Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

All roads lead to Rome

It seems that since the "original God", the name MMORPG has begun to be shunned by countless manufacturers.

Whenever introducing the type of game, most MMO begin to call themselves open world or xRPG, some simply do not talk about it, directly with the theme of the game, IP or a feature of the game as a promotional point.

However, once players enter the game, they will soon be able to find the essence of their MMO from daily tasks, team copies, arenas, multiplayer games and other games, and then leave with a "old-fashioned" evaluation.

According to the China Game Industry report from January to June 2022 jointly launched by the Game working Committee of the China Audio and Digital Association and Gamma data, among the top 100 mobile games by revenue, role-playing games have the highest total revenue, accounting for 18.45%.

Although not all of them are MMORPG games, the market for this category is still considerable, and manufacturers will not easily give up this piece of "fat meat".

So the next step is to make MMORPG less disgusted by players.

Why does MMORPG now "everyone fight" once upon a time, being able to make a MMO is absolutely the embodiment of the manufacturer's technology and strength, and even many Korean game producers regard it as their lifelong goal and pursuit to be a MMO.

In the current environment, if you go to the player community to ask which MMO on PC is recommended, the answer is nothing more than "World of Warcraft", "FF14", "sword net 3", "Moonlight Blade" and "cold against the current". While recommending it to you, I also advise you, "Don't think too much about playing MMO."

Even when it comes to mobile, most popular MMO products change hands. With its own big IP and mature mode endorsement, players naturally pay more attention to it.

How did MMORPG go from the original "bright new star" to the present situation of "everyone shouting and fighting"? The author believes that there are three main reasons:

1. Repetitive play has a strong sense of boredom.

two。 The charging mode consumes the game life excessively.

3. Lack of game immersion

Players' biggest criticism of MMORPG is that they have to "work" in the game when they get home from work. Clear the daily routine, brush large copies, save money in the arena. A series of equipment-driven games make players have to do repetitive work day after day. And once in a season equipment "graduation", will quickly lose the motivation to continue to go online, until the new season to pick up or abandon the pit.

For this reason, many seasonal MMORPG choose to use the point card + appearance charging system, so as to ensure the stickiness of players and reduce the strength gap between players. Many players said, "Why World of Warcraft and Sword net 3 live for so many years because they are really cheap."

Once you enter the field of prop charging, then the nurturance system and card-level settings will gradually become a bottomless pit, and the gap between free players and paying players can be described as a big difference, which leads to the loss of prop charging game users is generally faster than the point-card system, and users are not willing to return.

With the continuous updating of the game version, the volume of the MMORPG game is also expanding. As we all know, the full level is the beginning of a MMORPG game. As a result, many new players are likely to find it difficult to catch up with the army because the early plot is too long.

So, in order to let players quickly experience the core of the game, but also to encourage players to quickly generate paid value, the vast majority of MMO after a period of operation, began to cut part of the plot and launch straight-up services.

This is undoubtedly a double-edged sword. The advantage is to adapt to the current fast-paced work and life environment, through social interaction to achieve user retention.

But when MMORPG began to cut the plot, it was undoubtedly overdrawing the vitality of the game. Because it is essentially a role-playing game, players have to become people in the game and resonate and recognize the game world before they can truly connect at the emotional level rather than at the social level. If players don't know what's going on in the world and which characters are there, it's hard to turn into a long-term user of the game.

In a sense, the decline of MMO seems to be an inevitable trend in this category.

Can Open World + MMO really work? In order to break through the bottleneck of MMO, many manufacturers begin to seek new design elements and solutions. Especially since the launch of the "Magic Tower", the feasibility of the two-dimensional open world + MMO model has been repeatedly discussed and verified by manufacturers.

Photon recently announced the new martial arts work "Code: to Jin Yong" is also an exploration of this model, NetEase also said to use "against the cold" mobile games to "make MMO great again."

In fact, from the perspective of map design, the gap between the two is not big, and even some technologically mature MMO has achieved seamless large maps a long time ago.

But from the design purpose, the two do run counter to each other. MMO emphasizes the "gathering" of players, while the open world emphasizes the freedom and separation of the target path.

It is precisely because of such contradictions that the open world MMO products on the market inevitably favor one side, while the elements of the other side are naturally deleted or watered down.

