Text/Qiuqiu & Thomas's Skull

On September 20, "Seven Days World" started the mobile technology test. Since its first overseas exposure, this game has been the focus of discussion among players.

For example, when it was originally called Once Human, it seemed to be a new weird SOC (survival, open world, building) game with a bit of a twist.

But later, its behavior in reality also began to be "weird": angrily brushing its presence overseas, not selling values, and preemptively making Palu like...... In April this year, "Seven Days World" also raised the banner of the uprising, and satirized the phenomenon of the industry cheating Krypton in a black humorous way through the video, which was well received and supported by players.

After its launch, the game won the second place on Steam's global best-selling list

"A lot of players have spoken for us, saying that Seven Days is the best online game he's ever played in years...... I blushed a little when I saw this support. Some time ago, producer Xiaobao chatted with Grape Jun about the idea behind their many rebellious remarks and rebellious decisions from project initiation to marketing, as well as the development process of this game.

Paraphrase: "I'm 100% sure that this game will be the best game of the year after the open beta"

Xiaobao believes that these decisions are not made for the sake of mavericks, but that they need these designs to make "Seven Days World" the true color, "Maybe everyone will think that we are slow and special, but when the SOC matures, our ideas may become a new paradigm for this category and become the object of learning for other games in the future." ”

01

I made four editions in two years,

to make your own open world

Grape: How did you first come up with the idea of making a SOC? Is it because of the success of The Day After Tomorrow?

Xiaobao: It's not the influence of other products, it's more a product that combines the team's interests and market trends.

First, our team likes survival games and weird stories, and everyone usually plays games such as Conan Exile and Don't Starve; Some colleagues watch almost every episode of "Stranger Things", and they also watch "The Lost South" and Cthulhu-related content.

Conan the Exile

Second, at the beginning of 2020, when the game was established, the trend of going overseas in the domestic market increased, and we also hope to make a product that global players like.

Therefore, we looked at the global trend of SOC categories and new weird themes at that time, and found that although SOC is relatively niche in China, it is a trend of increasing and replacing traditional MMOs in the global market - in addition to triple-A masterpieces, large-scale games in recent years are more SOC, or games that include survival and multiplayer cooperative competition, such as "Valhalla", "Sons of the Forest" and "Phantom Beast Palu".

Phantom Beast Palu

The trend is similar for new weird topics. For example, the backrooms, the strange talk of rules, and the dream core that have exploded in recent years...... This is a testament to the fact that this type of content is gradually becoming popular around the world.

Seven Days of World

If we do things that foreign countries are already good at, such as western and samurai, we will definitely not be able to do European, American and Japan manufacturers. But to do a slow-growing, growing theme, we still have a chance. And there are not many products in this field, we will have more space and room for creation.

Grape: In your opinion, what is the biggest charm of New Strange Talk?

Xiaobao: Essentially, it's a seemingly scientific way to explain unscientific things. This strong contrast makes it easier to attract the interest of users.

In addition, it also has a strong co-creation attribute, and a lot of content can be developed based on daily life, without the need to build complex frameworks and narrative logic. Just like the popular rule myth before, many people can create their own things.

With a low threshold, we will get started faster, and it will be easier for users to resonate, and maybe more users will participate in the creation in the future.

Grape Jun: The decision-making logic sounds very smooth, how was the internal support of the company at the beginning?

Xiaobao: At that time, the company was also looking for opportunities for globalization, so the project was officially approved, and it was actually approved at the first time.

Grape Jun: At that time, did you think that this project would be done for many years, or that it would be of a very high standard?

Xiaobao: There is an expectation. From the beginning, we wanted to make a global full-platform product form, and we wanted it to have a texture close to that of overseas top competitors, so we had high requirements for team size and technical capabilities.

But at the same time, we don't use the content consumption model to make the open world, but more hope to set up gameplay rules to give players an experience that can be repeated and created by themselves, so the team size is more streamlined than other open world games. Seven Days World had just over 20 people when it was first established, but after a year of development, it had increased to about 40 people, and now it has about 100 people not counting the middle office - this size may be one-third of that of other large game teams.

