Text/Thomas's Skull

An old friend of Chinese gamers, Blizzard founder Mike Morhaime's new game Wildgate, just released a teaser today.

Before the trailer was released, Mike posted a warm-up on multiple domestic social media, and also specially arranged a trip to China, which shows the importance they attach to the domestic market. And whether it is his new company Dreamhaven, or the core members of the "Unowned Star Abyss" studio Moonshot, the background of Blizzard, Riot, Microsoft, Sony and other big companies, have also raised everyone's expectations.

Mike also greeted the readers of the game Grape

For more information, please refer to the video on Game Grape

Last week, while attending GDC, Grape was invited by NetEase to visit Dreamhaven's office in Irvine to try out Abyss in advance and chat with Mike, Jason Chayes, head of Moonshot Studios, and game director Dustin Browder. Before that, the latter two were the game directors of StarCraft 2 and Heroes of the Storm, and the heads of Hearthstone.

Happy welcome!

Anyway, whether it's "Unowned", or Moonshot and Dreamhaven, they all subvert my common sense. Because I've never seen a team like this, and I've never seen a game like this.

01

It's crazy, it's crazy

"Unowned Abyss" is really not the kind of game that can be explained in one sentence. Sea of Thieves, Overwatch, PUBG, Escape from Tarkov, Space Werewolf Kill...... It draws inspiration from a large number of games, but if we say stitching, it seems to insult its whimsical creativity.

To put it simply, Abyss is a 20-40 minute first-person PvPvE game where 5 squads compete against each other, each with 4 players and a spaceship. You'll have to work with your teammates to hunt for treasure in the most dangerous areas of the universe. The first team to find a powerful artifact and evacuate from the Wildgate, or the team to destroy all other ships, will win.

Dustin Browde introduces the game loop

But the gameplay of the game is far from so simple, and almost every module has a lot of complex gameplay details.

First of all, the game has put a lot of effort into the spaceship module. Each ship is equipped with probes (search and mark quests, resource ores, wild gates, enemy ships), wheelhouses, turrets, component hardports, hatches, and more. Players have to constantly adjust their division of labor, gather supplies, and strengthen their ships in order to win the battle.

Players can leave the ship at any time (or teleport back to the ship with one click), mine materials in space, enter the dungeon battle treasure farm, and help the ship grow. When the ship is attacked, it will also catch fire everywhere, oxygen leaks, and damage parts, requiring the player to repair them everywhere to restore the original state.

More subtlely, players can also enter other teams' ships at any time, kill their crews, destroy and steal components and even artifacts, and hack the ship's core to make it lose health...... That is, spaceship vs spaceship, agent vs spaceship, agent vs agent...... Players have to switch between multiple PvP playstyles flexibly.

On top of that, the game offers different ships, agents, and weapons to enrich the strategy space. For example, robot characters do not need oxygen and are good at collecting ores in space; Ian, who looks like a shark man, can kill the opposite player in melee instantaneously and destroy components, which is suitable for destroying enemy ships; Movs, who resembles the Batman, can be invisible, and is good at stealing and hacking the core......

A bit like Overwatch? However, most of these characters' abilities are passive, and players can choose two weapons and two active skills before the start of each game and build around them.

The difference in the number of one-way doors, the number of turrets, the amount of HP, the speed and other factors of the spaceship will also affect the game and strategy between the teams. For example, if a ship has its shield retracted, it will gain more speed, which encourages the team not to blindly cultivate, but to quickly search for artifacts and then quickly evacuate.

Seeing this, it should not be difficult to imagine how ridiculous this game will be to play...... It's kind of like one of those hilarious superhero movies, where the squad can't wait for a plan every minute, but the plan never catches up with the change. One second you feel like a reliable teammate can make a stupid mistake the next. And any mistake can trigger a chain reaction.

Imagine that you finally find the artifact, only to find that two ships on the opposite side are firing artillery at your own ship, multiple components in the cabin have been destroyed, the hatch is wide open, oxygen is leaking, and there is a sea of fire everywhere. At that moment, a clairvoyant teammate chanted on the voice channel: "The enemy is on board!" "You rushed to protect the artifact, but the enemy hiding behind you came with a heavy punch and killed you directly. While waiting for the resurrection, you find that your teammates are in a mess, the ship is twisted and turned, and someone is about to leave the ship and go to space to find an enemy ship to sneak ......

Dustin said that by nesting layers of mechanics, they wanted to give the game a chaotic fun similar to Breakup Kitchen. The ship is on fire, oxygen is leaking, and the approaching enemy ship ...... None of this is a big deal at first, but if left unchecked, these little timers can become a death knell that can create a huge mess and fun.