However, since products such as the "Magic Tower" have successfully come out, it proves that this track is feasible, and the key is how to balance the design elements of the two and how to meet the needs of different types of players.

In this regard, some game practitioners also gave their own opinions.

Guo Weiwei, CEO of Xishanju, once said in an interview: "the most energetic part of making an open world MMO may be to satisfy its content."

Based on the successful experience of "Sword Network 3", he believes that to be an open world MMO is to provide players with as much interactive content as possible; second, to introduce social, so as to achieve the "social × content" relationship, so that the content of the game breaks through the limit. Of course, it is difficult in design and technology to achieve environmental feedback like the one in the open world in MMO, which requires constant accumulation of technology.

As the agent of Noah's Heart and Magic Tower, Tencent also has a unique interpretation of the open world MMO category.

Fule, the advanced game operator of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Distribution Line, once shared the exploration of MMO play in the open world in the column of "Zhenjing Pavilion" of Tencent Games College.

He uses Gbatu theory to divide MMORPG players into four categories: achievement type, killer type, social type and exploratory type. The introduction of open world design is mainly to meet the game needs of the fourth category of players, which is also the dimension of MMORPG breakthrough.

Through the analysis of sandboxie Game, the predecessor of the concept of open world, Fule said that the core element of sandboxie's game to explore is interaction, which includes the interaction between players and players. also a large part of the proportion is the interaction between the player and the environment.

After further dismantling the two games, Legend of Zelda: the breath of the wilderness and radiation 4, Fuller summarizes three criteria for the characteristics of the open world: 1. The real world of WYSIWYG; Rich interactions that serve growth; 3. A variety of games that have an effect on the environment.

This view is actually similar to the former, except that floating music emphasizes the influence that players exert on the environment in the open world, that is, the importance of "I" to the world.

From the point of view of these two, the open world aims to solve the dilemma of high repetition of MMORPG game content, and the way to achieve it is focused on content supply and interactive experience. Especially the interaction between people and the environment, which requires a lot of technology accumulation and detail polishing, in fact, it also puts forward requirements for the details of manufacturers.

So, how to solve the supply at the content level?

One is like the "original god", through the construction of industrial processes and production lines to achieve a stable output of content, which is also the direction that most manufacturers are working on.

Another way of thinking is that the previous nuclear race was in "AI being?" PUGC? What kind of open world do Qi Chuang she and Xiao Bing want to build? As reported in this article, the comprehensive content creation model of PUGC+AIGC is finally realized through PUGC+AI auxiliary tools, which allows professional producers to create game content based on the game. In other words, it is a more advanced form of creative workshop.

Of course, this model seems a long way off, but before the pain points of MMO in the open world have been completely resolved, Seven Chuang has pointed out a potential path for the MMO category.

The European and American market in the post-World of Warcraft era at the 2022 Chinese original boutique game forum held not long ago, Xu Yiran, chairman of Seven Chuang Society, shared some of his new observations on the current global game market, including the European and American MMO market.

Europe and the United States and other developed markets have a very wide range of mainframe gamers, they have also seen many high-quality stand-alone games.

But it has been nearly 20 years since the birth of World of Warcraft, a popular global MMORPG game. For many post-95 and post-00 European and American players, MMORPG is a very new category instead.

In particular, the outbreak of the epidemic makes it difficult for many European and American players to socialize offline. If there is a highly recognized MMORPG that enables players to move together in the virtual world, it can greatly meet their social needs.

Amazon, as an e-commerce giant, has taken a fancy to this market and successively launched self-developed MMO "New World" and "Lost Ark" produced by South Korean developer Smilegate ("Crossing the Fire Line" developer). The online peak Steam of the two products exceeded 910,000 and 1.32 million respectively. "Lost Ark" has also become the second highest online game in Steam history, after "PUBG".

It should be noted that these games do repeat the rapid warming and cooling of most MMORPG, and the actual retention rate of users is not as gorgeous as the peak number of people. But to a certain extent, it also reflects that European and American players have curiosity and freshness to this category.

After decades of experience, the MMORPG production capacity of domestic manufacturers is definitely the first echelon. If we can combine the products and do the localization design of the theme and retention means for the European and American markets, it is also expected to "tear" a hole in this category, and then reproduce the brilliant achievements like the domestic SLG going to sea.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:Coreesports, author: Qian Hongyan

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