Grape: After deciding on the direction, how did you deduce the current product form? For example, how did you say that the gameplay rule drive came about?

Xiaobao: Since it is an open-world game, the first step must be to build the world, we found a lot of data cases from European, American and Japan manufacturers, and gradually explored their design logic through analysis and disassembly.

The second step is to make the world move, which refers to how the world loops, and we thought of the running logic of the season system and multiple scripts, which drives the player's experience for a period of time through the gameplay rules; The second is how players experience the world, which may have to supplement a lot of combat, production, construction, interaction and other systems.

In fact, by the second step, the game can be experienced normally. But if we compare it to a person, the first two steps just shape the flesh and bones, so the third step is how to inject soul into the world and make the world and the player "live". In this regard, we have tried to do a lot of humanistic care and content experience design, not to overdefine the player, let them play roles in the game world freely, and enjoy a vivid world that is not written by code.

Grape Jun: Have you thought of these three steps from the beginning? Did it go well or not?

Xiaobao: It can only be said that it is hindsight...... In fact, in the first step of building an open world, we stepped on a lot of pitfalls. Together with the demo, we iterated four versions of "World" in the early stage of development before we got the current product form - it took us half a year to verify the opportunity on average.

Grape-kun: If you're so tormented, why did you choose the open world as the base?

Xiaobao: In my opinion, there are two main types of survival building games: one is a rules-driven survival sandbox, such as Minecraft; The second is content+rule-driven SOC, such as "Scum", "Fallout" and "RUST".

If we're going to do a new weird story, we can't just be rules-driven, giving players an empty space to do their own weird talk. Therefore, the open world needs to be a carrier that integrates the environment, content and rules, and it also needs to be driven by POI (Point of Interest) to maximize the contrast of weird stories.

Grape Jun: How do you understand the design of POI? Do you have a history of it?

Xiaobao: This is a common practice used by Japanese companies when designing open worlds, such as the huge volcano in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the golden tree in Elden Ring, both of which serve as giant visual spectacles when players first enter the game, giving people an impact and allowing players to actively explore out of curiosity, which is actually a manifestation of POI drive.

At the beginning of "Elden Ring", you can see the golden tree that runs through the heavens and the earth

In "Seven Days World", we also hope that there will be more POI-driven content, because the more POIs, the easier it is for players to wander through boredom and interest, and the resulting game experience will be more contrasting and exciting. With a normal SOC, the POI will be less, and it will be more like an experience of exploring in the wild.

Grape King: Hanging the player's appetite, the feeling of three steps and one scene, five steps and one painting.

Xiaobao: But "Seven Days World" needs to pay more attention to the POI of the human environment, and you can't just say that I give you a bunch of weeds and say that it's weird.

The theme of weird stories emphasizes that it is closely related to the human environment, for example, if you go to an auto repair shop, the wheels of the car are floating in the air; Or in the supermarket, you see a bunch of monsters doing the job of a cashier, so you feel weird.

Grape-kun: So the open world of "Seven Days World" is actually borrowed from the ideas of Japan game manufacturers?

Xiaobao: Not exactly, we've been exploring which open-world design logic is better suited for Seven Days World.

In the early days, we chose Ubisoft, Bethesda and Nippon as the objects of study, among which the Ubisoft-style open world is a series of missions and worlds, which is not very suitable for the design requirements of the second and third steps of our project, and cannot give players a more free experience. So we learned more about Ubisoft's engineering system, production pipelines, and R&D processes.

As for Company B and the Japanese factory, we took a portion of each. B Company is good at content-driven, and its open world is alive, such as the "Elder Scrolls" series and the "Fallout" series; Nissow is good at using rules and POIs to guide the user experience, such as the "Legend of Zelda" series and "Elden Ring" just mentioned...... Eventually, we formed our own open-world design logic through combination and repeated construction.

02

Don't do SOC with MMO thinking 

Grape: We've just talked about it so much, but it's just the first step in game design, so isn't the second step more difficult?

