Text/Yiguang Flow

In recent years, companies that seem to have some strength are hiding big moves.

Not long ago, the official version of "7 Days of Killing" was tested, and Grape Jun spent a lot more time shopping for YouTube-related videos, and accidentally brushed up on a new game "CrisisX - Your Last Survival" (hereinafter referred to as CrisisX) that had just been tested in Southeast Asia and sold very well.

A simple check,What's interesting is that this game was originally tested in Southeast Asia,But there are a lot of European and American anchors in the trial and video,It can be seen that the test scope is very small,The number of single video playbacks is not high,But there are a lot of anchors who upload videos and live broadcast trials,At the same time, it also received a wave of praise from players,From the side,It can also be said that this game is also a small wave of fire overseas。

There are more and more videos of CrisisX on YouTube

From the player reviews, you can see the anticipation for this new work
I didn't pay much attention to it at first, but unexpectedly, I saw CrisisX again in the circle of friends - just a few days after the game was tested, Daniel, CEO of Hero Games, reposted the video of the game and liked the vehicle model in a wave.

This seems to span a little distance from attention and praise, which is quite unusual.

So, after some verification, I learned that CrisisX is the open world survival construction class (hereinafter referred to as SOC class) project that Hero Games is currently developing, and it is speculated from the completeness of today's test package that the development time and team size of Hero Games are not small, and it seems that it is quietly hiding a big move.

Speaking of hero games, the related products that impressed me were the "Ming Tide" released globally by Kulo Games, which he invested, and "Black Myth: Wukong", which was about to be released globally by Youke, and now that I have seen the quality of CrisisX, I suddenly feel that this low-key Beijing factory behind the scenes is going to take the stage on its own this time, and it is also investing less than 10 billion in the SOC track before and after Tencent NetEase.

01

This new product,

I'm afraid I'm going to roll the SOC into the sky

Frankly, my first impression of CrisisX was amazing; When I learned that it was a product made by a domestic team, I was very surprised.

The reason for the amazing is that the quality of the game is very good, and the intuitive feeling is the level of a first-line mobile game masterpiece. It can be seen that the graphic expression is a major focus of this game, and the game's materials and light and shadow have a strong realistic color, which makes the scene look more realistic and more infectious. The following set of images is a good example. The animated image of this article has been compressed, and the actual effect will be better.

Not only the scenes, but also the character modeling emphasizes the stylistic characteristics of realism. Just look at the preset character model at the beginning of the game, you can find that the character model not only has high precision, but also rarely appears in the material details of the domestic customary grinding techniques, but emphasizes the roughness of the skin and clothing more realistically, and the different character models well present the characteristics of people in various countries and regions.

If you look closely, you can see that more details are also in place. For example, the modeling of horses is also very realistic, and the movements of interacting with them are also silky. In addition, models such as vehicles are different from other models, emphasizing the texture and reflective effect of metal, which is also very close to the real performance.

It can be said that the highly unified realistic style of the whole game makes CrisisX look very impressive, and it is also difficult to immediately think that this is a domestic game.

And the amazing thing is not only the graphics, but the feeling of playing the game is also different from that of regular mobile games.

The early experience of CrisisX is very immersive, and if you ignore the virtual buttons of mobile games, then its experience will be very similar to that of PC games. In my observations, the reasons come from several sources:

One is the exaggerated and compact plot, after the game chooses people, a plot CG will be played, which is very fast-paced, and a little exaggerated. Specifically, the shots in CG are designed to be taken in one shot, but the content in the shots is supposed to be plots in multiple different time periods.

For example, the bar is hilarious, the lights are suddenly flashing, the zombies are protruding, the corpse tide is coming, and the criminals are grabbing guns...... These operations are almost complete within three or five steps of the player's walk. The pacing is exaggerated, but the sense of conflict is also strong, giving a sense of urgency, and having to quickly accept the series of plots of escape, boarding, snatching, hitting the ship, falling overboard, and landing on the island, which is the transition to the map at the beginning of the game.

The second is guided design. The game doesn't have a traditional mobile tutorial and doesn't force players to do certain tasks or teach certain actions. More often than not, the game uses some guided design that conforms to the survival instinct, so that the player will naturally become familiar with the basic controls of the game, such as using the terrain to guide you in the direction of travel, and then placing a knife and a wave of mobs along the way, or an axe and a row of trees, then the player will naturally try to use weapons or tools.

