On May 16th, the hero action mobile game "Glory of Kings: Dawn of the Stars" (hereinafter referred to as "Dawn") developed by Tencent TiMi Studio Group suddenly launched the "Star Soul Battlefield" new gameplay experience server, it is understood that this is a "chicken" gameplay with the king hero as the core.
So far, Dawn has told two more interesting stories to the market.
On the one hand, the actual test shows that the integration of the king hero and the action chicken is indeed feasible, even if the new gameplay is still in the testing stage, we can also see the inheritance and personality of the "Star Soul Battlefield": in this huge and free king map, players can freely choose and match the king's classic heroes and skills, and carry out a three-person team of fast-paced strategic action confrontation. Change the posture to play the king, and also use another way to open the chicken.
At the same time, when we look around the pace of Dawn, we can see more signs: the R&D team uses continuous cold starts to promote the iteration of a high-heat product, and the rhythm expands the gameplay dimension distinctly; With "Meteor Butterfly Sword.net", "Martial Arts" and other vertical OG (network language, that is, veteran/pioneer) to do authorized co-creation, equal dialogue, but also steal the growth of teachers.
4 years after the first exposure, Dawn is still standing in front of the huge and complex number of users of the king IP, thinking about those problems about supply and demand and experience. The bad news is that the perfect answer is still being explored; The good news is that this derivative product has a preliminary solution idea: through the interpretation of the king element, more users can understand the action category, and then through the continuous addition of new categories, to meet the diverse and complex needs of users.
In this line of thinking, Daybreak is becoming an action play paradise for king players outside of MOBA.
The king started the group again, familiar and surprised
As a new gameplay in Daybreak, the most prominent feature of "Star Soul Battlefield" is that it allows king players to experience the fun of gameplay outside MOBA in a more comfortable state.
There is no eternal means to work in a business story, and for many IPs, the path that made them successful in the previous stage often creates challenges for the next stage of development. The same is true of "Glory of Kings", which captured the public's desire for fair competition MOBA and became a national IP; At the same time, the huge user base also puts forward more complex, diverse, and irreconcilable requirements. From the addition of different modes in the early days to the launch of Vientiane Tiangong in 2019, which focuses on co-creation, the king has been trying.
The "Star Soul Battlefield" of this Daybreak Update is not a separate innovation, and its earliest creative prototype comes from the "Hero Freelance" mode launched in 2018 by "Honor of Kings" - Border Breakout.
The original intention of its design is to allow the king hero to get a bigger stage, so that players can feel the same quality as "Honor of Kings" in a freer world, but with a fresher hero action competition experience.
In the Star Soul Battlefield, players can use the most familiar "king pose" in each game link to understand and experience the new fun of eating chicken with their friends.
- Team up on a tricycle and switch between two heroes
In preparation for the game, players can team up with 2 friends and compete with the remaining 15 squads. This means more high-frequency real-time team battles, and more refreshment. If you want to win the game with your teammates, you also need to rely on the right combination of heroes and skills.
In the game, each player can bring two heroes to battle at the same time, and switch to play a variety of combinations at any time to achieve a combat effect of 1+1 greater than 2. Hero combinations can also flexibly change formations according to the battle situation, and you can get other heroes to replace by picking up treasure chests halfway.
Ai Xiu loves to go heads-up, so he takes Yun Ying + Shangguan Wan'er, first uses Wan'er's skills to get a strengthened dash, Feitian causes explosive damage, and then switches Yun Ying after the skill is broken, and the two hegemons play a game advantage. If you want to pull safely, use the duo of Hou Yi + Sun Shangxiang shooter, Hou Yi hits a stun, and instantly switches the eldest lady to use the roll to trigger a strengthened attack, and hit full AOE damage.
- You can understand it at a glance, and you can make a big move with one click
At the same time, players don't have to worry about becoming "experience babies" (Internet slang for novice players who are arbitrarily dominated by masters) because of strangeness and handicaps. The hero skills and positioning here are the same as the classic design of the king, and even if it is a new element, it also has an appearance that players are familiar with.
I was a little confused when I first saw "Xingshuo", but as soon as I heard that it was the power of "Zhuang Zhou Mengdie", I could know that this was a "flying machine" that could help with displacement. In the same way, the Bian Que medicine on the ground means poisonous, stay away; Towers still demarcate the boundaries between safety and danger; When a Hou Yi saw Li Bai drawing circles, it was still the best policy.
In addition, players can also assemble a star soul skill in addition to the hero's own skills, and if they want to save the life, they can choose Cai Wenji's healing and Da Qiao's teleportation; I feel that the damage and explosion are not enough, and the increase in damage of "Red Dad" and Zhuge Liang's vitality bomb can also solve the problem. Through the Star Soul Skill, more familiar king elements can accompany players in a new form, adding more strategic dimensions to the gameplay.
- Taunt in front of the tower, sneak attack in the grass
In addition to the inheritance and development of heroes and skills, the "Star Soul Battlefield" also retains important mechanics in the MOBA, such as defense towers and grass. Among them, the defense tower is still an important game point in the game: delineating the security range, and also automatically locking the enemy "justice from heaven", increasing the uncertainty and strategic depth of the game.
