Text/Nine Lotus Treasure Lamp

Saros Studio's "two-dimensional chicken" has finally been exposed recently.

This team may not sound like a well-known team, but the actual identity is full of stories. The predecessor of Salos was the Shenzhen Gravity Studio. Their game, originally codenamed S1 in the morning and evening light years.

Unfortunately, they were quickly abandoned as Bytes retreated from the gaming industry. However, they were relatively lucky – they soon co-founded Saros Network Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. with many members of the Jiangnan Studios Open World Project, which was also abandoned. Today, they are also favored by Tencent as its wholly-owned subsidiary.

Less than half a year ago, the former S1 project officially appeared under the name "Fate Trigger: The Novita", and was announced on social networks in North America and Japan, opening the Steam store pre-order. It is understood that the game was developed using the UE5 engine, and a PC/console/mobile version is planned.

IN MY OPINION, WHETHER IT IS A PRODUCT LABEL OR AN ITEM LABEL, IT IS SIMPLY A STACK OF DEBUFFS: NOT TO MENTION WHETHER THE LOGIC OF "TWO-DIMENSIONAL + CHICKEN" IS REASONABLE, JUST THE TRACK OF TACTICAL COMPETITION ITSELF, THERE ARE ALREADY TWO OVERLORD-LEVEL PRODUCTS IN FRONT, "PUBG" AND "APEX". At this time, how many opportunities can I still eat chicken?

Coupled with the "ill-fated" resume of this team...... It's really a little hard to wonder, moving so fast, is it self-abandonment?

But that doesn't seem to be the case. In the early hours of this morning, "Fate Trigger: The Novita" released a PV on YouTube, and overseas players seem to be looking forward to it.

What exactly does this product look like under PV? In fact, a few days ago, I reached out to their studio and tried the game offline.

And after playing it, I have to admit that even though they are still very young in many aspects, in terms of imagination, they are really unique in the tactical competition category. Their attitude towards products is also more like a reflection of the sense of survival.

01

The most imaginative tactical shooting?

The first is its distinctly stylized fine art.

As a sci-fi two-dimensional style game, "Fate Trigger: The Novita" adopts the PBR+NPR rendering method, so that the game's scenes and characters have a style similar to those two-dimensional games; However, in the material performance of some clothing or buildings, there is a realistic taste.

In terms of character design, I don't think I need to talk about it. Just by looking at the pictures, you can see that in the tactical shooting track, you won't find a second work of this style.

But the best place to show their ideas is the insider.

These characters in the game have different classes and skills. Of all the tactical shooters I've seen, this one is probably the most over-the-top in terms of skill design.

For example, there is a character named "Nase", her ability can summon a small shark, which will slide a waterway on the ground, and the character can glide at high speed on the waterway it leaves behind.

Nase's ultimate is even more magical, not only does it allow the character to create a waterway on the ground and glide without a shark, but if the character is knocked down during the ultimate time, it will melt directly into the water. At this point, the player can lurk in the water, hide in cover where no one else can attack, and then lean out again.

It's not just the characters' skills that are exaggerated, but they're also imaginative in their weapon design.

There are a number of weapon enhancement stations on the game map, where players can use the currency they pick up to strengthen their weapons. But this is not simply to enhance the weapon stats, but to install different chips on the weapon to bring different effects.

For example, if you have a chip that is mounted on a sniper rifle, the player will shoot not a bullet, but a grenade that explodes on the ground; There is also an anti-gravity chip, which can make the bullets fired by the player no longer fall, and really point where to hit;

In addition, they have healing chips that allow players to recharge their health by shooting at their teammates, as well as overload chips that can directly replace bullets with health when the magazine is empty, thus saving reload time......

The team has designed 10 different chips so far, and while weapons can only be mounted one at a time, you can fully imagine how many interesting changes the game can make with these chips.

It's worth mentioning that the game's map is also made up of multiple floating islands of varying heights, and the player can travel between them through portals, which also brings a lot of variables.

Another thing that impressed me was the game's Poison Circle fault tolerance mechanic: players can get a chance to resurrect after dying for the first time, and can freely choose a fixed landing point scattered throughout the map to resurrect. For some players who are too far away from the poison circle, or the competition for landing sites is too fierce, this also avoids a lot of frustration of landing in boxes.

