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

When talking about the history of European and American games, there is always an old concept-"Genesis", "witchcraft" and "magic gate" are called the three RPG of Europe and the United States. Among them, Genesis, as it is known, ushered in the era of video game RPG under the graphical interface; witchcraft highly simulated the RPG rules, and then greatly influenced the Japanese RPG gameplay design; and Magic Gate is famous for its exploration of the big world with environmental design, game mechanisms that break Dumpd-style monopolies, and outstanding worldviews.

▲ left: Genesis; middle: witchcraft; right: magic gate

Today, however, about 30 years after that "golden age", they have suffered enough dust to build a mountain. From time to time, there are people who dust them, just to show their rotten light, to show off their feelings and to do something leisurely. To know that roughly the same period of Zelda legends, brave fighting dragons, final fantasy and other games are still prosperous.

There are so many stories about them that I can't understand all of them. Here I just want to talk about the Magic Gate, a great series that took its last breath seven years ago and has not yet taken a breath.

1 Chinese players come into contact with Magic, mostly from "Hero Invincible 3", a chess game with a high status in the domestic gaming world. But before we talk about what may be the most successful game derivative series in game history, we still have a lot to say.

The birth of the Magic Series is a very standard Silicon Valley story. A student named Jon Van Caneghem (Jovankanheim) was so moved by Genesis and Witchcraft that he decided to learn to program and make his own games outside the main field of medicine. He found that his love had been poured into his gaming career. With his father's support, he started a company called New World Computing (NWC) with friends and girlfriends.

▲ left: Kanhem and his partner; right: NWC logo

After an initial struggle, Magic Gate I was released in 1986 on Apple II, then the most popular personal computer platform at the time. As money flowed into Macintosh, NES, IBM and other platforms, the company was finally able to develop new works in a virtuous circle.

The original game, written by Kanhelna assembly code, had top picture quality at the time (it had to be reminiscent of Wicca 2). The highlight of its play system is that although the main frame of the story is simple, it is driven by the mystery-solving plot, contrary to the single-threaded brainless cycle of village-dungeon-village. Mountains, rivers, villages, dungeons, plains and other topography constitute a huge open world. In addition, the characters that make up the player team are no longer ordinary avatars and names, and the race and even gender of the characters will affect the course of the game.

▲ Magic Gate I screen

In addition, Kanheim's passionate creativity is also reflected in the construction of the vast world outlook of the Magic series. At that time, the boundary between European and American fantasy and science fiction was not so clear, and at the end of Genesis, players rushed into the universe from the world of sword and magic. The same is true of the Magic Series, and her background is broader-the world outlook is directly placed in the universe, the creation of the player's planet is actually the creation of higher civilization, and the villain to deal with is also the degenerate of higher civilization.

The Varn map of the occurrence of the original story of ▲

"Magic Gate II" was released under the shadow of the first generation, and with the enthusiasm after success, the improvement of budget and the rapid development of hardware technology, the picture of the second generation soared again, and unfolded a larger story story that occupied a large number of pages of the manual. In the game system, the second generation introduced automatic maps, which made players lose the hard-core experience of self-drawing maps, but this is obviously a great progress.

In addition, there is a more realistic adventure experience, for example, during the journey, the members of the team will face birth, aging, sickness and death. As they grow older, their physical attributes will weaken, and they will die quietly some night at the age of the character and at the age of 80.

The page of the official guidebook of ▲ Magic I shows the importance of automatic maps.

Magic reached its peak in three generations. Players who attach importance to design always bypass the audio-visual mechanism when evaluating the game, but at that time, many players were overshadowed by the audio-visual innovation, such as the novel stronghold occupation mechanism in the game and the widely acclaimed rich puzzles.

"Magic Gate III: the Adventures of Fantasy Island" was released in 1991, and she arrived on PC on DOS, with colorful pictures, fascinating opening animations, and character dubbing-the ability to use 286 computer speakers without a sound card to produce a clear human voice.

My first contact with Magic was also in the third generation, when I was a child and opened the game in a simulator in the corner of the hard disk. Magic III has been fully Sinicized, but you can't ask a primary school student to understand it, and after the baptism of pirated Diablo 2, I don't have much feelings about the pictures of this generation, that is, I think the colors are very bright, different from those dark things. But with the in-depth understanding of this series, I pay more and more attention to this game, especially her design sense of UI, which has led me to have a morbid pursuit of the game's UI so far.

▲ Magic Gate III screen

By the time the magic gate reached the fourth or fifth generation, the development power of NWC had reached a new peak. The third, fourth and fifth generations of games are released year after year and become "New year goods"-quality and quantity goods.

