Text/Repair & Thomas's Skull

Today, Ark of Tomorrow: The End (hereinafter referred to as the End) has opened the "Retest".

A week ago, Grape King was invited by Eagle Horn to participate in the closed-door trial in advance. During the technical test, we were worried about whether the product was too challenging and whether the eagle horn was taking too big a step. But this time, most of the worries are gone.

There is no other reason. This version has evolved a lot from the "technical test": the core combat logic has been refactored, the coupling between infrastructure and various systems has been improved, and the infrastructure-themed design of different regions has been shown for the first time...... It really lives up to the positioning of Eagle Point's next flagship.

To put it bluntly, if all the possibilities that the game presents so far can be smoothly implemented in a well-designed way (which is difficult), then it will have a good chance to break out of the trap of the previous generation of second games, lead a new round of trends, and even create a new generation of design paradigms.

In recent years, there has been no leapfrog breakthrough in content-based products, and some players have even begun to complain about their "second game impotence". But there may be a chance to change all of that in the end—perhaps what Eagle Point really wants is never to simply replicate past successes, but to make another breakthrough.

01

Information Bombardment:

Aesthetic fatigue is gone

Recently, I talked to many friends, in fact, looking at the world, content-based products have been in trouble for a long time.

Take the category with the highest input threshold and income ceiling, open world, as an example. The difficulty of the first generation of products was "big". The team can break through technical difficulties and make the world bigger. The difficulty of the second generation is "empty". The team can complete the construction of the industrial pipeline, fill in enough content, and prevent the player from growing grass, and win the country.

But as more and more teams overcome these two difficulties, content-based games are falling into the dilemma of canning, which makes people start to feel aesthetic fatigue. And this is also the quagmire that overseas 3A open world games have long fallen into. Looking back at some open-world games now, the most fun thing may be teamwork, action, and card gacha, but not necessarily the world itself.

From this point of view, the essence of excellent content is not in the form of an open world, but to provide a differentiated and fresh experience with a large volume and high density to meet the needs of players.

In the same way, the Terminal Land is not blindly scrolling the size of the map, it is a huge box garden, but after experiencing it this time, I think it has achieved this: most of the content feels very fresh, and the information density is so high that I can forget what aesthetic fatigue is.

Let's start with the most intuitive vision.

Eagle Horn is already good at dealing with details, and the details of every aspect of the game in Ark of Tomorrow have proven it. Now that the switch to 3D has been made, the team has not simplified the design because of the cost issue, but has stepped up the design a bit.

For example, the texture and material details of the character's clothing can stand up to scrutiny, and the depreciation of leather and the reflection of silk can be perceived.

The same overflowing visual performance also includes the transition actions in the character development interface: the amplitude is large, the number is large, the details are rich, and the camera movement covers the whole body, from facial expressions to leg movements are very exquisite, raising the specifications to a higher level.

For example, Chen Qianyu's breathing really has a sense of breathing

Of course, there will still be problems in the game, such as the uneven quality of NPC hair, and the details of the fingers that need to be polished. But this is a small problem that will become conspicuous when other parts are very prominent, and it may usually be overlooked.

Compared with the high-quality characters, in fact, what caught my eyes more in this test was the new scene "Hongshan". I believe that many people, in the actual machine demonstration video released at the end of the previous release, were amazed by this set of visual effects.

This is not only due to the brilliance of the art quality itself, but also to the fact that the perspective of cultural aesthetics is tricky enough. Yes, the trend of new national style games has been blowing for so many years, and it seems to be crowded, but in fact, most of them still revolve around the concepts of "urban national fashion" and "modern ancient style".

Who would have thought that the player community could summarize the stalk of "the style of the republic is also the style of the country", this seemingly brain-opening, but very reasonable concept of differentiation, can really be shown in the end.

You can see a lot of details of high-concept cultural expressions linked to contemporary China, such as cattle with new energy license plates, elite monsters holding Chinese New Year firecrackers as weapons, slogans and street signs everywhere, and so on.

