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

An unprecedented zero-like patch. Since the E3 show in 2018, players' understanding of "Ancient Scroll 6" has been stuck in that half-minute concept PV.

Three years later, Todd, the game director of Society B, mentioned in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that "Ancient Scroll 6" is only in the design stage, which is more familiar to everyone. That is the phrase "new folder" that domestic players often laugh at.

In recent years, Society B has obviously focused on the operation of "radiation 76" and the development of "Star Sky." the former has a reputation for a collapse at the beginning, while the latter has abandoned its original plan for sale on November 11. it is not difficult to see that the 400-member team of Society B is really incompetent in the face of a number of large-scale projects.

But even so, Society B took time out of its busy schedule to deal with fans of the Ancient Scrolls. On the 10th anniversary of the release of Ancient Scroll 5, Todd came to the player community to share with players the anecdotes behind game development and future plans, and released a new version called "10th Anniversary Edition", which is sold as DLC, focusing on feelings.

Although there is no essential difference from the original game, the existence of the 10th anniversary version at least proves that Society B has not forgotten the IP, which has not been published for 11 years. After the game is launched, five updates in succession also show the determination of President B to operate the line.

Contrary to the expectations of Society B, players of Ancient Scroll 5 do not seem to like such "diligent" high-intensity updates, and players always complain as if they are facing an archenemy when a new version of the game is released. This strange phenomenon for outsiders began to take shape at the beginning of the announcement of the 10th anniversary edition, until the update on September 15, an official update that received more than 2000 unhealthy comments and an unprecedented 0 likes.

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Eight months later, the 5th Anniversary Edition of the Ancient Scrolls ushered in its fourth update patch. This 190MB-sized update file has only two lines of concise explanation: fixed the problem of accessing MOD in Japan and China, and fixed the display problem of the game in-house store.

For players who don't know much about the game, it's just a regular BUG fix, and although there's no real update, it's better than none, but for those who still stay in the Skyline Province, the word "version update" is scary enough to avoid.

The game "Ancient Scroll 5", which was released in 2011, still has tens of thousands of active users on the Steam platform, and such a long vitality has something to do with the vitality of the MOD community. The game itself and MOD complement each other, or in other words, "Ancient Scroll 5" is synonymous with "game MOD", and even passers-by who have not played the book know more or less about the complex MOD environment behind it. The player MOD fills every regret in the game, beautifies every inch of the land in the game, and even here, some commercial games are born.

MOD, the predecessor of the highly acclaimed independent game "City of Forgetting" in 2021, is precisely in the context of MOD supporting the popularity and content of the game, the official update of "Scroll 5" is not futile, but superfluous. On the one hand, there is not much vicious BUG in this game that needs to be repaired urgently, even if there is, it has been perfectly solved in the hands of private MOD makers, and most of the minor fixes pushed by Society B are innocuous; on the other hand, the version upgrade of the game will lead to a large number of MOD failures, which will almost destroy players' enthusiasm for playing.

High-definition MOD packages are often hundreds of gigabytes in size in large foreign MOD communities, with a total of 47921 working MOD included. In order to sort such complex documents, players usually need a unified front tool, as well as special management tools. These tools are highly bound to the game version, whenever the version number does not match, there will be problems such as error crashes. Every time the official version is updated, players either delete the MOD, wait patiently for the new version to adapt, or simply roll back the version and stay in all the normal old games.

Mod Organizer 2, the current mainstream MOD sorting tool since the launch of the 10th anniversary edition, Society B seems to have never considered the mood of the majority of MOD players, and the iteration of the game version often makes players unprepared and disorganized. Before the Sept. 15 patch, players enjoyed eight months of quiet time without being bothered by the update, but this sudden update brought more BUG while fixing two irrelevant BUG, and the game had to push an emergency update seven days later.

The update announcement on Sept. 21 is still familiar with zero likes in just one week, and players who have just reinstalled the MOD have to go backwards again, so capricious that it is easy to understand players' grievances and anger.

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The good MOD ecology of Ancient Scrolls 5 began to collapse only after the 10th anniversary edition was officially launched. If players don't install or even buy this so-called 10th anniversary edition, will they not be harassed by the official update? Unfortunately, the answer is of course no.

In the 11 years since its release, Ancient Scrolls 5 has released a total of three large branch editions, namely, the legendary version, the special edition and the 10th anniversary edition of the protagonist of this event.

Legendary version, as the earliest special version, integrates all the updates and DLC of the original version, and has a quite perfect MOD environment; the later special edition is further refined in terms of picture performance, running efficiency, compatibility and adaptation on the basis of legendary version, which can be regarded as a more mature version.

Although there is no essential difference between the legendary edition and the special edition, Society B still treats the two versions as two works and launched the special edition in 2016 in the form of separate sales. Due to the incompatibility of different versions of MOD, very few MOD initially supported the special version, but in the course of several years of development, the special version has been promoted to the most abundant version of MOD support, gradually becoming the first choice for new players.

After the special edition is on sale, the legendary version is removed from the shelves and sold separately, giving players the right to choose. Whenever something goes wrong with the special edition, players can go back to the familiar legendary version and continue to roam in the skyline province. However, the emergence of the 10th anniversary version deprives the player of the right to choose, because this time, the game uses a mandatory patch upgrade to replace the original old version. Upgrade the special version in the player's hand to a unified version.

