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

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: DLS_MWZZ

At a face-to-face meeting in September, Nintendo unveiled Fae Farm, a traditional farming game, and HARVESTELLA, another fantasy farming game from Square Enix, will be released in November. This type seems to have suddenly received some kind of certification from heavyweight manufacturers, and it seems that we are about to enter the golden age of farming games-- perhaps just like the golden age experienced by RTS in the past.

Today, farming games have a long way to go. What's so interesting about it, and what will happen in the future?

Farming games, which have always been biased towards small production, seem to have finally been targeted by big companies, whether it is the future "Fae Farm" or the current farming masterpiece "Story of Xinglu Valley." their creative genes obviously come from the definition of this type of ancestor, "the Story of the pasture." reviewing the overall development of the farming game, we should also take the "Story of the pasture" as a reference.

1996 was the first anchor of the farming game, and the Story of the Ranch made its debut on the SFC platform. Of course, this is not to say that there were no farming games at all before. From its birth to 1996, video games have evolved into a chaotic period of farming and production, and occasionally some creative ideas for production games have emerged, such as the sweet potato planting method in "heavy aircraft soldiers" in 1991. However, under the background of these games, these similar farming designs often served the logic of RPG and ACT, which were popular at that time, and did not systematically form a framework for players to "invest, care, harvest and apply". It was not until the birth of the Story of Ranch that the specific form of farming games was defined.

What is worth mentioning in the game menu screen of "the Story of the Ranch" on SFC is that, also in 1996, the electronic pet (Tuomagozi), which represents the way of raising and playing in the farming game, was listed and was greatly recognized by the market. In the early years of the "Ranch Story" series, when it was uncertain how to integrate raising and playing methods and could only raise 12 chickens, electronic pets had already confirmed the gameplay and commercial value of the breeding system.

From then on, to 2003, it was the formative period of the classical farming form. This stage mainly focuses on the exhaustive adjustment and collocation of several core games in the farming game. For example, there was a marriage system in the first generation of the Story of the Ranch, but in the two works transferred to the GB platform, the system was temporarily removed because of the low age of the players or the capacity of the cassette, but it was still added in the later series, indicating that the marriage system has its particularity and necessity.

In this stage, there are many games that join the production and simulation management elements with different proportions, and carry out demagogic polishing of the subsystems needed for farming games such as manufacturing, commerce and trade from many levels. For example, the Night of summoning: the Story of casting Swords, which made its debut in 2003, is almost complete and predictable in today's mining game. other important games include "Mary's Alchemy Workshop: the Alchemist of Salbrook", which joins the workshop system, and "Invention Workshop", which combines production capacity with the plot.

Rome was not built in a day, and the bricks may come from a variety of places. The unique one is the 1997 Dungeon Guardian, a bullfrog studio classic that can be regarded as the "stitching monster" of the DOS era. It not only contains much more production content than the RTS of the same period, but also has a large number of elements such as fighting and digging, raising monsters, building planning and so on from the first perspective. Although it is not a farming game in strict sense, it is sufficient to prove that the game based on rich productivity construction is open and feasible enough in stitching. In 1999, "Dungeon Guardian 2" even designed the "My Pet Dungon" mode, which allows players to play whatever they want in almost complete leisure, which is very close to the experience of today's farming games.

In 2003, "the Story of the pasture: the partner of the Ore Town" came on the stage, and the five systems of farming, raising, mining, selling and emotional communication were integrated, which is a complete form of farming games. This work has been widely spread under the help of the GBA platform, and now, whether it is an authentic farming game or not, it will more or less contain its shadow, and even the Story of Xinglu Valley, which was released in 2016 and originally intended to pay homage, has caused a lot of controversy because it is so similar, and it shows the classic of this farming form.

From 2003 to 2013, it is the natural growth period that constitutes the different basic framework of all kinds of "farming games". The most typical one is "famine", which defines the more important supporting type "survival class" in farming games. "Famine" appeared in 2013, and farming systems have long existed in the evolutionary exploration of survival games, such as the "lost Blue" series, which has been launched since 2005. Due to the early designs of Famine, there is an urgent need for players to carry out farming activities to ensure safety, and people always see people on the forum asking where to find the cultivated material of "cow poop".

Famine players all know that we need more fields to produce blood-nourishing dumplings also in 2013. With the zombie craze, a large number of doomsday survival games have come one after another, of which "7 Days to Die" and "Project Zomboid" have been popular to this day, which has greatly boosted the development of survival games. Farming, which plays an important role in these games, is now an integral part of the type of life, to the extent that it is difficult to distinguish them from each other.

