On January 2, version 2.0 of "Singing Tide" was officially launched.

After a few days of high-intensity liver blasting, I also finished all the content of version 2.0 over the weekend.

The whole journey takes about 25 hours, of which the main story + dangerous mission (equivalent to the map opening branch) + the companion mission of the new character Keleta is about 5 hours, the garbage time of hoeing the earth liver sound remains is about 4 hours, and the rest of the time is spent on exploration, puzzle solving and challenges scattered on various maps.

After reaching 100% of the whole map, I put down the keyboard and mouse, and I always feel a little unsatisfied. At the same time, as a server player, I have come all the way from the 1.0 era, and after experiencing the content of version 2.0, I always want to talk about something.

To be honest, "Singing Tide" in the 1.0 era didn't give me such a strong desire to explore at all.

If it weren't for the binding of exploration and the development of the protagonist, and the exploration of Chengxiao Mountain and the Black Coast in versions 1.1 and 1.3 as limited-time activities, I wouldn't have the motivation to go to the liver at all, and there are still a few areas in the entire Puron area that have not been touched.

(Explain the problem of the protagonist.,1.0 era lacks a role team.,The dark master is a very good quick-cut C throwing gun.,In most cases, it's a high-quality solution.,To a certain extent, it's a role that must be trained)

Maybe it's just my subjective feelings. Because I'm also a Genshin Impact player, as of the latest version 5.3, the entire Teyvat only has the Valley of Shenyu, the Sea of the Old and the new map of 5.2 that has just been out for a long time, and all other areas are 100% explorable.

In all fairness, "Singing Tide" in the 1.0 era is a little unsatisfactory in terms of the experience of the big world. Especially for a player like me, who has a high intensity of both games, the repetition is too high.

But in 2.0, "Singing Tide" is like a different game.

The cat's claw buff that accelerates the efficiency of character running maps has been added to the new map, and the exploration module of soaring has been added.

The core content of each area of the new map is relatively concentrated, and a clear direction guidance is given, the mobility of the characters in the big world is full, and after a challenge is played, it takes off on the spot to go to the next area, and the big world experience that I complained about during the opening of the server is presented in this version with a fast-paced coolness, and the feedback given is much stronger than in the 1.0 era.

At the same time, the map explorability clearly shows what challenges are still unfinished in the area, and even if you break in the middle, you can immediately follow the guidelines to continue the unfinished content. The richness of the content is naturally not as good as those 3A masterpieces, but the experience is already very similar to those PC stand-alone machines that I used to play.

Strong feedback and a strong sense of coolness are the core feelings of the entire version of "Singing Tide" 2.0 (of course, the grass has grown now).

01

Obvious "new version of the ship"

When I first entered the 2.0 version of "Singing Tide", my first reaction was that it was really stable.

The first is music.

Version 1.3, the song "Stars, New Life, and You" has left a deep impression on many players.

When the player finishes the main story, sits in front of the piano of "The Wandering End" with the shore keeper, and plays this piece together, only at the beginning of the simple four notes, it portrays a grand and thick epic feeling, setting off the long-term watchfulness and loneliness of the shore keepers - the name of the music also fits perfectly with the plot of the shore keepers - and then there is a tranquility and healing that transcends time and redeems each other.

In 2.0, Mingchao's musical performance continued this stable performance. The musical performance in different regions is enough to be judged as excellent, and only two of them are highlighted here.

The first section is the cutscene in the main story, when the protagonist comes out of the back door of the Hidden Sea Order and officially enters the great world of the Lai Na Xi Tower.

Because I didn't record the screen in the process of passing the main line (who is a good person who records the screen while passing the main line), here I use the video uploaded by the UP main @Neuro music of station B.

The 2011 song "A Fariy Tale" by musician Yuria Miyazono was arranged by Kurlo, and it made my scalp tingle when I crossed the main story, and the style was a bit like Celtic, and when the music started, my mind was full of the feeling of fantasy adventure.

The second piece of music comes from a flight challenge in the big world, because the challenge is accompanied by a boss in the current version, Lorelei, and is also nicknamed "Lorelei Companion Mission" by players.

