even have a larger team than ours? ”
The crux of the controversy here is that many people look at the case of one-person development and ignore an important issue, that is, although the core idea comes from the most important producer, in such cases, a lot of technical resources may need to be outsourced to complete, and "Manor Lords" would not have been able to create such an amazing picture if it had not been outsourced to those technical tasks.
Bruno's anger is that many players have used cases like Manor Lords to accuse game companies of being too slow to develop games.
In fact, the development model of "The Farthest Frontier" and "Manor Lords" is also different, because the former is a multi-person company project, and all 7 people involved in this project can contribute their own ideas, while the core creative source of the latter is only Greg Styczeń, which is fundamentally different.
波兰独立游戏制作人Greg January
Coming back to the topic itself, the key to getting so much attention is that the core creative came from Greg Styczeń, which is extremely valuable for maintaining an integrity consistency in the overall design of the game.
Because of triple-A masterpieces such as "Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora" or "Blue Sea and Black Sails" produced by large game companies such as Ubisoft, such games have too many participants, perhaps a scale of thousands of people, and multiple studios around the world work together to develop, so there will be problems such as the overall mediocre level of level design or high and low, as long as it is a super large project, it is basically difficult to avoid this problem.
And from a marketing point of view, "one-person development" has a high topicality, which can be said to have touched many players, on the one hand, many players are now disgusted with the kind of inferior 3A masterpieces that many people develop but do not have a core soul, on the other hand, the public always expects the emergence of a miracle hero who single-handedly creates myths, and this has been the case throughout the ages.
Of course, there are some people who think that from a rigorous point of view, even if there is only one person at the core of the work, it cannot be regarded as a case of one-person development, because the outsourced work is also a development participant.
Personally, I think we should look at this problem this way, as the scale and difficulty of game development continue to increase, it is impossible to say that there is no such situation as a single person to develop and do all the work of a game, but it will definitely become more and more difficult, unless it is a small game that does not have much technical content.
And on such a large scale as this work, if you don't outsource it, it may take many years, which doesn't make much sense, after all, KEIZO's development of "God's Balance" has made many people feel embarrassed.
So from a broad perspective and a tolerant point of view, it's okay to call this work a "one-person development", after all, the core ideas are all done by one person.
In addition, the quality of the work is the most important thing, otherwise a bad game, whether it is developed by one person or how many people, cannot change the essence of a bad game.
It's a long road
This game is currently released in the EA version, and there are many things that have not been unlocked, and there are some bugs, in addition to the fact that some players think that the game has too little content and the map is too small.
But on the whole, the general gameplay experience of the game is made, and gameplay such as the diplomatic system will be slowly updated and added later, and now it is inevitable that there will be some bad reviews because of the lack of content.
However, games with extremely complex content experience like this have to launch an EA version, which is one way to earn income through the first release and then invest in subsequent updates, and the other is to collect feedback from players through the EA version and then continuously improve, which is actually a process of communication between developers and players and then building the game together.
epilogue
Personally, I think that with the continuous update of the work in the future, the current declining praise rate can rise back, and the unique experience of the game itself is difficult to replace other games at the moment, just like a player who likes "Dragon Rise" He has been looking forward to a sequel to the work, but this is almost impossible to achieve, so in the end he can only choose "Manor Lords" with similar gameplay.
Judging from the current popularity and influence of this work, this model of a core developer and a large amount of outsourcing may be used as a reference by many companies or individuals in the future, and it is also a new development model that is likely to be popularized in the game industry in the future and reduce costs and improve efficiency, and this is mainly due to the improvement of the portability of development tools and the popularity of the Internet. (Text/Feiyun)