During this year's ChinaJoy, I played the game Dragon's Breath: Silence.
It was one afternoon when I met up with the game producer at a restaurant to have a chat. It didn't take long, and I only played a small part of the game at a glance.
"Dragon's Breath: Silence" is a somewhat awkward but highly recognizable name. It's a Western fantasy game - in China, the pure "Western fantasy" game has been silent for a while. The game first attracted attention a few years ago, when it appeared at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC2023) and won the runner-up in the October 2023 China Overseas Game Growth Rankings. It's a good game, but it's not very loud in China.
The game was featured at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference 2023
For Chinese players, the word "Western Fantasy" is actually a bit too general, after all, we have been washed by a variety of Japanese-style Western Fantasy and Korean-style Western Fantasy, and many people think that as long as there are dragons, female warriors with wings and bikinis, and mages, even if it is a Western fantasy theme.
In my own definition, "Western fantasy" refers to a game set in a Western fantasy setting, with Dungeons & Dragons (DND) or similar rules at its core. In my opinion, "Western Fantasy" has its own essence, such as focusing on the grandeur and diversity of the world, and focusing on the telling of the story, and on the basis of these, it has derived characteristics such as giving players a high degree of freedom and often throwing players with dilemmas.
The promotional image of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" is quite orthodox!
A classic vibe
When computer functions were not very developed, RPGs with Western fantasy themes used to be the most glorious pearl of the game market. "Baldur's Gate", "Emerald Empire", "Outlander Requiem", "Icewind Dale", and until "Baldur's Gate 2", which is the culmination of everything. I've spent countless hours in these games, and they've even shaped part of my worldview. Then there was a long period of silence, until last year's Baldur's Gate 3 - it was brilliant, and countless people loved the game, and it won a lot of awards. But both in terms of influence and the "trend of the times", I know very well that the world will never go back to what it used to be.
I was ready not to play too many Western fantasy games, and then I came across Dragon's Breath: Silence.
The game fits all my definition of a "fantasy game": a great worldview, NPCs that seem respectful of the player (I mean, normal IQs and tone of voice), and a story that looks very complex. The characters in the game are also very distinctive, and as for the styling and skills - to be honest, the time to play was too short, and many of the characters in the version I got have already been trained to a very advanced level, so I haven't studied them very seriously. The most interesting thing is that the whole game is filled with an atmosphere of "ancient CRPG". It's hard to describe this atmosphere, but in general, I'd rather describe it in one sentence, the developers themselves are some veteran players in their right minds, clear minds, good tastes, and have played a lot of games (especially CRPGs), and they are also serious about making a game for the same people.
An old wood elf wanders alone, he forgets everything, but he is trapped by an obsession that cannot be solved, and he cannot die. The protagonist explores the cemetery and helps the old man recover his name and memories - a dark memory of the Wood Elves that have been sealed in history. "Oira de tavaril", the protagonist recites the prayer "Cycle of eternal life", and the soul of the old man acquires a calm, quite orthodox taste!
To be honest, I play a lot of domestic games, but there aren't many opportunities to encounter this kind of cultural product that "doesn't treat me as someone who was raised by online texts" - at least not as many as you think, so that you can clearly distinguish it from some other products. The game developers don't lie to you, don't coax you like a child, appease you, and don't tempt you with all kinds of bells and whistles and special effects (if you don't top up, it's too late!). ）。 They just make a game normally, hope you can play, have fun, and then pay some money normally, that's all. But it's a rarity.
Let me briefly introduce what surprised me the most about this game. The game has quite a bit of a mix, including relatively new elements like auto-chess, and you'll also find standard elements like gacha and treasure chests. But the foundation and temperament of the game is completely old-school DND games. They did work with Wizards of the Coast to get the rights to some of DND's stories, but that's not all, and I was most pleasantly surprised by the overall quality of the story—from the characters, the graphics, the dialogue, to the events on the map, and some of the details—that were quite coordinated and unified, giving it a pure DND running team game. This sense of wholeness is very rare, and the game is very well completed.