Xiaobao: The second step is how to make the world move, and how to achieve the experience that SOC should have. The difficulty in this matter is not the work itself, but the change of attitude.

Many domestic game manufacturers, including ourselves, used to make RPG games based on numerical payment, so we had a great inertia in our understanding of SOC values at the beginning.

For example, in "Seven Days World", players need to cut wood to build, so how should wood resources be distributed to players? Previous manufacturers may follow the approach of MMORPGs and strictly control the resources that players can obtain - in MMOs, most of the resources can be turned into numerical increases for characters, and unplanned resource distribution is easy to destroy the player's ecology and accelerate the consumption of game life.

However, the SOC does not have high requirements for numerical values and has strong feedback. Because it's a survival game, players have a low starting point, and the first thing to think about is to eat, drink, and then develop technology, manage the territory, and then fight and grow - so the value in the SOC serves the game experience, not who is better than who in the MMO.

Under this logic, you need to give players more growth changes, such as first-level technology primitives, second-level car-making, and third-level airplanes...... This can make users feel the value of hard work, rather than upgrading technology and adding 5 points of combat power - I think the attitude towards values and cultivation is the essential difference between MMO and SOC, if you can't get this, you will only be complained by players: another MMO comes out.

Grape: How hard could it be to do that?

Xiaobao: Frankly speaking, there are very few plans in China that are good at experience design. It can only be said that compared with exploring the logic of the open world, its trial and error adjustment cycle is shorter.

Grape Jun: Now that you have the concept, how should you implement and implement it in the game next?

Xiaobao: As I just mentioned, it focuses on content, POI and gameplay guidance, and downplays numerical values and linear growth. For example, at the specific execution level, we combined the solutions of other SOC games to adopt a season system at the world loop level, giving players a limited and differentiated experience.

Grape: Are there any players who don't understand your decision to make a season system and clear your data?

Xiaobao: It's really hard to understand from the perspective of MMO, after all, the fruits of everyone's efforts have been emptied; But in fact, many SOC users like this mechanism, thinking that it can bring a new experience - SOC is not like MMO, it does not have so much content support, and it cannot be said that it gives users 10,000 level technology to slowly rise, which goes against the core experience of this category.

In addition, we are also willing to communicate with players, accept and respond to doubts, and create a better experience together. For example, instead of completely emptying the player's stats, we put them in a player territory called "Timeless Island", and at the beginning of each season, players can choose some items and bring them out;

If some users really need to play until they retire, Seven Days World will provide them with permanent servers and seasons in the future...... We want to make the numerical experience something really fun, rather than forcing people to pay for it.

Grape-kun: Were you so resolute in the beginning?

Xiaobao: At first, I was not so resolute, and although I tried my best to reduce the degree of numerical payment, I still retained the possibility. However, as we do it, the industry ecology has changed, so we decided to directly kill the value payment, and we will not do it in the future.

03

"In the game,

The least important thing is to play the game."

Grape Jun: Then let's talk about the third step, how do you embody humanistic care? Does it depend on the plot?

Xiaobao: That's one thing, but it's not the main thing. The core is to find a way to provide emotional value to players. For example, we have launched a pet system like Kru (anomalous).

Grape Jun: Does the name Crewe have anything to do with "Phantom Beast Palu"?

Xiaobao: Actually, we made Crewe very early, but after "Phantom Beast Palu" became popular, we enriched their number and function. After all, in the new weird world, anomalies and monsters are common, and since there are, you can get them into your home to cultivate, interact with, and help—we were adding and refining this system when we started the co-research test in July 2023.

Grape King: What is the value of Crewe?

Xiaobao: From the perspective of traditional game design, it's actually quite unreasonable.

First of all, it doesn't sell for money, because we think that the containment itself is a part of the world, making the player really feel like they're living in a weird story, and if there's a charge for this thing, does that mean I have to pay for both looks in the world?

At the same time, a lot of Crewe's designs revolve around a sense of companionship and experience. For example, there are a lot of "big cats" in "Seven Days World" that look like cats, but are bigger than people - many users can also understand our design intentions, such as building their own houses into cat cafes, inviting friends to pet and suck cats together.

