Text/Lin Zhi& Grey Pigeon

Today, NetEase's "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" was finally announced: the public beta will be released on December 27.

Stayed up long enough.

As of today, "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun", which was originally scheduled to be launched in July, has been postponed for 155 days.

If you follow what they said before, postpone 1 gram of gold for one day, and now they will give an additional 90,000+ yuan.

"Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" really attracted much attention before.

NetEase attaches great importance to it. This large-scale investment product, with a team of hundreds of people, has been developed for 5 years, and it has been frequently mentioned in the financial report.

The market is also concerned. This is the first open world that Dachang has come up with in the post-"Genshin Impact" era, and it is also the answer that the martial arts theme has never handed over.

But "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" was also the focus of negative public opinion later.

The products that originally had good word-of-mouth feedback were questioned after the three and four tests this year, but also because of the "decline" in quality and the problem of mobile terminals......

Originally positioned as a 3A online game, but after the result was postponed, "Black Myth: Wukong" that came out in August this year made it a yellow hair in the village with 3A.

——I came to participate in their offline tasting and play today, and I laughed silly, the staff of "Yanyun" dyed their yellow hair and walked around......

However, now that I have experienced it offline, and then chatted with the person in charge of EverStone and the main creative team, I am not so worried.

It's not that these people are ready to win, but at least, they have solved a lot of problems and explored a lot of answers beyond market perception in the past five months of silence......

These people are honest enough and their ideas are interesting, maybe this round of their answers can answer all everyone's confusion about "Yanyun".

The following is the self-statement of the main creative team of EverStone.

01

postpone

Originally, we didn't plan to postpone.

As early as April this year, we set a date for July 26, and also made a promise of "one promise of a thousand gold", saying that if it is postponed, we will give everyone one gram of gold for every day of delay.

Be sure of the feedback from the first and second tests. The feedback was very good, and the media gave the title of "3A Online Game", and we ourselves felt that the framework and content were fine.

In addition, this year is another big year for games, there are too many big products, and there are many big works, so we want to catch up with the public beta node in the summer vacation.

Moreover, the overall data of the game also exceeded expectations.

Many people have questioned whether our users are more complex, whether it will have an impact, in fact, the overall user retention and stickiness are quite good, and many data have exceeded the indicators of NetEase S+.

There is also the commercialization that is questioned about not being able to support itself and not selling values, it really didn't make a lot of money, but it met our expectations, and even the PC payment exceeded the estimate.

So the question is how big the user scale the project can capture when it goes live.

However, there were some problems in the third test of "Yanyun" that we did not expect.

One is the quality problem. There are too many bugs in the third test version, and the stability is not very good;

The other is that the amount of content is not enough. We opened 1/3 of the area, and originally thought that a large map would be divided into three sections, but everyone consumed it too quickly.

Another thing that has been questioned a lot is that the completion of "Yanyun" is not enough.

What impressed us the most was the cutscene-

During the third test, we had animations that weren't done yet, so we replaced them with black screens. Putting it down, we've done it in our previous projects, and it feels like everyone is happy and over.

But "Yanyun" is different. Everyone is very angry: I don't care what reason you give, you didn't finish it, you didn't finish it.

At that moment, we realized that the products of this era had to be ready in all directions.

That is, you have to be fun, you have to pass the quality, you have to be complete, and you have to be stable enough...... Every side should be presented to everyone in the best state.

People have been persuading us.

In those days, we did two interviews with core players, chatted with more than a dozen people, and everyone said, you guys change and go online again-

"If the open beta is of this quality, you guys are a bit of a waste of the foundation of "Yanyun"."

Many players left messages saying: Can you really test it in July? Why don't you change it again? We can wait.

NetEase bosses also came over to reassure: no one wants to see an imperfect product launched, you have to be ready to go on again, time can wait.

And to be honest, throughout the first half of the year, everyone has been sprinting for the original schedule for too long, to the limit, if in order to rush online, no matter how high the intensity of the content changes, it may be difficult to give players a good result.

In the end, we decided to postpone "Yanyun".

After that, we worked for almost half a year.

