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

Which games from 2003 must be retained and which patterns from 2023 need to be abandoned, That is the question.

By the third decade of the 21st century, there are almost no navigation games on the market, let alone stand-alone navigation games.

"Pirates of Sidmeier" and "King of Maritime Merchants" have become the last song, while the glorious "Great Navigation Age" series, which is regarded by countless players as a classic, has launched a large number of adaptations of online games, page games and mobile games, with few visitors.

In 2021, the glorious launch of the "Great Navigation Age 4 HD version" has received a lot of criticism because it has not made any changes to the original plot and game content, and inherited the standard price of the Japanese factory (the national price is 249 yuan).

The Steam page of "Big 4HD" and recently, the domestic game "Sailing Age" has been released. A "nautical adventure game", which is released as a stand-alone game, seems to me to be more or less like Quixote asking for trouble.

A CG of "Sailing Age": the out-of-date Knight reads the name "Don Quixote" and "Sailing Age", which is an obvious tribute to the "Great Navigation Age" series, and there is no lack of old games borrowed from various sailing games. But Sailing is not a simple copy, and I've seen the production team trying to incorporate some of its ideas-what problems will it encounter when it launches a sailing game in 2023?

1 the eye-catching art style is one of the most intuitive advantages of "Sail". As big as the world map, the city background, as small as the scene, commodity props, the whole game is made up of very modern art resources, which can give people a good first impression.

The main characters in the game are relatively young in setting, and most of them adopt the painting style of today's two-dimensional game. for the younger generation of players, this aesthetic "modernization" is undoubtedly effective.

"Sailing" does show a friendly side to beginners. The first version has four protagonists, all have tutorial tasks after turning on novice mode, and detailed system teaching can be found in the pause menu at any time.

Compared with Big 4HD, Sailing operates more like a modern game, with a large number of keyboard shortcuts and perfectly compatible handles on keyboard and mouse.

Reassuring tutorials, however, the core mechanisms such as Sailing's exploration and trade focus more on serving veteran players of sailing games. In the process of exploring unknown routes and cities, the default player of Sailing has some knowledge of history or geography, and does not provide much hints and guidance for most missions and cities.

For example, Big 4 will give players a world map, which will show major cities and fixed routes, making it easy to find secondary cities at the intersection of routes.

And the map of "Sail" is full of war fog. We must first find out the major cities in a certain sea area and buy a sea route map before we can mark that part of the route in the known sea area, and then follow the route direction and drill into the unknown sea area in the fog to find a port.

In addition to the foggy map routes, "Sail" is surprisingly rich in content worth exploring, comparable to "Great Navigation Age 3", the hardest core in the "Great Navigation Age" series.

For example, players can use the lookout function to search for shipwrecks at sea and treasure boxes along the coast; some cities have post stations leading to the wild, and they need to combine the different capabilities of NPC to form expedition teams to witness the anecdotes heard on the road.

Land exploration is presented in the form of random events in the form of lattice encounters, which is not novel, but it is more complex and interesting than the pure plot exploration system of "Big 4". The expedition can find unique local landscapes, creatures or treasures, as well as a large number of experience rewards.

An endless desert

At that time, the trading and economic system of the Dodo 2 "Sailing" mainly referred to "Big 4", and may also draw lessons from games such as "King of Maritime Merchants", which was actually slightly challenging to play.

There are always all kinds of reasonable-sounding elements to deduct my runner's profits and make the operation more difficult. Like a tiresome transaction tax, every port exchange levies a tax, drawing 10% directly from the final profit. Sail also introduces the mechanism of wear and dampness of goods. In ocean voyage, the quality of goods will decline over time, and so will the price.

If you want to transport large quantities of goods, you have to buy more ships, recruit more sailors, and maintenance costs will rise. "Sailing" adopts a monthly wage system, and the salary is not a small fee in the early stage. Before ensuring a profitable and stable business route, the brainless expansion of the fleet will go bankrupt sooner or later.

Random reward tasks provided by local governments or commercial guilds will become an effective source of income. This kind of reward generally requires players to go to designated areas to fight against pirates, or to deliver specific goods.

The commercial guild will be paid if the reward is completed, and you can also get the contribution of the place. Some cities also have an one-off fixed reward, which is more like a regional task, which is difficult and rewarding extraordinarily well, and it is possible to obtain rare drawings of ships or modified parts.