Since 2014, as the survival game with a large proportion of farming elements has developed year by year, farming has begun a wide range of theme integration. The 2014 Forest, for example, stitched together life types and non-zombie elements, trying to be more successful. Then there are "Deep Sea Trek" and "Raft" promotion of ocean farming in 2018; "Green Hell" real hard core farming in 2019; "Tiansui Rice Ji" in 2020 has occupied the place of Mengxian farming; in addition, "Genesis ideal Land" even carried out "carpet stitching" without restraint; the "Temple of the Soul" in 2021 was Viking farming; and the "rise of the Night people" in 2022 even brought vampires to farm.

Space, alien farming and so on more during this period, in addition to survival, simulation games are also combined with farming play, blossom and bear fruit. Different from the previous management-focused games of simulated business types, the proportion of production and play in the "City of exile" in 2014 is very large, and its "version answer" is to rely on planting and breeding to accumulate a large number of agricultural and animal husbandry products, relying on trade in exchange for everything to get rich.

So today, people can't help but wonder, who are we going to play next time and where to go?

The elements of farming have been integrated into a variety of classic game types, but there are always some constant core elements in these 20 years, which is not only the key to the success of the type, but also an indispensable basis for future evolution.

The first constant core element is continuous, stable and long-term feedback, thus forming a "sense of companionship" that coexists with reality.

A typical example is the Story of the Ranch. This kind of feedback is not only the virtual feedback brought by frequently obtaining all kinds of props in the course of the game, not only the humanistic companionship brought by the virtual ranch life, but also through many ways, including the two, to accumulate a sense of reality in the hearts of players. one of the necessary conditions to achieve this goal is the convenience of access to the virtual world.

Now if you look back at SFC's original "the Story of the Ranch", you will find that it is not very different from the GBA version, and the new system that has actually been iterated over the past few years is mainly mining. Apart from the differences in the background of the times, the portability of the GBA as a handset that can be played at any time is an important difference. Whether on the way to work, resting or going to the bathroom, when players want, they can connect to their own virtual space, which is very important-- turn a corner and say that the game of stealing food, which is popular on our side, is a similar logic. popular things, everyone's attributes are the same.

The companionship of an electronic pet sometimes exceeds that of a real pet. After all, it can go anywhere. Portable elements are not so strong now, but only if there are too many ways to play games. With the help of iOS, Steam and other platforms, most farming games tend to be small and medium-sized, distributed on computers and mobile phones. Office fish-touching people or modern social animals can cut into the game at any time. Many farming games are keen to transplant NS and obviously understand this. In terms of game functions, such as "the Temple of the Soul", "the rise of the Night people" and other designs that are archived at any time, online and offline at any time, are also the embodiment of portable and fragmented.

In addition, continuous, stable and long-term feedback is also reflected in the "failure punishment" of the game. In recent years, almost all farming games have tried to reduce or even simply remove the loss of players, even in survival games will try to compromise the impact of death. Because players play farming games for comfort and relaxation, rather than nibbling at the 3-minute explosion countdown to escape from the institute, if players are overly nervous or really suffer heavy losses because of the possibility of huge losses, then the player's bond with the world is about to be broken.

For example, the very early version of "Raft" supports "peace mode". All hostile animals will not attack the player first, and the player will not lose anything when he dies. It is even set up that players can deliberately die too far from the ship and return to the city quickly, which is very convenient. In the iteration of the subsequent version, the normal mode of "all items dropped at the place of death" was also adjusted to "the equipment will not fall, but lose some durability." Similar to the idea of "wandering Pastoral", the recent version also supports options such as "Giants will not die", allowing players to relax enough to participate in the game to ensure the absolute safety of their virtual spiritual home.

Especially for young and middle-aged players with slow and tricky tastes, the second core element of the farming game, which is not deliberately embarrassed by designers, is the game logic of "anti-brush", paying attention to more practical "pay for work".

The 2000's, when farming games were not yet fully mature, was also the era of the rise of "Dark" Shuobao games. Although this kind of play is interesting and successful, over the years, both manufacturers and players have slowly awakened from the lies of pseudorandom functions, compared with the luck test of 20%. Farming games pay attention to the reliable return of hard work and harvest, which may be more worthy of players' time-the real world is already cruel. As an ideal carrier, the game world may not have the difference between "non-emirate" and "European Emperor".

This kind of thinking is particularly obvious in the survival game represented by "Famine". There is basically no outrageous probability for players to hit something strange and lose something. Although there are also some relatively rare resources, because the survival and play method makes the player's endurance is limited, no one wants to continue the game. Therefore, the focus of the game is still on the use of resources after acquisition, rather than pinching the acquisition end to be a difficult person.

