Text/Nine Lotus Treasure Lamp

"Returning to the Dragon Tide" is finally about to be launched.

Almost from the first exposure, the game has received a lot of attention. In the industry, it has not only won several awards from the China Audio and Digital Association and the China Game Innovation Competition, but also received government funding support for many times. At the market level, according to the current official website, the number of pre-registered players has exceeded 8 million.

Grape Jun believes that the first game of a new game label can gain the attention and recognition of the industry and players, which can be regarded as a good start.

This past weekend, the "Return to the Dragon Tide" project team conducted a public beta preview live broadcast. In this live broadcast, there were two points that sparked a lot of discussion that night: one was that you could get 141 draws for free when you opened the server, and the other was that the UP card pool launched a "non-crooked pool" mechanism. These two benefits have caused a lot of discussion in the community. What kind of courage made them make the change of "sending lottery numbers and cutting card pools"?

I think it's probably a good time to get acquainted with the game again. Just last week, I approached the game's project team and had a conversation with them.

Here's a curated transcript of the conversation:

01

"We want to get into the capillaries of the national tide."

Grape Jun: What do you mean by "national tide"?

Project team: At the beginning of the project, the concepts of "national tide" and "new national style" were already popular. But from the perspective of the game market, although there will be games to launch related character skins, no one has dedicated to this theme yet.

In our eyes, the first thing to show is "country" - there will be two meanings in this. The first layer refers to the traditional Chinese culture, and some traditional elements have traditional colors, which is the core of what we are doing in this game; The second layer is the interpretation of contemporary Chinese culture, that is, our rich regional culture. China's cultural image is formed by these regional cultures, and we believe that it is the best expression of contemporary culture.

In terms of "trend", we hope that through a unique aesthetic expression, more young people will appreciate, like, and even admire these cultures, so as to form a "cultural phenomenon" and then form a "trend".

Grape King: What are the details in the game to show the "national tide"?

Project Team: One of our logics is to "go off the beaten path".

There are many cities and regions with regional characteristics in China, and each city and region has its own unique living environment, cultural environment and cultural atmosphere. Let's go deep into their "capillaries" to feel, to experience, and then to structure and present the world of "Returning to the Dragon Tide".

As long as we grasp the essence of each regional characteristic culture and integrate them with local people, objects and places, we can show the trend culture with the most social background.

For example, the characteristic buildings of different regions are the objects of our key expression. The first block of our game, "Zhongpu District", is a reference to Chongqing Hongya Cave, and some graffiti on its streets and some retro signs and light signs make people feel like they are in Chongqing. We also designed some places to listen to books and play mahjong to add flavor to this traditional culture. In our preview live broadcast, you can also see that the second block, the "Lion District", largely restores some of Guangzhou's architectural features, such as arcade buildings.

Some new scenes in the Lion District in this preview livestream

In terms of character design, the character costumes have also been repeatedly polished by the team, which not only incorporates some ancient patterns unique to the region, but also absorbs the trendy styles loved by young people.

In addition to the visuals, the design of the dialect will also convey an auditory sense of "immersion" to the user. We believe that it is most direct to shape the atmosphere of the entire characteristic culture through the linguistic environment.

Based on the design of these details, players can feel that the "Kowloon neighborhood" they are in is both familiar and unfamiliar in "Return to the Dragon Tide". We also hope that through the construction of this worldview and scene, we can arouse the player's "sense of curiosity" to the greatest extent - there are all kinds of strange stories hidden in such a familiar scene, and I want to explore it well.

We think this method of building is interesting and unique in the entire market, and players can also have a more similar feeling of "regional characteristics" and "national tide".

Grape: Now about the game, how would you describe it?

Project Team: Although "Return to the Dragon Tide" has gone through several iterations, our original intention has never wavered: we want to make a national tide action game with innovative cultural presentation, recognizable game content, distinctive themes, and refreshing gameplay.

We really want to make the concept of Guochao a prominent cultural label in our games. So we have been doing three things, the art style is carried out to the end, the pursuit of the ultimate sense of action, and the continuous improvement of 3D art quality, all of which are to better present the temperament of the national tide.

02

"I want to resonate more with young people"

Grape: Since the beginning of this year, there has been a lot of discussion about games, have you seen it? What's the mood?

Project Team: Many of us in the team are very concerned about community evaluation.

So far, there have been a lot of changes in the game, whether it is the plot lines, the core of the battle, the mode of operation, the cultivation system, the commercialization, and even the current and novice experience in the early stage of the game, all of which have changed qualitatively from before.

It's not just about listening to the players, it's also about the objective issues we analyze from the perspective of gameplay and data. In the data, we can realistically see the retention and performance of players in different playstyles, as well as the number of times they have experienced them, and so on. This allows us to tell which ones players really like and which ones they don't want to play.

Grape: What specific changes have been made to the game now?

Project Team: We've made adjustments to the game in multiple dimensions.

For example, at the level of story content. I hope that our content is more in line with the style that users want now, such as focusing on character building, and making the main character more fleshed out in the story.

Specifically, first, I think that no matter what the content of the game is, the characters that everyone loves in the end are the characters. Therefore, in the process of advancing the story, players will hope that the characters who can be extracted will play a greater role in advancing the story, and can create a more complete and three-dimensional character through the plot.

Second, I think a good story is for players to quickly recognize who I am, what world I am in, and what I'm going to do. Therefore, in the current story setting, we have focused on strengthening the player's position as the director, and at the beginning and end of each chapter, the main characters will also appear, leaving clues to help players understand the world and clarify their goals.