The ambush in the grass and the teamwork are also interesting under the new rules - is it a scientific collaboration between two people who develop in the tower and one person who remotely releases the wind? Or simply stuck at the edge of the safe zone, when a bush trio group to the ground, it's all up to the player to choose.
- Audio-visual upgrades, full of splendor
In addition to the gameplay, the innovation of the "Star Soul Battlefield" also lies in the new audio-visual performance effect.
On the one hand, the battlefield has shifted from a top-down perspective to a free perspective, where you can see the new posture of Li Bai and Hou Yi jumping and gliding; Or get a stronger sense of coolness in a more three-dimensional performance of skill effects. Just like in real life, the perspective changes, and the world will be very different.
This means that flat team battles have shifted to three-dimensional team battles, and while retaining the king's characteristic mechanics, players will be able to see the gorgeous performance of classic skills in three-dimensional space, and adrenaline-pumping highlight operations such as three-dimensional defense, and get a unique action experience.
On the other hand, the Star Soul Battlefield also deeply inherits the classic IP elements of the king, and follows the original voice, soundtrack, and scene of "Honor of Kings". At the same time, on the basis of the original desert map art style of Border Breakthrough, the whole map further adds the design themes of Chang'an/Jixia and other design themes that are close to the king's IP world view.
Scene under the grass
Chang'an scene
Category OG co-creation, lock in the direction of innovation
Over the past years, "Honor of Kings" has maintained the exploration of multiple categories.
The R&D team responsible for the Star Soul Battlefield has rich experience in the R&D of action games and large-map scenes in the past, and has the professional and technical strength to run through the entire R&D chain and support the landing of large-scale heavy games. At the same time, the team has always maintained an open attitude to the outside world, and has had conversations and exchanges with other well-known action game R&D teams on the innovation and development of action categories, and thought together. The "Star Soul Battlefield" is also gradually taking shape in this kind of co-creation.
In the early stage of R&D, the Daybreak team established close and lasting exchanges with the R&D team of the originator product "Meteor Butterfly Sword.net" in the domestic action field and the first domestic martial arts game "Wuxia Yi", and reached an authorization and co-creation relationship.
There are two hardcore terminal game OGs in the action category, plus the king of Dawn, which has rich experience in popular mobile games and is backed by national IP. From different perspectives, the three parties combined their experience and thinking in their respective fields of expertise, learned from each other's strengths, and jointly deduced the development direction of the Star Soul Battlefield, or the chicken mobile game. Among them, the three most common points are: balance, experience threshold and degree of freedom. These theoretical achievements have also been preliminarily transformed in the "Star Soul Battlefield".
In terms of balance, most of the existing chicken games are designed for traditional ranged weapons and melee weapons, and it is easy to fall into the cycle of "too strong if you can't touch it, or die if you touch it so you are too weak". Daybreak, on the other hand, cancels the weapon system, and replaces weapons with heroes based on the numerical balance accumulated by the king over the years, making melee combat and ranged attacks easier to achieve fair confrontation.
In terms of experience threshold, traditional action games test skills and skills such as skill rubbing proficiency, release timing accuracy, and other abilities involving reaction and muscle memory, and the threshold for getting started is high. In this regard, the heroes and skills of Dawn are designed based on the experience of kings, combined with the needs of chicken gameplay and strategic depth. For example, the timing of the move has been turned into a hero switch and skill release. At the same time, it is relatively simpler to break the move, and there is no need to test the immediate reaction too much, but to pay more attention to teamwork.
Finally, in terms of degrees of freedom, Daybreak has also upgraded the traditional MOBA and action chicken experience. On the one hand, MOBA players can experience more free scenes and collocations through the free matching of dual heroes and multiple skills in the three-dimensional world. With the star shuttle, you can move flexibly without grabbing the wall; Switching between two heroes can also interrupt the backswing for a smoother fit.
On this basis, players no longer have to be trapped in a relatively fixed strategy, and lying down, showing, reckless, and reckless can all be winning postures.
At present, this kind of co-creation and experimentation is still ongoing, and it has become an important help for Dawn's continuous optimization and iteration.
Choose a dangerous path and start first
Returning to "Breaking Dawn" as a whole, as a king IP derivative mobile game, it has been widely concerned by the industry in the past few years. Players are looking forward to new experiences, and practitioners want to see new ways to update the category experience and balance the supply and demand of product users.
For Dawn, taking a path that no one has traveled is necessary for its own development, and it is also a certain annoying "duty".
Fortunately, now, Dawn has a preliminary clear direction: they are trying to jump out of the traditional framework of a single "derivative new game", and under the vision of doing diversified competition, they are running in small steps, trial and error iterations. On this path, one by one, such as this open experience server, is just a small fragment of the vision, they will continue to appear, evolve, and finally converge into a river one day in the future.
Predictably, there will be stumbling blocks along the road. Recent rounds of cold starts have shown that the Daybreak team is highly cautious in the face of such a diverse and complex audience. They hope to adhere to the direction of multi-play parallel operation on the basis of their own action research and development advantages, so that every action lover can return happily. They were also worried about whether these innovative operations would make players uncomfortable due to dynamics and pacing, so the Daybreak team paid close attention to each player's feedback and suggestions.
Thinking, transforming, testing, and tuning, this is a long-term path to grow with players.