There are many similar guided tutorials, and you can even see the flow of the first half hour of the game as an immersive, semi-open-ended tutorial with a certain plot. This is very different from the mandatory teaching of traditional mobile games that teach players all the operations in 3 or 5 minutes, and it is also different from the pure PC survival game that allows players to let themselves go completely, so it can be said that it is somewhere in between. But such a design, the immersion brought by the mobile game, will indeed be greatly improved.

The third is non-traditional UI and control settings, which is very interesting, traditional games will habitually put most of the controls and function menus in the UI of the main interface, which does save jump steps, but the experience is also very fragmented. Many of CrisisX's UI and controls only appear after the player interacts with the corresponding object, and although this kind of design is a little deeper, it is more realistic and reasonable, and it also weakens the sense of separation.

The fourth is the polishing of more details, such as cutting down trees will drop sawdust, riding a horse and riding a car will have interactive actions, and there will be hints of the camera zooming in when encountering important areas, etc., in addition, there is a dog that accompanies you in the game, giving you some hints from time to time, or rushing up to give the enemy a bite.

After having a certain amount of exploration experience, players can also discover the map where the game is located and nearby resources through the buildings along the way, and then the game enters the stage of accumulating resources, during which they can explore alone, or they can form a team to build a base, and even later form a larger union to build a survivor base.

It can be seen that this game emphasizes the post-apocalyptic humanity and competition, from the beginning of the CG in which people compete for ships and push each other in the face of the corpse tide, to mark map resource points to attract people to compete with each other, and it is said that there may be a large team competition for high rarity resource points in the later stage, and it is estimated that this game will develop towards the zombie apocalyptic environment depicted in "The Walking Dead".

It's worth mentioning that the game's map is also very large, according to the ruler, it is almost 30kmx40km, which is full of large and small resource points, monster gathering places, minerals, and different terrain and landforms. It is to be expected that large teams or unions will inevitably focus on competing for rare and productive resource points, but small and medium-sized teams, even lone wolves and scenic parties, will be able to find a suitable place to settle in this mega map.

What surprised me was that CrisisX didn't look like a hero game at first glance, or even like a domestic game, but it was slapped in the face.

You must know that the direction of self-developed projects of Hero Games in the past is very scattered, and it is difficult for us to find obvious commonalities in these products.

However, the emergence of CrisisX is not without a trace, on the one hand, the sandbox category and the SOC category have a lot in common, and the accumulation exists, on the other hand, after inquiring, I learned that the last work of the R&D team of this game was actually "Peak Battleship", and this product actually has a deep accumulation of realism.

From the overall point of view, CrisisX is undoubtedly working hard in the direction of next-generation mobile games, high-quality industrial mobile games, and innovative mobile games, which is also in line with the increasing competition in the current market. Then it is not difficult to judge that CrisisX is likely to be running to break through the track, or compete for the top position on the track.

02

Now that you are entering the SOC, do you still have a head?

Although the ambition of the new product of Hero Games is not small, it has to be said that there are really a lot of domestic SOCs on the market at present, and CrisisX seems to be a bit late, which inevitably makes people wonder if there is still a chance in this track.

It is undeniable that the SOC category is gradually becoming mature. First of all, with the entry of multiple products, the number of domestic mobile game players playing SOC is increasing, and after playing for many years, everyone is also familiar with this category, and they will definitely not ignore this kind of game as they did in the early years.

Secondly, the commercialization idea of SOC games is also clearer. In the past, when SOC games were mentioned, they immediately conjured up classic apocalyptic survival building games such as "7 Days of Kill" and "RUST". However, commercialization is a big problem for these buyout games to be transferred to mobile games, but fortunately, over the years, the testing of many products has finally established a mature commercialization mechanism.

Finally, the themes of the combination of tags such as apocalypse, zombies, and survival have a strong eye-catching ability in many fields such as literature, film and television, such as various zombie films, as well as TV series such as "The Walking Dead", and online novels with related themes have never been lacking. In the field of games, a number of domestic games have been tested, which has also proved that this theme is really absorbed.