The busy thing is roughly divided into three parts-

The first is quality. Before, everyone liked the picture style of the first and second tests, and we strengthened the contrast between image quality and light and shadow on that basis, so that it was as close as possible to the texture of a single host product.

The second piece is to enhance the experience. For example, in multiplayer gameplay, we are enriching more content; For example, in combat, we have been listening to everyone's opinions from the first exposure to the present, adjusting the feel as much as possible, recognition, and problems such as the BOSS zero frame start.

The third piece is the amount of content. In the Kaifeng area just mentioned, we have accelerated the completion of the remaining 2/3 of the content in the past six months, and we are already developing the third large-scale area "Hexi".

Of course, there are other unseen behind-the-scenes adjustments, such as bug fixes, model adaptation optimizations, and operational stability stuff......

For example, we have been frequently pulling players to test independent modules recently, even if the multiplayer and social modules are not so easy to test, we will also find everyone to do a long-term experience.

After a long period of adjustment, and after getting feedback from everyone, we have recently polished the project to a high enough level of completion......

In other words, we feel that the current "Yanyun", compared with the past, is enough to meet our original imagination and is ready to be launched.

02

Single-player or multiplayer?

In fact, we know that there is a point that many people have questioned about the three tests of "Yanyun": are you doing a stand-alone game or an online game?

Honestly, we really like the immersion of the stand-alone.

Stand-alone machines have invisible boundaries. Within the boundaries, the game will have a very extreme and immersive kind of immersion, which can make people reach a peak of fun.

The clearer the boundaries, the more customized the experience becomes; The more blurred the boundaries, the more likely the player is to be distracted by others, and the experience you want to deliver will be lost.

I'm a big fan of single-player myself, and the whole team has a lot of single-player playing...... What we want to give players is also that extreme emotional feeling.

So, we decided to play a single-player game and convey the emotions as completely as possible to everyone.

However, we also really feel a certain unique charm of multiplayer long-term games, which is a kind of world malleability.

I've always felt that long-term online games have such a charm: as long as you are in it, you can feel the sun rising and the moon setting, and feel the possibility of the world flowing forward under its rules.

When I used to play those MMRPGs, I especially liked to sit alone on the mast of Stormhaven and the top of the snowy mountain.

Really, you don't do anything, and you don't really get in touch with any substantial content of the game's output, but you can feel the flow and continuation of the world.

We want Yanyun to embrace this kind of experience – the world is alive.

In fact, there are many MMOs that have done similar cases of "single player + multiplayer".

Sometimes, in order to immerse themselves, MMOs will make a single plane for players in order to ensure the pure experience of some plots.

In contrast, it can be understood that "Yanyun" will make this single plane very large.

For example, the battles in "Yanyun" have throwing skills. It's something MMOs won't do.

MMOs prioritize multiplayer. Pitching, a very strong mechanic of 1v1 performance, is interference, and it is designed to make other players uncomfortable.

But "Yanyun" gives priority to a single person, so the pitching technique is a form of stronger feedback and stronger substitution, and it is necessary.

So, rather than being more alone or more people, we might want to make the choice of "more immersion".

In other words, we hope that the single-player experience of "Yanyun" will be more exciting than previous games.

Speaking of this, I would like to respond to an additional question that has been extended: why does "Yanyun" have to be social?

Before, everyone was very reluctant to socialize when they mentioned "Yanyun". Because martial arts and MMOs are too deeply tied, when it comes to martial arts and socialization, it almost directly leads to the same MMO.

But we feel that what everyone really rejects is the experience of coercive, heavy, and forcibly breaking the social comfort zone.

And the social interaction that "Yanyun" wants to do is not an MMO, it is really just a concept of "multiplayer".

What kind of multiplayer does "Yanyun" want to do? There's something I've been remembering for a long time, and I think I can answer this question—

On the last day of the first test a few years ago, one of the player's characters fell ill, and the illness would evolve, and he would develop to the most severe level.

Since the disease cannot be cured on its own, the player must find an NPC or player to treat him, otherwise his operation will be disturbed from time to time.

Everyone is asking, is there an old Chinese medicine doctor? It turned out that a player actually came to treat him, and what was even more amazing was that the player's avatar happened to be an old man.

In this way, players will gain accomplishment and satisfaction when they feel that their unintentional actions will help others and have some good impact.