Cat café buildings crafted and shared by players,

Image source watermark

In the future, we will also launch more colors and types of "big cats", and if you like dogs, we may also launch corresponding content in the future...... To put it bluntly, we wanted Seven Days World to be designed with a human touch so that players would remember us and come back from time to time - if it was just a naked "you play, I make money" model, then I don't think it would last long.

The "big cat" of various suits in the current game

Grape-kun: But there are also people who say that you always borrow from other games, and that you are a stitching monster.

Xiaobao: The stitching of SOC games is a trend, after all, the essence of this category is to simulate the survival and life of users, since everyone's real-life content is very similar, it is normal for the design of the game to have a certain convergence, the core lies in the process of learning, don't lose your true colors - you sew a lot of things, but you don't have your own, then this is a failed stitching.

And successful stitching has long become the design paradigm of subsequent games. For example, the classic red and blue containers pioneered by "Diablo" are used as health and mana design, which have been used in many subsequent games.

Image source network

Therefore, I think stitching and borrowing is an inevitable stage of the development of the category, for example, MMO basically does not have the situation of who sews whom, because it has formed a set of paradigms, and everyone thinks that MMO games should look like this - maybe in 5 or 10 years, maybe everyone will no longer discuss the issue of SOC stitching, and "Seven Days World" may also become the object of learning for other games in the future.

Of course, I hope that this category will never enter the stage of a paradigm, and the SOC still needs to remain alive and needs a lot of creators to explore different things.

Grape Jun: But sewing too much may not be a good thing for the game and users: the game can't get the most attractive points for users; Users can't find a hard demand to play this game.

Xiaobao: I think the answer to this question is diverse, just like the idea of "Seven Days of World", we don't want to use a certain point to constrain users, and we don't want us to rely on just one thing to keep users.

There can be many reasons for users to play a game. It may be that you have met a friend and stayed because of social connections; It may also be left behind because of the farming system, the house-building system, and even the combat system and genre building that you like to play...... Users are far smarter than developers, and they can really feel whether this thing is fun or boring.

The content ecology related to the game building a house

The conventional wisdom of game design is that we want to provide a process for the player, but that doesn't fit into the SOC. MMOs already have a standard paradigm, and if you don't do that, players won't be satisfied. But the SOC is not yet at this stage, and we should think about how to provide more emotional value and create more fun.

We will also make "Timeless Island" a UGC paradise in the future. For example, players can build a track drag racing and build a CS venue to hold multiplayer shooting...... If there is an entertainment ecosystem of social interaction between users, then they will naturally enjoy the game.

Game Eternal Island gameplay

In fact, the product concept that "Seven Days World" chose to do this is also borrowed from a sentence mentioned by the head of our business department: "In a bar, the least important thing is to drink." ”

To put it into practice: in "Seven Days World", playing "Seven Days World" is the least important thing.

04

Make a limited game that doesn't make users anxious

Grape Jun: Actually, think about it, are there not so many SOC games that choose to do ecology and UGC? Do you still prefer content consumption, stand-alone or MMO? Are there any other past cases of Seven Days World's product ideas?

Xiaobao: There are some cases, such as Final Fantasy 14, which gives us the impression that don't tie the player's time to a value, the player will have fun himself.

Although Final Fantasy 14 is an MMORPG game, it will not let players spend too much time on leveling up and brushing up the numerical development of equipment, and after each new expansion update, everyone may be able to finish the main story and seasonal equipment in a few days. Therefore, players of this game can create a rich social and content ecology, for example, "Final Fantasy 14" has a gameplay called RP shop, which means that players substitute into the game world, open a store like an NPC, and role-play.

To put it bluntly, where users invest their time and energy, your game ecosystem will become. If you let users level up non-stop, they won't have time to do anything else, they'll have no money to consume other content, just like the only way to get into the industrial revolution is to free labor from the land.

And the inspiration of RUST is that if you want to open the world, you must follow through the freedom of the open world to the end. HOW FREE CAN RUST BE? There may be less than one-tenth of the players who play the official server of this game, and more than 90% of the remaining players are playing self-built servers, and you can set up different gameplay and rules to create a rich content experience - the script mode of "Seven Days World" was born under the influence of this ecology.

