More than two years have passed since the open beta of "Tower of Fantasy" at the end of 2021, and today (July 16) Hotta Studio (Hotta Studio) suddenly has a new move, announcing a new work with the theme of "supernatural + urban + open world" "Alien Ring". The game is developed using the Unreal Engine 5 and follows its two-dimensional art style, and the official website will open reservations when it is launched, and it is announced that new information will be released on July 18, which may be the first test time.

At the same time, the official also released a 17-minute premiere video, including a PV video dubbed in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and English, as well as a 13-minute trial of the actual machine.

Players in the comment area lamented that the reason for the slowdown in the update frequency of "Tower of Fantasy" has finally been found. And with the official end of Tower of Fantasy Studio, the two-dimensional urban style open world is rolled up again.

The city, the incense car and the beautiful girl

As can be seen from the first exposure video, this time the Tower of Fantasy Studio can be said to be prepared. They have accumulated a lot of experience in the Tower of Fantasy project for more than two years, and this experience has now become a bargaining chip for "Alien Circle".

In terms of gameplay, "Alien Ring" focuses on the open world. Compared with the products of the same track, its main difference is that it does not do the fantasy style of another world, but chooses the cyber urban style. From the video, you can see the dense urban buildings and dazzling neon lights. Whether it is the form of the building, the street signs, fences, shops and other details are rich enough.

As you can also see from the actual machine trial, these buildings are not cybercardboard boxes, but can be freely entered and exited and have interactive details.

Judging by the video, the game is not expected to be too small. When the player takes the sightseeing elevator, they can see a wide vistas and the different neighborhoods are clearly functionally differentiated, allowing players to experience different urban landscapes.

In terms of freedom of exploration, urban background games can no longer use the "wings to fly" set in another world, and one of the major selling points of them is vehicles. There are several driving demonstrations in the actual video, and you can see that the vehicles have certain details such as driving and turning, and there is also a certain degree of collision interaction between vehicles, as well as between vehicles and roadside fences, street lights, etc., which can bring players a real driving feeling.

The game also allows players to freely switch the driving perspective, allowing players to cut into the interior of the vehicle from a first-person perspective, bringing a better sense of immersion.

In addition, the game also supports the free modification of vehicles. The video shows the free replacement of a variety of components, which can meet the needs of many change-changing parties.

The introduction of vehicles and other vehicles inevitably requires that the open world of the game should not be too small. From the actual demonstration, the game still performs well during the driving of the vehicle, and there is no screen to read the progress bar throughout the process, which shows that the game truly realizes a seamless large map. Of course, all of this is the actual screen of the official full-equipped machine, and the final smoothness of the game will have to wait for the first test to experience.

In addition to the selling point of the urban world, the two-dimensional concentration of the game is also very high. Characters with different attributes in PV appear in turn, and attributes such as white hair, glasses, black silk, and animal ears are not absent.

The theme of the game chooses the city + supernatural, and the beautiful girls all have special abilities to pursue anomalies under the neon lights of the city. It's true that the genre has been a bit of a flood lately, but the reason why it was chosen this way is also due to gameplay considerations.

On the one hand,With the setting of the ability, the beautiful girls can appear in a dignified manner.,Lori can also have strange powers.,The thin body can also fight against strong enemies.,It won't make players feel out of play.。 On the other hand, the introduction of abilities can also expand the player's ability to move, allowing cyber exploration to change from 2D to 3D.

Just like shown in the PV, the beautiful girls can not only rely on vehicles to move quickly, but also rely on superpowers to directly fly the eaves and walk on the wall, and even change the direction of gravity to walk on the wall. This design makes the city more three-dimensional, but for players who are stunned in 3D, this kind of freedom is sometimes not very good.

In addition, the introduction of the ability theme also helped a lot in the game's level design and puzzle solving. The actual video shows a number of environmental interactions, and the character can open a special space to investigate after discovering the abnormality, and the different space will expand and extend in unexpected ways, giving the player a sense of oppression. This spatial dislocation is reminiscent of the SCP work "Control" a few years ago, and I hope that "Alien Ring" can be a little more bold in this regard, and use environmental narrative to bring players some fresh experiences.

The cake of the two-dimensional GTA is not enough to share

With the end of Tower of Fantasy Studio, the open-world sub-track of the two-dimensional GTA has another strong competitor. It's hard to say who will die, but who can bring the product first will undoubtedly have a first-mover advantage.

ACG GTA, or the urban style of the ACG open world, has always been a promising potential opportunity. Especially in the context of miHoYo's cancellation of Project SH and the choice of Hakonia "Small World" for "Jeopardy Zero", the opportunity of ACG GTA is equivalent to a fair placement in front of all other manufacturers, and Tencent, NetEase and other major manufacturers will not want to let go of this opportunity.

And for Tower of Fantasy Studio, which was the first to eat the dividends of "Genshin Impact" back then, it is inevitable that it will set foot in this track. "Tower of Fantasy" was able to transform from an MMO project to an open-world two-dimensional project in a very short period of time, which in itself reflects the determination and technical foundation of the production team. After more than two years of operation, Tower of Fantasy has become one of Perfect World's best-performing new games in recent years, and has also been recognized by many overseas players after being brought overseas by Tencent.

Since version 2.0 of Tower of Fantasy, map production and scene design have gradually improved. In order to differentiate itself from "Genshin Impact", its new version of the city itself has a lot of cyber elements, and vehicles such as motorcycles and cars have long been introduced into the game, but limited to the theme world view of the game itself, there is no way for the official to let go of his hands and feet to make a cyber city.

Perhaps that's why the Tower of Fantasy team finally decided to start a new project. Get rid of the burden and use a new IP and a new setting to make a real cyber urban two-dimensional game.

Of course, miHoYo's abandonment of the open-world urban theme also shows that there are still many difficulties and risks in this direction. No matter how successful GTA itself is, how big a market can be for the two-dimensional GTA, and whether the game is fun or not, it still has to withstand the test of the market.

Unreal Engine 5 is powerful enough, but given the limitations of mobile performance, there are still questions over how far the game's physics can be detailed and how much freedom it can reach. And the old players of "Tower of Fantasy" are also worried about whether the Tower of Fantasy Studio, which has opened more than two projects, can still keep "Tower of Fantasy" continuously updated?

Today's Tower of Fantasy Studio has a certain amount of accumulation and has enough desire to survive, but it actually doesn't have so many choices. The two-dimensional volume to the present is already a battlefield where you will die if you don't advance, and the Tower of Fantasy project team hesitates.

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