On May 10, "Glory of Kings: Dawn of the Stars" (hereinafter referred to as "Dawn of the Stars") low-key opened the advance test of limited numbers without deletion. At first glance, this operation is actually quite strange.
After all, the game has ended its final test in March this year. According to the regular rhythm, the team should focus on optimization in the final stage, why do you have to toss a wave on the eve of the big war?
It wasn't until today that everyone found out that Tencent was secretly holding back a big one.
As soon as I woke up, "Dawn of the Stars" officially announced that it had reached an authorization and co-creation relationship with "Meteor Butterfly Sword.net" and "Martial Arts", and cooperated to launch a chicken-eating gameplay "Star Soul Battlefield", and started a small-scale test today.
Therefore, there is also a scene where Li Bai, Meng Xingsoul, and Ding Xuan, the three leading characters of their respective IPs, gather together.
It seems that the three products from all over the world are gathered, and Tencent and "competitors" are engaged in joint research, which is enough to surprise people. What's even more unbelievable is that "Dawn of the Stars" has two sets of gameplay before: PvP fighting, PvE plot, and now there is a chicken, what kind of medicine are they selling in their gourds?
Moreover, in the more than 4 years since the first exposure of "Dawn of the Stars", it has been tested several times, but it has never exposed the "Star Soul Battlefield" chicken gameplay, and now it is a surprise attack after the final test of the game, which also makes the product look a lot more mysterious.
And after experiencing the "Star Soul Battlefield" today, I found that Tencent is taking the next interesting move.
01 Why do the three of them create a chicken game?
Before talking about the game experience, I would like to talk about why "Dawn of the Stars" chose to suddenly eat chicken.
First of all, it doesn't seem like a makeover decision.
We all know that with the expansion of the number of users of "Honor of Kings", they have launched various types of gameplay to satisfy players with complex attributes. For example, the "Border Breakout" that previously quoted the rules of eating chicken, and the Vientiane Tiangong model that was integrated later.
According to Grape Jun, the king team has been researching various categories over the years, and has maintained stable communication with the elite R&D teams of various vertical categories. The idea of "Star Soul Battlefield" was also formed during this period, and its earliest creative prototype came from the "Border Breakout" launched in 2018.
As far as "Dawn of the Stars" is concerned, it is the first IP-derived mobile game of "Honor of Kings". Last year, the R&D team said that the starting point of the product was to meet the wishes of players who want to operate the king hero and have more action experience. On the whole, this is an "action mobile game of kings and heroes".
Therefore, during the development process, the "Dawn of the Stars" team often talked and discussed with OGs in the action field, including "Meteor Butterfly Sword.net" and "Martial Arts".
The former is the earliest representative of domestic action games, and the latter is the first domestic action chicken product. The "Dawn of the Stars" team is backed by the king IP market and has many years of experience in action mobile game development. The combination of the three parties happens to form complementary advantages.
In the process of many dialogues, the three parties found that there are still many pain points in the current action chicken mobile game based on their respective experiences and perspectives in their respective fields, and gradually formed a category consensus.
First of all, in the past, the action and chicken categories were more difficult to get started, and if you want to continue to expand the user base and adapt to the habits of mobile gamers, you must lower the operation threshold of the category and make it easier for players to get started.
Secondly, as a competitive multiplayer category, it must be balanced. If the optimal solution appears in the game too early, it will lead to a single player experience, and the entire environmental ecology will fall into a tug-of-war cycle of "the R&D team solves the problem, and the player solves the problem".
Finally, improve the overall freedom of the game. At present, the category gameplay on the market is relatively solidified, and players have a certain aesthetic fatigue, so they need to have different focuses and more diverse gameplay products.
These consensuses have contributed to the development direction of the chicken gameplay of "Dawn of the Stars".
However, although the above three aspects of the idea seem good, "Dawn of the Stars" should still face a lot of problems from the IP itself.
For example, "Glory of Kings" is a MOBA game after all, players are used to the top-down perspective, accustomed to the simple skill release logic, if it is just the previous simplified 2D platform fighting, maybe it's okay to say, but now into the 3D world, playing is still a difficult action category, can you get used to it?