In the fourth and fifth generations of games, there is a point that can reflect both creativity and technical ability. These two generations of games are actually staggered and developed at the same time, which may be the reason why they do not have a Roman numeral sequence. We can think of five generations as an expansion that can run independently. When you have four generations in PC, insert the five-generation game disc, and the installation window will ask you if you want to install the contents of "Legend of Magic: the Dark Lord counterattack" into the folder of "Legend of Magic: the Mysteries of the Nebula". If you agree, the two games will be merged into one, showing a completely different startup interface, with a new title "Legend of Magic: the World of the decisive Nebula".

On the left and right of the ▲ picture are the different sides of the planet Xeen.

When the fourth and fifth generations of games merge, the map will be converged into one, and there will be a series of additional tasks, and even the name of the Boss will eventually be changed. This mechanism was the excellent material for writing articles in the year when it relied on paper media, and the magic series reached its peak at this moment.

Kanhem has always been full of enthusiasm, while developing the Magic Gate series, he also participated in the design of the cosmic theme RPG "Planet's edge" and developed the semi-real-time chess game "Gift of the King". The latter is the predecessor of the heroic invincible, at the same time, it still has a large fan base of IP.

The Gift Picture of King ▲

However, Kanheim chose to sell the company at this time.

This is not because he is ready to cash out and run away, but as an excellent game director, he does not understand anything other than development, especially the release of the game, which plagued him during the initial release of the Magic. At that time, the poor NWC company was completely unable to afford to issue on its own, did not know how to issue, and failed to find a big factory willing to lend a helping hand all over the United States. In the end, it seems that Kanheim's partner went to Activision to beg his grandfather to sue his grandmother before he was able to make a successful appearance.

In 1993, NWC became a subsidiary of NTN Communications, which was then involved in bar entertainment (American bars were inextricably linked to electronic games). This is not quite the same as the general concept of acquisition, more like a kind of "hosting". But when Kanheim came up with the idea of handing over the business to outside capital, the story may have been doomed.

In 1994, the Magic series lost the vitality of the previous consecutive New year products, and only released an integrated version of the fourth or fifth generation and an officially supported fan expansion. In the same year, RPG games include final Fantasy 6, True Goddess reincarnation 2, Warcraft, Ancient Scrolls: Arena, while other games include Rockman X, Iron fist, NBA live, and Need for Speed.

The traditional European and American RPG has already been violently killed by Japanese manufacturers in the field of echo system, and the emergence of "final Fantasy 6" is a more historic blow. Even if we compare the four or five generations of magic gate with it, we will at most get some advantages in the field of freedom and dubbing. On the European and American side, the popularity of real-time strategy and the emergence of other "cool" games make the European and American RPG become an outcast of the market for a while.

In this context, Kanheim also felt the pressure on the magic door to be designed. Following the inspiration of his previous production of "Gift of the King", he developed a series of foreign accounts of Magic, "Magic: hero Invincible".

▲ Hero invincible first Generation main menu

The treatment of the first generation of hero invincible is very similar to that of Magic Gate-although there is no unprecedented achievement, it has gained good evaluation and good sales. The following year, in 1996, a hero invincible with a more complete game system and more textured graphics-"Heroes of Magic II: continuing disputes" was released.

▲ Hero Invincible 2 main menu

But it was also this year that the Magic Series came to the track of her fate.

In 1991, EA founder Tripp Hawkins set his sights on the mainframe market, left the company he founded and started 3DO. However, five years later, in 1996, 3DO's game console was completely defeated by PS and Saturn, and 3DO had to reshuffle and return to Hawkins's original path of becoming a full game developer and publisher.

In 1996, NWC was acquired by 3DO. In fact, there are no serious economic reasons. NWC is not in danger of not having enough to eat. The reorganized 3DO is gradually stable, and the first 3D MMORPG-- Meridian 59 has been released. Just because the highly forward-looking Kanhem and Hawkins have a need for each other-3DO needs the brand of magic and heroes, Kanhem has his eye on the future of online games.

▲ Meridian 59 picture

It seems nice to hit it off, but unfortunately, it's not the beginning of a wonderful story. And when we talk about tragedies, talking about Westwood, talking about bullfrogs, talking about Blizzard, talking about Maxis, talking about rebirth, we can witness at least a honeymoon period. But for NWC, this initial honeymoon period does not exist.

Only in the year of the acquisition, after the release of Heroes 2, Kanheim and Hawkins had differences in development ideas. Kanheim did not immediately force the birth of "Magic Gate Online", but hoped to make all-out efforts to develop "Magic Gate VI" after the two derivative films; and 3DO's considerations-- it's easy to guess, 3DO wants to take advantage of Hero invincible 2 big sales, immediately launch an expansion to maximize profits.