This game left a deep impression on my heart. A month after ChinaJoy, the development team invited me to attend a "media seminar" in Guangzhou to talk to the developers. I was attracted to the game, so I said yes without saying a word. The question I'm most curious about is what they think about "how much mobile games can do" - in fact, mobile games are much heavier than practitioners imagined 10 years ago, but Dragon's Breath: Silence goes one step further, so to speak, from the very beginning, wrapped around the 50-year-old DND, and then presented in a more modern way.
Dragon's Breath: Silence is also licensed by DND, and you can see a lot of familiar old friends in the game
This constitutes the subtle but not discordant main tone of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence".
"Western Fantasy", Orthodox Western Fantasy?
What is Orthodox Western Fantasy? It's more of a "feeling".
I could certainly name a lot of "must-haves", for example, old-school games were generally turn-based with a grid, but a lot of games now include real-time elements. But no matter what it is, the essence of combat (and not just combat) is "probability", and the probability of Western fantasy games often gives you a specific process of "throwing the dice - reading the dice", and many games will even give you a variety of dice animations. You can think of this as a classic, which was the way people calculated probability before the advent of the electronic age. This approach allows players to construct a world full of magic, swords, and gods 50 years ago, using just pen and paper, dice, and imagination.
In "Dragon's Breath: Silence", you can find a lot of gameplay combined with D20 dice, such as equipment crafting, horn summoning, and cooking
For another example, Western Fantasy wants to give you a sense of "the world is real". In order to achieve this feeling, it tends to focus on large, complex, and completely self-justifying world settings. Because of these settings, you usually have a high degree of freedom in the role you play (note the word "play") that you can go to many places, meet many people, make many choices, and different choices will give you different feelings and experiences.
And the reason why I say Dragon's Breath: Silence has an old-school CRPG flavor is because all of these feelings are very strong. The game's setting is roughly like this: players and their acquaintances venture to the physical plane, follow the trail of the "Children of Chaos", and gradually dig into their own past - this introduction alone will remind you of many works that you were once obsessed with.
Of course, I can start with a series of numbers, such as the worldview of Dragon's Breath: Silence has 6 major elements, more than 30 races, more than 20 classes, and more than 300 heroes - which is a huge amount of world view and content in a CRPG. And from what I've seen in my later game experience, most of the characters are very well shaped, not the kind of Western fantasy that has been washed by the Korea style, but a relatively "very serious" Western fantasy - I don't know if you can understand this, but if you have seen this game, you will agree with me.
The design of the tiger race based on the Baghdad culture is quite exquisite, and the development team takes the worship of the great river as a racial belief according to the civilization base, and the repetition of water is its core doctrine
But I still want to put my feelings in a more subjective way. The game put a lot of effort into the game in a lot of places, and the NPC dialogue and story (although not as long as similar games on the computer) are very "positive" from the story to the tone, and I was actually a little surprised that Chinese game developers could write such well-toned game dialogue. As soon as I saw it, the authors of these dialogues must have spent a lot of time immersed in those classic games.
The amount of content in the game seems quite large, and I certainly didn't get to experience it all in a short period of time. But from the fact that there are more than 300 heroic characters, it can be seen that this is not 300 "cards that can be drawn", but characters who appear in the plot and have a role, and some of the characters have very in-depth stories. The project team told me that they had completed the development of over 240 heroes over the course of 4 years of development - combined with the sheer amount of content and the game's pretty good graphics, the development efficiency was simply amazing.
Each character in the game is full of unique vitality, and the various characters in the orc tribe are also multifaceted, with their own love and hatred, which is very different from the traditional "villain" character
Increasingly, I'm looking at "whether the developer really likes to play their game" as the most important criterion for judging a game. In fact, you can tell from a game whether the developers really like it, whether they really like what they are doing, whether they really like to play it when they are off work - there are so many places in the game that can show you this kind of secret, some "better than good" details, some expressions that go beyond functionality, some sentences and characters that you can see that you can only write if you have fun in it...... Dragon's Breath: Silence is such a game.