In this regard, the solution that "Dawn of the Stars" tried is to simply use IP as a category, and optimize and innovate the chicken gameplay according to the advantages of the king's IP.
02 Make categories in IP
One of the biggest feelings I have about "Star Soul Battlefield" is that this is really too king - if I want to describe this gameplay in general, I won't say that it is action chicken or cold weapon chicken, it is pure king chicken.
In fact, in hand games, a sense of familiarity comes to the face, and the most intuitive is the audio-visual level.
"Star Soul Battlefield" follows the classic elements such as the original image, voice, and soundtrack of the characters in "Honor of Kings", and if you don't look at the specific gameplay, you shouldn't think that these are two different products.
But at the same time, the game has made a round of upgrades to the world view of the king's IP. For example, in the past, "Border Breakout" only showed the desert map, while "Star Soul Battlefield" included the big world scenes that players such as Chang'an and Jixia were familiar with, but could not immerse themselves in.
This freshness also applies to heroes. Thanks to the 3D gameplay and the change of perspective, players can better observe the details and charm of each hero when they actually operate the heroes to release their skills on the map, and its expressiveness is completely different from the top-down perspective.
In terms of specific gameplay, the game is also completely from the perspective of IP.
The first is the hero design. To give two examples, in the "Star Soul Battlefield", after Sun Shangxiang presses the dodge, the next basic attack will be strengthened, and her skill is the ultimate move in "Glory of Kings".
Li Bai follows the sword qi setting in "Glory of Kings", and the skills and charged basic attacks correspond to the 1 and 2 skills in the original work respectively. After accumulating 4 levels of sword energy through attacks, he can also unleash his ultimate.
It can be said that if you have played "Honor of Kings" before, you don't need to read the hero introduction of "Star Soul Battlefield" again, and even the game logic is common: the shooter hero is output in the rear, and the warrior rushes forward.
This is also the biggest difference between the "Star Soul Battlefield" and the traditional chicken: it is completely hero-oriented. Although there are recovery items, materials and equipment in the map, they will not change the player's way of operation, what hero you choose, the move and skill will be fixed TA, and only when you pick up the hero's corresponding specialization, there will be a derivative change.
In other words, you can think of heroes as weapons in traditional chicken games, they become looting materials in the map, each hero has different qualities, and they are scattered in the high and low resource areas, and you can carry up to two heroes at the same time and switch at any time. And powerful heroes like Nuwa, who can teleport in a large area and change the terrain, have been made into an existence similar to "airdrop materials".
Paired with the heroes in the game, there is also an out-of-the-box skill called Star Soul Skill, which also comes from the classic elements in "Glory of Kings", such as the skill of the red Buff to make you transform directly, Cai Wenji is a group of blood returns, and Zhen Ji is a large-scale control.
Two heroes that can be switched at any time, paired with a Star Soul skill, greatly increase the game's routine combinations. For example, Sikong Zhen's Star Soul Skill is a long-range thunderbolt, and with Sun Shangxiang, you can fly a kite at a long distance; Li Bai and Wan'er both have multiple sprint displacements, and when combined, they can pull the opposite side to hemp.
What's even more interesting is that the "Star Soul Battlefield" not only reproduces the heroes, maps, and interactive props in the king's IP world view, but even makes defense towers into it.
When the player captures a tower, it can automatically detect and attack enemies within range. While tower damage isn't as powerful as in MOBA, it can interrupt enemy combos.
From this point, it is not difficult to see that the Star Soul Battlefield not only uses the classic elements of the king's IP to shorten the distance with players, but more importantly, it has made a strong fusion of chicken and MOBA.
Under this set of ideas, "Star Soul Battlefield" has also made a lot of optimizations for the gameplay of eating chicken.
First, the change in gameplay ideas has brought a lower threshold for getting started. In the traditional action of eating chicken, action is the first, it pays attention to the proficiency of rubbing, the timing and accuracy of skill release, and the ability to react, etc.
