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

The full-immersion MMORPG Sword Art Online (SAO) was officially launched on November 6.

Since it went on sale at the end of October, the game has received increasing attention and has received rave reviews from players in various countries who previously participated in the closed beta.

As a medieval magic theme RPG, only "sword" in the game without "magic" is the most important feature of SAO, players/can not use magic skills in the game, correspondingly there are various forms of melee skills available to master.

Producer Mao said he hoped to give players a "more realistic" gaming experience in virtual reality space.

As the first party game exclusively owned by NERvGear for a new generation of entertainment, SAO fully applies the neural connection technology of the device, which can bring players an immersive gaming experience and is also considered to be the first true "killer" application in VR gaming field.

SAO's NERvGear console is also in short supply at the moment, and has been fired to nearly twice the official price in the second-hand market.

It is worth noting that since the game opened today, there have been rumors everywhere that players who entered the game have not quit yet, and even some players fell into a coma because the outside world forcibly removed NERvGear helmets or powered off. It is said that only when there are players in the game who successfully break through the 100-layer checkpoint can all players exit safely.

Some players claim their families are trapped in the game.

It has not been confirmed whether these claims are hype or rumors, and officials have not responded to them, which undoubtedly raises concerns about the safety of such neuro-connected VR devices.

Fortunately or unfortunately, none of this has happened as planned in our world. Fully immersive VR devices and fully realistic "Sword God Domain" still exist only in Kawara's novels, and no players are harmed by the "death game" held by the producer.

In reality, the Sword God Domain that we can play is still a lot of ordinary games.

In reality, perhaps only disappointed players 'wallets have been hurt. Sword Realm is a novel that author Kawahara has been serializing online since 2002, ten years after Neil Stephenson's avalanche, which depicts a cyberspace in which people can live, which is now known as the prototype of the "metauniverse."

Obviously, SAO's idea of "immersive VR game" itself is not much advanced, but at that time, the earliest batch of "online game novels" also took "Legend""StarCraft" and other real games as the prototype, wrote fellow people, told player stories, in contrast,"Sword God Domain" depicted "virtual reality death game" can still make many people refreshing.

This is true even in 2012, when SAO was animated.

At this time, the traditional MMORPG fell into the bottleneck of development, and there were still four years before the "VR Year" that disillusioned the masses. Many people were still familiar with and unfamiliar with "immersive games." We imagined the appearance of VR-style MMORPG, but it was not clear how far such technical effects were from us.

SAO's animation embodies this imagination to some extent, and the theme of "Death Game" also projects the public's fear and worry about this technology, which may be called "it's better to come early than at the right time."

Link Start For China's "secondary" market, the timing of SAO animation is also very coincidental.

At this time, it is the first year of "new edition" in China. LeEco, which bought the copyright of "Sword God Domain," spared no effort to promote it on the whole platform. In that era when the animation circle still relies entirely on fans to generate electricity with love, the effect of this commercial promotion is self-evident.

From the long list of official social platform accounts in the upper right corner, you can feel the sparing efforts in promotion. From today's point of view, SAO's first season animation is quite skillful. In the first episode, it omits the title song, uses a lot of empty mirrors and perspectives, and is matched with Kaipu Yuji's atmospheric soundtrack to create a kind of "theatrical texture," leaving a well-made impression; After that, he also followed the popular "three-episode law" at that time, and arranged the "anti-routine" section where new teammates appeared and died quickly in the third episode, which directly filled the tension of the plot.

Young people's first "dead wife" People who watch too much Japanese late-night animation are used to these routines and usually think it's a standard "cute second fan," only those who like to call "animation""anime" will hold it as a treasure; Readers who have read SAO novels also complain that the animated version has edited a lot of original plots to create gimmicks, making the story fragmented and inconsistent.

However, for the newbie viewers attracted by the video website, the plot of Sword God Domain was simple and compact, the overall picture was exquisite, the action scenes were quite a lot, and the music was also ear-catching. It had all the elements needed for a successful commercial work, which was enough to attract them to chase for two seasons.