This year's best-selling survival game "the rise of the Night Race" is jokingly called "Diablo 3.5", in which the design of unlocking technology can be called a game design textbook. On the one hand, it supports the traditional random function, killing Boss has a higher probability of dropping the technology formula, thus making advanced equipment, but hitting boxes, jars, and miscellaneous soldiers that can be seen everywhere may also fall; on the other hand, according to the idea of farming, players can pick up "technology fragments" everywhere in the game world, and even a small reasonable number can unlock technology. And there are not many unlocked items in the game, which can be replenished by "liver". These designs make the sense of harvest and growth of "brushing copies" very good, and the tragedy of wasteful hard work will never happen without a legendary weapon that works for dozens of hours.

The belief in farming games: the third core element of farming games that cannot be solved by one hoe is sufficient player-oriented game rhythm and freedom, or a logic of "anti-big narrative" and anti-compulsory development. This is also in line with the general trend of game design changes over the past 20 years, just as RTS, which leads thousands of troops, has shrunk step by step to MOBA, which controls only one hero.

At this point, the most typical works are works such as "around the World" and "my World". Whether from the perspective of God or from the first-person perspective, the core is to support players to do anything, and the game is just a platform. through its production function to provide players with creative resource support, to help players with the maximum freedom to live any life they want in the game world. Instead of "the director asks you to press the F key to drive the vehicle and start the Boss war".

The gradual rise of such games also reflects the changes in the group of players from the side. You can think that the "elite thinking" that used to be keen to save the world is beginning to weaken, or now people pay more attention to virtual life and spiritual rewards. there can be many angles of interpretation, and the point is that this free and inclusive logic of thinking itself and farming are naturally attracted to each other.

As I write this article, someone has already built a computer in "my World". The fourth point at the core of the "my World" farming game is more like a strength than a core element. that is, it is very in line with the requirements of frequent updates of modern service games, that is, it needs to be rich enough in parallel content.

Farming games have a wide range of content coverage and can form loops in flat process lines. For example, there should be food in the game, the function is only for players to eat or sell, but whether it is 3, 5, or 18, can be. This is very convenient for ultra-long update iterations, and players can fully accept it.

There are also many typical examples below this point. Such as the length of the update of more than a decade of "Thalia", the degree of completion such as watching the completion of the pit to achieve a complete "Raft", are very good examples. "Raft" has even occurred because of the general needs of players, temporarily modify the plan, update the engine controller separately in advance.

An ongoing example is the "rise of the Night people". It can be found from some designs of the game that the production team may not have made too many bets on farming, but habitually focused on PvP. The official log also mentioned that the production team did not think about "building the second floor" in order to avoid technical difficulties at first. But in farming games, it is common to build a hometown, especially when it comes to vampires, where "castle on the ground floor" is even more ridiculous-fortunately, the form of farming allows players to be patient enough to wait for the authorities to slowly solve the problem without causing too much trouble.

This stable update not only allows manufacturers to eat longer and happier in a game, after all, content filling is a "constructive" practical return for players, which is generally recognized. As a long-service game, compared with Watchman, developers often have to make deliberate updates because of rigid requirements such as balance and preventing players from relying on version answers, causing players to lose the results of long-term practice "destructively". As a result, the more updated, the more scolded-by contrast, the story that farming games generally get is obviously better.

On the left side of the picture is the master controller that was originally updated in Chapter 3 of "Raft". Due to the needs of players, the fifth core element is to have a social space under a free and reasonable framework. No matter the reality or the game, the production work itself is boring, what brings meaning to it is the demand behind it, and the demand often emerges from the society, which may be to show a gorgeous house, or to pull a friend, and so on. The marriage system, which has existed since the beginning of the Story of the Ranch, can also be regarded as the embodiment of social elements, but today, players are not limited to socializing with paper people.

However, like the third rigid need for freedom, the social space should not be too mandatory, whether it is a stand-alone or multiplayer game, forcing social interaction is not appropriate. A typical example of forced social interaction is "double play". The game is really good, and the experience for two is great, but it's really impossible for one person to play. By the same token, games that overlook the actual experience and pretend to have single-player or multiplayer mode are tantamount to abandoning a considerable number of players and are not quite in line with the inherent concept of all-inclusive farming games.

In this regard, the fire in the past two years of the "Temple of the Soul" and "the rise of the Night Race" can be said to give high-score answers, balancing the single-player and multiplayer experience through multiple subsystems.