The existence of the Wild Gate withdrawal point, as well as the design of the 5 spaceship squads, also make the game richer. For example, the last game we won was because we were the first to find the artifact, but we never approached the Wild Gate, sitting on the mountain and watching the tiger fight. Waiting until there were only two opponents left, he slowly approached the finish line with the artifact, and at the same time used the sniper guns he had collected to bombard the enemy who had run out of ammunition.

Super multi-complex gameplay, multi-scene and multi-dimensional multi-player melee, multiple in-game growth lines and strategic games...... It's hard to imagine how difficult this game is to develop, and it's hard to imagine how much effort it takes to become proficient in the game.

But in terms of actual experience, these designs are not out of control, but because of the many elements and the abundance of choices, players will not feel like they have nothing to do. For example, as a newbie, although I don't dare to sail a boat, I can still help the team explore the map and mark resources; In the melee, even if you can't hit anyone, you can repair equipment everywhere and pull people to put out fires.

As Dustin explains, they're trying to create a sweet balance where the player can barely control everything — reluctantly, mind you, meaning that the slightest mistake can lead to chaos again. But if you can make everything go according to plan, you don't have to say much about the sense of accomplishment.

In general, "Unowned Star Abyss" relieves the pressure of searching and withdrawing with a three-dimensional battlefield, subverts the experience of eating chicken with treasure hunting and spaceships, and weakens the operational difficulty of tactical shooting with multi-level objectives and division of labor...... It's hard to define the experience in any one category.

How did such a strange and crazy project come about? After the demo, I asked Jason and Dustin to review their development experiences.

02

Blizzard's team started from scratch,

It's all about innovation

In 2020, Dustin and Jason, who left Blizzard, started their business in Dustin's restaurant with Paul, a colleague in charge of publishing, and Laura, the art director who previously worked on Titans at Blizzard. "Every day when the children come home, they want to kick us out." At that time, the name of their team was also very sloppy, it was called Red Table Games, because when the name was called, the table of the restaurant where they drank coffee happened to be red......

After three months of working like this, Mike, the old leader, talked to them more and more, and finally decided to pull them in. So the team joined Dreamhaven, founded Moonshot Studio, recruited colleagues in charge of UI and technology, expanded the team to 7 people, and then began to brainstorm and find the direction of the project.

The name Moonshot comes from the Apollo moon landing program - because they have been in Blizzard for too long and haven't created a new IP for too long, they would rather take some risks and jump out of their comfort zone and make a game that is cool, unique, and unconventional.

In this way, while doing technical pre-research, everyone created dozens of gameplay prototypes. After picking out the best five of them and bringing them together, the team identified the four design pillars one by one, and Abyss was born.

Jason Chayes introduces the gameplay

The first pillar of the game is Typhon Reach, the most dangerous place in the galaxy and a treasure trove of adventures; The second pillar is the Spaceship, as it is the vehicle, the medium of combat, and the core of cultivation; The third pillar is the Artifact, which is the goal of the Typhon and the key to victory; The fourth pillar is the Prospector, or character, who has different traits and skills that enrich the game's replayability.

Around these elements, the team started to get creative, on the one hand, to design enough mechanics to make the game complex and interesting; On the other hand, it is necessary to confine the content to a level that a team of 50 people can accomplish.

"We want the game to be like a sandbox, giving players enough options to do different things and win in different ways...... We have confidence in our players, they are very smart. Just like LOL and Dota now have hundreds of heroes and equipment, players still love these games. ”

"Unowned" also has a large number of differentiated guns

And the time of a single game of 20-40 minutes is what they think is the best length for competitive games.

"Every three minutes, you don't care too much about winning or losing; One game an hour, you will be very uncomfortable if you lose. But a 20-40 minute round, a meal at noon, you can play at least two rounds. ”

Hence the map size, growth rate, opening speed of the Wild Gate...... Everything will be adjusted according to this time, which gives the game a basic constraint.

In the years that followed, the team went on a brainstorming spree, coming up with ideas, testing, retaining and killing ideas. "We're a small team, we're all very skilled developers, and we have great prototyping tools, which allows us to do trial and error quickly and innovate like crazy."

Dustin said that Right now Abyss offers four ships, but they have done at least 30 ships. "Ships 1 to 5 never got into the engine, and we played with 9 for a year and a half, but we still couldn't tune it up. Now you can control ships 12, 15, 25, and 28. "The reason it's so tough is because the ship is both a base and a battlefield, a weapon and a vehicle. The team had to highlight the different hull features while also making sure it was fun enough for both co-op and PvP.

