Text: Yan Jinyan

On December 6, NetEase Leihuo's self-developed FPS game "Outside the Bounds" opened the first test of the national server. Just yesterday at the TGA, the game was officially announced to be officially open beta on March 7 next year.

Previously, "Outsider" was famous. At the earliest, it cooperated with Microsoft and was first revealed at the Xbox conference. In the last two overseas tests, it received a lot of tap water and praise: former Valorant pro player TenZ and former Apex Legends pro aceu both praised it in the live broadcast;

The authors of the overseas media PCGamesN also praised it

FPS head anchor Shroud even shouted, "Everyone should play "Out of Bounds". ”

When it came to the first test of the national server, many FPS players came to try it, and you can see player tags such as CS turn, tile turn, and Apex turn in the community. After the experience, some up owners claimed that there was a "boundary" disconnection reaction, and some even said that they had experienced the happiness of the summer of 16.

Shoot the norm for players

Don't worry when you see this, this kind of statement is really not embarrassing.

In terms of gameplay, "Outrunner" is a hero shooter + traditional blasting mode, which is similar to "Valorant". To be reasonable, the development of traditional shooting competition to this day has not been broken through for a long time, and Valorant has been regarded as an excellent model of micro-innovation. Surprisingly, "Outsider" can go one step further and give people a sense of freshness.

The first layer of novelty lies in its biggest innovation - incorporating card elements into the shooting gameplay.

To put it simply, cards can be understood as buffs, which are selected by team members before the start of a single game, and are roughly divided into ability enhancement cards such as adding attributes and regenerating health, as well as functional cards.

How fun are utility cards? To give some examples, the big head mode in "Life and Death Sniper 2" is to make the player's head bigger, so as to physically increase the chance of a headshot, and "Out of Bounds" has a card that can achieve this effect;

Some hero skills are grenade throwing, which is paired with two cards, auto-tracking and the projectile becoming larger, which directly allows you to harvest heads with your skills;

Juggernaut is a card that also allows you to incarnate Genji, and the knife catches bullets

There are also outrageous cards that can make the whole battlefield change. For example, letting a dense fog envelop the entire package is equivalent to directly confiscating the sniper rifle on the opposite side; You can even lock down a bag point and force the attacker to run to another point.

From these examples, you should be able to roughly feel that the entertainment of "Outbounds" is full. When you're new to the game, you'll want to experience as many different card effects as possible.

At the same time, the cards don't just make them more entertaining. In terms of competitiveness, it also hides a lot of gaming space. For example, the effect of many cards points to the map control. Teams need to develop different tactics based on their cards.

For another example, ranked mode bans some cards that are too perverted by default, and has an exclusive card pool. Before the start of the game, the team needs to elect a representative to be responsible for BP (banpick). At this time, he has to adapt to the needs of attack and defense, as well as the opponent's selected cards, and see the moves. This is like the BP link of a MOBA game, choose the right lineup, and win half of it first, this kind of brain-burning game in the direction of strategy is also one of the charms of competitive games.

Of course, you can also be by your teammates' BPs

The second layer of new refers to the rules of gameplay.

First of all, although the foundation of "Out of Bounds" is traditional explosives, its economic system mainly serves cards, and the number of times guns can be used is limited, and it is not affected by the economy.

Pick up the gun casually, but you can't keep using the same weapon all the time

What difference does this make for an experience? First, players will be more relaxed when they fight, and they don't have to think about how to save money and start guns, and how to play money saving games, which will be more refreshing.

Second, if there is a big guy in your team who is particularly good at sniping, then others can give him the number of times the sniper is used, which is equivalent to the younger brother can better shoot the eldest brother.

Thirdly, the game also encourages players to try out different guns. In traditional shooting games, the most common thing we see is that a certain weapon is too powerful and supermodel, for example, as long as you have money, everyone will basically use AK in every game. This would make the game a little less interesting and variable, and Outrunner may want to avoid that.

Secondly, the duel game mechanic of "Out of Bounds" is also very inspiring for players. To put it simply, when the player finally fights to a draw, instead of overtime, 5 people take turns to play the game, playing 1v1 heads-up in the form of a ring battle, and the remaining 4 people in the team watch the game. When you operate in a wave and win the game with one outfit, there should be no gun man who doesn't like that sense of pretending and highlights. Even if you're the one who didn't win, you can feel fairer.

Judging from the current community feedback, this exciting duel match has been recognized by many players, and everyone is even shouting to the official whether it can be made into a separate mode.

Based on the above game performance, I think "Outland" actually starts from a lot of small facets, capturing the emotions of shooters and competitive players in similar games in the past, and amplifying the experience that players like and want to have. If the team doesn't have enough experience and insight into the game, they probably won't be able to do this.

Finally, the third layer of new is reflected in the basic quality of the game itself.