The statue of the Unbeliever is found everywhere in the game, and it has a very strange temper and asks the player some unbelievable questions, which are actually interesting reflections based on the main story, such as a philosophy of life with no standard answers, or a hint of breaking the fourth wall
I think from the very beginning, Dragon's Breath: Silence was a sincere game, and that sincerity was both in terms of quantity and quality.
In terms of numbers, it's still in its early stages, and many games start with a framework and then slowly update it, but Dragon's Breath: Silence is a big deal first...... In Steam's player reviews, quite a few players have been playing for hundreds of hours, or even one or two thousand hours, which is obviously telling.
In terms of quality, "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" has achieved quite good results in overseas launches, topping the download list and best-selling list in more than 10 regions on the day of its debut.
This means that Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence has a high level of acceptance overseas. In fact, most people are unaware of the Chinese background of the manufacturer. In an interview, producer Sagi told me that after the game was officially launched, there were even domestic manufacturers who sent emails in English to ask about cooperation.
When the "Western Fantasy" returned to China
"SGRA is an abbreviation for 'Alpha Sagittarius,' the closest three-star system to the Sun, with an average distance of 4.24 light-years from Earth, and Alpha Centauri is also the center of the Milky Way."
On the official website of SGRA Studio, there is an introduction to the origin of the studio's name. Compared to this sci-fi name, SGRA is actually quite early in its infancy, with Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence being their first title. Just as the road to interstellar travel was long and difficult, SGRA's first title also faced its own challenges.
The name of the studio means "Sagittarius Alpha"
In our conversations with the development team, we also talked about the challenges and skepticism of Dragon's Breath: Silence - Rather, SGRA took the initiative to talk about what had fallen short and how they could improve them.
The overseas version of the game has achieved good results, but in terms of long-term operation, especially cross-season operation, players also have some opinions - the project team wants to solve these problems before the game is launched. At this seminar, the project team put forward its own modification plan and called it the "National Uniform Explosion".
When we talk about "content", we're talking about two different things. One is the one-time consumption content, which is the case with the "approximate CRPG" part mentioned above, where the player will experience the story, read a lot of text, and travel through a fantasy world; The other content is the gameplay time provided by mechanics, such as combat challenges, PvP, etc.
Card battle strategy combined with RPG plot, often with surprising performances
At present, "Dragon's Breath: Silence" is quite rich in content in both dimensions. Players are happy with the first half - as a free-to-play game, Dragon's Breath: Silence has plenty of content to offer. As far as I've seen, players' opinions are mainly focused on the second half, such as not having enough rewards and focusing on the late distribution (Sagi told me that this is a failed design, and players feel like they're picking on the door even though they give away the same amount of things), such as repetitive content is very tiring to play...... This part will be the main optimization direction of the national server.
These modifications are not complicated, the national server will give players more game characters, further optimize the art (I am more curious about this, in my opinion, the art effect of the current game version is already quite good), reduce the player's repetitive work in the game, and further strengthen the strategic gameplay...... All in all, the game will be greatly improved on the basis of the international server.
The development team's summary of this is "remove the duplicate experience", for example, the hero cancels the level (the level directly follows the protagonist), and there is no need to farm duplicate dungeons. In terms of effect, the development team believes that "5 minutes a day" can "get 80% of the benefits", and after saving time, players will have more playable parts to fill the amount of content.
A newly customized character for national server players - White Ape Gong
As I understand it, these "content volumes" also include the above two dimensions. On the one hand, there are more stories and more adventures, and the game has to build a whole Western fantasy world; On the other hand, in terms of long-term operation, more things worth playing instead of repeating will also be introduced.
