Global destruction, virus invasion. Dodge zombies, collect supplies, build your own shelter, and survive the chaotic apocalypse.
As the most classic track in open-world games, the apocalyptic theme is still loved by the majority of players today. Stimulated by the pressure of survival, players try to find food and water to satisfy their most basic survival needs and immerse themselves in it. However, with the proliferation of apocalyptic mobile games such as "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Dawn Awakening", the conventional story of "starting with a dog and raising a gun to fight zombies" has gradually lost its appeal. "Now that I've killed the first zombie, I know that I'm going to pick up supplies and build a house. ”Some core players complained that the game content was too cookie-cutter. After players gradually became desensitized to traditional zombie stories, the game planner rolled up new ghost stories. 
Futuristic wasteland, urban weirdnessWhat are the new stories under the survival theme?In the creation of apocalyptic themes, the film and television industry plays zombie mutations at low cost and alien invasions at high cost. Entertainment is not separated,After "The Wandering Earth" became popular with Chinese science fiction films, the science fiction category of China's mobile game market immediately doubled. According to Gamma Data's "2023 China Mobile Game Category Development Research Report", sci-fi is now the second largest market for users, with a category user scale of 2200 million people, and the market has been in a state of product vacancy for a long time. Latecomer Chaoxi Lightyear seized this subdivision track, combined "science fiction" and "apocalypse", and created ByteDance's last work in the game field "Planet: Restart". Under the new story, the characters no longer degenerate into the era of slash-and-burn farming, but live on a future planet with advanced production technology. In the publicity process, the production team tried to make players understandIt's a brand new genre that aims to differentiate itself from the overcrowded traditional survival track. To this end, in the screenwriting session, the project invited Wang Jinkang, He Xi, and Han Song, four Chinese sci-fi "Four Heavenly Kings", to cast a new world view of the game, and strive to create a new story of survival in the sci-fi world. But returning to the game, players are shocked to find that although they already have the highly developed production technology of 2112, they are also facing the highly deteriorated planetary environment of 2112. Therefore, even if the player no longer needs to use the traditional axe to pick up the tree, he will need to use the "laser cracker" to collect the wood. The durability of the axe also becomes the electricity of the laser cracker. 
The same goes for the dangers of confrontation. There are no more zombies, but new mutant creatures bred in the wasteland have appeared. If you think about it, you'll feel like it's a lot like:Level 1, I take a crude stone axe and chop wild pipi shrimp by the river;At level 2112, I'm taking Wakanda's vibranium laser axe to chop the Demon Swamp Ultimate Emperor Pipi Shrimp. In order to circumvent this mindset, NetEase introduced the concept of "strange talk" in the project "Seven Days World" to be launched next year. The game refers to the logic of the "SCP ** Meeting", and repackages the dangers to be fought or the materials to be collected in the mode of "strange stories".
SCP Foundation (English name: SCP Foundation), the full name of Special Containment Procedures, is a collection of online co-writing literature with the theme of the eerie science fiction alternate world, and it is also a mysterious fictional organization in its derivative works, specializing in the discovery of various supernatural phenomena, mysterious creatures and other anomalous events. In its unique worldview, it operates without interference from any state organization, and its goal is to contain anomalous phenomena, events, individuals, etc. in the world, collectively referred to as "containment" (i.e., SCP). Each containment object will have a corresponding designation (e.g., SCP XXXX). Many of these "objects" can both pose a physical danger to people and interfere with their daily lives. **The Society is dedicated to containing these anomalies and protecting the world from the unknown.In this mode, the existing scientific logic is still in effect, but the supernatural and bizarre events around the characters are endless. This gives the player a sense of anti-routine novelty:The paranormal is hidden in the peaceful everyday life, and you don't know when it will appear or what it will look like. Wu Di, the project's main director, admitted in an interview in August this year that one of the major efforts is to integrate weird stories into the gameplay to form a more differentiated game experience. For example, if a player wants to install a monitor in their territory, when they conceived the material**, they planned to redesign a foreign object - a monster with similar behavior characteristics to the monitor, its head looks like a monitor, and the light will turn red when the player is spotted, and warn the surrounding monsters.
In addition to original game planning, some apocalyptic games have also adopted the mode of directly digging gold on mature IP. For example, the project "I Have a Doomsday Safe House", which is to be launched at the beginning of the game, has "Absolute Zero, Doomsday Comes" on the game poster, and the gameplay basically adopts the setting of the IP work "Global Ice: I Created the Doomsday Safe House", which is popular at both ends of the online comics. NetEase's other apocalyptic game "Frostpunk: The Last Home" is an adaptation of Steam's top 3 "Frostpunk Age" into a mobile game. 