The game's current different scripts and update plans

So although we have made a lot of innovative and maverick things, this is not a delusion that arises out of thin air, after all, there are products that have been done and done well.

Grape Jun: Do domestic and mobile SOC users not appreciate the "freedom" set? After all, they may have been affected by the numerical payment and gameplay guidance for a long time.

Xiaobao: The nature of "Seven Days World" is that it is compatible and free, and it does not exclude any user. For example, we hope that the mobile terminal and the PC terminal will exchange data to provide better services for mobile game players; For example, at first, the user may think that the game is a bit strange and not quite in line with the experience habits, but if he can sink in, he will find that the non-anxiety experience brought by "Seven Days World" is important.

Because many domestic games use anxiety to force users to continue to experience or pay, but I think the pressure on users is very great now, and games should decompress them.

Grape: What do you think is creating anxiety? Why does "Seven Days World" make users not anxious?

Xiaobao: It's easy to understand, for example, in online games, if you don't have krypton, the level is low, the value is poor, you can't participate in many activities, and PVP is always killed in seconds - you were beaten by the big guy, and if you count the damage, you still owe people a few lives. It's obviously the anxious gaming ecosystem, where you're always worried about falling behind, worrying about not being able to keep up with the big army.

But not in Seven Days World.

First, it doesn't sell values;

Second, you can have 100 ways to develop, and everyone can choose the one they like;

Third, the gameplay design is free, and it does not say which game you have to participate in, or what conditions you have to meet to participate;

Fourth, the game ecosystem is relatively fair and harmonious. The game does not need to be led by the boss to clear the level, and three ordinary players can be better than the boss in a group, including users who often help each other, even if some people will interfere with the experience of other players, we also try our best to communicate and iterate to reduce the impact;

Fifth, the design of our season system and script can also help players reduce the pressure of the experience. Players can freely choose PVP, PVE and other gameplay modes, and they can also make it easier to keep up with the big army because the script is reopened and everyone returns to the same starting line...... These designs are also something we are proud of.

Players can participate in the script in a variety of ways

Grape: Actually, many games are doing a season system now, what do you think of this phenomenon?

Xiaobao: From a macro point of view, all games can be divided into finite games and infinite games.

Infinite games, like traditional MMOs, can be played forever with no permanent ending; Limited games have a clear endgame gameplay, and users can allocate their energy according to their time, such as single-player, MOBA, and battle royale games, where they can play for a while when they have time and don't play when they don't have time - this is difficult to achieve in MMOs and numerical cards.

It's just that the earliest users had fewer forms of entertainment and were willing to devote their time to infinite games, but now users have fragmented time and infinite games have begun to be anxious, so they are considering using limited games to alleviate this anxiety and meet the user's experience needs.

For example, I used to play MMOs, and if my guild was at a disadvantage in this server, I knew that I would be weak after 1 year and weak for 2 years, so I wouldn't want to play. But in "Seven Days World", if you are weak this season, it does not mean that you will be weak next season, and you will feel that you will always have a chance.

Grape Jun: Is it true that in addition to SOC, there will be more categories that can use this idea in the future?

Xiaobao: Actually, everyone has been thinking about this for a long time - you will find that more than 90% of the big DAU games on the market are doing limited games.

Such as MOBA, battle royale, party games, racing sports, SLG...... Limited games have been a trend for a long time, but the loop structure of different games is different, some are a few minutes per game, and some may have a day or two, a month or two.

Grape Jun: After all, we are using limited time and content design to reduce anxiety and adapt to users' fragmented entertainment habits.

Xiaobao: After all, when a person sees the end, he has a sense of purpose and achievement, and his anxiety will naturally decrease a lot.

For example, if I tell you to work hard in life, and after 10,000 years, you will find that it is very desperate; But if I tell you that life is only 100 years, you will feel that your life is limited, but you will have a sense of stability that your life is over.

Grape: So eternal life is also a curse.

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