However, in the "Star Soul Battlefield", the strategy has been raised to a higher position. How you want to match your own heroes and star soul skills, and how you complement the two teammates in the squad, it's a lot like a MOBA game.
Second, the ecological environment of the game will be more diverse. We all know that in MOBA games, players will always study a variety of routines in different versions, which is also applicable to the "Star Soul Battlefield" that emphasizes hero strategy.
Moreover, in the past action games, ranged weapons and melee weapons, it was easy to have balance problems, and there was inevitably a difference between strength and weakness between each weapon. And "Honor of Kings" has been in operation for many years, and the balance of each hero has already been adjusted countless times, and with this experience, heroes as weapons may also be the design point that can best exert their abilities.
Third, after the introduction of the king's classic gameplay and IP elements, the operation experience of the entire "Star Soul Battlefield" is more smooth and free.
For example, when players make combos, they can use the mechanism of cutting people at any time to cancel their own action backswing, or cooperate with the Star Soul Skill to play a more silky combo possibility.
And it is worth mentioning that although it is no longer a 5V5 MOBA gameplay, "Star Soul Battlefield" maintains the basic social experience of a 3-person squad, and the duration of a single game is basically controlled within 15 minutes, which is in line with the habits of mobile game users.
Under the 3-person squad and chicken gameplay, the communication rhythm of players will inevitably be different from that of MOBA, which may also bring a different social experience to king IP users - competition in chatting, exploration in competition, and king players can also enjoy open mic.
To sum up, "Dawn of the Stars" is an idea of making categories in IP.
Through the classic elements of the king IP and the MOBA gameplay, it lowers the threshold for the understanding and experience of the chicken category by the king players. At the same time, the integration and innovation of categories have brought differences to eating chicken. And this approach, I'm afraid that only "Honor of Kings", which has experienced years of precipitation of IP, content, and gameplay, can try.
03 The stronger the wind and waves, the more expensive the fish
Even if "Dawn of the Stars" is backed by the king's IP and has made innovations and differences, it may still face many risks.
For example, when IP users and the public, action, and chicken users flood into the game at the same time, will there be demand and supply chaos and social contradictions? Will too much emphasis on IP, combined with MOBA gameplay, make hardcore action players uncomfortable?
Of course, for the king team with long-term experience in mobile game operations, these are not unsolvable structural problems, and the game has not yet been launched, so it is too early for us to judge.
What Grape Jun wants to discuss is that he knows the risks that innovation will bring, why does "Dawn of the Stars" do this? I think there may be several reasons for this:
First, as mentioned above, the diverse needs brought about by the huge player base of the king IP have developed so far and must be satisfied. Now that the team has done PvP fighting and PvE plots, why not continue to dig deeper and build the product into an action game platform for king IP fans? Judging from the material reuse rate and team genes, they should have the ability to try.
Second, when we discussed the first two gameplays of "Dawn of the Stars" before, we were worried about whether its gameplay and category selection were too niche. Nowadays, the "Star Soul Battlefield" should increase the audience of the product to a certain extent, after all, there is no need to go into too much detail about how popular chicken is. Moreover, "Dawn of the Stars" has reached a cooperation with two other manufacturers to co-create, and by complementing each other's advantages, it has the opportunity to make a better experience of chicken mobile games.
Third, the method of using IP as a category in "Dawn of the Stars" is actually a routine operation of influential game IP. There are many similar examples, such as the MMO World of Warcraft, which was hatched in Warcraft, and the strategy card Hearthstone; Mario Bros. has developed from the initial platform jump to the current family bucket category layout of racing, sports, and parties. In this way, if the IP is well-known enough, this style of play will at least have a chance to hatch a hit.
Don't underestimate this kind of thinking, at a time when traffic competition is becoming more and more fierce, it may be more and more needed by the industry in the future to be able to stably incubate categories and make innovations from the existing traffic of IP. From this point of view, "Dawn of the Stars" is indeed opening up a more imaginative path.
Now, the player has raised his hand and is waiting for the drop.