“Genshin Impact” draws the next meaningful comma

When the solstice really comes to our eyes, it seems a little unreal.

Just yesterday, the official account of ‘Original God’ launched the special program ‘To the Winter, to the Future’. Continuing the form of a behind-the-scenes program of Node Carle, they officially unveiled the mystery of the new country winter: new real machines, new scenes, and the creative thinking of the behind-the-scenes team, and talked about it in the 20-minute short film.

In one night, the video playback on station B exceeded one million. The feedback from the players was as expected. In the plan of the Seven Kingdoms of ‘Original God Tiwatt’, Zhidong is the last country. The story of Nord Carlay gives us a glimpse of the grand corner of the solstice in winter. There is a spectacular scenery of the snow country, and there is also a conspiracy to seize the eyes of God and fight against heaven. The adventure stories of the past six years on the Tivat Continent are destined to reach a key meeting point here.

So, what about after the Seven Kingdoms? Players are looking forward to the answer to this question, and the show also gives an answer. As the battle designer Ji Ge said, ‘The biggest regret of every story is to have an ending. For us and many travelers, ‘Original God’ is no longer a story, it is a part of life.’ The difference is that the story may end, but life cannot be separated.

According to their public plan this time, as they have been doing for the past six years, they are still constantly charging in their creations, waiting for the best time to jump to a new future chapter.

01

ExplainReleaseUnique cold place

This kind of creative acceleration is particularly evident in the presentation of the winter.

It has its particularity in winter regions. In terms of the narrative structure, it assumes the important closing function of inheriting and turning, and in business, it bears the expectations accumulated by players for many years. Under such a node, it especially needs to pour enough thinking to make real differences and highlights, so that it can respond to the expectations of players – but how to do it specifically?

In this behind-the-scenes program, the answer given by the ‘Original God’ team is very clear, with ‘self-consistent’ as the keyword. Focusing on the setting itself, extract the uniqueness of the region that truly belongs to this area and fully restore it, so that the power that moves people’s hearts will naturally grow together with the whole world.

In fact, the many settings of the solstice winter have already paved the way in the previous version: this is not the kind of barren ice and snow common in traditional film and television and literary works, but the cold zone. The high-energy system driven by the environment superimposes the ancient power, so that they have a strong strength enough to confront the principles of heaven and fate, and it is a composite regional structure with a sense of contrast. At the same time, there is a history of long-term national struggle in the sorrow of the winter, and this heavy historical dark line has to be conveyed.

On the basis of such a setting, the handling method of ‘Original God’ is very organized: first use the natural environment to determine the tone, and then the person who really invites the main role of vision and narrative before coming to the stage is the cultural traces carved out here by winter civilization. As you can see from the opening animation, in the frozen mountain snow, a train gallops by, and has been driving to several towering buildings in the distance of the picture – and immediately stood up to the tone.

As the R&D engineer Xiaodan said, the starting point of creation is the methodology that they have polished for many years. This time, they have extracted elements from countries in the Eastern Europe and the Near the Arctic Circle. Most of these countries have a history of opening the road with flames and steel from the cracks of ice and snow. These elements are then combined with the ‘Original God”s own tonal digestion and processing, and rearrange the combination in a self-consistent way.

At the same time, through a set of ‘Ice and Snow Nature’ and ‘large man-made objects’, the civilization characteristics of the solstice winter are set more clearly – the ‘train’ that appeared in the previous article is one of the core images they chose for this version.

From ‘Snow Country’ to ‘Train’ is a natural and smooth association. In the well-known doomsday movie ‘Snow Train’, the train galloping in the snowy field is not only a battlefield for the survivors to fight, but also the last Noah’s Ark, and has the dual meanings of ‘destruction’ and ‘hope’. In the program, Brother Ji also mentioned the Ukrainian game series ‘Subway’, which is also a representative of the classic frozen wasteland world view, and the carriage is also an important scene in it.

‘Metro: Leaving Home’

But the project team’s refinement from it doesn’t stop there. They also further noted the point worth digging for the ‘interlaced use’ of the train in these classic works – not only the vehicles, but also the humanistic functions in the story. So in ‘Original God’, this train will not only exist as an important background, but also extend a further gameplay function: maybe a camp, a theater? In the program, the project team has left a suspense here, but we can imagine that this combination can not only be embedded in the environment of the snow country, but also strengthen the humanistic impression of the industrial and technological strength of the winter. It is a highly self-consistent expression.

Of course, ‘self-consistent’ itself is not just a concept, but an implementation problem. For example, the technical challenges mentioned by Xiaodan: the difficulty of complex structures in geometric construction and motion simulation, and the seamless switching of scenes inside and outside the car, etc., all mean extremely high realization costs.

But for the ‘Original God’ team, on the one hand, they have formed a stable aesthetics and methodology, and on the other hand, they also have the ability to ‘do what they think’. This ability has been verified repeatedly in the past six years, and it is still growing continuously – as Xiaodan said: ‘Everyone can always trust the technical team of ‘Original God’.

02

‘Return to the Origin of the Open World’

In addition to the part of the design of the world view, what has attracted the attention of the teahouse is the rethinking of the ‘Yuan Shen’ team returning to Yuanyuan at the level of gameplay.

This thing itself is not simple. It means jumping out of the industry’s instinctive understanding of long-term content update instinct – not just adding and filling content, but actively resetting players’ experience expectations.