Another example is the action gameplay level. Our team has experience with side-scrolling and the ability to be more innovative in it. So our goal has always been to make more refreshing action mobile games.

But at the same time, the action experience presented by our product is no longer limited to the horizontal version. In terms of combat style, it's actually closer to an ACT feel, and from that perspective, we've made two important changes to our current version:

The original button setting was a combination of "sprint" and "basic attack", in fact, the original design was designed to simplify the operation and lower the threshold for players to get started; However, during the test, it was found that some players would get close to the boss and release attacks when they wanted to dash away by pressing the button to dodge the boss skills, which caused a lot of negative feedback from players.

Now we've split the bonds, and we've redesigned the character combat type based on that logic. For example, our new ranged character, Zui Sheng, can attack directly from a distance, which is not only conducive to player control, but also makes the character's characteristics more distinct.

Another big change is the elemental reactions: from the previous tests, the elemental reactions in "Return to the Dragon" are not satisfactory: the elemental mix is limited, the rewards of elemental reactions are not outstanding, and in general, they do not show the characteristics that distinguish them from other games on the market.

Over the past few months, we've iterated the core rules of combat into a resilient system. The role positioning of this test has also changed from the original element classification to breaking tenacity, output and support, and under the new battle rules, our characters will automatically seek enemies and combos after switching.

With such a big change, the game's operational requirements have actually increased, but not too complicated. We look forward to making it easy for new players to get started quickly, and at the same time, it can also adapt to the needs of in-depth players, so that in-depth players can enjoy the coolness brought by battles.

Players think that the iterative ranged character "Drunken Sheng" has a refreshing feeling

Grape Jun: Speaking of action, I see that some players on the Internet don't want to play as soon as they hear that your game has PVP. What do you think about this?

Project team: First of all, even if the content is in the field of games, and even in the field of two-dimensional games, there have long been PVPs, such as "Fantasy Simulation Battle". Until now, these PVP plays usually come in the form of team PVE. We added PVP and social gameplay because they can make the game experience not repetitive, and the playability and playability of the game will be greatly improved.

Aside from anything else, we know that some ACG users are very repulsive to the PVP gameplay mode. Why would they resist this content? The first is that in many games, PVP is usually strongly tied to stats; The second is that some games force players to socialize. For example, in order to get a reward, a player must reach out to someone else and join the party. For some players, these things are more uncomfortable than challenging bosses.

But that's not what we meant in the first place, our goal was just to give players more options. Therefore, a lot of design was made in "Return to the Dragon Tide" to avoid the problem of heavy values and forced socialization.

For example, our Leaderboard gameplay is actually a kind of fair play PVPVE. In this gameplay, all players use characters with fixed values, which has nothing to do with the player's personal development; We've even designed the Hero Balance buff in this gameplay to give all characters room to play.

In the design of 2v2 competitive gameplay, it also focuses on avoiding the problem of forced socialization. Now this competition doesn't require players to socialize, it's basically all about matchmaking. We will even offer a 1v1 game in the future, where players only have to face their opponents.

In addition, the resource allocation of these games is very restrained, and we don't force players to have to play or play. It doesn't matter if players really don't like to play, the rewards can be easily obtained.

Judging from the data we obtained internally, in fact, the PVP engagement was quite high every time we tested, which shows that we have chosen the right direction.

Grape: Why did you decide to change the card pool design and give away so many draws?

Project Team: We are a small team, so we hope that players can get to know us and "Return to the Dragon" through a relatively low threshold.

So we first decided to give players enough gacha opportunities to get a more comfortable start.

At the same time, we also want players to be able to play the way they like, so our UP pool provides players with two options. One is the 50% probability UP card pool that players are more familiar with, and the other is 100% non-crooked pool, but the number of guarantees in this card pool will be a little higher.

The Unskewed Pool is an additional option based on the mainstream voices of players in the current market, some users want to get more rare characters, and some users want to get specific rare characters.

In addition, we have added a ban selection mechanic to all card pools, where players can ban a character in the card pool. This not only increases the probability of drawing their favorite characters, but also does not draw unwanted characters.

03

"We are on the right path"

Grape: What was the hardest time for you?

Project team: Exploring the direction at the beginning is the most difficult.

When the project was established in 2020, "national tide" was a new theme for everyone. How to not let the "national style elements" be superficial, how to design appropriate gameplay to match this theme, and how to extend more content based on this theme...... Questions like these stand in our way, and we have to forge our own path.

After the first exposure of PV came out, "Returning to the Dragon Tide" unexpectedly attracted a lot of attention, and everyone had their own ideas about the "national tide", which followed by the scrutiny and discussion of many players.

This feedback is both pressure and motivation, and we have debugged the product many times in these tests to better illustrate our understanding of Guochao - so that everyone's imagination of traditional Chinese aesthetics can be extended from the past to the future.

I also saw that some people would carry some of our videos to overseas platforms, which also attracted the attention of many foreign players. In the comment section of these videos, we can see that our oriental elements can also resonate with the East Asian cultural circle and the overseas Chinese circle, and European and American players will also be curious because they have not seen it, which is also a great affirmation for us.

Grape: What are your expectations for the game right now?

Project team: The members of our team, from various companies, large and small, have come together to make "Return to the Dragon Tide" for nearly 4 years. "Return to the Dragon Tide" is the team's first product, which gathers the hard work and expectations of the whole team. We not only hope that "Return to the Dragon Tide" can accompany players to go further, but also hope that it can become a benchmark work on the theme of national tide in the future, bringing more imagination to this theme.

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