After some expedient, 3DO decided that the development of NWC would focus on "Magic Gate VI", while the development of the expansion of Heroes 2 was outsourced to other production teams. The first decision-making disagreement after the acquisition was to compromise by entrusting the biological IP.

…… Fortunately, high blood pressure has not occurred for the time being, and this documentary film called "the Price of loyalty" is well-made and well received.

The price of ▲ loyalty on the game cover

In 1998, Magic Gate VI: the order of Heaven was released. This brand-new 3D magic door was released four years later, and she has a new look, except that the images made by the 3D engine bid farewell to the previous grid labyrinth, and the field of vision can be rotated horizontally without a dead angle; the transfer and refinement system brings the character training and combat system to new heights; the story also sets foot on the Colony planet where the heroic invincible story is located and enters a new development.

At that time, the media compared her with games like "Ancient Scroll: blade Rain". Paradise order had less bug, better UI design, higher freedom, and deeper combat system, which was called "the harbinger of Western RPG revival" by players and the media.

Although the criticism caused by the sharp decline in the number of puzzles caused by the increased difficulty of development in the six generations began to emerge after the tranquillity of the waves, the sixth generation of Magic Gate is basically regarded as the pinnacle of the series.

Fire spell page of ▲ Magic Gate VI

In 1999, the domestic limelight even overshadowed the release of "Hero Invincible 3", a game of chess being played by Magic Gate. Although the game was completed only after the release of the expansion called "Shadow of death", but the body perfect game system, superb artistic style, top configuration of the screen, top-level music production, fascinating plot unfolding has brought it into the hall. 3DO is in the limelight for the moment-- it has both top 3D RPG works and top strategy games, and only Nintendo and Skywell have such status during the same period.

▲ Hero invincible 3

On December 20, 3DO took advantage of Christmas to release Magic: crusaders, a third-person action-oriented game. the quality of the game was mediocre, but it was an exploration of new ways to play, and the sequel, Magic: warriors, was released the following year. The Magic Series blossoms and bears fruit again.

Everything seems to be taking a turn for the better, but not surprisingly-an accident is coming.

3 unlike the scenery of Hero Invincible 3, the evaluation of "Magic Gate VII: lineage and Glory" released in the same year is so mediocre that it does not have six generations of game duration and plot depth, and the only thing worth mentioning is that it has joined a card game Mini Game, which is dwarfed by the exotic Requiem of the same year. When the game enters the 3D era, the difficulty of making the New year game is greatly improved, but 3DO does not care, it just keeps sending new money tasks to the invincible heads of magic and heroes.

▲ Magic Gate VII game interface, little progress compared with the previous generation

In 2000, Heroes Invincible 3 released the Shadow of death, the second expansion of the work, and a great series should come to an end. In the same year, however, NWC released six "Chronicles of Heroes", which can only be called "official maps". The game content is based entirely on three generations and brings nothing but the plot.

▲ Hero Invincible Chronicle cover

In May of the same year, "Magic Gate VIII: the Day of the Destroyer" was released, and the Magic Gate, which was still powerful last year, fell into a lot of criticism. This work is still nothing but a new bottle of old wine on the basis of six generations, not only the game has not changed, the plot is inexplicable, and the picture that has always been the benchmark of the industry is not at all the top level in the industry because of the backwardness of the engine.

Such an onerous and boring development task stems from the parent company 3DO's financial resources caused by the stock market explosion, which led 3DO to order NWC to do everything possible to circle the money, but at the same time laid off NWC staff again and again. It is said that in the most serious period, only more than a dozen staff members can be seen in the NWC studio.

▲ Magic Gate VIII game interface, in my personal aesthetic, this set of UI is extremely degraded.

3DO's only support for NWC is that it finally satisfied Kanhem's original intention of bringing magic online in a ridiculous place-they moved Mini Game, a card game from the seven generations of Magic Gate, separately for players to play online. Online Genesis, a sequel to the "three RPG", has been in operation for three years.

Mini Game "Magic Card" in ▲ Magic VII

In 2001, no magic works were born. But this year's Magic Series released three works: the Chronicle of Heroes: the final Chapter, the Dragon Wand of Heroes, the Legend of Magic, and the Wrath of Dragons.

"keel staff" released on the PS2 platform, with a good expressive she did not get enough publicity, the semi-finished level of play experience also makes it difficult for fans who will buy the work.

