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

"Don't worry about your rat."

The Legend of the Plague: the Requiem has been on sale for nearly a week. The picture of the game has sparked more discussion than the way the game is played and the plot.

Asobo, the French studio that made the game, focused on images long before the game was released, but the direction of the main push was obviously a little skewed-they spared no effort to render the staff trying to stuff more moving mice into the screen, and the former "Plague Legend: innocent"5000 Mouse on the same screen" was raised to 300000 of this generation.

The "rat tide" in the game has reached the point of "covering the sky and the earth" this time, which is of course quite a magnificent visual spectacle, but to tell you the truth, even if it does not cause "dense phobia", few players will actually play a game to see the mouse.

Coupled with the fact that the mainframe screen of the game is locked at 30 frames, and the PC version requires more than 3070 graphics cards to run smoothly, the game has been criticized before its release, questioning whether it is worth sacrificing performance in order to plug so many mice.

However, after the Requiem was officially released, it was found that the remarkable feature of the picture was not the number of mice on the same screen.

Whether on sub-era hosts such as Xbox Series and PS5, or on PC with more than 30 series of graphics cards, the actual picture effect of the game is amazing, especially the delicacy of the map can be called the ceiling of the current industry.

Gamer PS5 took quick pictures of the scene in game photography mode, and Requiem was called "the best advertisement for 4090 graphics cards" by players, allowing many people to tolerate its shortcomings in optimization.

Despite the exquisite texture of the scene, Requiem does not occupy very high video memory, and even if it is difficult to maintain a high number of frames steadily under the 30-series graphics card, the static picture performance is still quite amazing.

In addition to environmental performance, there is also character modeling in Requiem. The face and figure of the heroine Amicia strike a balance between the realistic texture advocated by European and American games in recent years and the beauty of Japanese games, and the facial expressions and movements based on real-life action in the performance are also vivid.

These were quickly used to "step on" those unsatisfactory 3A masterpieces, and some players mocked bluntly: "really? Oh, really? there won't be a 3A game character modeling in the first studio that is no better than an independent small company, is it?"

Neither Microsoft's unlisted Starry Sky nor Sony's Horizon: the West's despair were spared overnight, and Requiem became a new benchmark for game screen performance.

1 as a studio that has just been founded for 20 years, it is said that Asobo also has more than 100 employees. The company's previous major resumes are contract manufacturing for Disney, Microsoft and its French counterpart Ubisoft, and the 2019 Legend of the Plague: innocence is their first independent work.

This movie-style action adventure game can be called one of the best "quasi-3A" games of the last generation, with top-notch pictures, complete stories and ways of playing, as well as some impressive characters. At that time, the appearance of the protagonist Amicia and her mother was regarded as a clean stream in the current European and American games.

Even Japanese players who are used to seeing handsome boys and girls in the game praise the appearance of the characters in "innocence". As the debut work of a small and medium-sized company, "innocence" is an excellent exercise, but its limitations are also obvious.

In many aspects of the game, it is not difficult to see that for the copy of "the Last Survivor", putting aside the common collocation of a big and a small protagonist, the level design is also deep in its quintessence, alternately arranging "knowledgeable human enemies" and "obstacle zombies / rodents", so that the player's game rhythm swings at the balance point of "battle" and "stealth", and the weak protagonist's escape barrier is reengraved at the end of the game. Even the open ending is the same.

This led Asobo to be jokingly called "naughty dog" by some players at that time.

Of course, it is not difficult to feel some of the ideas of the producers of "innocence". For example, it is impressive to replace common monster enemies with rats, and a series of puzzles based on "mice are afraid of Fire" are also somewhat new. By contrast, the script with the theme of "Plague" is a bit complicated.

At the beginning of the game, the impression is a realistic medieval adventure, about how a brother and sister struggled to survive in the environment of war and plague, but in the middle of the story, the story suddenly changed, telling the player that the plague curse hosted in his brother's body was caused by him, and he could also control the rodents, and in the end, the sister and brother and BOSS controlled each other's "rodent tornado" collision.

In today's words, such a super expansion that makes people doubt the mental state of the author at the time of creation has made it difficult for players to judge whether it is "good or bad", and most people think that "this production team is quite thoughtful."

"innocence" is rated as a "minority masterpiece" among some players, while many people think it is lacklustre, but both sides agree on one thing: "it is rare for a small company to make such a work."

Sales of the game exceeded 1 million a year after its release, which seems to be a fairly satisfactory result for Asobo, and the sequel is on the agenda.

The previous film the innocence of the Legend of the Plague received good sales and reviews on Steam. In 2020, the Last Survivor released a sequel seven years later, and the game was polarized because of its script. Two years later, Requiem, a sequel to the Legend of the Plague, was released two years later.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the art and pictures of Requiem are not inferior to the current first-party works, and the play of the game is much richer and more playable than the previous works.

For example, the level design of the game is no longer as distinct as the previous one, which is divided into "stealth clearance" and "combat clearance". Most of the time, players can choose between frontal confrontation and stealth clearance, and even make use of the terrain to parkour all the way.

