Almighty Game Designer

In the first half of the year, it wasn't just the Assassin's Creed series that made a big difference in the global gaming market.

Of course, Assassin's Creed: Origins and Assassin's Creed: Revelation are undoubtedly one of the best games available at the same time, but they don't mean they can completely crush other games at the same time.

It can only be said that the Assassin Creed series has become an iconic gaming IP thanks to its compelling plot, exhilarating historical background, rich cultural heritage and unique combat system, but not perfect in all respects.

And that's why TGN gave the Assassin's Creed a score of 9.3, which is one of the best.

Before the launch of the Assassin Creed, a VR game called Traveler scored 8.8 points, while half a month after the launch of Assassin Creed: Revelation, a game called Lost Fleet came out of nowhere and also scored 9.3 points on TGN.

The power of this game appears as if it was proclaiming to the world: the era of Celent rule? It's still far away!

Indeed, the last two years of thunderous entertainment and Chen's strange style have been too great, especially since the emergence of a series of classic ips has made many large foreign factories feel a little overwhelmed, and the players have become emotionally “time-changing”.

But after all, the game industry is not a zero-sum game, and when everyone can make a good game, it's when you make money and I make money, and you don't hang me all over because your game is 0.1 points higher than mine.

As long as there is a genuine commitment to making games and truly adapting to the needs of the market, every game designer will reap success, no less than sooner or later, more or less.

Lost Fleet is an FPS game with a science fiction background that tells the story of a small starfleet in the future that had to go through adventures in a dangerous cosmic environment because of an accident that completely lost contact with its mother ship.

In the process, players will experience the warmth of humanity and the cruelty of the laws of the universe under desperate circumstances, experience a scene of bizarre cosmic adventure, battle with horrible cosmic creatures, experience infinite drifting solitude in space, and eventually return to Earth, many players will cry like drifting home for many years.

This game is not as good as the Assassin's Creed in terms of influence and topic, but it is clearly a great work in terms of artistry and gameplay, so it also received a 9.3 rating.

Moreover, the sale of the novel of the same name has risen due to the explosion of the game, and the filming of the film of the same name is already under preparation.

For the players, The Lost Fleet creates a very real cosmic environment (or very real, after all, the current technology is not enough to support humans in their space voyages) that embodies the endless loneliness and despair of humans drifting in the universe, with bloody spaceship driving and gun theatre in the middle, and in every respect, it is not a shame to get a 9.3 rating on this piece.

However, the discussion of the Lost Fleet was not confined to the game itself, but extended to a larger dimension.

For example… the direction of the game industry.

This is mainly due to the fact that two of the best rated pieces of the first half of the year, Traveler and Lost Fleet, are linear games.

In other words, both games abandoned the idea of an open world and took the path of "game movieization”.

As for why… we have to start with last year's strange Mysterious Seas.

Prior to Mysterious Seas, the world's mainstream VR games were basically geared towards an open world, and many people even felt that not doing an open world was anachronistic.

The reason is simple: an open world approach has an immediate effect on prolonging the player's game time, while making his or her game look "content rich” and “overpriced”.

In fact, many open-world games are not always better than linear games, and many poorly done open-world games tend to have their form. For example, add a large number of collectable elements to the game's map, duplicate game play, high-order props that strictly control numerical values, and so on.

In this open world, players actually get bored after playing for a while. It's nothing more than running a map. It's nothing less than brushing.

But it has to be said that the results are immediate, players like to collect achievements and trophies, and brushing this numerical stimulus, while simple and rough, is very effective.

So, many of the big international game factories are indulging in the concept of an open world, unable to pull themselves out.

But the advent of Mysterious Seas changed that. Through sophisticated process design, artwork under high performance, meticulously carved game scripts and other factors, Mysterious Seas, as a linear game, successfully conquered a large number of players, almost secondarily losing most of the open world games of the same period.

And the advent of the American End of the Day is fuelling the effect. Obviously, like the American End of the Day game, the best thing to do is to play a linear game, which would destroy the classic if it were an open world.

America's End of the Year wins the best game of the year, and many designers start to think about it. Would it be okay to open up the world?

Travelers and Lost Fleet are the result of this reflection. Many designers no longer blindly believe in the idea of an open world, but rather reinvest in linear games, firmly capturing players' hearts with beautiful stories and sophisticated rhythms.

It has to be said that an open world is good, but uncontrollable. In contrast to linear games, with a good script, gaming commercials can almost invariably create a game with good ratings.

If it sells well, let alone the game media's rating will definitely not be bad there.

If the rating is not bad, advertise and properly cater to the market taste, the sales volume will not be poor.

Traveler and Lost Fleet are the pieces that come out of this opportunity, and the linear game proves to be doing well.

This has led many designers and players to discuss the core question: Is it not enough to make the open world the best it can be at the current level of technology? Is linear game the better option for this stage?

Of course, there are some good open-world games in parallel worlds, but they are ultimately a small number compared to the total number of open-world games. That is, parallel world games are classic as long as they are done, but the vast majority of games are poorly played.

Instead, a rigorous, rule-based linear game becomes a very good option.