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

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

Waiting in the endless starry sky.

(there is a slight spoiler of Starry Sky in this article. )

In 1955, Neil Armstrong joined the National Aeronautical Technical Advisory Board (later NASA) Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory and later worked as a test pilot at the Edwards High Speed Flight Station in California. In March 1966, he became a super pilot of the Gemini-8 spaceship.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon for the first time aboard Apollo 11.

160 years later, man landed on Mars. In 2138, Victor Issa built the first gravity thruster prototype.

In 2241, the first spacecraft capable of gravity transition was built on the moon. at the same time, the earth's atmosphere began to spill over, opening the way to cosmic colonization.

Today, you are a small part of the colonial tide, a newcomer who has just joined Star Mining. Like all previous works by Bethesda, you are still an unknown small potato, working for life on a small planet. Then, in a moment, you touch the secrets of the world, and the adventure begins.

The opening is from Starfield, the largest American RPG of the generation, and Bethesda is the creator of the game. Eight years ago, when Bethesda released radiation 4 after Ancient Scroll 5: skyline, I'm afraid no one would have thought that its next mega-masterpiece would be a brand new, space-backed game. Before the arrival of our dream of "Ancient Scroll 6" or "radiation 5", the title of "the most high-profile American RPG" of this generation was "Starry Sky".

A voice straight to the bottom of my heart, saying words that will not change, on the other hand, for Bethesda, Starry Sky is not a "pillar" game like the Ancient Scrolls series. Its positioning is a bit like the "radiation 3" inserted between "Ancient Scroll 4: annihilation" and "Ancient Scroll 5: Skyline", but its development cost is three times that of "radiation 4".

I mean, you can find traces of innovation in the game, such as trying to build a new system that connects time-killing modules, or trying to design more radical tasks. But at the same time, Bethesda attaches much more importance to the project than "radiation 3". As a result, now conservative with a radical "starry sky" was born.

The spaceship that connects everything is now 2023, and the concept of an open world has taken root in the hearts of the people.

Bethesda's most recent all-out effort may date back to the development of Ancient Scroll 5: the Skyline. At that time, the open world was also called a sand table game-a world independent of the player's action, a NPC of its own life, a completely free exploration, and a multi-branch narrative that changed according to the player's action to form the basis of "Ancient Scroll 5: the Skyline", and let countless players experience the joy of "living somewhere else."

But now, players' fatigue with non-linear games is beginning to show signs. Countless players talk about such topics as "how annoying it is to run back and forth" and "how tiring the game has become" every day, and some people even call for a return to linear games. The concept of a semi-open world is also being revived.

In this context, Starry Sky is doomed to face the risk of going against the tide: how to develop a game that maintains freedom and guides the process so that players don't get bored midway?

The answer of "Starry Sky" is to take character growth as the core and add a new system that can connect various parts, allowing players to play constantly in the cycle. The idea itself is correct, but it has encountered a variety of problems in the specific implementation.

The name of this system is "spaceship construction system". It appeared very early, and players can own their own ship at the end of the preface. On the initial spaceship, players will be able to do some vital research that will directly affect character development. Role training will affect fighting and exploration, the latter is bound with the base construction, and the base construction will eventually serve the research system.

In radiation 4, Bethesda designed "Base Construction" for the game, which effectively binds fighting, exploration and construction together, giving players more motivation to explore dungeons and pick up more "trash." coincidentally, the base construction system was also thrown to players after the opening of radiation 4.

However, the entire construction module of radiation 4 is abruptly inserted into the game, which allows players to spend more time in the game, but has no impact on the main tasks and character development. So, in Starry Sky, they designed a "spaceship construction system" to solve this problem.

As you move toward the land of faith, tearful meteors simply put it, players get new "trash" in dungeons, collect new "resources" in planetary exploration, and then take these things to the research desk of the spacecraft, through which drawings of vital weapons, spacesuit modification modules, and outpost buildings can be unlocked. The modification of the spaceship does not require research, it only costs money.

Among them, "outpost" refers to the base construction system, although players have spacecraft, but can still build bases on various planets, so as to obtain a steady stream of resources; "weapons, spacesuits" module modification is one of the only two means for players to enhance their combat strength.

As another part of role growth, in Starry Sky, the role-playing system is greatly diluted, not to mention the "radiation" series, it is even simpler than "Ancient Scroll 5": the skill points acquired by role upgrades, on the premise of meeting the pre-task (that is, proficiency), can be added to one of the five categories at will. Half of these skills are used to unlock research, while the other half are directly related to character growth, plus all kinds of damage, weight-bearing skills, and so on. Of course, there are also skills to unlock outpost robots and improve the performance of the ship. The proportion of the so-called non-combat skills, such as negotiation, unlocking, stealth, and so on, is very small. In other words, a considerable part of the entire role-playing system is tied to "research" and "spaceships".