After the first season of "Sword God Domain," where many people dream of starting, the number of broadcasts on Letv is counted as "100 million," and other works are hard to catch up with in terms of popularity alone. No matter what attitude you have towards the "second dimension," no matter how you look at the production quality of "Sword God Domain," you can't deny that it was the so-called "hegemonic animation" at that time.

2 The popularity in China is only the tip of the SAO boom.

SAO was originally the first single-volume work of Japan's light novel publishing factory Electric Shock Library, which sold more than one million copies. After animation, the sales volume increased by leaps and bounds, and soon exceeded 20 million copies; With animation going to the world, the cumulative sales volume of multi-language versions is still growing. According to official disclosure data, 4 million copies have been sold in the two years from 2020 to now.

At this very moment in 2022, the newly released Sword God Realm Volume 27 is still the top selling light novel in Japan in October.

According to some views, it is precisely because SAO has almost eaten up the market for "online games novels" that Japan's light novel industry has accelerated into a more straightforward "otherworld crossing" trend.

As for how popular SAO was in animation circles all over the world at that time, the "Eighteen Tong People Array" on various comic exhibitions in those years undoubtedly reflected this point most intuitively.

Compared with the original, SAO's first season animation also focuses on the "family scene" of Tong Ren, Asna and artificial intelligence in the adaptation process. It turns out that such "live" plot also attracts a large number of unexpected female audiences, which is similar to the popularity of "Spy House." This has also further boosted the popularity of VR gaming concepts.

Because of its wide public awareness, Sword God Domain was often mentioned seriously in the field of science and technology.

Palmer Lach, founder of VR device development company Oculus, always talks about SAO. He has repeatedly mentioned that it was the popularity of SAO that helped Oculus achieve initial success. Quest2 produced by this company is currently the leading product that accounts for nearly 90% of global VR device sales.

April was also the founding month of Oculus, and the founder left the company after Oculus was acquired by Facebook, but he still mentions SAO from time to time on Twitter. In just two days, he wrote another long article about his story with SAO (which we detailed in today's push), as well as a self-made live device-a VR glasses with three detonators that detonate bombs when users fail.

IBM also used SAO in 2016 to promote its own cloud services and deep learning technology, and seriously made a set of trial games and devices called Sword God Domain: Start, recruiting a group of players to experience, making people feel that even if neural connection technology has not yet arrived, at least VR version of SAO will not be too far away.

The way in which SAO animation presents virtual reality UI has also had a profound impact on the VR industry. Most of the players who have seen SAO can get started with the operation menu of all kinds of VR devices without obstacles, and the various desktop beautification systems made by fans have continued from XP era to this day, never out of date.

SAO Utils is a set of desktop beautification system that a group of fans in China have tirelessly maintained and updated for ten years. It can be said that before the film "Top Player" came out (the original novel was published in 2011), SAO represents the most extensive and specific cognition of the global public for "virtual reality space," which is often underestimated by the animation circle when evaluating the historical status of "Sword God Domain."

However, the glory of the past cannot hide the development dilemma SAO is in today.

The new theatrical edition that is being shown in Japan at present "sword God domain attacks chapter dim dusk scherzo" it is a miniature. It broke "One Piece's Red-haired Singer" for 12 weeks at the box office, but its two-week cumulative box office score of 600 million yen was clearly not in the same order of magnitude as the latter's 7 billion in 10 days.

"Scherzo at Twilight" is also a commemorative work for the 10th anniversary of SAO animation. This is almost the commercial position of "Sword God Domain" in Japan's domestic market. It is still regarded as the ceiling in the derivative field of light novels, but it is far from the real "national level" animation IP. Its influence in other parts of the world is gradually declining. The popularity and sales volume of several seasons of animation are worse than each generation.