Different from pure accompaniment or soft chanting, this song officially named "Dancing in Dreams" has lyrics, dreamy and gentle, and when the vocals come out, they are amazed. Here we also use the video uploaded by the UP main @Neuro music of station B, you can feel it.

The second is the scene.

This point is actually mentioned in the previous talk about music, the combination of scenes and music performances is very silky, especially the large world scene presented during the music performance of "A Fariy Tale": when the protagonist walks out of the cave and presents the picture in front of the player's eyes, it is too fantastical.

In addition, there are also challenge scenes like the mission of the Great Forbidden Academy - I don't know if it's my personal feelings, this scene is a bit of Fam Yazra in the Neta Old Man's Ring - the whole scene is built very long, like a long-shot shot in the film and television, and the flight experience is a bit like the air control challenge in the World of Warcraft (unfortunately it can't be accelerated), this experience is still somewhat shocking.

Then came the drama performance.

In the companion mission of the new character Keleta, there is a performance CG that has received praise from many players. The show combines the duet dancing and combat of the protagonist and Koletta, and gives emotional value through an elegant and violent visual representation, as well as a straightforward MasterLove.

But I want to mention another short plot, because the main line process here is a single line, it is not what I have experienced intuitively, but from the sharing of the UP master of station B @ unhappy.

In the main storyline, the player has a small dialogue that needs to ask Rococo for help, and the player is given 3 different options in the dialogue.

In most games, no matter which answer the player chooses, the final reply must be the same, which is a relatively cost-effective approach, and after all, the main line is a single-line process, and the player only needs to experience the choice itself.

But here, the player chooses different options, the answers given by Rococo, the items taken out are completely different, and even each paragraph is fully dubbed.

This is actually a waste of capacity. After all, "Singing Tide" is not a game like "Baldur's Gate 3" and "Detroit Becomes Human", and the player's choice will not change the direction of the plot.

And as I emphasized earlier, the player process is one-line, and it is impossible for most players to find this kind of easter egg at all. But Kuro just did. From the perspective of word-of-mouth and market communication, this kind of "waste of capacity" is not completely ineffective, don't you see it in this article?

Finally, there is part of the gameplay.

I don't want to mention the soaring and cat's claw buffs that enhance the mobility of the big world, but another area gameplay that truly integrates puzzle solving, boss challenges, and scene interactions.

The scene design here is clearly neta the golden tree of the old man's ring

In the upper right corner of the map of the Dawn Tower, in the area of the Aobo Garden, there is a boss and a chessboard called backgammon hidden in the center of the labyrinth.

Through the information hints on the map, players can learn that by playing chess and solving puzzles, they can explore the various rooms around the maze, and then weaken the boss's ability through the buff effects provided in different rooms, and finally they can easily defeat the boss and get rewards.

This triad makes the challenge and exploration process of the whole area interesting.

It's too boxy.

This is my only thought after clearing the whole challenge without consulting the strategy in advance: all the exploration in the area, as well as every step of the chess puzzle can get corresponding feedback, and this feedback will be applied to the final boss battle, the coherence of the whole process experience and the continuous feedback to the player, I personally think this area is the best design in the whole version.

After experiencing all kinds of content, the whole 2.0 is a version that is piling up materials everywhere and emphasizing feedback in everything. By any measure, it was a bit more than I expected.

02

A sense of relaxation in the appropriate concession of commercialization

Having said so much, the 2.0 "Singing Tide" is excellent, but friends who know "Singing Tide" know that this game has not gone very smoothly from the beginning to the present, especially the two-dimensional open world track has a pearl like "Genshin Impact" in front - Especially at the beginning of the open beta, many people must still have some impressions.

From a three-way perspective, "Singing Tide" is clearly a work that benchmarks "Genshin Impact". Back then, making such a product was unthinkable for many teams.

First, ACG is a field with special barriers (and it still is), and the results of teams without ACG production genes blindly following the trend can only end miserably;

Second, the cost of producing Genshin Impact was a scare away for most people, and it was difficult for even large manufacturers to match the industrial production pipeline that was the ceiling level of the industry at that time.

