Game Making: Start By Healing the Player

With the advancement of time, the masterpieces of major game manufacturers have also appeared one after another.

And before the launch, they are all scrambling to warm up, for fear that their games will not have enough attention, so that sales will crash.

But as a new work of Nebula Games, "Eldon Circle" is obviously different.

Except for the previous online live broadcast, there is no news at all, which simply makes countless players wait to death.

After all, until now, apart from the game name, genre and theme, nothing else is clear.

………………

While outsiders were extremely uncomfortable being caught, Chen Xu and his team inside Nebula Games were very happy.

The game quality of the previous life "Ayrden's Circle" is indeed very good, but there are also many places that players feel criticized.

In terms of content, the most direct point is that many side quests have been cut.

The content triggered in the game and the lines that players follow through unpacking can clearly find that many important branch lines have been deleted.

According to the content unpacked by some players in the previous life, aside from the branch lines such as the wine seller and Toria's half body, which did not appear at all, Melina, who is a fireproof woman, also has a series of related stories.

From her original dialogue, it can be seen that she is a character who is confused about the meaning of her existence, has very deep feelings for the faded person, and has been encouraging the faded person to become a king.

Melina didn't tell the fader how to upgrade independently. The original idea should be that Melina needs to hold the fader's hand every time he upgrades.

Also, the Eternal City originally had a related mimetic teardrop branch line, but it was directly cut off and reduced to a plot map for the line of La Ni and the Dead Sleeping Girl.

These are the plots that have been deleted, and players can't find out without unpacking them.

But there are also some that are anticlimactic.

Among them, the magician Se Lian, who is excellent for players, has deleted some dialogues, but the plot itself is actually quite complete.

But as a name familiar to old soul players, Patch's plot is a broken line, and you won't be able to touch him again after the volcano.

There are also the Hyde City Lord, the female warrior Neferilu, and the Stonewell city guard, which should have been three intertwined lines.

Among them, the orthodox king of Nimgford, which Hyde City is mainly looking for, is a female warrior, and every time a player in Stoneville City dies, money is stolen and they enter the small black house from the path and get the key, and the door is closed. The doorman, these characters have their own dialogue with each other.

But they were all cut off.

But even so, the side plots in "Ayrden's Circle" are quite good, especially the side stories of La Ni and Dead Sleeping Girl, which are almost a must-do for players.

One of them can get a weapon that is necessary for the soul series: the moonlight sword, and can also successfully harvest a wife.

It's not the one imagined by the player, but the one that brings a unique ending to the ring.

And another story about the dead sleeping girl Feiya, that is even more exciting, not only can you feel the hug of love throughout the whole process, but also can be transformed into a tauren and give the legendary dead prince to the cow.

In addition, there is interaction between the two side missions of the Impression ending. If you want to complete the side mission of the girl who sleeps in death, you must complete the pre-order of Lani and open the secret passage of Kalia's study to go to the God's Tower.

For Chen Xu, he is also ready to complete some of the missing content as much as possible.

And there are some optimizations to the game content, because the first time trying to open the world, the previous life "Ayrden Circle" still has many deficiencies in the player experience.

It is different from "Curse of Blood", "Dark Soul" and "Sekiro" because the open world has larger content and a lot of props.

But this experience is not very good. For example, after picking up the props, the player needs to open the backpack and slowly look for the props one by one to determine whether the item is a consumable or a material or a task item.

In addition, there is an imbalance in the values. The original intention of the ashes system is to make it easier for players to pass the bosses. Even many bosses are made according to the settings of the ashes. The influence of the hatred value can be combined with some special weapon battles. Skills and occupations, such as the famous swordsmen Yueyin and Laohan's legs with extremely large toughness values, suddenly collapsed the difficulty curve of the game.

However, these are obviously not a problem for Nebula games. It is better to conduct content tests and numerical tests.

As for the difficulty of the hatred effect caused by the ashes, this is easier to solve.

A more mature AI allows the BOSS to have a more intelligent performance, not like in the MMORPG "World of Warcraft", where the hatred of monsters has always been on the ashes, which can directly make the difficulty curve more reasonable. In the death mode of "Soul", all the leftovers have been played a long time ago.

So for Chen Xu and his team, the more important thing is the level design and some detailed settings for VR performance.

"Mr. Chen, your design can..." Yang Xin looked at the screen on the monitor in front of Chen Xu and hesitated.

"Isn't this to give players a more immersive sense of substitution?" Chen Xu smiled slightly.

The above picture is a preview, which will be fed back to the VR platform in the future.

I saw the fader wearing armor in the game, slowly pushing open an iron gate in the attic.

The inside of the door was dark, and the fader at this time did not have the waist lamp hanging from the waist of the player like in "Curse of Blood".

At this time, in the corner of the room, an armored knight holding a sword and shield slowly stood up and pushed open the wooden box in front of him.

The next second, there was a burst of footsteps behind him, followed by a very obscene laughter, and a 'crunch'.

The big iron gate was closed, and the only people in front of the player were the fierce knights.

There are many, many more similar insidious designs.

"The sense of substitution is very strong, my blood pressure exploded just looking at it!" Yang Xin couldn't help but complain.

In the soul-based games such as "Dark Souls", "Bloodborne Curse" and "Sekiro", basically every game is full of all kinds of sinister monsters.

But compared to "Ayrden's Circle", Yang Xin feels that all these are insignificant, because it is an element of the open world, so there are too many places in this game that can be played as players.

It looks like jumping won't kill you, but it's actually the point where you will fall to your death.

Stonevale City crossbow that can blast the player.

Unremarkable explosion barrel.

There are various gargoyle little devils hiding in dark corners in the dungeon.

Just looking at it, Yang Xin can't even think about it.

"And more importantly, Mr. Chen, the monsters on these maps will really make players collapse!" Ruan Ningxue, who was in charge of art, also complained.

Originally, she thought that in "Curse of Blood Origin", the shapes of various ancient gods should have reached their peak.

But when it comes to "Eldun's Circle", according to the information given by Chen Xu, this is simply aggravating!

Go to the big hairy ant at the bottom of the deep root, spiders, maggots and big-eyed curse frogs in the sewers of Wangcheng, as well as the maggots in the woods outside Wangcheng Rodell...

It can be said that in "Eldon's Circle", the monsters that make the player's SAN value drop straight will never be less than in "Bloodborne Curse".

"Relax, our players are strong, we have to trust the players' psychological endurance." Chen Xu looked at Ruan Ningxue and said with a smile.

He wasn't worried about that at all.

After all, when the player comes into contact with this, at least they have finished fighting Greck and the Queen of the Full Moon. What is there to worry about if they haven't been persuaded to return for so long?

Maybe even some players with special XP might like it very much?