And "Legend of Magic" is a fully networked FPS, which is a ridiculous follow-up, let's not talk about her play and quality-in 2001, World of Warcraft just filed a case, holding such a long series of rpg games, but let NWC, which has little technical reserves, develop a first-person shooter?

"Wrath of the Dragon" is also an indescribable third-person shooting work, in which players drive dragons to take revenge on orcs, spitting magic while stealing farmers' hard-raised cattle to eat. If they die, there will be indescribable death images.

▲ Niuniu thinks you're rude.

In 2002, Magic Gate IX went on sale in the same year as Hero Invincible 4, along with the tepid third-person action series Magic: the transferor.

The release of Magic IP's next two masterpieces a year later is not because NWC has been holding back for a year, but that the parent company's 3DO is running out of breath.

The only highlight of Magic IX is that it became the first full 3D work in the main series, followed by the "most disappointed work Award" from various reviews. "Hero Invincible 4" is recognized as a semi-finished product, which later revealed that the unfinished system content is faster than the game itself. We can see a large number of 3DO dying signs in Hero Invincible 4, the most obvious is the shoddy towns and abrupt map elements, which is said to be due to financial constraints led to too many cut projects, leaving too much art bits and pieces, so waste recycling put them directly into the resources of "Hero Invincible 4".

The adventure of Hero Invincible 4 and the interface of the main city, the artists are disorganized.

The last feature film of Heroes 4 went on sale in 2003, and on May 28 of the same year, when 3DO went bankrupt, the collapsed building would not bypass anyone who was still there.

After 4NWC's death, "Gift of the King" was bought by chess-loving Russians, while the Magic series was taken away by another company-Ubisoft took away "Magic" and "Heroes of Magic" for a low price of $1.3 million.

I only need to tell one story to understand what happened next-on the 20th anniversary of the "Heroes" series, Ubisoft decided to release a remake of its most classic "Heroes 3".

This is something that deserves to be applauded no matter how much it deserves to be applauded. However, when the work was released, everyone found out why there was no classic death shadow documentary in the publicity.

It's not that Ubisoft wants to circle the money over and over again, just because Ubisoft lost the source code of the expansion.

However, Ubisoft later came up with a complete remake-- it could not be the story of Remake or the whoring community-- but the outsourcing studio responsible for transplanting the mobile version found the full source code of the expansion on their hard drive two years later.

However, the hero invincible and Ubisoft still have a honeymoon period. The development of Hero Invincible 5 was handed over to enthusiastic Russian studio Nival. Today, with the decline of chess games, there are still many heroic competitions between Chinese and Russian players, and the love of this type of game between the players of the two countries is less than that of other countries.

▲ Heroes invincible 5 Cemetery Camp main City

This work has received as much praise as three generations, with 350000 copies in 2006 one month after its release, making it once the best-selling game in Germany, Britain and France.

In October of the same year, Ubisoft was able to work with V Society to outsource Arkane to produce a first-person action game, Magic: the Dark Messiah, using the Source engine. At that time, Arkane was still a small studio without a representative work, but this work received more praise than criticism because of its good play.

▲ now seems that as early as this time, Society A has cultivated their unique game temperament.

After this great success, Ubisoft will hit the IP of Magic again while the iron is hot-which is impossible.

After this great success, Ubisoft not only continued to commission Nival to produce expansion films, but also developed "Magic: hero Invincible mini". This "mini" is a very confusing suffix, but the simple explanation is: hero invincible online version.

This web version has already invalidated the domain name, and the relationship between Nival and Ubisoft is getting more and more stiff, finally ending the cooperation between the two sides.

In the following five years, no magic or heroic masterpieces appeared. The core of Ubisoft's development in the Hero Invincible series is to continue to do page games. In 2008, Chinese domestic companies were authorized to produce "Hero Invincible Online", and the following year they developed the same Hero Invincible webpage version of "Magic: the Kingdom of Heroes". As the domestic "Hero Invincible Online" is of good quality and understands the market, this work developed by Ubisoft Chengdu was easily defeated and finally hastily shut down.

▲ left: domestic online; right: Ubisoft online

Ubisoft has made a little effort on the prefix of "Magic Gate". However, the Dark Messiah, also developed by Arkane, has received a lot of criticism: the Dark Messiah of Magic: the element. Instead, the cartoon-style puzzle game Magic: the Battle of Heroes, released on NDS, earned NDS's fourth-best-selling performance that year, when NDS included new works by Pokemon and Zelda.

▲ adheres to the principle of selling to death as soon as it is easy to sell, and the game was later transplanted to many platforms

In 2011, perhaps the success of the Assassin's Creed II trilogy gave Ubisoft some leisure elegance, and the Hero Invincible page game series was finally remembered again. And this development directly destroyed a game studio.