Of course, SOC games also have shortcomings, for example, the overall quality of SOC mobile games on the market is not too high, and they are not as good as the two-dimensional and other tracks, which provides a certain degree of upgrade space for new products. Another example is the optimization of experience, and the experience of some mainstream SOCs is constantly updated, and it is slowly transforming into a boring liver material process.

On the basis of the above, if you want to make a product with track deterrence, you must have multiple elements at the same time, such as quality, gameplay differentiation, mid-to-late stage content planning, experience details, etc., after all, SOC games not only have deception in the end of the world, but also have elements of self-achievement such as resisting environmental pressure and improving their own power.

And these elements are estimated to be the main targets of CrisisX. After the trial in the past two days, I discussed with friends in the industry, and most of them thought that CrisisX seemed to be deliberately avoiding some of the drawbacks of SOC mobile games and SOC online games, such as excessive values and a strong sense of part-time work. In CrisisX, there is no sign of imbalance in the values involved in PvP, and it is possible that they are deliberately controlled in terms of gameplay design, numerical planning, and even payment point considerations.

At present, the beta version speculates on the possible payment points, one is to pay for the appearance of casual players and small R, the game modeling is so exquisite, and a companion dog and a mobility vehicle (horse, car) are also arranged, and the follow-up is likely to be based on the content that these players can use for a long time and watch to do the appearance or auxiliary function payment.

The second is the competitive consumption around large resource points in the later stage, from the perspective of CrisisX's large map resource distribution, rare resources must be the core of Pan Technology, and it will also be a must for large guilds or multi-person teams, and consumption will inevitably occur under competition, which is easy to evolve into a GVG situation similar to the later stage of SLG, and the corresponding payment points are also easy to do. Even if players don't want to work part-time or don't like PVP, the huge size of the map can also provide second-level resource points to build a home and avoid the competitive red zone of large teams.

Of course, at present, the game is still dominated by small team competition and exploration, and it is far from developing to the late stage. However, it is only these elements in the early and middle stages that CrisisX has accumulated a certain reputation, indicating that it is feasible for SOC to weaken the value and emphasize appearance, function and competition.

In the past few days, the crowd in the game has become more and more complicated, at first it was people from several countries in Southeast Asia, and then European and American big brothers and anchors poured in, in the past two days, even many domestic players came in to join in the fun, and once the server was crowded - it is conceivable that the official estimate did not expect that there would be various foreign IPs into the game trial at the beginning.

Many players are also a little impatient for this game

Well, at least for hero games, the direction of the new CrisisX is feasible, and its potential is also worth our attention.

03

Hero Games sees an opportunity for SOC?

After a few days of testing, my feeling is that CrisisX is very close to its full form, and it is likely that the game will have a big move soon.

And looking back at the past products of Hero Games, it seems that the success rate this time is also quite high. You must know that the track shootout sandbox "Peak Battleship", "Peak Tank", "Gunfight for All", "Creation and Magic", and "Ace Wars: Civilization Restart" have all achieved good results, and the products they have invested in are also popular and popular, such as Kulo's "Singing Tide", You Ke's "Black Myth: Wukong", etc.

It can be said that Hero Games and Daniel have always had a tricky eye for products. Looking at the layout of hero games in the past from the perspective of the present, you will also find that many of their actions are quite advanced.

For example, in the early days, everyone was rolling MOBA, but they used military navigation niche tracks to make a name for themselves; When the two waves of FPS and sandbox arrived, they also had the opportunity to harvest products; Since then, they have dug up two potential stocks on 3D second tour and domestic 3A.

Today, CrisisX is a project that has been accumulated for many years in the direction of realistic rendering and has accumulated enough product scale capabilities. I have also communicated with technical friends in the industry, and I think it is also wise to use U3D for this project, after all, on the one hand, it is difficult to recruit talents from other engines in Beijing, and on the other hand, it is impossible to avoid backward compatibility to make a big DAU, and it is easier to achieve this with U3D, compared to high-grade and high-quality pictures, but the requirements for the engine are not as high as the requirements for the art literacy of developers.

The beta version achieves this level, as long as the follow-up values and operations do not step on the pitfalls, CrisisX is placed in the mobile game market, and I am afraid that it will really be able to enter the first series of competition in a short period of time. Properly functioned, perhaps Hero Games will seize the opportunity of the SOC and take a big leap forward.

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