But don't get me wrong, it's not that there is no expression of traditional culture, it's just not so deliberate. For example, the rendering effect of the landscape in the distance, although it is not an ink art style, but it has the elegant charm of ink painting.

Another example is the Lost Forest, which is a small labyrinth of bamboo forests that changes its orientation as the player moves forward and backward. I was in the middle of it, looking at the unpredictable, flickering bamboo forest, and I felt like I was in a Chinese martial arts movie.

In fact, the expressiveness and content density of the scene are one of the core highlights of this test. There's a lot of content to interact with and see across the map, including the trails and interiors of the complex, and there's more room to explore on the Z-axis. Combined with details such as textures and materials, the world rarely feels bare at a glance, making it more believable – it's hard to imagine that Eagle Point's technical team has been able to set aside so much of a performance budget.

For example, when running the map, you will find an ordinary backyard, which has appeared a variety of potted plants, crops, rocks, birds, thermos cups, tea sets, plastic stools, building materials, wooden tables and rattan chairs...... It's less like a level planner who opens the editor, places scene components at hand, and just fills the map, but more like a flesh-and-blood design work.

In short, high-style design and high-standard art resources just bombarded my head over and over again. And it's just as dense, there's also the flow of content experience. These elements are superimposed, and in the end, quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes, giving the final place the texture of the works of the next era.

If you want to understand the latter, you have to start with the gameplay.

02

Coupling:

The key to increasing the density of the content experience

First of all, it should be noted that the end is definitely not an electronic potted plant, and it has nothing to do with the popular "side game narrative" of the second tour.

If you want to play and understand it, you need to re-learn the system logic, re-understand the focus and loop of the content experience, this threshold is not low, but it will use a highly coupled design to make you have fun in the learning process.

Let's start with the battle. During the last technical test, many players questioned the game's weak action and slow pace of combat. However, this "Retest" has reworked the entire combat logic, retaining the strategy and strengthening the action.

In short, the end did at least three points:

First, the design that the main character will also attack automatically has been removed, the operation logic has been changed to left-click basic attack, right-click dodge, and allow precise dodge (but no slow motion), and the player will no longer have a bullet time and range selection when releasing skills. Including settings such as the ability to interrupt the enemy's charge with skills, it also makes the combat operation of the end more powerful.

Second, change the skill energy that was originally calculated independently for each character to a battle resource shared by the whole team. This allows combat to be more strategic and paced, and avoids becoming a mindless state of "where the light is on". At the same time, these skills also have their attack range and action swing, and there is a possibility that they will be missed.

Thirdly, the game strengthens the presence of ailments such as flying and knockback, and ailments are also one of the prerequisites for triggering the "Combo Move". Combos are similar to combos, and players can trigger further effects after hitting the preconditions, so as to pursue a large amount of damage after breaking the defense. Not only does this greatly improve the thrill of operation, but it also gives the game a new pre-battle strategy - you need to consider whether the team's combo skills are smooth and easy to play.

In the end, character attributes (such as nature, fire, and frost), the effects generated by the skill system, and mechanics such as breaking defense and interrupting are coupled into a set of decision-making chains that can withstand scrutiny, realizing the fun of Build and Combo.

Let's talk about infrastructure. The test showcased a lot of new and related content, such as tower defense, strongholds, puzzles, a new tech tree, and more.

But I think what is more noteworthy is that the infrastructure construction has been further coupled with multiple system mechanisms such as combat, cultivation, and exploration this time. Rather than the separation of modes that many games emphasize, they do not interfere with each other.

The first is the coupling of infrastructure and map exploration. The rhythm of the opening scene of the game is a battle-infrastructure-exploration-battle, such a progression cycle. There are a number of obstacles on the map that need to be broken down by infrastructure, such as pulling power grids or creating industrial explosives. Even if it's not mandatory, you'll find that the road is paved, which helps a lot with your exploration efficiency.

