Text/Nine Lotus Treasure Lamp

This Thursday, Perfect World Tower of Fantasy Studio's new work "Alien Ring" has just been revealed for four months, and the first test has begun.

I've always been concerned about the progress of Alien Circle. The first time I tried the game was at the TGS Game Show in Tokyo. This modern two-dimensional world where you can drive and buy a house has left a deep impression on me.

This game has been very active recently, since the first exposure, they have organized offline tests, landed at the Tokyo booth, and now organized the first test, and the progress is particularly fast.

The popularity of the game is also explosive. The first video released by their official account has been played nearly 10 million times on Station B. Qualifications for this test are also hard to find.

Such a hot attention, if nothing else, this is the closest to the launch of the "two-dimensional urban adventure".

Nowadays, as the development of the second-game category has fallen into a bottleneck, the previous big world gameplay is considered difficult to make new tricks, so many manufacturers have thought of taking the urban theme route. We can see that Perfect World's "Alien Ring", NetEase's "Infinity" and Shiyue's "Mochizuki" are all eyeing this.

So, as the first product to put the "two-dimensional city" to the test, what is the potential of "Alien Ring"?

After experiencing the first test, Grape Jun believes that the current version basically expresses the direction that this product wants to do, and in Grape Jun's view, it is not like another "Genshin Impact" that some people think, but a product that has taken a new path.

But at the same time, the first test also revealed some things that they may not have thought clearly.

In a word, there is an opportunity for a hit, it depends on whether "Different Ring" can grasp it.

01

Let's talk about the highlights:

The core experience is clearly in place

The core experience that "Alien" wants to create is obvious: urban life and new weirdness, and they do a good job.

Let's start with urban life.

At present, the second tour of the big world on the market, the scene is basically wilderness-based. Although the concept of a city will exist in the game, it can only be described as a miniature version and only take up a small part of the map. And "Alien Ring" really brings an entire city into the game, and players will only see large areas of greenery in places such as parks, and most of the time, they will walk the streets and alleys of this city.

They've done a really good job of creating an urban feel. As soon as I entered the game, after a short prologue, I was in the city. Overall, the game presents a developed East Asian city located on the seashore with a more integrated style, with both domestic streetscapes and some scenery reminiscent of Kamakura in Japan or Busan in South Korea.

Although the style is blended, the streets are surprisingly down-to-earth. Not only are there many "Delicious Rush" signs, but there are also many staff who come to the door to greet customers. The streets were noisy, shops were shouting, and people were playing musical instruments or dancing on the streets.

As for the shops, they are the core charm of this city. There are a variety of storefronts in the game, and players can come and go as they like without loading. In addition to buying drinks and snacks at convenience stores and roadside vending machines, you can also buy groceries at butchers and fruit and vegetable stores, furniture at second-hand electronics stores, car dealerships, real estate agents, and toy shops or roadside capsule toy machines...... You can even take down the roadside berths and open your own shop.

The bustling crowds in the game are just as interesting, and you can see parents with children, food delivery guys, couples shopping, and so on on the streets. On rainy days, you may see people who forgot to bring an umbrella covering their heads with their hands and rushing to hide from the rain. With these details, the city looks quite alive.

And you can also see that the urban theme of "Different Ring" is not only a change of appearance, but also a lot of gameplay is bound to the city: for example, players can buy cars, drive, modify cars in the city, and can also take trains and buses. If there are no city roads, this series of gameplay is difficult to hold, after all, in the wild, the only thing players can drive is an off-road vehicle.

For example, the player can buy multiple shops in the city, or they can buy real estate, and after that, the player also needs to buy goods for the store and decorate the house, which need to go to the corresponding store to buy. This kind of gameplay with a strong atmosphere of life also needs an urban theme as a base.

The urban theme does sound good enough, but it also has a problem: in most people's perception, this kind of modern society must have security institutions. So how do you package the fact that the world is littered with enemies?

In traditional triple-A games such as the GTA series and Cyberpunk 2077, street gangsters often take on the role of enemies. This makes sense, but it's not so innovative.

Fortunately, the second highlight of "Strange Ring", "New Strange Stories" makes up for this problem.