An art guy at work

In order to test the reliability of various ideas, all team members played their own games three days a week, and killed countless ideas in the process: the super height difference dungeon "Lighthouse" that encourages vertical movement, the AI boss that can directly kill the spaceship, and the brain-burning puzzle ...... that requires players to do math problems

At the same time, some of the ideas that were lucky enough to be kept had to struggle to find technical art solutions. For example, in order to fit the sci-fi worldview, the characters in the game have very different sizes, so the weapons have to automatically adjust the animation and model according to their body shape.

Dustin and Jason believe that all companies, including Blizzard, have to work this way if they want to make masterpieces. Because apart from the occasional good fortune, there are few shortcuts to innovation: "The more time you invest, the more you test, the more you iterate, the more people align your values, the more ideas you have, and the better the results of your innovation." If you act in a hurry, you won't make something smart. ”

And this is also the reason why Moonshot has invested 5 years in "Unowned Abyss".

03

Don't want to copy Blizzard,

But with the temperament of Blizzard

Unlike many teams that have had great success, both Dreamhaven and Moonshot seem to want to leave behind the baggage of the past.

A counterintuitive feature is that while it is not difficult for Dreamhaven to mobilize a large amount of resources with Mike's influence, everyone wants to keep the team as small as possible, so that the team in Unowned Abyss is only about 50 people.

Dustin told me that the advantage of having a small team is that everyone can develop enough chemistry and be close to each other. "Every Monday when we meet, we celebrate the birthdays of some of our colleagues. But if there are too many people and you have to celebrate the birthdays of 5 people at a time, it doesn't seem very special......"

When I talked to Dustin and Jason about the lack of large-scale hiring or project initiation for Game Science after the success of Black Myth: Wukong, they agreed that many teams had a hard time resisting the temptation. Mike also believes that the leaner the team, the better, and he said that the core team of World of Warcraft in the vanilla era is only 65 people. In this way, as development tools become more sophisticated, people should be able to do better things with fewer people.

At the same time, all the main creators of this team don't seem to be worried about the nightmare of not being able to succeed continuously.

As a small team, Dustin said, they don't need to replicate their previous successes. "In fact, we might be more successful with a smaller audience." Jason says that for him, it's the things that excites him to make the game better and cooler. Their biggest hope for Unowned Abyss is that its results will allow the team to keep developing and developing.

Mike also said that working at Blizzard was stressful, and as part of a large group, they couldn't help themselves, let alone face the expectations of millions of players. Now that Dreamhaven is just getting started, all they need to do is lay the groundwork: "We hope that players will build trust with us and be willing to try our other games in the future." "

Sounds like a deliberate attempt to shake off Blizzard's influence? But you can also feel that Blizzard's genes are still flowing in this team.

Dreamhaven supports remote work, and with very few people in the office every Monday and Friday, you'll find a large area of empty desks; Their office is bright and spacious, full of board games, posters, figurines, and even a pinball machine in the conference room - the overall atmosphere is not like the kind of triple-A factory that often rushes to work, but has the style of the golden age of the Internet.

In Mike and his wife's office, there are also a lot of Blizzard memories of those days, including Chinese posters of "World of Warcraft" and the autographs of many project designers and well-known players.

Swipe left and right to view

An employee at Dreamhaven told me that his experience at Blizzard has made Mike and many of the company's core members focus on the global market. In the sharing, Mike specifically mentioned their collaboration with the Chengdu team Game River for Steel Commander, "If someone asks me what I've been playing lately, I'll say I'm playing this game. Later, when I talked to Dustin and Jason about it, they all agreed that while globalization has encountered some obstacles today, the trend of people connecting with each other will not change.

During the exchange, I felt that "Unowned Star Abyss" was an extravagant project. It's not that the cost is high, but that it has gathered a group of rare talents, and it has taken five years to make a lot of innovation.

As Jason said, what they care about most now is not to build a certain IP or what technology to chase, but to create a safe environment where everyone feels that their creativity is important and that everyone's abilities are brought to the fullest. I guess if it weren't for such a wonderful company, I'm afraid it would be difficult to implement such a project.

Jason talks about Moonshot's values

When we miss Blizzard, what exactly are we missing? Excellent quality? Amazing innovations? An intimate and welcoming community? The influence that can bring the world together? At least that's what I'm seeing in today's Dreamhaven.

How do you think innovation is important? How to make good innovations? If you want to make a good game, do you need a large team? Does the so-called success have to be huge team and business returns? Maybe "Unowned Abyss" makes me feel strange, and it is also a direction that many game companies have not seriously considered. And this seemingly somewhat conservative and old-school way of doing things may be closer to the essence of the gaming industry.

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