This year has really been a year of explosion for survival and building games, and shortly after Palu became a super hit at the beginning of the year, a game of the same genre called Enshrouded launched on Steam at the end of January, and sold more than one million in the first four days of its release. You must know that the release of the work coincided with the high popularity period after Palu's launch, and such a hard-nosed behavior also caused ridicule from many people at the time, thinking that in the face of a strong man like Palu, he would definitely fail miserably.
However, "Fog Lock Kingdom" not only exceeded one million sales within four days of release, but also exceeded 2 million sales in less than 30 days after it was released, and the ** peak also exceeded 150,000.
And the reason why you can still achieve something in the face of strong enemies is that this game has its own style and gameplay, and has its own development ideas, so it can also attract many players to buy.
This also shows that there is still a huge room for development in survival and building games, and there is still a lot to explore in the future.
So, what's so different about this game?
"All sewn" again?
Similar to Palu the Phantom Beast, Foglock Kingdom is another "all sewn" game, and the game's official has publicly admitted that its combat aspects are inspired by the Dark Souls series and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Not only that, but you can also see the shadow of a large number of survival RPGs such as "Valhalla", "Rise of the Night", and "Conan the Barbarian".
But again, sewing is not a problem, random stitching is where some games cause players to be disgusted, sewing well and sewing well is an art, and being able to sew your own style is a master.
The game's expansive world, magical fantasy style, and various terrain designs are very similar to Elden Ring, and the game's fragmented narrative is clearly borrowed from the Black Souls series.
The game's world structure is similar to that of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with ancient spires scattered throughout the area, where players will encounter various traps, solve various puzzles, and find a teleportation circle to the upper floor, and finally reach the top of the tower. Unlocking the Ancient Spire not only unlocks the fog in the area around it, but also serves as a waypoint for the player. Ancient Spires near the spawn point are less difficult to challenge, and the farther you go, the more difficult they are, and the traps and puzzles inside will gradually increase in difficulty.
The whole game world is a combination of the Ring and Breath of the Wild, but the beauty of the game is that it integrates the gameplay of Valhalla, so it feels very different. The latter is a survival-building adventure game released in 2020, and its sales exceeded 10 million after its release a few years ago, which can be said to be an epoch-making and milestone in the development of the survival construction genre.
Before the advent of this game, this type of game, represented by Minecraft, put construction first, allowing players to give full play to their imagination to create, because exercising the ability to transform the world is one of the most fundamental desires of human evolution.
But when it comes to Valhalla, the boss is put in the first place, the main purpose of the game is to defeat one boss after another, hunt huge monsters and then dedicate them to Odin, in this process, players need to build and manage resources to achieve the purpose of defeating the boss, the game makes it difficult for players to move an inch by increasing the difficulty of gathering, the difficulty of transportation, the difficulty of construction, and the difficulty of defense, resulting in resource transportation and boss battles often need to cross extremely long distances, complex terrain, Countless high-level monsters, extremely high death penalties.
Therefore, this design requires the player to build infrastructure, plan logistics and shipping routes, and build roads, ports, and outposts.
This creates a cyclical process, that is, build-fight-build-defeat the next boss, and so on and on, giving the player a strong incentive to keep building.
Since then, many similar parodies have emerged, such as "Rise of the Night" and "Terrain Core Protector".
"Fog Lock Kingdom" has also been greatly influenced by the work, but the difference is that this work has added a complete set of RPG systems on its basis, that is, skill trees, attribute points, mission logs, career promotions, diverse monsters and equipment drops and other varied elements, which are much richer than Valheim's RPG elements, and the core purpose is not to fight bosses, but a high degree of integration of common RPG gameplay and survival building gameplay, that is, to constantly explore new areas, Then build to earn resources, explore the next dangerous area, complete various quests, uncover the hidden stories of the world, and more.
The RPG design in the game is indeed more complex than common similar games, and it is also equipped with twelve talent lines, which can be roughly divided into tanks, warriors, mages, marksmen, assassins and life classes according to their attributes. In addition, the game supports changing careers at any time, and a single character can get a relatively complete cultivation experience.
This kind of fusion requires a certain amount of courage and ability, because to combine elements of Elden Ring, the Dark Souls series, The Legend of Selda: Breath of the Wild, and Valhalla, and then design a whole complex RPG system, it takes a lot of research to find a better way to integrate the above games, and it also requires some experience in the development of survival building games.
The developer of this work, Keen Games, has had a lot of experience in the development of this type of game before, and they launched a game called "Portal Knight" many years ago, which was also a popular game for a time, and also launched a national server in China.
So from this point of view, it's not surprising that they were able to make this game, it can be said that they have been studying this track for many years, and of course they have made such a masterpiece in the end, and many people think that this is the most content-rich game of this kind they have played so far, which makes some sense.
Build a miracle
One of the most amazing designs in this game is that the voxel gameplay has been carried forward and made more interesting.
Voxel means that all building materials in the game are made up of independent voxel points, such as a preset base foundation, which is a large cube composed of 64 voxel points. Theoretically, players can build buildings of any shape with fine voxel blocks.
In the game, players can use fine "voxel" blocks to build buildings of various shapes, or they can hollow out the entire mountain and build a large dungeon in the ground, with more than 20 different building materials not only different in appearance, but also in the sound of walking on them.