On the one hand, with the public disenchantment of VR games in recent years, more people realize that the realization of SAO is tantamount to fantasy for the current human technology, and the setting itself loses the scientific and technological haziness of "both near and far," becoming pure popular fantasy books, and the audience has dropped sharply.

As a senior player, Kawahara spent a lot of thought on the game stage to shape the story. In addition to the initial immersive melee game of SAO, he later designed the open world online game ALO based on Perfect World, the "Sequence Battle" integrating VR and AR concepts, and the "Great Escape" FPS game such as GGO. Considering that "Jedi Survival" was still in the concept stage at that time, These designs somewhat reflect Kawahara's foresight towards the needs of players.

The prototype of ALO is Perfect World of Chinese game manufacturers. However, in reality, the games developed in the name of Sword God Domain are always low-cost, formulaic and fan-oriented games. The quality reputation is unsatisfactory even among fans, let alone to the public. This contrast also overdraws the technological imagination that the work itself brings to fans.

Sword God Domain Faramita is SAO's latest console game. It has mixed reviews among players. For those who don't care about science fiction elements and only care about the fate of characters, the old-fashioned writing method of Sword God Domain is becoming more and more boring.

On the stage with more variety, the story of SAO series performance is always the same routine_"online game strange man" Tong Ren enters the new game to show off, encounters powerful villain to eat, finally in the desperate situation to kill... Even the evil of the villain is always like a withdrawal, nothing more than sexual harassment of female characters.

Many viewers think that the original black character in the work is an anti-routine, personalized villain, his famous saying "This is a game, but not a joke" raised the style of the whole work, but did not expect that the subsequent villains are more than a cliché.

This sentence of Mao Chang Jingyan is still the most representative line of SAO series. In the end, the foundation stone of SAO series story creation is not stable.

The first season of SAO has a lot of surprises in the plot. As the main line content,"The 100-layer checkpoint is considered to be cleared," most of which are omitted, even the behind-the-scenes black hand appears and is defeated midway. The stormy development rhythm became a hot topic at that time, so that the audience could not predict what would happen in the next episode, thus feeling that "this story is not ordinary."

But as the work became commercially successful and destined to grow into a long novel, these once-bright ideas became double-edged swords.

After the SAO series launched a large number of "post-biography,""external biography" and "post-biography," readers, editors and authors realized one thing_the process of climbing the tower, which was initially carried out, was the plot with the most plot tension.

Kawahara turned back to create a supplementary content called "Attack Chapter," describing how the protagonist attacked the checkpoints in SAO layer by layer at the beginning, but inevitably there were contradictions between the plot and the previous work, and the character design was not unified.

For loyal fans who follow along, the experience of this kind of topsy-turvy reading is tiring, and for casual readers who occasionally want to know how the story is going, they don't know where to start.

There are many similarities between the current dilemma of Sword God Domain and Digital Baby series, which also carried people's imagination of cyberspace in the new century at the end of the 20th century and worries about network security problems such as "millennium bug." With the bursting of the technology bubble, these works lost their original atmosphere and charm, but had to continue due to popularity and commercial value.

With the recent popularity, SAO also announced the news of new games and new original theatres. However, even so, the impact and emotion that Sword God Domain brought to the audience in those years was still real, so now that real time and story synchronization were in place, fans all over the world would simultaneously role-play on the Internet, pretending that the game everyone imagined was really released as scheduled.

From Blade Runner and Akira fantasizing about the cybersociety of 2019 to the VR game of 2022 in Sword Realm, even if people's imagination of the future is increasingly conservative, reality technology has not caught up with people's imagination in the second decade of the new century-except for some things.

Kawahara recently tweeted about his initial price fix of 128000 yen for a NERvGear device, worried that the setting was too high to be realistic.

Just two days later, Sony announced the PlayStation VR2, with a suggested retail price of 74980 yen, coupled with a regular PS5, which costs exactly 124960 yen (about 6123 yuan)_although the technology is still lacking, VR technology is still keeping pace with the times in terms of price.

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Game Research Society (ID: ysaag), author: Lushark

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