The player's style of play will also determine the growth of the character's skills. With a relatively rich combination of weapons and props, the game experience is almost the medieval version of Tomb Raider.

But objectively speaking, it is difficult to say that the gameplay of Requiem has made any qualitative leap on the basis of the previous works.

As the game producers said, they tried to make up for what they had not done well in the sequel by almost reengraving the classic puzzle-solving elements of "innocence" in a different scene at the first 1/3 levels of the game. and make them smoother and more fun, until some new mechanisms are added in the second half of the game.

For example, the limited promotion of being able to directly manipulate rats to swallow people is particularly evident when compared to the sequel of "the Last Survivor" that the Legend of the Plague once chased.

The Rope in Survivor 2 was hotly debated after the game was released because the prop, which was not critical in the game, was physically real enough for players to play for a while.

The classic rope Requiem also attracts the prop "rope" in the middle and later stages of the game, which can be bound to the crossbow and launched. But if players expect the rope to be useful, they will be disappointed-the rope here can only be connected to distant props in certain scenes, and then trigger the device by dragging and dragging. There is no doubt that the game level looks a little backward.

Press Y to drag and drop, that's all. On this basis, lifelike scene maps are sometimes counterproductive. For example, although a goat in the game looks quite real, it has no response to the interaction of the players, and there is no way to distract the enemy by alarming the goat.

There are few plot branches in the counterintuitive game, and even if players try their best to save some NPC who still seem to have a chance, they will eventually find that the game mechanism determines that they can only watch them be killed by bandits or engulfed by rats, so most of the producers are unable to add more dispensable content to the game.

Despite the close pursuit of the screen effect, Requiem is still inadequate in many ways compared with the technical skills of the real 3A game studio.

This has also been used by some players to refute the fact that "facial modeling in big companies is not as good as small studios" mentioned at the beginning of the article-although the characters of Requiem look more beautiful in some still photos, but the game is only arranged in a few venues, and most of the expressions are still mechanically rigid.

In contrast, Eloy, the heroine of Horizon West, uses a lot of dynamic capture material, and even the eyeball makes a real-time mapping effect, which makes the character look more real in motion. There are also more collisions and interactions with environmental objects, and the overall technical gap between the two is comparable to classroom exercises and real research topics.

Some players say that Eloy can also take beautiful pictures as long as he finds a good angle, and the previous comparison is unfair. 3 despite the disputes and comparisons among players, Requiem itself is no longer so much like a copycat of 3A masterpieces. This generation is more complete about the story and has more personality, like a less commercial independent game.

Compared with a generation of Hollywood-style sister-and-brother adventures, the Requiem story may not be much reversed, but its progress is quite "against the best part"-the main actor's efforts to achieve his goals at a time often lead to deeper despair.

As a result, the most frightening content of the game is no longer the ferocious enemies and rodents, but the abyss of suffering that does not know where to go.

Compared with a generation of B-style bloody violence, the Requiem scene is more bizarre and this style of story has caused a lot of controversy among players.

Many people complain that the plot and play of the game are separated, and the protagonist Amicia is decisive but always crying, which makes it difficult for people to empathize, and the outcome is also difficult to accept; but many players think that this precisely reflects the production team's handling of the player's psychology, achieving a rare unity of player behavior and plot logic, and the ending is of practical significance.

It's easy to see the opposite evaluation of the game plot in the Steam comments section. Controversy like this is not hard to foresee at the game production stage, and the writers could have written a more "water" but more stable story as before, but they finally came up with a script that made the player community like and hate.

Similarly, the production team said in an interview before the release of the game that they had no plans to follow up on the Legend of the Plague for the time being, but at the end of the game, they added an egg that looked like a "modern story". It seems to be to test the reaction of the players.

This slightly experimental content is not limited to the plot.

In the middle and later stages of the game, players will enter an "open world level" and are free to explore in a rather wide map, collect and solve puzzles, and it will take several times longer for a normal combat level to explore completely.

A fairly large explorable scene for a linear flow game, this level does not fit in with the previous content, is not so fun, and plays the role of watching the scenery and adjusting the rhythm of the game at most. But it is also easy for players to perceive that this is an opportunity for the production team to accumulate the design experience of "open world" content and control it as much as possible within the acceptable range of players, and has not been used as a commercial marketing gimmick.

From "innocence" to "Requiem," the most amazing thing about this production team is its project management ability-- it took a team of 70 people three years to methodically produce a game that competes with top commercial masterpieces on the screen, has self-breakthrough in plot and play, and even has the spare power to pave the way for future works, and we all know that these three years have been plague in reality. Many game studios are mired in the era of development crisis.

Perhaps because the Legend of the Plague is not a true 3A, most players include the experimental content in the game and give a positive evaluation as a whole. The disturbance caused by this work also more or less reflects the players' attitude towards the current 3A masterpieces in Europe and the United States-rather than using the manpower and material resources of large companies to pile up some dispensable "game details", we look forward to clear promotion and innovation at a glance.

As the famous saying among players: "the number of polygons does not represent beauty."

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

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.