For example, the Temple of the Soul allows players' character archives and world archives to be independent of each other, so that players can travel from home to the world of different friends with the contents of their pockets, with the support of productivity in their own base. it is convenient to share meat, trade and draw swords to help. The game wants players to experience the play of shipping and land transportation of minerals, so there is a design that "metal materials can not pass through the portal", but the principle of archiving independence can be used to bypass the lonely transportation journey of single-player mode at any time. In multiplayer mode, you can experience the fun of a long journey with your companions-the right of choice is in the players, which can be regarded as having their own splendor.

"Temple of the Spirit": a pastoral town built by manual leisure, hundreds of hours of cyber bricks are needed to wash the soul. What is interesting is that the social activities of farming games in recent years tend to be among friends. The default state of many games in the online interface is friend filtering, rather than being open like the public channels in the early years, which is very much in line with the social logic of the Nintendo platform.

The future trend in the next year or two, farming games still have room to integrate with many classic themes, and this trend can be seen in reality. It has been announced that unlisted games include skyscraper farming's "exiled Cloud", the updated and increasingly complete Xiuxian farming "Fang Lingtian", and the upcoming space station farming game "IXION", all of which have their own distinct themes. In addition, there will naturally be other themes, perhaps in the future there will be farming as high as Gao Tian, Gu Aotian, Diablo farming and so on. May be specific to the national conditions, giant panda reserve farming is a good idea, who does not like giant pandas?

This fusion may sometimes seem like a holster, because farming often does not evolve much, and it is not easy for small and medium-sized games to produce one or two unique systems related to the depth of classic elements. For example, suppose you want to make a "black soul" farming game, Boss does not drop how rare materials, but only to let players test their own dozens of hours of "liver-made" magic weapon power, and then give an achievement and so on; or more black humor, the rare material for creating magic weapons is the "embers" that appear in the props column after the player's death.

Doraemon this "the story of the pasture" is too much for fans. In the future, more than two years from now, the games released at that time may not even have a draft, but I think what the excellent farming games needed urgently was to update and iterate the key elements to meet the needs of the players. to solve some of the anxiety and problems that players still face today. Most of the works that have left traces in history in the past decade have also achieved this, and become the basis for future generations to learn from.

At this point, the "Raft" approach is straightforward and effective, as long as the home can move, and then bid farewell to any troublesome base mobility problems. Newcomers such as "wandering Pastoral" and "IXION" obviously have similar ideas, greatly reducing the trouble for players to dig around for resources. It is also mentioned in the developer's news released recently by the rise of the Night that developers are thinking about how to make it easier to move. In short, so far, there are not many designs that can help move, and there may be surprises in the future.

Since it is a space station farming, of course it can move all over the world. For example, many farming games have the problem of facility layout, how to maximize efficiency, how to plan energy pipelines, and so on, although it is one of the conventional ways to play, but it is also easy to drive new players crazy. Planetary craftsmen proposed "automatic wireless sharing of the power grid", in which any building is placed anywhere and has no need to worry about the layout.

Similarly, the "Dyson Ball Project" uses a three-dimensional conveyor belt to alleviate the layout problem, "the rise of the Night Race" does not lose its equipment, and there are enough smart deputy characters in "the Road to Awakening", so that more players can invest energy in line with their own situations. experience the right happiness and maximize the audience. To make these iterations, developers need to have a good understanding of the key elements and be able to understand what branches and leaves are missing in the development of the huge game design tree.

Focusing on creating a sufficiently intelligent and realistic NPC is a great progress in the "road to awakening". To put it further, when the technology is mature enough, the iterations of design ideas are accumulated, and the elements are integrated to a relatively saturated level, it is an inevitable trend that 3A-level games based on farming begin to appear, just like all kinds of tricks in RTS games in the 1990s. Just as it ended with the triple-A StarCraft II in 2008, the current situation of farming games is very much like the RTS games of that era. Nintendo, which has already done "Animal Sen", uses "Fae Farm" as a test and exploration, and probably wants to do it, or even is already doing it. Nintendo is also good at being all-inclusive, embodies all kinds of characteristics, and has the ability and qualifications to make such products.

In addition to these more rational and conventional "right paths", there are also some interesting "evil ways". For example, joint environmental protection actions allow players to buy special gift bags, get unique skin, and put money into real afforestation activities-there are still a lot of ideas that can be opened in farming games. There is already a precedent for donating marine animal conservation activities in Raft, and it's extremely impressive to see whales swim past in the game-so are you sure you don't want to donate some?

Finally, through the obvious unscrupulous stitching games such as "creation ideal Town" and "PalWorld", we can easily find that the farming game based on the production and construction structure is very suitable for presenting the hyped concept of "meta-universe". Compared with other classical types of frameworks, it is still very convenient to sew on a variety of electronic game systems created by human beings so far.

After all, the farming system is one of the root causes of cyber productivity. Isn't it too much to dream of a golden age of farming games?

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