Third, the market performance of "Genshin Impact" quickly secured its position as the leader of the track, and then with the changes in the economic environment and the rapid entry of the two-dimensional field into the current situation of stock competition, it is difficult for a product with the same gameplay type and the same commercial model to survive from the remaining market share of "Genshin Impact", not to mention that the investment is so large, this risk is not something that every team can afford.

Kulo's approach is clever.

Because of the foundation of "Battle Double Pamish", first determine the gameplay characteristics of the action cool, and then benchmark the big world of "Genshin Impact", so there is the 1.0 version that is slightly rough except for "Battle Cool", and it is also at this time that Kuloxiti players gave the title of "grass platform team". But in any case, it is already worth affirming that you can first come up with a version that can see the user.

This crude version was not a great success, either from a commercial point of view or from a word-of-mouth standpoint.

But first, "Genshin Impact" has opened up the market scale of the open world in the two-dimensional field and cultivated the game habits of most category users;

Second, "Singing Tide" itself is not completely consistent with "Genshin Impact" in terms of gameplay, and the cool characteristics of combat have won some users with a more enjoyable operation experience;

The third is that Kulo himself also has a certain fan base with his battle double, so 1.0's "Singing Tide" cannot be said to be a failed product. For Kulo, it was a success, because at least the first stage goal was achieved, "Live".

In business, it is not enough to "make money", it is considered one if it does not take the lead to eat traffic dividends, and the roughness presented by 1.0 is somewhat "inferior to people", and there is also a core factor, which is that the commercial design of "Singing Tide" has chosen a certain degree of concession.

Although there is no major change in the character card pool mechanism of "Singing Tide", the logic of selling characters and the rules of limiting the weapon pool are all working towards the pain points of user payment.

The logic of selling characters in the open world is nothing more than three: numerical strength, XP, and large-world exploration functionality.

"Singing Tide" directly removes the exploration function, except for XP, which is a benevolent opinion for players, the others are completely bound to the value, all limited characters as long as they are drawn will have a complete mechanism, and drawing more repeated characters is just a simple and crude increase in numerical strength.

At the same time, the practice of limiting the weapon pool is not crooked, and it also further compresses the upper limit of user payment - but Kuro is also quite a "chicken thief", and the numerical gap between 5-star weapons and 4-star weapons is wide enough to stimulate users to draw more limited weapons, which can be regarded as ensuring the lower limit of payment to a certain extent.

So to sum up, the upper limit of the payment of "Singing Tide" is not that high, but the lower limit is sufficient. This set of business logic is finally reflected in the player's payment experience, which will be more friendly.

And this kind of commercial concession also makes "Ming Tide" more and more relaxed in the character production pipeline, and even gives itself a knife first in some designs that are obviously rushing to solve user pain points.

In terms of the functionality of big world exploration, in the past version of Genshin Impact (before 5.0), many functional characters will enhance the experience of big world;

Products like "Tower of Fantasy" make vehicles one of the core selling points to solve the pain points of players' mobility in the big world, and relatively do not have such high requirements for core paid content such as characters (but "Tower of Fantasy" is essentially more of a pan-two-dimensional MMO product logic).

On the other hand, "Singing Tide", version 1.3 limited to 5 character shore guards, version 1.4 of 4-star character lights, all have good ability to run pictures; In version 2.0, the soaring function and cat's claw buff, which can be used by any character, directly kill the characteristics tied to the character, which makes it more clear that the goal of not binding functionality to the character to give it commercial value, first help users exclude a paid option.

Each character can equip the Blaze Rider Rapid Run Map

Of course, it is not only the appropriate concession in commercialization, but also many other large and small optimizations, if you are also a player who plays both games, you should also be able to feel what kind of direction the optimization of "Singing Tide" has been in the past six months.

Since your user pain points are all public information on the Internet, then I will solve these user pain points in my product, at least kill the things that users don't want first.

Here is a video uploaded by the UP master of station B @不乐得, which can feel the real feedback from the player's perspective on the optimization of "Singing Tide" for more than half a year.

