Almighty Game Designer

The development of Assassin's Creed: Origins is well under way, and some changes to the VR version are basically fine.

As for the loading concerns of many people, Chen adopted a relatively compromised design scheme in Assassin's Creed: Origins.

Assassin's Creed: Origins will be an open world, but only an open world. Because linear games are unlikely to show the entire vast ancient Egypt, those brilliant branch tasks cannot be talked about.

However, the open world inevitably encounters the question of how to deal with the loading of resources.

The Mysterious Seas level has basically tapped the VR Game Cabin's performance to the extreme, and this is based on the premise that centralized VR Game Cabin performance handles only a small fraction of the scene. If you want to be an open world, you must allow players to choose any route they want to explore. It is not possible to plan player routes in advance.

So, the VR version of Assassin's Creed: Origins uses a seamless map approach, which is to divide the big map into lots of tiny blocks that are preloaded when the player reaches a tiny block.

However, this level of "seamless maps" alone, and some other games have been played, still do not guarantee 100% elimination of the loading strips. So, Assassin's Creed: Origins, there are other ways.

For example, in certain regional nodes, like Mysterious Seas, you can mask the loading strip by passing an animation or specific action to quickly read the area resources around the protagonist while loading.

Another is to plan the player's main line process more rigorously, while preloading resources for the player's next behavioral goal with an artificial intelligence system and big data analysis to infer his next route based on the player's behavioral habits, with a task or activity orientation.

That is, if the system determines that the player has a good chance of completing Task A next, the Task A-related resources will be preloaded to make the player play smoother.

This is mainly the case in a scenario where the player receives a task several hundred meters away and he happens to have a transfer point in that position, at which point the vast majority of players choose to transfer past. If routinely, such a remote transfer would necessarily result in loading, but if the system can predict in advance that he will, then the resources near the transfer point can be loaded ahead of time, eliminating or greatly shortening the loading time, possibly just a lens of an eagle flying through the sky, and loading is done.

Alternatively, the player dies while completing the task, and the resurrection point is a few hundred meters away, which is also loading. This loading time can also be saved if the resurrection point resources are still stored in the system.

Through these methods, Assassin's Creed: Origin eliminates most loading and gives players a very consistent gaming experience. At least for the first time, most players are unaware that the game has loading.

Of course, players may also suddenly wonder, trying to travel thousands of meters to another place, then loading is inevitable at this time, Chen is not a god, this technically unsolvable problem he can't help.

However, Chen Jiao arranged a cool loading space for players like the original Assassin's Creed: Origins. When players were loading, instead of watching the progress bars do nothing, they could run around in animus' virtual space and try their own various attacks, and there would be some virtual fake people for players to practice, so that they wouldn't feel too bored during the longer loading process.

In addition, Chen Jiao has made some optimizations regarding the level and main task of Assassin's Creed: Origin.

In the original, the difficulty setting and the task line arrangement are not particularly reasonable. One of the most obvious problems is that many people can feel that the main line task is too loose. Playing with it is somewhat confusing and do not know what to do.

Because in the original, even simple difficulty moderate suppression is very severe. If a player challenges a monster more than once, it can be very difficult to hit even with good skill on its own, as the numerical design is.

So the player encounters a dilemma: if he only does the main task, because he doesn't have enough experience and level up, soon the main task will have a demand level far higher than the player's current level, and the task will be very hard to do, even completely stuck.

If the player goes to one place and clears the main task and clears the branch task, it will be very difficult and the experience will be sufficient, but then the main line plot will be diluted.

Obviously the previous mission had just assassinated a member of the Upper Vichy, so the next mission was to find a drunk husband or a missing child, or even a horse stolen by a businessman...

When the leg task is finished, the player looks back and wonders what the next main task should be? I forgot all about it.

This mix of mainline and offline tasks can seriously dilute the mainline journey, creating a feeling of inappropriateness among many players as they play: What should I do now? The main task level is not enough, I don't want to do the branch task.

In fact, this level of repression is completely unnecessary. Many players choose the simplicity and difficulty, just to get through the drama quickly. As a result, this task process is equivalent to man-made difficulty.

Moreover, this is quite unreasonable in terms of background setting. Bayeckmin is a trained warrior, no one is defective in reason, but why is he constantly escalating? It makes no sense that some powerful enemies cannot be fought without escalation.

You know, Bayek is not a first prince, and on the way, he can only advance the plot by upgrading it. It's like that...

So, Chan chooses to adopt a dynamic level, and all enemies refreshing the full picture will dynamically adjust according to the player's current level. This way, the player can choose to push only the main line task all the way to clearance and then slowly clear the branch line task back; they can also do it with the main line branch.

In this way, different players can experience the plot in different ways, without being tied to levels, and can better experience the fun of the Egyptian Tourism Simulator.

And from a human standpoint, it's more scientific. I, Bayek, am such a dick. Why are you NPCs hanging me at a lower level?

Of course, the original upgrade and skill system is still to be retained, and players will continue to face stronger challenges during the game to ensure strength in the later stages of the game. But the challenge is more technical than numerical.