Text/Yiguang Flow

Domestic 3A has made a lot of moves this year.

The popularity of the black monkey has not completely faded, and last week another domestic 3A new work was released for trial play.

The game, titled "Contract of Everything", is a free-to-play fantasy-style action RPG developed by TipsWorks, a subsidiary of Papergames, and is developed by Papergames.

TipsWorks Studios is also a veteran, and its predecessor "Pascal's Contract" was presented as a representative product at Apple's conference in 2019, and the single-player game has also received 2 million global sales after its release. In that era when I didn't believe that single-player mobile games could be successful, this achievement was worthy of attention and affirmation.

Pascal's Pact

After a lapse of 5 years, their new work "Contract of Everything" recently held a small-scale offline trial, after the actual experience, Grape Jun believes that this game is a huge and comprehensive improvement compared to the previous work, and the quality is not inferior to the first-line 3A stand-alone masterpiece on the market. Let's talk briefly about my personal feelings after trying it out.

01

A new style born out of the soul flavor

Judging from the promotional PV or the actual video alone, perhaps the first impression of "Contract of Everything" will have the feeling of "like a soul series".

In fact, judging from TipsWorks' first game "Pascal's Contract", they did design and develop it with the idea of "making a game with a soul flavor on mobile phones" in the early days.

Nowadays, many well-known products on the market are doing the same thing, and the difference between good and bad is whether developers can crush and absorb the essence of other games into their own works, and find a path of their own.

From this point of view, combined with the experience of the actual machine, I think "Contract of Everything" has achieved this step.

Strictly speaking, the overall style of "Contract of Everything" covers the soul flavor, and the game reduces the unique sense of depression of soul-like works, adding a lot of bright scenes and shots, and controlling this feeling within the category of "somewhat mysterious".

On this basis, the game retains some of the core elements of soul-like games, such as beyond the cognitive spectacle, occultism, fragmented stories, battles with mysterious creatures, etc., of course, to a certain extent, it also weakens the details of the tragedy, darkness, and madness, and retains more of a mysterious color.

Further, we can also find that the game further refines the more core abstract concepts in these surface elements, and expands a deeper world view based on this. It is reasonable to guess that behind the images of the Colossus, the Everlasting World, and the Island Realm, there will be a large enough and complete story.

Take the most recognizable island world, it resembles an imaginary world, overlapping with reality, and people in the real world can enter it through mysterious means. And there is a new ecosystem in the island world, and it is more mysterious, to give a simple example, just like the sand value in the world view of the gram system can see weird monsters when the value is gone.

The animation of the appearance of the island realm is also very shocking, it refreshes the various places that players have walked and seen in the way of position diffusion, and will generate new landforms on the originally desolate ground, and even brush out a majestic giant beast on the original mountain rocks.

This scene is not only very shocking, but also leaves the player with the subconscious impression that "this place always feels like there will be some strange beasts hovering over it", leaving a trace of anticipation or fear.

A design like this is similar to that of a souls-type game in terms of player emotion, but the direction and amplitude of emotions are different. And "Contract of Everything" can thoroughly understand this design idea, and use its own world view, design, and ingenuity to create new things, and form a set of unique styles.

It is worth mentioning that in the one and a half hours of the trial, I only ran a small part of the game map, and judging from the terrain and open field of view at the end, I was probably just out of the novice village.

From the setting of the game, we can know that "The Contract of Everything" contains a number of countries with different styles, and on the map of the demo version, you can also see that the currently open map is just a few small landmarks shrunken together in the world map. So it's certain that the follow-up playable content will be huge.

This also makes me look forward to it even more: how will the game conceive the abstract imagery of other countries, and how will these countries collide with the islands? I'll leave this question to the pre- and post-beta versions.

02

Calm and challenging combat design

In addition to the island world, what surprised me more about "Contract of Everything" was actually the gameplay design.