The city in this game is full of all kinds of strange phenomena, and the player's main mission is to work for an organization similar to a bounty hunter, and work with his friends to investigate the strange things that happen in the city. These incidents basically belong to the tune of "urban weird talk".

For example, some lockers on the street may hide monsters; graffiti on the side of the road, which may come out of the wall and attack people; Sometimes, some vending machines and trash cans also grow hands and feet. These visions have become monsters that players often have to face in their daily urban exploration.

And in the main story, the events that players have to face are even more bizarre. For example, in the first chapter, the player has to investigate the strange cameras in the photo studio, which will automatically shoot and turn all the objects they take into photos;

When you are captured by the camera, you enter the world of negatives

In the second chapter, players and their friends work together to find a strange pawnshop that is said to appear on full moon nights, and people can pay various prices in exchange for something they want.

With such a straightforward narration, you may not feel the atmosphere of these strange stories. In fact, through the environment, music, and performances, the game makes these strange events quite tense and exciting, and even close to a suspense horror movie in some places, which may be an enjoyable sentence for fans of this genre. Among the current domestic works of the same theme, "Different Ring" benefits from its own 3D action + open world base, which can almost be said to be the most weird.

In addition to these two, the core combat experience part, for now, I think the performance is acceptable. It's basically still the same set of battle modes as the traditional two-game ARPG, and the dodge and QTE mechanics give the combat a basic sense of coolness, but after all, the game development progress is limited, and the 3C, sense of attack and values still need to be polished.

Even so, in the process of experiencing it, I couldn't help but sigh, who would have thought that this kind of completion is actually a game that has just been tested for the first time.

02

Let's talk about doubts:

Lack of creativity in daily life, not interesting enough to explore

While the core experience has done quite well, it's hard for me to judge how it performed in some other parts of this test.

First of all, the game is obviously constrained by the development schedule, and has not had time to optimize, and there are some obvious minor problems: such as the 3C and the sense of impact just mentioned, as well as some character models, UI and performances, etc. How these will be optimized in the future is not yet visible.

Then there's what players have to go through every day after the game goes into the long run. In this regard, it is very obvious that the experience of the "Alien Ring" project team in the category of urban world is really limited.

The player's daily gameplay cycle does not make obvious differentiation like the core experience, and it is basically similar to the second game on the market now: go online every day to do daily, brush dungeons, consume physical strength and fight some monsters, in exchange for money, experience, and cultivation materials, and that's pretty much it.

However, compared with other big world second games, there is also simulated operation in the daily links of "Different Ring".

However, this kind of simulated business experience is not pleasant. For example, in order to make a drink in the store, I had to go to the convenience store and buy milk and cocoa powder. Not every convenience store sells cocoa powder, and I have traveled to several stores for this purpose. The experience of "buying horses in the east and saddles in the west" was fun at first, but I gradually lost my patience.

After finally finding the cocoa powder, I had to drive back to my coffee shop and store the ingredients I had bought. That's when I realized that even if I bought all the ingredients at once, I would have to do it again in about a week. I can't help but complain, it's almost 2025, why can't I shop online and deliver it to my door?

And that's just opening a store. In Alien Circle, players can open multiple stores at the same time, and I can't imagine what it would be like to stock up every day after I took over all the stores.

Further extending from shopping is urban development. An excellent urban theme world requires the same meticulous planning as in reality. Cities should not just be a big pie and simply expand, but should be rich and compact.

As an alternate world game, "Alien Ring" can be better designed. At present, some urban areas are relatively chaotic, with many buildings but not enough rules, and landmarks such as squares and high-rise buildings are not eye-catching enough. The small blocks under the shade of the buildings can sometimes make people feel suffocated. Combined with the limited completion of the first test, navigation is often dizzying.

The city also has a limited desire to explore, and there is no goal for the player to explore the city, except for going to the store to stock up and randomly beating up some monsters popping up in the lockers.

Although there are some other anomalies hidden in the city for players to discover on their own, they are still mainly based on combat or dungeon puzzle experience, and although the performances are beautiful, I have not yet experienced content that has a strong connection to urban life.

Not only that, but the location of the monster is often relatively remote, and it can't be reached by car, and the battle is often impossible to play because of the space, and I have several times hit the monster into the flower bed or under the platform. Combat rewards are also limited.