Therefore, immersion is not necessarily limited to a single machine, we feel that it can also exist in some stories with other people.

In the past few years, we have been wondering what kind of social interaction is suitable for "Yanyun". We've done a lot of experiments.

For example, "street signs" - similar to the messages in the soul game, so that people are not lonely.

Through this street sign, you can feel in the rivers and lakes that some people explore the world like me, some people help me, and some people lie to me and tell me to kick the goose in front of me, and I was kicked to death by the goose after three or two kicks......

Later, we extended the system of shaking people.

Everyone plays a single-player level and finds it too difficult, but you can use an object to invite other players or NPCs to complete this challenge.

Even if it's a player who is invited, you won't be pressured and the person who responds won't be profitable. This is pure mutual help.

In addition, we have recently added a multiplayer feature that allows players to go on adventures with familiar friends, and we tested it internally and really felt that the experience was very different......

Taking 10,000 steps back, if the player doesn't want this kind of interaction, they can completely block out these things and play the single-player part.

To be honest, there are quite a few twists and turns to explore.

In many cases, we don't have a template, we don't have a benchmark, and it's hard to explain a game, so we can only explore.

For example, everyone said before that multiplayer battles and single-player battles were too separated, but later we moved multi-player to single player a little more;

For example, casual content also offers more ways to play, and we want to make it more enjoyable.

Even now, many of our designs have to wait for players to validate.

But in any case, what we want to do is not an MMO, but a social network where we can build some small sense of happiness with others.

This is also a part of our thinking that the rivers and lakes of "Yanyun" can be more vivid.

03

What exactly is "Yanyun"?

We have been saying that "Yanyun" should be a martial arts open world.

But I think our understanding of martial arts is limited to a specific paradigm.

Before, when we mentioned martial arts, we would think of MMOs, schools, rules of martial arts, and individual love and hatred.

But I think there are still a lot of things that haven't been tapped into martial arts.

For example, the martial arts of "freedom". Many martial arts are forbidden and rebel against authority.

You see Western knights, Japanese samurai and martial arts are very similar, but they will be loyal to someone or a certain force.

But what about martial arts? It is faithful only to an abstract concept, to the morality of the heart. If you deviate, I will cut the table with you.

This kind of freedom is too good for the open world.

Another example is the martial arts that are not limited to "Jin Yong".

Now everyone is doing Jin Yong-style martial arts, it is too relationship-oriented, master, relatives, friends, sects...... Relationships are intertwined.

But the ancient dragon is different. His martial arts are prodigal, with no place to come and no place to return. He just wandered forever.

This kind of image is also very suitable for a large world.

"Yanyun" tries to grasp this quality: you can learn all kinds of martial arts, use any weapon, even if you join a sect, it will not bind you to death like traditional MMOs.

Another key word, I think, is "ideal".

I've always been fascinated by the legend and purity of martial arts – I just have to recognize something, even if it costs something that the world can't understand.

If the tail is born and dies by the pillar, I have to wait for this woman, if she doesn't come, whoever comes, I won't leave;

The appointment of chrysanthemums, he drew his sword and wiped his neck, and he also went to the appointment by the yin wind;

Xue Hongxian, running thousands of miles, also has to report the grace of knowledge;

Jing Ke stabbed Qin, you have to make a big thing, ask for my head, don't say a word, the head will be cut if you say it...... It's too reckless, it's too extreme.

There is a boss in "Yanyun" called Wuxiang Huang, which is extremely ugly, and many people can't accept it at first. So we made a boss with fluttering clothes, which is in line with the traditional MMO aesthetic.

As a result, the battle was made, and everyone immediately remembered the former, so the light and fluttery design in the back was all deleted. This is also the ultimate meaning.

Having said that, now back to what kind of martial arts open world we want to make.

I think that the "open world" is not the core, it just provides the most basic, consensus rules, which are used as a background to carry other things of "martial arts".

Therefore, for Yan Yun, we put the above ideas on martial arts into design, then the answer may be "immersion, combat, and emotion".

Let's start with immersion.

The first round of feedback from players on "Yanyun" is saying that we have done a good job of substitution, and we will believe in the authenticity of this world and have a sense of belonging.

