Fall.
Rapid fall. The wind whistled in my ears, and I felt like a shooting star, but it seemed to lack some sense of weightlessness.
When I lifted the clouds, I saw a splendid metropolis, some of which were towering into the sky, and some of which were bottomless. Outside the window, transport pipes weave together to connect the city. Whether it's neon lights and advertisements, or speeding spherical vehicles, they all reflect the beauty and prosperity of the city, and I am dizzy.
I forgot my fears and just wanted to get a glimpse of the city's mysteries, so I spread my limbs and adjusted the direction of my fall. It got closer and closer to me, closer and closer, until I hit the ground ......
Overlooking the "** moment".
This is Honkai: Star Rail 20 In the new version, the screen of the pioneer entering the main stage of the game for the first time "** moment". Without a doubt, this is a very expressive, visually and atmospheric passage. And it also made all players feel for the first time: the "Star Railway", a train that shines with creative brilliance, has brought us some new highlights.
On January 21, 2024, Honkai: Star Rail released the first "Pinocone" promotion**. From the perspective of Pinocone's well-known ** image "Clock Kid", the "rubber tube" style animation popular in the middle of the last century introduces players to the appearance of Pinocone's main stage "** moment", as well as the overall style characteristics of this area.
To put it simply, "The Hour of *" is a metropolis set in Pinoconi's dreamland, with a drunken appearance and a lot of sci-fi elements. Today, "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" 2Version 0 is officially launched, and players can experience the distinctive style and rich details of this metropolis in the game.
Since its launch, Honkai: Star Rail has been known for its varied setting and style, with each region the train traveling through with a unique landscape. When it comes to Pinocone, "modern" is undoubtedly the most apt summary of it: in the sense of the word, "modern" represents trendy, and the word itself has a retro flavor in the context of 2024. That's why it's a fitting representation of Pinoconi's form – a retro state that is constantly evolving.
Pinoconi's retro flavor is reflected in the fact that the metropolis contains many traditional functional facilities, from theaters, shopping malls, and countless Empire State Building-style mega-buildings, to kiosks and fire hydrants, and old-school cobblestone streets. The exaggerated artistic words and kanban girls in the huge advertisement, the geometric decoration above the store and the window-style publicity, just like the name of this scene "** moment", all pull players back to the middle and early last century, when science, literature and art, technology, and media developed rapidly at the same time, laying the foundation of industrial civilization.
The brutal development of the "advertising" style is also an important feature of the "** era".
*Age" symbolizes an urban heritage, presented through a unique visual style that constitutes Pinoconi's aesthetic tone. On top of that, the game has made a lot of extensions, and the trend that players feel comes from this. However, it is worth noting that this trend is not completely based on the background of the times, but incorporates some familiar things for current players, and to a certain extent, this style that is both familiar and unfamiliar brings a fresh aesthetic feeling.
The "ball cage" in the transportation pipeline next to the skyscraper has a spherical carriage shell and a catapult-like starting method, which makes it difficult to capture its movement trajectory with the naked eye; The "Wutongpeng" brand automatic car on the ground, one-wheeled, can be autonomous, and will intelligently identify obstacles in front of you and avoid them during automatic driving; The best in the theater is not an ordinary movie, but a "hologram" whose content can be customized and can be realistically felt in virtual reality, like a dream that is sold on the shelf.
The facilities in the city make you feel "retro" and "trendy" at the same time
"Modern" is the visual experience that Pinoconi brings to players, and the deeper core of the dream society is "utopia".
It is also a vision of the future society, and Pinoconi is quite different from the "cyberpunk" that has become popular in the literary and artistic market in recent years. The city was an entertainment utopia created by a handful of rulers. The Pinocone people outside the "family" enjoy entertainment in their dreams every day, and entertainment occupies the whole of life, and the whole society presents a scene of "illusory high-tech, illusory high life". The first promotional scenes in the PV are the result of these entertainments: shopping, buying imaginary memories, and drinking the national soda drink "Suleda", which the Pinoconians call their way of life "syrupism", advocating pleasure, always living in the present, never ushering in tomorrow.
Suleda carts all over the streets.
In reality, even if it is a beautiful era that many people miss, there is still a dirty side behind the prosperity, poverty, discrimination, injustice ......A similar dark side also exists in Pinoconi, and there are also many hints in detail in the plot - the "harmony" of the Pinoconians converted to is itself an irreconcilable contradiction with the drunkenness and "syrupism" they show.
The player will obviously realize that this underlying contradiction is like the pistol placed in the scene in theatrical theory, the pistol will definitely go off, and the utopia will be broken - if you strip away the aura of entertainment, Pinocone becomes an empty shell. And this also laid a lot of foreshadowing for the subsequent story: what is "family"? Why did they put the inhabitants of Pinocone into dreams? How does this metropolis work? As the Trailblazers delve deeper and deeper into the holes beneath the beauty of Pinocone, the mysteries in the plot will be revealed one by one.
Of course, just as Honkai: Star Rail has always been good at, the tonality of the game composed of these world views and visual elements will also complement the gameplay to provide players with a composite experience.
Putting a good concept design into a player's actual experience is also done through gameplay. At this level, the project team chose to emphasize the disorder, absurdity, and vertigo of the core element of "dreams" with details that can be actually interacted with, giving players an "immersive" feeling.