Through the "spaceship", all parts of the game are connected. Players are also in a state that no matter what they do, they can have something to do with their growth. On the other hand, the random missions of this generation are basically related to spaceships. You can imagine what the bounty hunters in Star Cowboy do: exploring planets, hunting pirates, delivering goods. At the same time, players in the main line of missions, but also in the transition between galaxies (it is worth mentioning that the ship's take-off animation is very similar to the "Mass effect" series). At this point, the spaceship becomes more intimate than your partner in the development of romance.

As for the game of "flying a spaceship" itself, there is nothing to say. It is more crude than "Unmanned Deep Space" and more simple than "X4:Foundations". The air combat part does not have much maneuverability and is mainly linked to numerical values. The "Dancing War" and "capturing each other's ships" demonstrated in the promotional video require you to destroy the power system before completely destroying the hostile ship, and the power system will only be randomly damaged when the ship is damaged, so the result of the air battle is basically the destruction of the ship, and the boarding operation is more like some kind of uncontrollable small probability event.

In addition to the main mission and the good dungeon, the function of the "Planet Exploration" system itself is to eliminate "boredom" for players, but the way is to return the exploration to the "linear" experience.

The game has a total of 80 to 100 galaxies, each with several explorable planets and moons. During the trip, I imagined more than once how Bethesda's mission designers designed the planet: a large map like radiation 4, full of dungeons, cities and encounters. Then tear the map into a hundred pieces, each rolled up to a planet. At the same time, Starry Sky really has no false hype-you can certainly walk most of the planet on foot, and each planet has unique gravity, resources and random monsters, supported by data from NASA. The problem is that the scenery of the planet is neither magnificent nor beautiful, let alone a spectacle, and no one wants to explore such an empty scene at all.

In the morning of praying before the truth, love will come again to this old-fashioned map design idea, resulting in a very linear process of planetary exploration. The tedious operation page of the game reinforces this point. Just to jump, players need to open the main menu, find the target galaxy from the star map, click on the jump, and reach the target planet in a fast-moving way within the galaxy. Players are also able to quickly move to choose a destination to land on the planet.

There are cities and dungeons on the planet. The dungeon design of this work can be scored 7 points. In his past works, in terms of dungeon design, Bethesda's performance in the fantasy world, reality-based future and pure science fiction is completely different: in the fantasy theme of the ancient scroll 4: annihilation, dungeons are basically cluttered caves. In the near future "radiation 3", there are far more dungeons than cities, but fortunately, dungeons have realistic prototypes, such as museums, subways, the White House, etc., as well as hidden plots and designs. However, in the "starry sky" with a pure sci-fi space background, the dungeon design presents a kind of polarization. Good dungeons, such as landmarks on the old earth and planets that directors must visit, maintain their advantages since "radiation 3," with equal emphasis on scene narrative and gameplay. The most perfect example is the "Renke Research Station." In this dungeon, players have to travel between the two worlds, solve the mystery, gradually go underground, solve the crisis, its design is excellent.

Because of such a complex dungeon, the game has a built-in pathfinding system, which can be seen as a compromise.

In addition to these good dungeons, there are more "abandoned outposts" dungeons occupied by space bandits and crimson fleets on a large number of planets. For example, the "listening outposts" throughout the galaxies, all the listening outposts have the same architectural structure, and the rewards are more or less the same.

Most of the planets are desolate, with only a few encounters and locations. Even the environment of many planets is so cruel that people will have all kinds of negative effects to force you to upgrade your spacesuit. More than half of the encounters and locations on these planets may exist in a random selection of several outposts, such as "science outposts", "civilian outposts" and "mining outposts". You can buy supplies for your spacecraft at these outposts, but there are no missions for you to trigger.

On the other hand, although the planet is dynamic, space is static, and you will never see the fleet running about in space for life, nor will you see the spectacle of countless starships entering the port. There are only pirate ships and guard ships that scan you.

Of course, you will encounter some encounters scattered in space, such as old spaceships emitting mysterious radio waves, infiltrating space stations occupied by aliens, and so on, but generally speaking, space is empty, even if you are in the center of the civilized galaxy. from the cockpit of the spaceship looking down at the starry sky, all you can see is the reflection of your own face, besides the distant and dark stars.