Speaking of which, I believe you can also see that this game has made so many differentiating points, in fact, it wants to create a game experience with a lower threshold and more variables.

While attracting more players with beautiful art, they also use skills and weapons with different functions to increase the strategy in the game and weaken the game's "gun" attributes. This way, both new and old players will have the opportunity to try their hand at this game.

But back to the question I was initially curious about: there are already masters in the tactical competition category, so why is Salos convinced that he can fight his way out of the encirclement in this direction at the moment?

02

Where does the market opportunity come from?

The project team explained their thinking to me from the perspective of "funnel theory".

If you compare the process of a game from attracting to retaining users to a funnel, the mouth at the top of the funnel is the packaging. By choosing this differentiated and appealing theme, they will not only attract core players, but also have the potential to win the attention of some new users.

And if you really want players to be willing to stay and play, you also need to look at the mouth of the lower level of the funnel, that is, the gameplay design.

The key reason why battle royale has become a popular genre in shooters is that it is more strategic and random than pure fighting. With the experience of defeating the weak over the strong as the core fun, it not only expands the audience of the game, but also increases the durability of the game.

Compared with other products in the category, Fate Trigger: The Novita further strengthens this logic: they have lowered the threshold for characters, 3Cs, maps, and skills, and shortened the TTK, so that the core factors of the decisive victory are further tilted towards the depth of strategy.

The logic is smooth, but "two-dimensional + chicken", can this thing work?

From a product point of view, the project team said that this kind of non-realistic sci-fi packaging has provided them with a lot of help to enhance their strategic goals, allowing them to make more interesting and even self-indulgent designs in terms of character skills and weapon effects.

From the user's point of view, the main target users in their eyes are not exactly the traditional understanding of the two-dimensional players. Although "Fate Trigger: The Novita" has two-dimensional flavor art and rich content packaging, after all, there are still many differences between the tactical competitive gameplay and the internal games that two-dimensional players are used to.

Therefore, their main target users are those who prefer two-dimensional groups in the audience of shooting games. This group may not sound like much, but considering the recognition of "Overwatch" in the two-dimensional group back then, as well as the linkage between many two-dimensional games and shooting games, it may really have a lot of possibilities.

03

Possibility: The upper and lower limits are high

It is understood that "Fate Trigger: The Novita" has been in development for about two years, and the project team hopes that the game will be launched in overseas markets next year.

As a team that once "hung by a thread", I was a little surprised that they were able to make such progress. During my two-hour experience, I didn't encounter any obvious bugs, and the product ideas were well executed. How did they do it?

The producers say they're not a brand new team, but a team of industry veterans who have worked on many projects together. They never gave up on the project because they believed in the direction of the project and the capabilities of the team - and even when the team was faced with being laid off by Bytes, they barely wavered.

At that darkest hour, it took them less than two months to reorganize, rebuild and rebuild. In the end, more than 90% of the members managed to stay in the team and together they formed the current Salos company. Today, the project team has more than 200 people.

During the game production process, the team didn't need much running-in to quickly set up the production pipeline. When they encounter some product problems, they can also solve them more skillfully.

Regarding the expectations for the game, Salos Studios said that as long as the project can support the team, they are satisfied. However, in my opinion, their will to survive has made them show a harder attitude in many places:

For example, they incorporated anti-plug-ins into the design framework from the beginning of the project, and directly made some plug-in functions impossible to achieve from the source. They also integrated self-developed technology on the basis of the capabilities of Tencent's ACE team to ensure that the project was not dragged down by plug-ins and black products as much as possible.

They are also envisioning the project's future esports model. The producer and I shared a lot of interesting ideas: for example, since the game is on all platforms, maybe in the setting of the game team, each team can have players who use mobile phones, controllers, and keyboards and mice, which brings a strange division of labor, etc.

Of course, these ideas are still very immature, but when you hear this idea, it is not surprising to look at the creativity in the game.

After talking to them, I'm even more uncertain about the success of Fate Trigger: The Novita: some of their designs are too creative but not validated by players; Even with some of the designs we've seen, we've never seen a project put them together.

But this kind of big stride is like a lever, it is full of dangers, but once it can be achieved, then the upper limit of the game may be more imaginative.

This article is from Xinzhi self-media and does not represent the views and positions of Business Xinzhi.If there is any suspicion of infringement, please contact the administrator of the Business News Platform.Contact: system@shangyexinzhi.com