The update of the 10th anniversary edition is divided into free and paid parts, and free players can also enjoy four new contents: rare treasures, saints and seducers, survival mode and fishing mission line. on this basis, paying players can get a total of 70 expansion elements, large and small.

It sounds quite luxurious, but in fact, most of the 74 new contents are transplanted from private MOD. In other words, this 10th anniversary edition is actually the act of regularizing private MOD under the official banner.

As early as 2017, Society B pushed a mandatory update for the special edition, with an internal mall called "Creation Club" built into the game, where players can pay for CC points on the Steam store page and consume the corresponding points in the game.

The creation Club, with prices ranging from 100 to 900 points, is not the first of "Ancient Scrolls 5". Radiant 4, owned by B Society, also has the same internal shopping mall. These malls are not officially provided with experience cards, game currencies and other paid props, but officially excavated from the player community from the private MOD. Although Society B has made some improvements to some of the MOD, most of the MOD has been copied into the game intact, so that even if there is a BUG, it may not be officially fixed.

Even on the 10th anniversary of the launch of the MOD game that repaired MOD, Society B asked these private MOD producers to produce some of the new content and packaged all the paid MOD from the previous creation club. In terms of performance-to-price ratio, the 10th anniversary edition is obviously more cost-effective than buying CC points alone, but Society B does not seem to have considered that players do not want these perfunctory MOD at all.

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Before this unprecedented zero-like update, although the 10th anniversary version of the Steam store interface reads "support traditional Chinese", there has been no real Chinese in the game.

Beware of the new type of online fraud this is not language discrimination, but the follow-up operation of Society B is inefficient, and it was not until several versions were updated that they made up for the proper Chinese. Ironically, players who have bought the 10th anniversary edition in China during this period are generally buying genuine copies and playing with pirated copies, and the so-called "genuine victims" are no more than that.

Spending money to suffer is not a unilateral problem for Chinese players, and the roughness of the 10th anniversary version is reflected at all levels. For example, the built-in official MOD of the game will not be downloaded together when downloading the game, but requires players to use the "low-speed server" provided by Society B to download slowly after entering the game.

And the paid content priced at $20 is not worth the ticket price in terms of quality alone. Not to mention the fact that there is not much content available for players to play, most of them are just a few pieces of equipment and weapons, and the only new content in the real sense is the new games introduced by fishing mode, and even all the new tasks save the expense of dubbing actors. Just muddle through with notes and letters.

As for the ancestral method of buying games and giving them to BUG, the 10th anniversary edition has also been inherited. In the patch update on December 13 last year, they fixed a few problems, but mistakenly used the corrupted texture in the update file, causing a more serious flicker problem. The player community followed up to solve the problem the first time, and the official fix didn't arrive until a month later.

It is an indisputable fact that the total number of downloads of the special edition downgraded patch has exceeded one million "Ancient Scroll 5" MOD community, but due to the influence of language, environment and other factors, it is not easy for Chinese players to experience all kinds of MOD smoothly. Compared to reading the MOD installation tutorials in detail and finding several available MOD in the advertising stack, domestic players still prefer to use special integration packages, that is, a large number of practical MOD files, which can be decompressed and used conveniently and quickly.

The "Ancient Scroll 5" MOD installation tutorial written by user @ GR4P3 can dissuade a large number of players from the emergence of lazy integration packages just by looking at the directory next to them, giving rise to a large number of unscrupulous merchants selling these files. They use poor information to earn money in Xiaobai Meng's new hands in the name of "lucky money". While embezzling private MOD, they have seriously damaged the enthusiasm of domestic MOD creators.

New players subconsciously think that these integrated packages are the 10th anniversary version of the built-in official MOD that should be a good thing, recruiting MOD authors, profit-sharing incentives, simplifying the MOD installation process, and helping new players understand the nature of MOD to avoid recharging pirated merchants. However, because of the casual attitude of Society B, this special version, which was supposed to celebrate the 10th anniversary enthusiastically, has a poor reputation and appears to be "ugly."

The praise rate of the 10th anniversary version of Steam jumped out from time to time to tinker with the dispensable details, and continued to speed up the repair after making a bigger mistake, and behind each update announcement was the painful cries of countless players. As a result, the 10th anniversary edition is the worst-known version of Ancient Scrolls 5, and players will not have a peaceful life as long as it is updated.

Society B, which has eaten up the bonuses of folk MOD, has no reason not to know the resistance of the player community to the updated patch of "Ancient Scroll 5". Rather than maintain a stable MOD environment, Society B prefers to keep rolling out pointless updates to continue to promote and optimize their official MOD platform, even if doing so will ruin the gaming experience for all players over the next few days.

Four updates and three related to in-game purchase if you are a new player who is not interested in MOD and just want to see what the authentic Skyline province looks like, the 10th anniversary version is not a big problem. At present, many private MOD authors are trying their best to adapt to this new version, as long as the future updates of Society B are no longer so frequent, it may only be a matter of time before it becomes another version suitable for newcomers.

Of course, given the slow development of Ancient Scroll 6, there is still a lot of time left for Ancient Scroll 5.

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

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