The contribution is similar to the popularity of the city, replacing the traditional "prestige" or "power value" mechanism in sailing games. In addition to offering a reward, you can gain contribution by reporting to the government the findings found during the expedition and the goods sold in the cross-cultural circle. After reaching a certain degree of contribution, you will be able to obtain permission to trade specialties in the city, to explore through post stations, and to apply for exemption from transaction tax.

Contribution also allows players to set up chambers of commerce, which have two major functions. One is the additional trade fleet, which is analogous to the food collection mechanism of some mobile games, which allows me to spend a small amount of money to send the fleet to a designated city to restock. The farther the city is, the higher the purchase cost is.

It is a pity that trade cannot be completed automatically. the second is to invest in cities by analogizing the investment mechanism of "Big 4" to enhance the three attributes of population, technology and trade of the city. gain benefits such as doubling the output of goods, increasing the chances of a prosperous market in the city, and providing new transformation options for shipyards.

When there are plenty of funds in the middle and later stages of the investment interface, the Chamber of Commerce is the most important means of profit and technology climbing. It's just that the contribution of each city is calculated separately, and there are more than 200 cities in the game, but for time abundance or obsessive-compulsive disorder, the contribution of several major cities is enough to achieve wealth and freedom.

On the elements of adventure and business that most sailing games have, Sailing has made a set of self-consistent system, which has an unconventional performance.

But in other respects, "sail" is not entirely satisfactory. Maybe the focus of the game has not been on these aspects from the beginning.

Sailing is loyal to the historical background and specializes in romantic narrative like Big 4, deliberately blurring the setting of specific years and the passage of time. The border or cultural circle will not change, and the age of NPC will not increase.

But unlike the "Great Navigation era", "Sailing" is more like a travel and runner simulator. It deliberately emphasizes the "great light" side of that era, but talks little or no about the conflicts and contradictions between people.

At the beginning of the game, it was emphasized that "pure fiction" and "Sailing" did not have a "Big 4" power struggle system, no "Big 2" national hatred value and wanted mechanism, and no fellow explorers competing with players for discoveries in "Big 3". In "Big 3", as long as America is not discovered before 1492, a man named Columbus will surely take away the honor that should belong to the players in the game.

There are also very few NPC fleets available for interaction on the sea, unlike the fact that the whole world is keen on navigation. Occasional fleets, whether caravans or pirates, have no other interactive options than trading props or going to war, and sinking them will not cause trouble with any country / power.

Without competition, there is no pressure for development, not only for players, but also for characters in the game. Many "Big 4" players, accustomed to national hatred and family feud and fighting and killing, are unable to sympathize with the main corner of "Sailing", largely due to the lack of external factors that force the protagonist.

Although the plot text lacks tension, each protagonist does have a reasonable and sufficient motivation for the "sail" naval combat system is not so ideal. Naval battles are divided into shelling and hand-to-hand warfare, sinking the enemy's flagship or emptying the flagship sailors is a victory.

Shelling probably borrowed from the "Pirates of Sidmel". The only guns that can be manually controlled are the flagship and its guns, which need to be constantly moved to a dominant position that can carry out continuous shelling on enemy ships. The rest of the wingmen fight on their own, the game does not have the option to command the bureaucrats manually, and the wingmen will not follow the flagship and form a complete battle line of fire.

It's hard to imagine that in a sailing game that refers to reality, players can't use the T-shaped tactics commonly used in reality.

The flagship is exporting, the wingmen are shopping as compensation, and letting the NPC seamen serve as the captain can effectively improve the IQ of the bureaucrats. Windsail designed an additional mechanism for carrying shelling, which arranged for the captain's wingmen to target enemy ships, and when my flagship opened fire on enemy ships, the wingmen would shoot together, causing a lot of damage in an instant.

The slightly grandiose company with special effects went hand-in-hand with the "Big 4" set, which was carried out automatically when our ship was close to the enemy ship. Grinding meat for a long time will trigger a NPC melee on the deck, and there is a chance to trigger an one-on-one fight, but the probability is very low. After 30 hours, I have only triggered once in a novice tutorial task.