The point of immersion is to shape the relationship between people, and we will say, "Where there are people, there are rivers and lakes".

So, in the composition of the game, there must be a bond between the player and the player, random encounters, and the development of relationships - which is why we insist on being multiplayer.

The second is the combat design.

The combat in "Yanyun" is very different from the previous MMO framework.

Empirically speaking, the battle should be tense, and it can even make people's palms sweaty. For example, just 10 minutes into the game, players will be guided to challenge a particularly difficult boss - "Shadow Man".

Why is it so hard to do?

Because the original battle was too bland and too similar. The frequency of the player's attack is very high, that is, to put skills, hang BUFF, and don't have to observe the boss much.

After the first exposure in 2022, we held three offline trial sessions and received a lot of feedback. After listening to the opinions of hundreds of players, we made up our minds to change.

We've made the transition more frequent, and players need to focus on boss mechanics rather than simple skill releases, so the game has extended the resilience mechanic.

This is an experience close to the challenge of soul games, which is relatively rare in domestic games. Because we all have a common concern - the player experience should be smooth and not hindered.

But we wanted to try this experience: yes, you failed, but it's not your fault, it's because this thing is really hard.

We will prepare the players in advance and tell them the meaning and difficulty of the challenge. In this way, the challenge will turn into a surprise and an unexpected fun.

At least in terms of PC stats, the fact that a player dies here doesn't have a particularly big impact on retention, so we think this is a valid thing.

The third is open-world exploration with emotional peaks.

We wanted to build a stronger emotional experience in an open-world context.

The basic layer of exploration is collecting and interacting, and this layer has very little emotional fluctuations; Further up, there is the independent module "Guard", which takes more than 20-30 minutes, and this layer is the highest emotional point.

"Town Guard" combines complete level design, narrative fusion, and boss challenges. For example, "Sanssouci Cave", which is a town guard content in the Kaifeng area, can last up to an hour. It is the epitome of Kaifeng's dark side, with not only a rich narrative, but also an impactful audiovisual experience.

We know that doing open-world mood spikes takes a lot more investment than just populating a map. Traditionally, when you talk about an open world, you may be talking about a workload, such as making a 10k x 10k, 2k x 2k world.

But if you're going to do some peak experience in it, that means there's going to be a 512 x 512 zone in 2k x 2k, and you're going to pay for more.

Anyway, let's be honest, we had one goal in mind: the game was recognizable.

We wanted to make Yanyun a clear differentiator from any martial arts game that players had experienced before.

04

Development History

When our team started working on other games, the idea was to move from "end" to "means".

For example, in order to enhance social networking and extend the online time, we designed functions such as idle and team-up, and then selected ready-made gameplay from the MMO framework to implement them.

This method is very mature, and the results are stable enough, but the problem is that in the end, it is only an MMO with a martial arts skin.

Later, when we made the game again, we changed our thinking: from "concept" to "landing".

I would start by asking myself: what is fun in a martial arts world? Then think about how to use gameplay to realize these fun things.

This seemingly random design idea is actually very close to the concept of a sandbox.

We try to break down the sandbox into three layers: the physical logic layer, which is how the player behaves according to the rules of physics; the environmental interaction layer, i.e., how the player interacts with the world; The humanistic choice layer, which is how players make choices about their emotions and values.

When these designs were proposed, everyone was excited because they sounded fun and wanted people to try them.

But the process is quite a toss-up.

In the beginning, we listed a lot of abilities that fit our team's imagination of martial arts, such as archery. But its features are not enough. So we began to do extensions, and picked out abilities such as telekinesis, tai chi, and acupoints in various brain holes.

Take Tai Chi as an example, this is a concept that everyone is familiar with, but there is also the problem of familiarity - everyone thinks differently.

Some people think that Tai Chi is external and has moves; Some people think that it is internal, overcoming rigidity with softness, and dialing thousands of pounds in four or two.

We finally conclude that the core is to "leverage strength".

In the beginning, Tai Chi must have an external force to trigger, such as an enemy rushing towards you and you use his strength to dissolve him. If you don't have the strength, you won't be able to make a move. This logic is fine, but it is too difficult to use, and the player is stuck for a long time and does not understand how to operate.