Unlike the mosaic blocks in Minecraft, the voxel blocks in Foglock Kingdom also have an interesting mechanic, which is that they can automatically fuse with the surrounding voxels, adaptively adjusting the appearance, and each material has its own unique fusion method to echo the style of the material itself, such as filling in the beams of the house, and the blocks will automatically become beautiful decorative decorations. Therefore, the cornices and corners of Chinese buildings can also be realized in the game.
In the game, the seemingly natural and irregular shape of the terrain is also composed of voxels, players can craft the terrain carefully, or use the preset terrain blueprint to quickly generate the terrain, the terrain is also differentiated by different materials.
In addition, there are a wide variety of decorations in the game, and players can unlock a variety of decorative furniture, which can be combined with voxel construction to achieve a variety of personalized interior decorations with a high degree of freedom. Decorations can also be stacked freely, so you can not only stack the plates on the dining table to create a natural living atmosphere, but also build a transparent wall with glasses.
The game's construction functions are not only rich and powerful, but thanks to the various intimate and convenient measures of the development team, the construction process is also quite convenient, and there is no real physical load-bearing, so there are many fewer restrictions on construction; Whether it is building materials or decorations, it provides two modes: free placement and alignment; The game provides preset blueprints of various shapes and sizes, supporting the construction and demolition of the whole block, and there is no loss of building materials; Once the player makes a mistake or disassembles the wrong one, it can also support multi-step undo like office software.
After the blueprints are built, players can continue to use the micro-manipulation method of Minecraft to polish these finished products in small cubes.
Thanks to this massive voxel-building system, players can use their imagination to build all sorts of whimsical buildings, such as castles from The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, or Castle in the Sky from Hayao Miyazaki's cartoons, or even Notre Dame Cathedral.
Many of these buildings are very large, and the interior decoration is also very exquisite, and the amount and popularity of the buildings in the game made by many players are very high, and the spread of these will inevitably attract more players into the pit.
This is also the key to the popularity of UGC games, that is, all kinds of strange buildings, but the difference in "Foglock Kingdom" is that the buildings in this game are more realistic, and they have their own different fun compared to the pixelated world.
And this game makes it much easier for players to build various huge buildings through convenient construction operations, which can be said to greatly lower the threshold, so that players can use more thoughts to use their imagination.
And as the game continues to be updated in the future, it seems that there is a considerable possibility of creating a huge city in it.
Listen to the players
Of course, the game is currently in the EA stage, although the overall gameplay and content are not bad, but there are also a lot of design problems, such as a large number of repetitive running and a slight lack of skill in the game The combat is seriously separated from the game's excellent framework design, which makes many players feel irritated, so many people hope that the game will add a mount system in the future, and improve the combat experience, as well as enrich the variety of monsters.
The developer, Keen Games, is constantly collecting feedback from players to make improvements.
In a post from the Steam community, Keen Games also revealed that many players have made a lot of suggestions and requests for the game, officially reminding players that "they can vote for one of the more than 2,600 player suggestions on our feedback platform".
Most of these suggestions are quite reasonable, including a fix for one of the game's biggest problems - quest progress is synced across the server rather than each person individually. Other things include adding a weather system, adding lakes and rivers, and more.
Players also want the NPCs in the game to be updated and lively, rather than standing still all day, and they also want to have a follow-a-the-path system to help players fight or gather resources. There are also those who want to see more NPCs, such as merchants wandering around towns or maps.
At present, officials say that they have completed 40 of the more than 2,600 recommendations, such as increasing the day-night cycle and adding lanterns. "We're working on another patch and hopefully release it soon," Keen Games said. Development on the first content update has already begun, and we hope to be able to share plans soon! ”
2600 suggestions, just reading it is a huge amount of work, and keen games actually takes these suggestions from players so seriously, from this sincere attitude, it can be seen that this game will go further in the future.
Because many games in the EA stage can be said to be a form of co-construction between players and officials, which is different from the development of games in the past, in the 1990s, when the Internet was not developed enough, and there was no game platform like Steam, what the game company does, players have to play what, and the form of game companies to obtain player feedback is often only questionnaires, etc., but now you can write comments on the Internet at any time to put forward various opinions on the game.
Therefore, today's players are not passive recipients, but participants in game development, and the combination of players' wisdom and game developers' listening will make a game's popularity last longer.
Because many players are now more experienced, there may be some aspects of understanding and thinking about games that are more enlightening than those of developers.
Therefore, every game company should always listen to the voice of players, such as some domestic mobile games because they ignore this point, ignore some of the suggestions and voices of players, and finally cause an uproar, such cases can be said to be common in China in recent years.
Conclusion
A hot topic in the world in recent years is the metaverse, and this work is indeed a bit of a prototype of the metaverse form.
Looking at the game field, you can survive in one game, build, cook, gather, fight monsters and other various operations, whether it is the construction part or the combat part of the content is surprisingly rich, and the two experiences can be better connected and not so separated, except for "Fog Lock Kingdom", it seems that there are really few games like this.
If Red Dead Redemption 2 is an immersive metaverse form that takes the experience of a single-player adventure to the extreme, then the richness of the content of Foglock Kingdom is the ultimate in the current survival building genre, although this game is not good enough, but with a good start, this game still has a lot of potential to be tapped, and it will inevitably affect the further development of the survival building genre in the future. (Wen Feiyun).