The gameplay of this game,My first feeling is stability,Although at first glance there are more elements,Such as light and heavy armor-piercing attacks、Charge、Bounce back、Execution、In addition to the ultimate,There are also substitutions、Substitution attacks、Support attacks, etc.,But strictly speaking, there are not too many outstanding designs,Such as complex combos、Complex attribute restraint and combination、Complex anger control skills、A single character corresponds to a variety of weapons and fighting styles, etc.。

In actual combat, players only need to master a few basic move release rules, and the rest can be handed over to the process of "familiarizing yourself with monster moves→ dismantling moves, finding output timing→ improving proficiency and controlling the rhythm of attack". In general, the concept of gameplay design is more inclined to a low threshold, proficiency and experience.

But the low threshold doesn't mean that the difficulty is also low.,Take personal record as an example.,Due to the slow accumulation of experience due to the old hand.,When fighting against a powerful boss in the trial process,,I almost died more than 20 times.,In the end, I had no choice but to ask for planning to fight.,It didn't affect the trial of the follow-up new content.。

In my personal experience, the difficulty lies in the boss's strong desire to attack, the speed of the moves, and the second stage of "near → far; The change of attack pattern of Thing → Demon is not like many medium-sized and large-sized bosses in similar games, which are both bulky and like to revolve around the player, so it is difficult to grasp the timing of output and corresponding moves. In comparison, it is a bit similar to the oppression given to novices by the boss priest in the first level of "Bloodborne".

But compared with the combat process of the substitute fight, the core difficulty is actually proficiency, because after skillfully using the skills to see the moves, the substitute can almost do the whole process of pressing the BOSS output, skills and moves one after another, and at the same time, different skills can also deal with different attack modes after substitution, and can even create more output environments (such as the shooter's ultimate move to freeze the BOSS).

Afterwards, the battle plan revealed that in fact, in this trial version, the strength of the BOSS was deliberately enhanced, and in the normal game process, this BOSS would not be encountered at such an early stage, which is a trial challenge for core players.

In the normal game flow, with the training of mobs and elites along the way, players will gradually become familiar with the fighting style of the characters, and gradually master the style and rhythm of play. Therefore, with a low threshold to get started, a skilled process, and a space worth challenging, this set of combat gameplay can be considered solid and stable.

And in addition to poise, the combat design also has another plus: multi-character switching.

To be clear, each character in Contract of Everything is highly complete, and is a complete design set that is unique enough, rather than a secondary pendant, scraping spare blood pack, attribute restraint and combination material. For example, the previous boss, if the player is patient and skilled enough, he can use the archer kite to die.

I think the most important role of role switching in this game is to connect the output, such as switching shooters, which can use retreat shots to quickly open up the combat distance; Switching to the protagonist swordsman will unleash a mid-range dash skill, which is suitable for quick melee combat when the enemy is under control. The second role is to deal with enemies with different combat styles.

In the trial version, I experienced the three characters of swordsman, archer, and shield hammer, and in the promotional PV, I can also see a spearman in black armor, I believe that more characters will be added in the future, and there will be more character combinations and playing style variables. At the same time, it is understood that each character will also present his world and story to players according to his own perspective and rhythm.

Considering that "Contract of Everything" said that it would not use a paid model for drawing characters, I think the design of the characters is more dominated by playability and story, which is also what I am more satisfied with.

03

Another challenger to the domestic 3A

Overall, after trying "The Contract of Everything", my confidence in domestic 3A has increased again.

In the domestic revenue-oriented environment, from the early stand-alone to the current 3A games with stand-alone specifications, it is like an ascetic. The development team not only has to think about how to support themselves, but also has to withstand the corrosion of the outside world and a lot of money, the mobile game has been crazy for more than ten years, and there are very few domestic 3A works that can survive during this period, and it is not until this year that there is a momentum of rise.

Fortunately, in the past two years, there are more and more teams on the market that dare to challenge domestic 3A, and many manufacturers in the circle are willing to inject capital to escort these new stars. As one of the teams that have been on this path for a long time, TipsWorks' new work "Contract of Everything" has undergone earth-shaking evolution in quality compared to its predecessor, and the design is more mature and thoughtful.

Moreover, the user accumulation of the previous work, as well as the precipitation of the past 5 years, is also the unique advantage of this team, so I believe that in the near future, their new work "The Contract of Everything" will also become a strong challenger in the 3A track. From the demo version, I can see that they still have a large number of hole cards that have not been opened, and I am also looking forward to the surprises that the game will bring to players when it is officially released.

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