Near the winter of the soaring winter, the choice of ‘Original God’ is more thorough, and even returned to the most primitive question: what is the open world, and what is the original god-style open world? What is it – ‘The map is so big, is it open? The characters run fast, is it open? There are too many contents, is it open? We think these are too one-sided,’ Xiaodan said.

In this new version of the unveiling node, they return to the core fun of ‘Original God’ once: an interactive system composed of countless atomic gameplay, through the combination of different dimensions, an instant experience is generated every moment. In other words, the essence of ‘Original God’ is not a certain type of gameplay, but a highly open framework that unfolds around ‘interaction’.

In fact, looking back on the game experience of ‘Original God’ at the beginning of ‘Original God’, it is very easy to understand the concept of ‘atomic gameplay’: apply ice magic to the water You can freeze a road, ignite the grass with fire to cause updrafts, and fly with the glider wings, and you can touch the eggs of the high places. These reactions triggered by intuition and curiosity constitute a concise interactive input, and the multiplication effect of a set of ‘interactive protocols’ is used to generate multiplication effects. The emergence of rich and interesting results allows players to subtly understand the interactive rules of the world, which also constitutes the unique fun of playing.

In the process of doing new gameplay this time, they responded to the most representative elements in the atomic gameplay, and made it possible to seal the function of ice elements further. The stored containers can also cause damage, shattering, and even change the terrain of the battlefield – this has broken the binary confrontation structure between players and monsters for a long time, and introduced the third pole called the environment.

Obviously, returning to the origin of ‘atomic gameplay’, in fact, is to use the underlying interaction protocol built by them again to make simple changes to the input side, and then a series of new interactions will emerge in chains. Instead of relying on the stacking of new content, it relies on the changes of the bottom-level rules of the world to achieve the ultimate goal of ‘transcending the rules’ and surpassing the current ‘Original God’ possibilities. This is a ‘four or two thousand pounds’ approach.

In the view of the teahouse, this design idea is actually responding to a long-term discussion in the industry – ‘where is the ceiling of content-based games’. It is the instinct of most long-term products to use addition, but the gameplay is not endless.

However, the logic of atomic gameplay is just the opposite. It is not stacked horizontally, but reorganized vertically, and the gameplay interaction of the whole world is drilled deeper.

03

The Evergreen Future of Content

For a long time, I have always had high expectations for these behind-the-scenes production programs released by the ‘Original God’ team. They are doing the only thing in the industry, and they are not afraid to cut through the methodology and mental journey in creation for everyone to see. For the entire industry, these incremental information always inspires some new thinking.

Just like this time, after watching their plans for the winter version of the solstice and the future of ‘Original God’, I feel that some judgments in the industry around content games may need to be revised in recent years. For example, many people think that ‘story will always end’; others think that the shelf life of content games is naturally capped, and they are not optimistic about long-term operation performance. But these are more based on empirical inferences, rather than inevitable conclusions.

In theory, a good story does need a rest, but as planned, they ‘won’t force a chapter to continue their lives for a very utilitarian reason’, It will not ‘forcibly draw an inexplicable end to the story’; creative space may also have boundaries, but ‘Original God’ is obviously far from touching this boundary.

Just like the future direction that the team mentioned in the show, in addition to the new content and new gameplay for the so-called winter, they are also planning a major visual upgrade, performance performance and more in-depth integration of gameplay. They even mentioned that the so-winter version will prepare ‘miaomiao tools’ for players, so that players can directly change the environment of the world – they obviously still have the content and creativity of the massive reserves that want to land in the game for players.

This reminds me, maybe you have recently brushed the new map empty temple of ‘Original God’ on the ‘Yi of the Moon 6’ version on social interaction. In terms of gameplay, follow the exploration task of this map, and decrypt various large-scale organs around the ability of ‘space manipulation’. In terms of aesthetics, flying into the sky island that has been seen for six years, and then gradually explore the main body of the temple, the grand feeling is opened step by step. Even the Luyang Academy in the map really put the ‘landscape into painting’ of Chinese aesthetics into an interactive 3D space. It is quite expressive, but it is very light and natural in the player experience.

And this periodic experience subversion, in the rhythm of ‘Original God’, has been the norm for many years, such as the former Longji Snow Mountain, the ancient holy mountain, the Yuanxia Palace…

Why is it said that ‘Original God’ can go on all the time – to a large extent, the reason why traditional narrative works often end after the story is finished is often due to the exhaustion of the individual’s individual energy and accumulation. After writing one or two great works, you need to ‘seal the pen’ and then precipitate.

But the difference between ‘Original God’ is that it is supported by a highly industrialized content production system behind it. It set a new standard of ‘a large version of 42 days’ for the entire industry. Over the years, the entire R&D team has been constantly polishing the creative output system of multi-team baton-style collaboration and efficient project management. Up to now, it has made it possible to continue production from stories and gameplay to art.

The more likely future direction is that the story of the entire Seven Kingdoms of the Tiwatt chapter will be closed into a circle; but after that, they will open the second circle. When the two circles are connected, they form ‘∞’. Compared with the parts that have been gone, what is really worth looking forward to is the unknown part that has not yet unfolded.

They have demonstrated their ability to iterate on creative ideas, as well as the agility in combination with new technologies. As the project team said in this program: ‘We have the ability to surprise the world in 2020, so in 5, 10, 20 years, we still have the ability to do it.’

I believe they can keep this very weighty promise.