At Pinocone, dreams have been designed to retain a certain amount of disorder, without having to follow the exact logic of reality, and dreamers will see many bizarre images, but to a certain extent, people can control their own dream experience.
This disorder first takes on a sense of absurdity. For example, in "Little Hanu Action", players can switch to the tiny form of the Hanu brothers, a "rubber tube" style animated image, shuttle through various small holes, and fight against the stone boss of ** - of course, if you encounter an obstacle in your way, you can also switch back to the real body and give it a blow. For example, if you encounter NPCs with clock marks on their heads, you can use the clock boy's tricks on them to change their emotions to promote the development of the plot. Of course, you can also be a happy person and control their emotions at will, and it is also interesting to see the multifaceted nature of NPCs.
In Operation Tiny Hanu, players battle their wits against the Stone Boss.
In addition, players come to the dream of Beloberg through the dream store, and deal with one after another limbs, muscular trash cans, and the reputation of the king of garbage "Tatalov" is ......These disorderly and absurd things show the player the unreality of the "dream".
The second is the change of space. In some map scenes, the player can turn on the "Dream Walk", which is simply "walking on the wall", walking up to the wall through the yellow link, the whole space will be reversed, and the original wall will become the ground that can be walked. This kind of effect that uses visual transitions and dislocations is especially good for the bizarre nature of dreams – if you've seen Inception or something like that, you'll see how powerful it can be.
The three-dimensional space brings a sense of vertigo to the player.
Similar gameplay includes "Dream Distant Eyes" and "Dream Lost Clock". In "Dream Vision", the player can turn the original 3D perspective into 2With a 5D top-down view, platforms and stairs that were previously of different heights will now be placed on the same level with visual misalignment, and then a connected path will be formed by triggering the mechanism that moves the platform.
The change of perspective in "Building Dreams and Distant Eyes".
"Dream Clock" is an independent level area, composed of some geometry and mirrors, the mirror will reflect the geometry in front of them, players need to control the mirror, as well as the rotation and movement of the geometry, "splicing" a correct path, let the player go to the end to collect gears, get rewards.
Example of the "Dream Clock" level.
This kind of "splicing" technique has actually been presented in the previous versions of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", as well as other games of miHoYo. For example, in the fairy boat, the player needs to merge the coats of arms in different directions and divided into two halves in a specific perspective to open the closed path. However, with the theme of "dreams", it is undoubtedly more suitable for the story and scene.
Not limited to specific gameplay, 20The interactive details in the main story line of the new version also revolve around the core of "Dreamland". One of the things that impressed me the most was the dream of the Pioneer when the train jumped into Pinocone: when the player followed the characters in their dream space to find the exit, they met countless characters along the way, but the characters I knew said lines that did not fit the character, which made me feel a little panic. Then, as I followed the guide to a certain corridor, the picture suddenly moved, and the end of the corridor suddenly disappeared, followed by an infinite stretch of space that could not be seen at a glance. Under this change, I felt as if the corridor was narrowing, the walls on both sides were about to squeeze towards me, and I ran forward, but I had the illusion that I was doing useless work—I was really going to be trapped in a dream.
An ever-expanding promenade.
Just like the feeling that came when they officially entered Pinocone's "** moment", players certainly knew it was a dream, but it was enough to simulate reality.
It is worth mentioning that this kind of interaction detail not only matches the "dreamland" idea, but also reflects the progress of game technology. For example, when the space changes, the vertigo caused by distorting the picture suddenly strikes; Or change the logic of the character's movement by changing the perspective. Although these interaction details may seem trivial, they are actually not easy to present in a natural way.
It is not difficult to find that Pinoconi has some essential changes compared to the previous regional map. Previously, whether it was Beloberg or Xianzhou Luofu, the world view, plot and art were all concrete, players had enough cultural affinity for the things in it, and the story was slowly unfolding in fixed areas and several camps. Compared with them, Pinoconi lays a huge tone - the world view based on "dreams", the plot of "Harmonic Ceremony" where all forces in the universe gather, and enough "modern" art design to add enough content thickness to the game. While controlling the quality of the content, the project team also let go of itself just right. Players also like the team's attitude to production. Some players sighed in the PV comment area: "'Crashing Iron' is a game that is very 'beautiful' for planning and players' mental state. ”
Very "joyful".
2.Although the content of version 0 is not so concrete, it can bring players enough immersion, and players can also have a deeper understanding and experience of the factions and factions of the entire "Star Iron" world view in Pinocone. More importantly, from the wide praise on the first day of the new version, we can deeply feel the real demand of players for the content of "Star Rail".
Players gave positive feedback on the first day of the new version's launch.
As players navigate the vast universe by train, they want to see not only simple space opera and clichéd stories, but also fantastical unknowns that they have never seen before. In other words, players always have a thirst for novelty.
The universe in Honkai: Star Rail can undoubtedly meet the imagination and expectations of players, and Pinocone confirms this even more - after experiencing the content of the new version, I believe that whether it is the concept of a wild dream or the fascinating initial plot of the version, it is enough to satisfy the freshness of players, which is a miracle belonging to Pinocone. After this psychedelic and captivating city, Honkai: Star Rail can write an even more colorful chapter for the adventures of the pioneers.