At the moment beyond fantasy, love waits on the other side of the rainbow in terms of tasks, and Starry Sky gathers all the past experience and development strength of Bethesda. Each task has its own way to import, and there are quite a variety of ways to import. The "rumor system" is scattered in every corner of the game, and a large number of roadside NPC conversations and random encounters with space pirates lead players to tasks and encounters designed by developers.

During the mission, Bethesda's designers also tried a more radical approach. Some tasks require you to remember a sentence from NPC, which is not reflected in the task log, depending on whether you notice it or not, and then you have to rely on this information to do something; for some tasks, let me get this straight, it will really kill your teammates (seemingly random)! After that, you have to hold a funeral for your teammate, and you can choose whether to go or not according to your impression of him.

The feel of the Starry Sky combat system is better than that of radiation 4. In terms of the number of game content, Starry Scroll still confidently kicks randomly generated hiring tasks out of the main task list, and divides the main tasks into camps and main lines, just like Ancient Scroll 5. Use activities to cover all task imports. And each major task also has both intricate plots and intricate dungeons. This condenses the sweat, experience and efforts of the development team.

This can also be seen in the length of the main line. In "radiation 3", the clearance time of the main line can be reduced to 3 hours, and there are only 4 necessary main tasks. In Starry Sky, the duration of the main task alone has reached 30 hours. in addition to the main line, there are four major forces in the game, each of which has its own camp mission, and the total duration of the game is estimated to be more than 100 hours.

It is worth mentioning that the highest quality dungeons in the game are all strung together by the main tasks. This is a huge change, in other words, as long as you follow the task, you are unlikely to miss the most fun part of the game.

With such a rich content, the mission structure of "Star" has also made progress compared with "Ancient Scrolls 5: the Skyline". Although the progress is small: the main line will guide you to walk through each camp, but it is still an one-line marching. You can completely ignore all forces, do not do any camp tasks, can also pass through the game. However, once you are involved in a camp mission, you will realize that the camp lines are intertwined and each camp will lead you to several other camps.

Some tasks are still not clever enough-there are quite a number of manually designed small tasks in all camps, but these tasks are so boring that you can see them to the end at a glance. In the "Starry Sky" envisioned by many players, the ingenious arrangement of the task network can make up for the deficiency of the task design itself. if the most common errand task is intertwined with the foreshadowing in the task net, it may also become a memorable detail for players-but the "Starry Sky" currently presented in front of people does not do so.

Even at the end of life, this love will not disappear. If prestige is used in return, these tasks could have been saved, but unfortunately, there is no reputation system in the game. This is very unsatisfactory-the existence of the character growth system is too weak. The specialty of building a character can only be selected in the initial interface, the special ability is placed in the main task, and things such as role newspaper and power prestige can not be found. The most important persuasion option in the American RPG is actually in terms of "success rate", which means that as long as you read the file hard enough, any player can use the mouth option-and then Bethesda's response is to cut back on the option to talk, so there's no way to complain. These non-combat skills belong to the diluted part of the role-playing system.

What about the random encounters that Bethesda is good at? They left their encounters in the vast expanse of space, and strange cries and occasional floating ships are all places where these unique encounters will take place, and each encounter is a science fiction idea, from which you can see the creativity of the whole development team and a little love for science fiction.

Captain, where to next? Starry Sky gives me the impression that it is better than radiation 4, which faintly shows that Bethesda, who made the "Ancient Scroll" series, gives the game a long enough development cycle to fill the development world with elaborate content, except for a slightly smaller volume. On the basis of past experience, they have also absorbed some advantages and improved some disadvantages.

But the pity is here, you can't see the leap from "Ancient Scroll 4: annihilation" to "radiation 3" in the game. Under the consistent design idea, Starry Sky has no new system or new narrative theme brought about by the space background. Therefore, it cannot surpass the works of the past.

For Bethesda, Starry Scroll is more like a step forward, and 12 years after the release of Ancient Scroll 5, they are finally back to where they just developed Scroll 5, and they know how to attract players and how to reconcile the complexity of American RPG and the barriers to entry for new players, which is probably the best they can do when their goal is perfect.

If it all ends, I cover my ears and only hear your words, but because of this, I am more looking forward to "Ancient Scroll 6".

Advantages

+ Great FPS module

+ very ambitious Quartet power structure

+ teammates have a high degree of completion and sincerity

+ A spaceship system that combines sand table construction module and role growth

+ many scattered and impressive tasks and narrative points

The task of Renke Research Station is well designed.

Shortcoming

− negotiation is too simple.

The task of − is accomplished in a single way.

− residential mission design is very boring.

− doesn't have a reputation system.

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.