Not long ago, Gyro-kun came into contact with a new war chess product "Awakening of the Heroes", and what attracted me at first was its very interesting product positioning - "National Style Open World War Chess Mobile Game". But after getting my hands on it, I found that the game is not only unique in terms of theme selection, but also very particular about its strategic gameplay.

This product is officially in public beta today, and the common Western fantasy and two-dimensional themes in war games on the market today, "Heroes Awakening" is set in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, with a traditional and classical "wife and sword" theme, which tells the story of a middle-aged patriotic general who avenges his wife and meets chivalrous people along the way.

What's more characteristic is the gameplay part of the game, the battles of "Heroes Awaken" show the breadth and depth of the war chess strategy well, a character can develop many branch genres, and the design of "elemental reaction" can make people play a kind of "burning the camp" and "flooding the golden mountain" strategy refreshing.

Gyro learned that "Heroes Awaken" was developed by an independent team and distributed by Kaiying Network. In the increasingly crowded and involuted war chess track, how is such a unique product ready to stand out? To this end, Gyro contacted the game's producer, "Silence", and exchanged views on topics such as the creation background, gameplay design, and team's understanding of the game category and users.

Integrating into the "open world", the "senior team" wants to make a different war game

Gyro: How many people are on the development team for Heroes Awakens? Has the team done other products before?

Silence: There are about 20 people involved in the development of this game, and the team has previously developed products such as "Three Kingdoms", "Chu River Han Realm", and "Martial Arts Heroes", most of which are strategy games.

"Three Kingdoms"

We are actually an "elderly R&D team", the average age of the members is about 40 years old, in the creation of the game, we will look for game inspiration from our own perception of life experience, for example, the theme of the game plot is "wife and sword", "wife" represents family, "sword" represents career. When people reach middle age, career and family need to be balanced, which is also the philosophy that we will face at this age.

Gyro: Now that the war chess track is also very volatile, what is the core competitiveness of "Heroes Awakening"?

Silence: In the past two years, war chess mobile games have indeed been produced frequently, and war chess players may be a little overwhelmed. But in fact, when we set up the project to do "Awakening of the Heroes" in the early days, we already had a certain judgment on the future situation, so at that time, we formulated the differentiation direction of our own products to ensure the competitiveness of the game, one is to make an open world war chess, and the other is to innovate in the battle, so we added the battle form of element fusion, and the third is to choose the background of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period that few people have dabbled in in the theme.

Gyro: Why is it the theme of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period?

Silence: I used to watch a Japan anime called "King of the World", and I was stimulated, Japan anime are telling the story of China's Spring and Autumn Warring States, but it is rare in our game industry, as a Chinese game practitioner, I hope to seriously make a game work with the theme of China's Warring States.

Gyro: Historical themes are often inseparable from the element of "national style", how do you understand the national style?

Silence: The national style, or traditional Chinese culture, as I understand it, is divided into "tangible" and "intangible". The tangible things are what we can see and hear, such as pre-Qin costumes, patterns, color schemes, etc., and we will integrate them into the shaping of the game world through art and sound effects.

The "invisible" part contains more, the morality of the sons of the Spring and Autumn Period, the chivalrous spirit, etc., these are the traditional treasures of our Chinese nation, and we will integrate these invisible elements into the specific gameplay and plot design.

Gyro: Open world is rare for a wargame game, why is it designed this way? How is the game reflected?

Silence: The history of the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period is very exciting, and we hope that players can freely experience the various humanistic content of that era. At the beginning of the project, we discussed this repeatedly and thought that the open world framework could meet our ideas well, because the core of the open world is a high degree of freedom, which is in line with our original intention. You'll find that we're not doing a very linear story, and the player's experience can be very free.

Learn from "Divine Realm: Original Sin 2" and do war chess with a high degree of freedom

Gyro: Some people think that the fragmented nature of mobile games limits the strategic fun of war chess, how does "Heroes Awaken" balance?