This kind of logic is very Party B: customers sometimes put forward some vague requirements, and they can't give very clear content, so they can only let Party B write a version first.

When an initial version is available, customers may not be sure what they want, but they can know exactly what they don't want. Optimize the parts you don't want, and the rest is what they want.

Perhaps it is precisely because of such a sense of relaxation, or perhaps because of the confidence in his own production capacity, that Solon behaved very easily at the 2024 TGA scene, and the picture of "hippie smiling face" was made into an emoji by players even if he accompanied him throughout the whole process, which was widely circulated in various communities.

03

The dilemma and choice of "Singing Tide".

praised a lot, and finally wanted to talk about the problems faced by "Singing Tide".

Although what "Rising Tide" came up with in 2.0 does show the industry's first-class production level, the game still faces a problem left over from the 1.0 era: it is difficult to attract new ones.

The first factor is the first impression.

The rhythm of "Singing Tide" at the start of the 1.0 server was a disaster and left a bad impression on a large number of users, even if the popular characters of version 1.1 Jinxi and Changli regained a ride to a certain extent, but it could not change the fact that a large number of players were lost and the rhythm of public opinion was flying all over the sky. This makes "Singing Tide" a big step behind at the starting point.

Now, after more than half a year of precipitation, although as a player who has always insisted on playing, starting from the long-left companion mission, to the follow-up Encore companion mission, the shore keeper plot, and then to Tsubaki and the plot of this 2.0, I can feel that the copywriting level of "Ming Tide" has been significantly improved compared with 1.0, and there are even many performances that exceed my expectations.

However, in various communities, you can still see many users who have only experienced 1.0, or even users who have never played it, are playing the rhythm of the meme, which has caused the situation that "Mingchao" has "always lost and lost" in various communities.

In fact, it has been less than a year since the open beta of "Singing Tide", and for any content-based product with a long-term operation model, it should theoretically still be in a period of new and steady growth, but such a community atmosphere discourages many users who have not even downloaded the game yet.

The second factor, which I think is more core, is that compared to other two-dimensional games, it can be intuitively compared to "Genshin Impact", the threshold for "Singing Tide" is too high.

As an open-world "action" game, "Singing Tide", which highlights a "cool battle", focuses on action, and it is cool to be able to play and be proficient in the mechanics and operations of the game, but what about those users who are more general and have almost no hardcore action experience?

What's more, today's users basically don't have much patience, and the resonance circuit of any character in the game is a small composition, and there are many proper nouns, and users either don't read it for too long, or they really can't understand it. To take the simplest example, the two different skills of variation and extension in the game alone are enough for many newcomers to drink a pot.

It's just the update of this 2.0 major version,Some of the discussion groups I'm in have added a lot of newcomers in the past week.,There are new and returning.,Without exception, most of them mentioned similar problems.,"I've raised this attribute.,Why can't I still hurt it?" ”

There are senior players in the group who answer how to match the team, and they want to eat the sustain buff of the sub-C, and some may go to the game to take a closer look at what the sustain is, and more will come to say: "What is the sustain?" What is the entry of variations? ”

Compared to "Genshin Impact", the various reactions that can be generated between different attributes are a more intuitive and easy-to-understand mechanism for users, as long as the team is reasonably matched, the lower limit is much higher than a reasonable team in "Singing Tide".

In short, the differentiation of "Singing Tide" at the combat level makes its lower limit not so high, and the feedback received by users is not so strong when they have not been so deep in terms of mechanism understanding and operation proficiency.

From the perspective of curing the root cause, the former problem is unsolvable.

But for Kulo, who is "good at playing against the wind", the wind reviews of "Singing Tide" have gradually improved since version 1.1, and the continuous optimization for most of the past half a year has gained a large number of fans, this time the 2.0 version is online, and more and more creators have appeared in the core two-dimensional position like Station B, although a discerning person can see that it does contain some business orders, but more players are actually speaking for "Singing Tide".

As it turns out, as long as you're willing to listen to players, keep optimizing and aim to produce better content, it's only a matter of time before word of mouth picks up – although it's a bit late.