The game's combat mechanics do have this potential. It can be summarized as "auto-chess that can unleash skills on its own", and at the beginning of the game, the player needs to adjust the position of the character, and the battle outside of the skill is carried out automatically. This set of mechanics gives full play to the characteristics of "Dragon's Breath: Silence" with a large number of people, different battlefields, different team combinations, will be the main fun in the later stages of the game - in my opinion, in fact, it is also compatible with many characteristics of CRPG characters, in the traditional CRPG, the player's eternal sadness is that he can always not put all his favorite team members into the squad, and the card gameplay will be relatively better, the player's tactics can be more diverse, and it can be tested frequently with different squads, while expanding the profit point, It also provides more room for strategy.
Multi-genre team Combo
All in all, Dragon's Breath: Silence has been validated in overseas markets, and now it is going to "return to China" to meet players. And the version we can see - whether it is a huge amount of content, or a very in-depth system design, or the national server version can be called a drastic reform - is obviously worth it. It's not the kind of game that "try and see how the market reacts", but a game that has been carefully thought out and then invested in a relatively unpopular field. The development team knows what their players need, and it's especially important for the genre to know that.
"Really good stuff"
At ChinaJoy and later in Guangzhou, I talked a lot with the game's producers, and there were about one and a half hours of more formal interviews. I have a good impression of him, he's been in the gaming industry for quite a long time (probably since the days of PC games), and SGRA Studios has had a rough time in the last few years, but thankfully they've carried it off now.
Sagi gives me the impression that I'm a mature game producer. He knows what he wants, and he can tell the line between reality, fantasy and ideal - I mean, everything is very "mature" for this game. It doesn't have the all-you-can-do energy for a dream, but instead has a sense of calm that balances reason and emotion well — going to work normally, working normally, launching the game normally, and giving the player the excellent feeling they expect.
"Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" is mixed with a lot of things, you can see the shadow of the old CRPG, you can also see the most popular card drawing and collection gameplay since the mobile game era, and the auto-chess gameplay that only came out a few years ago; The game is in the background of Western fantasy, and there are also a lot of handsome men and beautiful women...... But this hybridity is not "stuffing the elements that I think good into one game", but it is deliberate, and finally forms a fairly well-developed whole. Some of their designs push the boundaries of the "Western fantasy" genre to a certain extent.
During the interview, I asked Sagi if he had ever considered that this might not be an era when players like to watch long pieces of dialogue with so much dialogue and plot content in Dragon's Breath: Silence? He replied to me that they think the game should be made to make a world that people are interested in, and if they do, players will naturally want to read it. From a developer's perspective, that's what they want to do.
I have a strange idea that Dragon's Breath: Silence is very mature, it's like your former junior high school classmate - he's now middle-aged, slightly chubby, wearing glasses, and his hair is neat. He's funny, gentle, kind, and you often meet and chat together on weekends and help each other with things. He looks exactly what society defines as "middle-aged", but only you know that there is a fanatical impulse hidden beneath his calm exterior.
The style of this promotional image makes people feel interested at first glance
The game has a bit of a "go with the flow" feel to it. A less mature person always wants to attract others, and in order to be liked by others, he will disguise himself and twist himself into something that is not like himself - do you like to be lively? I am! Do you like that band? What a coincidence! Me too! But he's not really that kind of person, and he says it just to attract people. He might feel. As long as you can attract people to you, everything is easy to say.
But a mature person doesn't do that, he knows what he can change, and what he can't change – maybe he can't, maybe he doesn't want to. He just showed his qualities and waited for someone to show them up. It may have been too long for him to know that liking is liking, and disliking is disliking. He may also reflect on his failures again and again, and then find that he must first accept himself in order to gain the true liking of others - in short, he is no longer so eager to blush, no longer pretending that he is not what he is, but calmly showing his own qualities, and then quietly looking for those who are compatible with him.
I'm pretty sure that Dragon's Breath: Silence is one such game.