What I can't see through the most is cultivation. "Alien Ring" inherits the existing design ideas on the market, but it is not the same.

In the game, each character will have a system called "Empty Screen". Its interface looks like a game console, and in the screen section, each character will have a different shape of vacancy that the player can fill with Tetris-like "driver blocks". There is also a circular notch underneath the handheld, and the player needs to make a complete "cartridge" with two semi-circular pieces to fill it up.

These so-called "driver blocks" and "cartridges" are actually similar to the common numerical bonus sets in other second games. They provide bonuses to the character's stats in various dimensions, and players can also upgrade them.

The advantage of this system is that it is easy to obtain items. Except for the 2 cartridges that need to be considered for attribute matching, the driver block is common to all characters, and players do not need to farm it specifically for a certain character. In addition, in the first test, the game is also equipped with a special mall, and players can also directly use tokens to buy props if they don't want to farm dungeons.

However, this design also increases the complexity of the player's development: in order to fully unleash the cartridge's potential, the player must fill the upper pit with a number of drive blocks of a specified shape. These designated blocks are sometimes only 1 or 2 blocks in size, and to fill the pit requires the player to put in more of them.

For example, in the empty screen above, I could have solved the problem with 5 driver blocks, but in order to activate the cartridge for more effects, I had to use at least 6 blocks.

In extreme cases, a character may add up to more than a dozen accessories that need to be cultivated, not to mention the problem of brushing experience materials, just selecting and upgrading them one by one is enough to make people's heads big.

The content experience isn't all that perfect. The suspenseful and eerie feeling of the first chapters is certainly well done, but it lacks enough display of the main characters and worldview, and it is difficult for me to judge whether this world is near-future or modern.

In terms of character modeling, some of the designs are really interesting, such as the cute cat lady "Mint" and "Nanali" who appeared in the PV and left a deep impression on players.

But judging from the current character lineup, there doesn't seem to be the kind of "very profitable" shape at first glance, and the color matching is more conventional, basically a four-color arrangement and combination of red, blue, black and white. Under the current art style, what to do with the characters who are more eye-catching and have a desire to draw cards will be a difficult point in front of "Different Ring".

I can't arbitrarily call all of these "shortcomings" or "problems". Maybe after the game launches, the actual operation and commercial performance will not develop as I feared, or maybe these designs are only limited by the development schedule, so they are not fully presented.

03

Can "Alien Circle" seize its chance?

Some people may think that after 2 products have already seized the market first, the situation of the third open world second game will be very difficult. But "Strange Ring" is not without opportunities.

We can see that although "Strange Ring" seems to be just another product of the "Big World Second Tour", it is still significantly different from the existing products on the market from the foundation.

If most of the existing products are born out of Zelda, then this urban world is derived from GTA, and the two are fundamentally inconsistent. The experience of jumping up and down in the wilderness is certainly exciting, but navigating a virtual city road can also bring interesting resonances closer to life.

There are indeed many players who like this genre. On November 24, "Cyberpunk 2077" officially announced that the total sales exceeded 30 million, and on the small black box platform alone, the number of Chinese users was as high as 4.6 million.

In addition, from the perspective of the second dimension, urban fantasy stories such as "Different Ring" have also been popular in the animation field. Whether it is the popular comic "Chainsaw Man" or this season's hegemonic animation "Daring Party", it shows that this kind of urban theme work with strange and fantasy nature has enough audiences in the two-dimensional field.

Overall, I think the first estimate of "Alien Circle" is a good start. There is potential in the direction they have chosen, and their performance is remarkable. Their technical capabilities also prove that they are capable of navigating the new domestic track of Urban World.

In the first exposure PV of "Different Ring", many players mentioned that such as seamless entry and exit of the store and vehicle driving system, in fact, Tower of Fantasy Studio has achieved it in the previous work "Tower of Fantasy". Tower of Fantasy Studio has encountered a lot of doubts along the way, but judging from "Different Rings", their accumulation is real.

I believe that if they can continue to improve quality, further differentiate, and do a good job in commercialization and long-term operation design, they have a good chance of winning a piece of their own territory in the future market.

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