Exploration, in turn, will strengthen infrastructure. The acquisition of basic industry points is linked to map exploration, and as part of the gameplay content that encourages exploration, the space simulator unlocked after earning points is also a infrastructure tutorial - players need to find them on the map and complete the corresponding simulation level. A grape gentleman who has worked infrastructure construction said that this has greatly lowered his learning threshold.

The new tower defense and stronghold gameplay are also related to the development of industrial technology trees and map exploration. Players can earn basic industry points through map exploration, which can be used to light up industrial technology trees and create battle turrets. Industrial products can also be used to support the development of the stronghold, and as the prosperity of the stronghold increases, players can change the state of the map, reap different levels of map exploration rewards, and even obtain some cultivation resources from the stronghold.

The second is the coupling of infrastructure and art concept design, as well as gameplay themes. For example, the biggest surprise to me in the "Hongshan" scene is not only to raise the final place to a new height at the artistic level, but also to raise the imagination space of infrastructure gameplay to a higher level.

Because I found out that it even gave a whole new set of industrial tech trees. Focusing on the new core resource of "water", it has a new set of facilities and technological capabilities.

For example, water can be pumped at the water's edge with a water pump, and then transported to the field that needs to be watered through the water pipe, which plays the most simple role in farming and irrigation; For example, using water as a production resource to make specific solutions; Another example is the cultivation link in the production chain.

This means that the infrastructure content that is currently being shown in the end is really just infrastructure. In the future, as the game progresses, it is entirely possible that more interesting content is possible: the underwater world? Floating city? Underground base? Or even a space station further afield? Will there be more coupling between infrastructure and other elements?

The complex coupling of these modules, rather than simple stitching, gives the final picture an astonishing density of content. Go out and hang out, and you'll find a whole bunch of goals and feedback, and you'll be stuck in a nested positive loop.

Increasing coupling is a big trend in game design, but I don't really understand why Eagle Horn is pushing itself to this level in the first place...... After all, more games will first give a relatively simple gameplay prototype, and then gradually improve the coupling degree of each module as the version progresses.

Decisions such as Finale put forward higher requirements for the team's gameplay and system design. But if you can prepare in advance, the game will also have a more coherent and playable experience after the official launch, as well as higher potential energy. It can only be said that the choice of Eagle Horn is rare.

03

next-generation products,

It shouldn't be an industrialized pre-made dish

To be honest, I don't think Eagle Point needs to do so much. As the second flagship after the establishment of the company, art 2D to 3D, even if the tower defense gameplay remains the same, a few years earlier, it may be able to meet the expectations of players at that time.

But after experiencing this test, I suspect that the goal of the end is not just to satisfy you, but to amaze you.

In the game industry, quantitative changes in technological progress often drive qualitative changes in gameplay innovation, and this is true for both chicken and open worlds. And today's technology iteration may be approaching the next node. You can clearly feel that some new products in the future, whether it is content density or gameplay dimension, are obviously more than 5 years ago.

Therefore, the next generation of content-based products, if they are only micro-innovation iterations under the original blockbuster framework, or simply change the setting of industrialized prefabricated dishes, may still be able to make money, but it is difficult to create their own context and trend - and this is directly related to whether the team will eat meat or drink soup in the future.

Of course, the test still revealed some flaws. It's hard for me to imagine how challenging the game will be on mobile when the infrastructure maniacs pull everything to their heart's content.

But from personal experience, the content volume of "Retest" is enough to support 50 hours of gameplay. The sheer volume of reworked and new content, as well as the consistent frame rate and higher art quality, have proven the efficiency of the team's production of content. As for optimization, it may not be an insurmountable barrier.

A truly cross-era product should have the ability to make players call NB directly. It's like the first time I went into the Lost Forest, and when I saw rows of bamboos giving way, I said NB; When I first saw the landscape art rendering in the distance of Hongshan, I said NB again; Finally, when I stood on the Dijiang and looked down on the entire planet, I still couldn't help but say, NB.

To become such a product completely, the team at the end of the land will need more effort and better luck. But after this round of testing, I began to believe in their potential.

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