The second problem requires "Singing Tide" itself to do more guidance and optimization and adjustment of the early process. However, the gameplay mechanics of the game determine that there will inevitably be strong innate barriers to this thing.

From the perspective of a veteran player, the feedback given is not necessarily true, but can I only say that it is possible to guide new users to understand and familiarize themselves with some more interesting and stronger feedback in the early stage?

This is actually closely related to the previous question, more and more creators are willing to share, then Kuluo can maintain more community atmosphere, through some incentives other than business orders to let more senior players produce content that players are more interested in, and players communicate with each other in a more understandable and intuitive way, which is far more effective than the official complicated and lengthy formulaic process.

There are also multiple sets of combo teaching in each character tutorial in the game.

Can't remember, can't remember at all

The last factor is the addition of new sources. In fact, I'd rather be an option for resource input.

In addition to station B, "Ming Tide" does not cooperate with Android channels in China, although it does not need to be shared with domestic Android channels, it can obtain a higher profit ratio, but this also means that it is congenitally less than the part of the channel promotion. Compared with the addition of advertising acquisition, to a certain extent, the users from each game center are at least game users, which will be relatively more core.

It may just be my case, I have "Genshin Impact" and "Ming Tide" in my mobile phone, both of which are products that do not cooperate with channels ("Genshin Impact" Xiaomi Service has officially announced the end of operation), but I can often swipe the advertisements of "Genshin Impact" in places such as Douyin at Station B, " Advertisements for Rising Tides are much rarer.

On the one hand, it may be that the ROI of advertising is not so ideal, after all, the competition in advertising in the game market is extremely fierce, and the cost of this category is surprisingly high; On the other hand, for "Singing Tide", the revenue after deducting R&D investment may not be able to support large-scale advertising.

As a player, the accumulation of materials in various dimensions of 2.0 "Singing Tide" made me feel that Kuro showed sincerity at the level of production content; As a practitioner, I just want to say that the quality presented by 2.0 should be smashed with real money.

I don't know exactly how much of the cost of content production Kuro chooses to spend on his revenue, but experience tells me that it's not cheap. If you have readers and friends who understand outsourcing production and production pipelines, please welcome to supplement the exchange in the comment area.

However, this problem may have been solved to a certain extent: Tencent acquired a 51% stake in Kuluo, and the former "Kuluo Stationery Store" remained independent and joined Tencent Family Bucket.

When the news came out before, I made such a violent statement when I was chatting with friends in the industry group:

Tencent's acquisition of Kulo is a matter of time.

Because both sides need it, and there is little choice for either side.

From Kuluofang's point of view, "Ming Tide" is facing the problem of attracting new customers and the cost of attracting new customers, as we all know, traffic has never been a problem for Tengzi;

As for Tencent, they are interested in a mature ACG team with successful product R&D and operation experience, especially since everyone is engaged in an arms race in the ACG open world - NetEase's "Infinity", Paperfold's "Infinite Nuan", Perfect World's "Strange Ring", Shiyue's "Looking at the Moon", and Manchirp's "Blue Star Plain: The Ballad of Travel"—— As the big brother of the game industry, Tencent naturally hopes to occupy a city in the track layout.

But Tencent's traffic is large and widespread, which is a double-edged sword for "Ming Tide", which Tencent and Kuro should have a clear consensus.

It can only be said that with Tencent standing behind it, "Ming Tide" may be able to acquire some users with good quality at a relatively low cost or even zero cost. Especially on the PC side, Tencent also has the largest PC game platform in China, WeGame.

But if you hope that the traffic resources of all ports of Tencent will be open to "Ming Tide" to do streaming, it is obviously unrealistic, not that Tengzi picks, after all, the second dimension is still a relatively special field, and this will inevitably be eaten by traffic.

So even though after joining the Tencent family, it is such a blockbuster big version node, and the upcoming Spring Festival, I only saw a small number of Tencent resources giving the green light to "Singing Tide":

WeGame has all kinds of support in community maintenance, registration activities, and area building, which is no less than that given by Tencent's own games. At Station B, the core position of the second dimension, Xingtong, who is known as the "Princess of the Goose Factory" by users, has also played "Ming Tide" live many times after entering December, and many players have ridiculed in the comment area that this is "Tengzi's warm big hand".