Doomsday involutionStart with the homogenization of gameplay"Opening your eyes is to fight zombies and get supplies, closing your eyes is to distribute materials to build houses, the gameplay of the game is more stable than the work of 996, such a game SOC game grabs a lot of money, why should players play yours?It is said that this is the speech of the leader of a SoC project team at the theme seminar, and it is impossible to determine which project it comes from. But in terms of results, from the year before,Big-budget flagship products must be different in subject matter and be able to stand out in terms of artistic concepts. Taking the previous two titles as examples, Planet: Reboot combines the concept of a "futuristic wasteland" with elements of a "sci-fi mecha" to create an imaginative theme of survival in the futureAnd "Seven Days World" uses dark and withered scenes and strange atmosphere to build a weird and upside-down world. Judging from the four known monster designs revealed so far, players can easily perceive the terrifying supernatural phenomena that underneath the mundane world. 
Muzi, the game planner, has participated in the discussion of related themes, and she believes that the core cycle of "collecting materials" - "meeting survival needs" - "consuming materials" at the core of the survival theme will not change, but the player's experience can be optimized with the change of the theme. Muzi added that in fact, "theme optimization gameplay" is not a new concept, but for the project, it consumes more resources and has a certain risk, so it has not been put on the agenda. However, in recent years, the blowout of new games on the Doomsday track, coupled with the version number requiring the game to be operated for a long time, has made the problem of similar gameplay with apocalyptic themes paid attention to. "Game companies want their products to live a little longer in a segment. ”The differentiation brought out by this theme is divided into two parts, the early stage is mainly to form a visible difference in art and art settings, and accurately attract more target users to enter the pit;In the later stage, there will be a complete set of mature gameplay systems and themes**, which will really make a difference on this track. For example, in "Planet: Restart", in addition to adding the most common mecha vehicles in the sci-fi theme, because it is the setting of the future **, it is reasonable to add the most popular "skill" concept of the current shooting category to **, and different ** have their own exclusive skills, which enriches the fun of the battle. In "Seven Days of World", based on the logic of "SCP**", it is necessary to find anomalous phenomena, events, and individuals in the world (which can also be understood as the seals in "The Master of Mystery") and "contain" them, and this need can also be bound to the "home" system very naturally. You can imagine your home full of all kinds of strange foreign objects, which use their special abilities to help your home development. The two core gameplay of the apocalyptic theme, "survival" and "building", are covered within the scope of optimization. It is not difficult to find that due to the change of themes, these traditional gameplay methods have emerged with the possibility of redesign and redefinition. 
Innovation is easy to implement
Anyone can do it, and it is the most difficult to systematically implement each design. Eye Entertainment learned that in the whole design process of "Seven Days World", the most interesting part is the imagination design of weird foreign objects, but the most painful part is to think about how to incorporate foreign objects into the overall system of the game after the design. "Foreign objects must be distinctive, but the gameplay must return to the existing framework. "Previously, due to the popularity of the online article "Dao Weird Fairy", a large number of game up owners forged the actual demo of the game**. It also attracted the game planner to propose a survival game with the theme of "Chinese-style Cthulhu" - with Niuxin Village as the home development, there are a large number of mature art settings that can be directly referenced. 
But in the end, due to the inability to create a matching gameplay for this set of worldviews, the project was not established. At present, in terms of doomsday theme innovation, most of them have adopted the creative mode of "bold assumptions" and "careful stitching" of the gameplay. That is, more imagination can be allowed in the subject matter to form a conceptual difference. However, in terms of gameplay, I will still carefully choose to find the existing gameplay on the market, and put on the new skin of the theme for stitching. Curator Mu Zi explained that it is impossible to create a project of this magnitude in a completely original way. And SOC games, each stitched into a gameplay, is an innovation in itself. The game needs new ideas, but when it comes to the gameplay of a system, the first thing to consider is the overall feasibility. "Especially when you're working on a multiplayer game that is going to run for a long time, maybe you're working more on solving the problems that innovation brings about than it is about innovation. This is another answer to the game's curated involution of ghost stories.
From the perspective of solving needs, making up a ghost story is already the most cost-effective innovation of domestic apocalypse-themed mobile games.