Due to many contradictions, Nival Studio broke away from all the development of Hero Invincible, and Yubi found a studio called Black Hole Entertainment instead. The studio has only two representative works before, but it is of good quality, including a real-time strategy game of Warhammer. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of their studio, Ubisoft handed over a group of players with tricky tastes behind them, and Black Hole Entertainment was flattered by the development task of "Hero Invincible 5" Pearl Jade.

However, Black Hole Studios gets a budget that is not much better than page games. 3D main city? Camp 6? None of them. The main city interface of Hero Invincible 6 returns to 2D style, with only five camps, and the last one will be introduced in DLC.

▲ Hero invincible 6 Cemetery main City Interface

But Black Hole Studio never had a chance to develop the DLC of this work again. Ubisoft's requirements are already so low that it may not even be able to support the development of a game that is already full of compromise.

The notoriety of a shoddy work may not matter to a big company like Ubisoft, but for an independent development studio eager to make its own masterpiece one day, how can a black hole just shatter its reputation?

So at the end of Hero Invincible 6, the black hole has entered the stage of upside-down development, and when the game body was released, the black hole studio was tortured to its last breath.

Ten months later, the black hole studio whose cash flow collapsed went bankrupt.

The appearance of "Hero Invincible 6" is actually excellent. After all, it has been five years since the previous generation, and the brand-new and attentive art elements make its visual effect in addition to the interface of the main city better than that of the five generations. Although the newly transformed game mechanism is not perfect, but at least fresh. It's just that first impressions can't make up for players' criticism of many bug whose black holes can no longer be repaired, can't make up for the shrinking volume of just five camps, let alone the memory filters that players have as thick as barriers.

After this big failure, Ubisoft didn't hide the magic door again because it took a fancy to the card game market-- a forward-looking behavior. "hearthstone Legend" came a year after the release of "Magic: champion showdown." It was just a good deck of cards, and the game was closed in 2016.

▲ Magic: champion showdown

The game's daily life improved a bit in 2014 when Magic Gate X: heritage was released. The work was produced by Limbic Studio, and the budget is visible to the naked eye. Even if the gameplay is good, as a 2014 game, the sticker is not even as good as the 2006 "Ancient Scroll 4", and the UI texture only has the advantage of resolution in front of the page game legend. The only luck is that at this time on the network, the hero invincible players still exist, but the Magic series has fewer fans than the Sturgeon in the Yangtze River.

▲ Magic Gate X game screen

Limbic is also the developer of Hero 7. Limbic is a smart studio compared to the black hole. After Hero 6 kills all the players' hopes, their development pressure is not so great, and the budget is still so small. In the design of the game mechanism, Limbic listens to a large number of players' opinions and makes all the favorite content in one pot. The gameplay is very high. When I pull people into the pit, I generally do not recommend the most classic and still excellent three generations, but this work "Hero 7".

The biggest defect of Hero Invincible 7 lies in its art. In the case of inheriting a large number of art resources of previous generations, its main city is still a plane with few animations, which is enough to see the low budget.

▲ "Heroes 7" Cemetery main City

But even if the gameplay is guaranteed, the sales of "Hero Invincible 7" are still not worth mentioning, and there has been no news of "Magic Gate" and "Hero Invincible" since the release of the disaster-prone DLC.

If it's pure snow, it's good, at least you don't have to be tortured. However, Ubisoft's attitude towards this IP is, "although we don't want to do it with our heart, we want to do it," and especially miss page games. After its own page game was defeated by Heroes of invincible M online, Ubisoft launched Online (invincible M Heroes online) in 2014.

In addition, Ubisoft has also developed mobile games "Magic Gate: elemental Guardian", "Hero of Magic Gate: era of War", strategic board game "Magic Gate: duel", and dark-like game "Magic Gate: pioneer" (this work has been stillborn).

On this day in 2022, only Hero 7 and two of its mobile games are still running on official servers.

Conclusion in the history of the development of the old IP in the game industry, the folly of big companies is incisively and vividly reflected, regardless of Ubisoft, EA, 3DO, Activision. There is often only a difference in volume when it comes to "destroying IP".

For Magic Gate, my regret is not that it can not return to the glory of the past, not that she can no longer play with the latest sequel, but that she has been kidnapped to produce so much low-quality content in the course of her life. and anger that those passionate and loving studios were mercilessly oppressed and even went bankrupt.

Anyway, my story is over. As for the Magic Gate, as the former king of RPG, today she has almost dripped her blood, unable to meet a proud demise.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: Doruran

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