04

A few words to conclude with

After playing the content of a whole large version, the 2.0 "Singing Tide" is refreshing, but there are also some deficiencies to a greater or lesser extent.

For example, with the newly added soaring function, although I have been very proficient in playing the operation of "jumping hook and flashing TAB to take off on the spot", I will often encounter the problem of "I can't use this function in the current state"; And even though I'm already a pretty experienced Solaris pilot, the operation and feel of soaring is really inconvenient, especially on the mobile phone, and the steering and up and down angle controls are really frustrating.

However, these can only be regarded as small flaws of a slightly negative experience, and will not have a fatal impact on the main theme of this entire large version of "cool". And judging from the in-game announcements released in the next few days after the launch, Kuro is also continuing to fix and optimize these problems.

The nodes where the two-dimensional game enters the stage of stock competition may be earlier than we see.

At the same time, a category like B game has also eaten up part of the market share of the general second game to a certain extent, and then entered the subdivision of the open world, in fact, everyone can't open up the obvious gap in terms of gameplay, and there will definitely be a sense of repetition.

Compared with other secondary games that only need to be online for a few minutes a day and can be used as a side game, the category characteristics of the open world make it necessary to occupy more users' time and energy, be more picky about users' tastes, and eat more users' device configurations. In other words, it's more user-picking, and it's more user-friendly.

This determines that this track has a stronger Matthew effect (compared to the general two-dimensional card type), which is similar to big DAU products like MOBA.

The Matthew effect + stock competition makes the track competition more brutal. The high cost of customer acquisition does not mean that you can buy higher recovery users with a high CPI most of the time - unless your product ARPU is high enough and the ROI model is strong enough.

More commonly, the platform makes money with a smile, and the user comes in and scolds and leaves, leaving UA frowning and thinking about how to explain to the boss in the daily and weekly report.

Only by making the content better than your competitors, on the premise of acquiring users at the same cost as your competitors, users are more willing to stay in your product, and then pay through some design conversions, you will have a greater chance of eating the cake.

In recent years, everyone has been talking about the two-dimensional volume, and it is not unreasonable for the two-dimensional open world to change the volume.

This kind of volume is not only a simple volume of art and subject matter, but also has to make more differentiated performances in terms of gameplay. Take the open world as an example, to put it bluntly, there are actually those things that can make users play, nothing more than plot adventure storytelling, big world exploration to kill time, and then verify the long-term numerical cultivation through battles, and then what?

Therefore, it has become a rigid need to make a certain difference in the gameplay. In other words, in the case that everyone's current industrial production capacity has almost reached the same level, the same two-dimensional, the same open world, is there a particularly outstanding gameplay feature?

In the past, when making games, we may often mention the bucket theory, but the problem is that now everyone's ability to make buckets is about the same, so it depends on the bucket you take out, and whether there is a longboard that can attract the most attention?

Unless you can pull out a stainless steel one with your backhand while everyone is still figuring out how to make a barrel - this is a dimensionality reduction strike, which was the case with Genshin Impact back then.

And Kulo has chosen a path of differentiation that suits him best.

With the foundation of "Battle Twin Pamish", excellent character modeling, and strong enough feedback action design, "Singing Tide" in version 2.0 emphasizes the characteristics of combat coolness, and drastically weakens the practice of garbage time in the big world by strengthening the mobility of the characters, allowing users to continue this coolness in the game with a shorter blank period.

- But at what cost?

Extremely strong convenience and mobility, and the faster-paced refreshing feedback also means that users consume content faster, and there is generally a periodic long grass period in the second game, especially for players like me who have completed all the content of a version early, the long grass period is longer.

As we all know, no matter what type of game it is, players who have nothing to do in the long grass can do anything - then in the second half, the continuous version operation, the potential rhythm of public opinion, and the production capacity of follow-up content are the real tests of "Singing Tide".

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