In terms of the feel of the firearm, it takes the route of "Call of Duty", the shooting is more realistic, and the sense of impact is enough. The mobility of the characters is similar to that of Apex Legends, fast and flexible. The overall TTK of the game is relatively longer than that of traditional CS games, but it still encourages headshots and kills. In blast mode, this feeling of stitching and experience is still relatively new.

Moreover, since the control feel is biased towards COD and Apex Legends, players do not need to practice the skills of traditional CS games such as swing shooting and emergency stop, and the threshold for getting started is low. At the same time, because of the body control, the TTK is slightly longer, and its upper limit of operation will be a little higher.

In addition, the stylization of the game art is prominent, and you can feel it from the color, most of it uses a more competitive color contrast design, and the tension is very strong.

The graffiti-based design language implements the game, which also makes it look trendy. Players can even highly customize their pain guns with stickers. Combined with the low threshold for getting started and a more entertaining game experience, "Outbounds" should also want to attract more young players.

After talking about the advantages, let's take a look at some of the current shortcomings of "Outbounds".

The most obvious feeling is that although the game's visuals are adequate, the visual information it provides is inevitably a little messy, and there is a problem with light pollution. For hardcore shooters who are used to blast mode, it can interfere with the pure aiming experience.

In addition, how to balance the entertainment and competitiveness brought by cards is also a huge problem. At present, the game makes a distinction between matchmaking and ranked card pools, ranking encourages competition, and matchmaking is more entertaining. But there's no guarantee that this problem can be solved by pattern differentiation alone.

Moreover, when the novelty passes, all competitive games will gradually become hardcore in the end. In fact, "Out of the Bounds" requires a lot of team communication and cooperation, and the card elements also test the player's understanding of the game. It is not difficult to imagine that in the long-term operation, the game threshold is likely to rise, and players will slowly become core. This is also the dilemma that Overwatch has experienced before. Therefore, "Outsider" may also have to figure out its own direction in the future.

Of course, the game is still in the first test stage, and from the perspective of the foundation and core gameplay, it has no big problems, and it even has enough longboards, which is already rare.

Through Outsider, I also want to talk about NetEase's ambitions in shooters.

For a long time, Tencent has been firmly in the hegemony of the domestic shooting market, and NetEase seems to have few shooting products. Their best performance may be "Wilderness Action", which is still because of the category dividend. Later, "Wilderness Action" was only a flash in the pan in China, and now only some overseas regions such as Japan are performing well.

But in fact, NetEase has spent a lot of effort on major shooting categories, such as "Operation Apocalypse", "Firefly Assault", "Extraordinary Pioneer" and other products in the past year. Of course, none of them managed to achieve better results in the end.

There are many reasons for this, one of which is that NetEase has been shooting before, which feels more like it is catching up with market hotspots. Whether it's eating chicken, SoC, survival evacuation, or hero shooting, NetEase is a successful product after seeing it, quickly follow up, and if it doesn't work, then invest in the next opportunity category.

But the shooter game can't be done with this logic, it tests the precipitation of basic ability. Character movements, gun feel, camera control, and even sound effects all affect whether players can play or not.

Previously, a person in charge of successful shooting products once said that understanding shooting and understanding shooting is only the first step threshold, followed by the threshold of specific production, and finally you have to splice and integrate all the content together, which is beyond imagination.

Therefore, if you see why only Tencent has done well in the domestic shooting field, it is because since "Counter War", they have been accumulating underlying capabilities, and then through "CrossFire Mobile Game" and "Call of Duty Mobile Game", step by step they have developed to today's "Operation Delta", "Dark Zone Breakout" and so on. Valorant wasn't created out of thin air, it went through more than 5 years of research and development before launch. Not to mention how many years of precipitation the shooting giants of "Call of Duty" and "Battlefield" have been there now.

Therefore, shooting is really a category that is both brutal and extremely respectful of the laws of the industry. On the one hand, it's one of the largest categories in the world, and it's impossible not to want to eat such a big piece of meat. But on the other hand, if you don't have the real thing, sorry, the players just won't buy it.

Now, NetEase may have realized this, judging from the recent product planning, they are tightening their resources and shifting their focus to the direction of more opportunities and accumulation, such as hero shooters such as "Marvel Brawl" and "Outrunners".

As an increasingly mainstream competitive shooting category, there are those that emphasize firearms shooting confrontation under hero shooting, and there are also those that emphasize hero skills and tactics.

At present, it seems that "Outside the Bounds Frenzy" is NetEase's self-developed IP, with a certain amount of innovative gameplay, continuing its own art longboard, and the basic quality has also reached the passing line of the head shooting category relatively rarely, and it has also made a name overseas at the beginning. Regardless of the final result, "Outbounds" may be NetEase's most promising opportunity in the shooting category in recent years.

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