Later we changed it. It must be triggered by a force in motion, such as a directional force such as a water flow or a bear flutter. It's a little easier to understand, but it's still hard to use, and it's not good to get the timing wrong at all.

By the third stage, we simply changed it to such that players can use Tai Chi with or without external forces. This not only lowers the barrier to entry, but also allows players to use it in more scenarios. After this version came out, the experience was significantly smoother.

In the process of landing, we found that feedback and freedom are particularly important.

Feedback means that if I throw anything and hit the bottle, there should be feedback. If you don't land properly, players may think of some ways to play, but after a long time without feedback, they will be confused.

Degrees of freedom refer to the applicable scenarios of the ability. We initially limited a lot of our abilities: telekinesis could only be used in exploration, and Tai Chi was limited to fighting certain monsters.

Later, we changed it, and these abilities are no longer just tools for specific scenarios, but can be used in combat, such as telekinesis to grab enemy weapons. This degree of freedom is worthy of the word "martial arts".

Only by figuring out the concept to the implementation can it guide the subsequent design.

Map design is an example of this.

Qinghe was just an ordinary field map at first, but as he did it, he found that the content was very scattered.

Later, we decided on a theme - "The Concealment and Birth of Chivalry".

With this theme, the content of the map revolves around it: the knights of more than a decade ago have gone into seclusion, and before a new crisis comes, the player can touch the story of a previous era.

Later, when we made Kaifeng, we set the theme earlier - "prosperity and shadow under the prosperous world". This time the design is clearer, on one side is the prosperity of the early Song Dynasty, and on the other side is the scars of the troubled times.

We now have a relatively mature conceptual process.

There are a lot of concept points that will be proposed within the team, starting with the concept of a big map, and then subdividing the small concepts that everyone wants to do. Each concept is broken down into small pieces to be validated.

When the planner thinks of poetry, he needs to transform it into something subjective, maybe in collaboration with conceptual art, maybe to find a picture, a movie.

They need to convey the feeling they want and see if they like it or not. Players will also give us some feedback on something else that comes to mind.

In addition, we will now do it in phases, with a clear plan for what we will achieve at each stage.

Conceptual design drawing

But some things can be tested, and some can only be gambled.

In the past, I also know a lot of excellent teams, they are very rational and can look at the work from the values and rules.

But this time, we might be a little more emotional. We only make content that we like and approve of, and then serve players who are close to our ideas and understand each other.

After all this, I feel that the team has improved a lot.

Most of the team members haven't done open world before.

In the beginning, we started by doing what we had learned, but we quickly found out that it didn't work. After that, we started completely from scratch and worked backwards a little bit with our favorite games. Later, we learned from the experience of Ubisoft and miHoYo and made pipeline adjustments.

I think the key is to "forget about the past". Many of the previous habits of combat, formation, and storytelling don't work in the open world.

For example, in combat, we moved away from the design of value stacking and instead emphasized immediate feedback from players. Growth is no longer about "getting stronger in numbers", it's about "playing more". From the slow charging of a new weapon to the increase in displacement and impact in the later stage, the player's growth comes from the abundance of coping methods, rather than relying on numerical suppression.

We've also adjusted our growth paths so that the benefits are consistent across playstyles. Those who like to farm bosses can focus on farming bosses, and light players can explore strongholds, and different experiences can be harvested and grown.

05

epilogue

"Yanyun" is a project that has made me more resilient.

We have really experienced a lot: the praise at the first exposure, the overturning of the live broadcast, the reversal of the first test, and the questioning of the fourth test...... It can even be said that "Yanyun" is the longest, the most ups and downs, and even the most exciting project we have done.

Luckily, after all the ups and downs, I can feel the connection with the team become stronger and I can handle more on my own.

A lot of people asked us before, why don't we do MMOs?

Quite simply, we just want to do something different, something new, something that no one else will try.

During the development process, there have been countless voices - from the team, players, and the outside world...... But we always remember what we want to do.

This article is from Xinzhi self-media and does not represent the views and positions of Business Xinzhi.If there is any suspicion of infringement, please contact the administrator of the Business News Platform.Contact: system@shangyexinzhi.com