Silence: We had a lot of discussions about this issue at the beginning of the project, but I don't think the fragmentation of the mobile game is in conflict with the strategic fun of the game itself.

The combat process itself is very strategic and interesting, but players hate the meaningless liver material, as well as the various fixed-time, limited-time activities. Therefore, when planning the early user experience, we have made a reasonable distribution, such as brushing materials, cultivation and other gameplay, which players can complete through fragmented time. To challenge some difficult levels and some PVP settings, we have planned a weekly participation time, so that players can arrange their own time and try to be fun, but they don't need to be liver.

Gyro: It's cool to use elemental reactions to play AOE in the game, how did you come up with this design?

Silence: Elemental reactions are the core mechanics of this game's combat aspects, such as the fusion of water-based skills with fire-based skills, which will produce a large amount of steam, and the fusion of poison and fire skills will produce explosions.

At the beginning of the project, in addition to considering the common elements such as class restraint and terrain in the traditional war games, we were also thinking about how to add some novel and fun elements to the battle, and finally chose to borrow the gameplay of element fusion in "Divinity: Original Sin 2".

Gyro: Does the high degree of freedom experience emphasized before be reflected in the combat gameplay?

Silence: Our combat is actually very free, for example, the strength of each character in the game is balanced, there is no setting that the kryptonite character must be stronger, the game has more than 40 characters, no matter which character can be used as the core, build around it, this is the original intention of our design.

A character's skill pool

For example, our character movement and attack order are not restricted, which can extend the cooperation space between multiple characters, and there is a lot of operation space between each character's actions, and making good use of these free operation spaces is actually the biggest difference between masters and novices.

Gyro: The four-corner terrain is more common in the mobile game of war chess, why did "Heroes Awaken" make a hexagonal terrain? There seem to be a lot of traps in the level?

Silence: From the perspective of chess design, the biggest difference between hexagonal chess and quadrangular chess is the number of units surrounded by melee units, and hexagonal chess can be attacked by 6 melee units at the same time, so the flexibility and requirements of the positioning and encirclement strategy that players need to consider will be higher, making the game more strategic.

We did design a lot of mechanisms in the level, such as the fire barrel of the tinder, the rejection of horses, the barbarian camp, etc., different level elements have different functions, which can increase the fun of the level, and players can give full play to their imagination space to win the game when directing the battle on the spot.

Top: What is the concept of PVP for "Heroes Awakened" based on and how is it designed? Is it real-time or asynchronous?

Silence: We designed both real-time and asynchronous PVP modes. In the real-time part, we first considered the balance of the game, and we didn't want to design that kind of PVP with strong crushing, so we didn't bring the full amount of the development value into the real-time PVP of the game, so that players could experience a truly fair competition and battle. In terms of asynchronous PVP, we use the method of cultivating numerical substitution, in which players can experience happiness and revenge, and become a king and defeat a villain.

"War chess players are a high-quality user group"

Gyro: Why did you choose to issue it to Kaiying alone?

Silence: It is also the first time we have cooperated with Kaiying Network, because the strength of the other party has always been the MMO category, and we were a little nervous about cooperation at the beginning. But later, after several exchanges, I found that they still have a deep understanding of the online game of stand-alone works, and we saw the successful release of games such as "New Heaven and Dragon Slayer" and "The Legend of Sword and Fairy", and finally reached a cooperation.

The publishing team of Kaiying has given us a lot of tolerance, and attaches great importance to user experience in terms of operational philosophy, which is also very consistent with the concept of our production team, and overall the cooperation process is very happy.

Gyro: War chess mobile game is a relatively niche category, what are your expectations for the launch of "Heroes Awakened"?

Silence: Although Zhanqi is a niche category, Zhanqi players themselves are very high-quality user groups, they are wise, rational and divergent in thinking, and have high taste, and once there is a product that can meet their demands, their viscosity is also very high.

The original intention of our project is to provide a game that can be played for a long time for like-minded people, so in terms of expectations, in addition to the turnover figures, we are most concerned about the player experience, hoping to bring them a long-term play of the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States War Chess game.

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