Deck scuffle

One-on-one fist guessing 4 competition and the lack of combat content, resulting in the depth and difficulty of the later stage of the game is not high. The invincible fleet cultivated through exploration and runners has few opportunities to show its talents, and many of the details hidden in the black box have not yet had time to experience, but the weak main line process has long been over.

To make matters worse, in order to expand its depth, "Sailing" adopts an online game-like design idea that new and old players do not like:

Put in place a group of hard thresholds that are difficult to cross easily, restrict players' access to those critical nurturance mechanisms, and improve the liver of the early process. The mechanisms mentioned above, such as the compulsory purchase route chart and the 10% transaction tax, can almost all be attributed to the product of this line of thinking.

To develop a fleet, we need not only start-up capital, but also enough large ships and NPC seafarers. Whether we can recruit as many seafarers as possible in the early stage directly affects the difficulty of the start of the four protagonists. Among them, the Arab protagonist is the most imprisoned, and the main plot fights frequently, but there is only one deputy available at the beginning for a long time, and the deck interface shifts. There is no captain of the wingman, and the aforementioned shelling system is like a joke.

Each seafarer has five-dimensional attributes, three unique characteristics, dozens of different roles and levels of skills, and can learn up to five languages, which make the entire skill system look trivial and bloated.

Bookstores in some cities can buy books that enable NPC seafarers to learn language or skills, and it has to be said that there are the most bizarre settings. Books will become more and more expensive as the game progresses, and there are language, attributes, skills and other prerequisites for learning skills-and books are consumables that disappear after using them once, and can no longer be used by other seafarers. It's more like eating books.

As a reference, at the beginning of the game, a book costs only 30,000 yuan and a repair room related to shipbuilding skills. Only by changing out of the repair room and arranging for seafarers to move in, players can repair the aging of the ship. Ship aging is a mechanism that has appeared in the "Big 4" folk MOD to improve the difficulty of the game, but the aging speed in MOD is definitely not as fast as "sail". The durability limit of all ships will slowly drop to half of the original, and become extremely vulnerable to pirates. If you do not arrange repairmen, you will have to spend money on new ships to cure the symptoms rather than the root causes.

Aging faster than nuclear radiation when it comes to buying ships, shipyards only provide small and medium-sized ships in the early stages of the game, and large merchant ships or warships will not be sold until there is a chamber of commerce in the later part of the game to upgrade the city's technology through investment. In fact, this point is also learned from the "Great Navigation era." the difference is that the amount of investment required is huge, and it is gradually consumed on a monthly basis, which further lengthens the development time, and the input and output is not in direct proportion.

Players can also customize ships with materials and drawings collected from all over the world, but advanced materials can only be bought after investment in cities with ship materials stores. Different materials will also provide ships with a variety of random entry bonuses, not so much in shipbuilding as in drawing cards.

Wow! Golden legends! In the three days since Sailing was released, I have seen the game's Steam rating drop from 86% to 75%. After all, it has not been able to get rid of the common fault that makes sailing games unsold-new players who lack geographical knowledge and sailing experience complain about lack of guidance, unreasonable numbers, slow and hot rhythm, and old players who are familiar with routines. I hate that the game is too simple and there is nothing to do later.

In addition, the production team made certain trade-offs and focuses on the irrefutable trinity elements of the sailing game-adventure, business and combat, which led to a lot of comments and disputes about the game. Players who regard adventures and business elements as a process would rather refund and protest, while players who regard them as a result are addicted to them and cannot extricate themselves.

The numerous details and colored eggs in the game make me firmly believe that the production team is not intended to entertain the feelings of old players, and some institutional problems are more like the lack of experience or rush to work.

Sailing stitches up a lot of game mechanisms to make it more like an experimental field, from which we should draw some conclusions: which games from 2003 must be retained and which models from 2023 need to be abandoned.

For the past few days, the Sailing production team has been providing daily updates, fixing Bug, adjusting values, changing mechanisms and adding guides. According to the unpacking of netizens, new protagonists will be added to the game in the future, bringing new stories, and there is no need to worry about the production team making "difficult decisions" in the short term.

Just because there is room to update it, Sailing is more sincere than the Big Navigation Age 4 HD, which has only two updated versions and costs three times as much-it may not be easy enough to play a new sailing game in 2023.

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

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