Text/Yiguang Flow

On a track where there are no opponents, anything can fly into the sky.

In the last two weeks, Drecom's mobile game Wizardry Variants Daphne (hereinafter referred to as Witchcraft VD) is a good illustration of this principle.

This game is very special in that it is backed by the Wizardry series of IP, and Wizardry is also known as one of the three originators of RPGs, but its first game was released in 1981, 43 years ago, during which time it has experienced ups and downs, and the current player generation is seriously broken.

At the same time, the gameplay of the Witchcraft series is also very special, in the history of the game industry, its DRPG gameplay has been all the rage, many of which are classics, and even influenced countless popular RPGs in the future. However, this gameplay gradually declined later, and became more and more unpopular among the new generation of users, and it was even less popular in the field of mobile games.

What's even more worrying is that the new witchcraft VD blew up when it was launched on October 15th, and has been fixing bugs almost every day so far, which can be said to be the beginning of the collapse.

And even if the sky collapsed, the game climbed to No. 9 on the best-selling list of the Japanese App Store last week, and is still stable in the Top 20 sequence, which can be considered a success.

However, aside from the surprising contradictory performance, the success of Witchcraft VD has also exploded into a category worth paying attention to: DRPG.

01

"I have to play witchcraft VD with bombing suits and bugs"

Speaking of the original work "Wizardry Variants Daphne", the name of the game can be simply understood as "Wizardry Variants: Laurel", and the reason why it is called "Variant", the producer confessed in the official interview, is because it can get a higher budget for making a mobile game. Because from the perspective of investment relations, Drecom has received a special fund of 500 million yen from the policy investment bank DBJ of Japan, so the witchcraft VD is actually a project officially supported by Japan.

It's just that, judging from the performance of the product, even with the government's 500 million yen support, there is not much that the game can do, and strictly speaking, the overall quality of the witchcraft VD cannot be compared with the masterpieces on the market. So the reason why Japanese players can play countless VDs despite the bombing suit and many bugs can only be the gameplay and story.

The gameplay of Witchcraft VD is the most classic first-person DRPG gameplay, DRPG does not have the complex story line and task system of traditional RPG, nor does it have the social and pyrotechnic atmosphere of MMORPG, exploration and battle in the dungeon is all the content of this type of game, and the first-person performance technique amplifies the depressing feeling of the player in the dungeon in the face of crisis, trap, and death.

In the words of producer Keisuke Kanayama, DRPG is "at the opposite end of the spectrum of popular open-world RPGs, which emphasize the sense of freedom to play in the vast world as they please, while DRPGs condense traps, enemies, and events into every square of the dungeon." ”

Therefore, Witchcraft VD also strictly follows this premise, in the game, players will take on the role of an adventurer exploring the abyss, and contribute to the kingdom's plan to seal the abyss once in a hundred years. The game's story is small, but there are many details, such as the protagonist who is resurrected in the dungeon, and the multi-week reincarnation setting.

In terms of specific gameplay, players will explore in a gridded map from a first-person perspective. During this time, you will encounter monsters, and you will enter a sequential turn-based combat session, in addition to triggering events such as traps and traps, and sometimes puzzle gameplay involving multiple grids.

On this basis, Witchcraft VD cares a lot about the player's first-person immersion, so it lays out a lot of details. For example, the use of camera language from time to time to express the actions and emotions of the protagonist; Another example is to use afterglow and sideways to show teammates' attack actions and interactions with the protagonist; There are also stains on the post-war character models to show the intensity of the battle. These details are also well received by players.

If you look at any of the above designs alone, they will seem ordinary, but when you put them together, we will find the charm of DRPG's purely linear, high-intensity interactive gameplay.

At the beginning of the game, the scene of resurrection and escape is used to make people quickly familiar with the basic operation and simple combat of DRPG, and at the same time, the "sense of crisis in the dungeon" is also put in the first place. It also hints at the player: this game is not an easy otherworldly adventure, but a dangerous dungeon adventure.

After a tense start, the game relies on trigger-type events to explain to players step by step in the dungeon such as "the encounter with the blonde girl of the earthbound spirit", "the ability to change jobs after being possessed", "finding the body of the heroine after escaping from the dungeon", and "further uncovering the secret of the missing king".

In the process, the story will also change little by little according to the player's choices, and the player can also learn about the different personalities of his teammates in battles and events. However, the dungeon is always threatened, and a player's overly risky actions can also lead to the permanent death of a teammate character, even a Kryptonite drawn character is at this risk.

So the main line pushes players to explore the dungeon, in order to explore the dungeon, you need to have a full team, and the exploration of the dungeon will face attrition, and the main line will naturally be revealed after being careful to avoid losses, so in the process of one ring after another, the player will inevitably fall into it.

In fact, most RPGs have a similar loop, except that DRPGs compress complex events into a maze and accelerate the player's understanding of them with a sense of crisis, so once they get used to the rhythm of DRPG, players are easily hooked.

02

The gameplay is unpopular, but "fun" will not go out of style

Although today's pure DRPG gameplay is relatively unpopular and niche, its classic is still undoubted.

In different times and on different platforms, there will always be a few DRPGs that have gained fame and fortune. For example, the World Tree Labyrinth series, which released its first game in 2007, is very famous, and this series not only innovates in the art style, but also cleverly combines the hand-drawn map with the touch screen function of the DS handheld. To this day, the World Tree Labyrinth is also a classic in the hearts of many veteran players.

The most impressive thing about Grape Jun is the two works of the "Witch's Journey" series, which not only achieve a certain pinnacle in the gameplay mechanism, art performance, maze drawing, and music production, but more importantly, in the story design, with the world view of black fairy tales, dramatic foreshadowing and reversal design, writing the cruelty and greatness of human nature. If it weren't for the niche of the game, it would have been possible to write two separate articles.

In the decades of development, DRPG has also derived many differentiated directions. In addition to the classic DRPG in pure first person, there are products that jump out of the turn system and use ACT and other forms to increase the combat experience; There are products that depart from the first person and use other perspectives to design maps; There are products that combine roguelike mechanics to increase randomness; There are also works that move closer to the direction of board games and adapt to multiplayer gameplay.

To give two specific examples, one is to borrow from the Oriental Project series of fangames "Incredible Gensokyo" series of "The Wind Comes to Xilin", this series uses a third-person top-down perspective, and at the same time incorporates a large number of random elements, after years of updates, its exploratory, maze difficulty, and overall playability depth have reached a very high level.

The second is the high-scoring game "For My King" generation on Steam, although this game features more elements such as roguelike, turn-based war chess and running group board games, but its core dungeon mechanism still follows the classic design of DRPG: multiplayer team, difficult maze, mechanism puzzle solving, and death challenge. Of course, if the player is unlucky in throwing the dice, the attack and puzzle solving are more likely to fail.

If you take DRPG apart, in fact, many popular RPGs are somewhat influenced by the former. The most typical is Atlus's "Shin Megami Tensei" and "Persona" series, especially in "Persona 5", many small mechanics related to maze exploration can be seen traces of DRPG.

Looking back, we can find that DRPG has set foot in almost all game platforms, and its appearance in the field of mobile games may also be a kind of "historical inevitability" at work.

And I have to admit that Witchcraft VD takes mobile games as the entry point, which just hits the market gap that DRPG lacks in the mobile game market, and just relieves the pressure accumulated by players in the tide of mobile games. The so-called feng shui rotates, and players can't always chase one quality, one type of gameplay, and one set of mechanics, and witchcraft VD represents "another" possibility.

In fact, Witchcraft VD is not the first mobile game to pay attention to the DRPG opportunity, and there have been domestic mobile games that have been promoted under the banner of DRPG, but unfortunately, in fact, the strategy of the product is to assimilate with the mobile game experience, rather than boldly differentiating from the products on the market, so this kind of game is basically drowned out by the rolling trend of mobile games.

Therefore, in the end, the mobile game market also pays attention to the principle that scarcity is expensive, and those products that do not have a lot of money and resources can only retain players with freshness. Of course, it can't only be fresh, the product is fun is the necessary condition to hold the traffic, and Witchcraft VD also tells us that "fun" will not be outdated.

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