Like other RTS games, Worker Talk has been out of the market for a long time.
Real-time strategy games were considered to be "passed" game genres a few years ago, and the IP that once called the wind and rain on this genre have fallen into silence, such as "Homeland", "Hero Company", "Age of Empires", etc., compared to "Worker's Tales" is one of them more "longevity".
The Original "Worker's Tale"
The series, which was born in 1993, remained active until 2010, and while not as widely known as the aforementioned star titles, it also had its place in RTS games due to its unique automated gameplay and meticulous villain animation. In 2014, the development of the "Worker's Language 8" internal test feedback is so bad, has reached the point of being directly cancelled development, so that the future of the series is uncertain, until 2018, Ubisoft announced the "New Worker's Tale" at the Cologne Exhibition, and invited back the series founder to lead the production, everything seems to be back on track, which makes the series fans put their minds at ease.
Returning legendary producer Volker Wertich
But unexpectedly, only two years later, in July 2020, Ubisoft very suddenly announced that the "New Worker's Tales" originally scheduled for release in 2020 entered the "indefinite jump ticket" state, and the release date will be determined after polishing the quality of the game, and even pre-order players will be refunded directly, which in turn cast a fog over the future of the game, because at that time, the A test demonstration seemed to be that the completion of the game was already very high, and what difficult problems encountered in the development made the game have to be postponed indefinitely. Players obviously don't know.
Fortunately, "New Worker's Voice" is not as "gone" as "Blue Sea Black Sail", Ubisoft said that it will disclose new information in January this year, and we have also ushered in this opportunity to play the beta test in advance, so what kind of adjustments have been made to the game during this "infinite postponement" time, and how to get started? I hope that this "New Worker Language" B test play report can answer some questions from players who pay attention to this game.
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Some players may not know that Ubisoft Dusseldorff who developed this work and Ubisoft Mainz who produced "Anno 1800" are sub-studios of Ubisoft Blue Byte, and for a long time before, the production of "Anno" and "Worker Language" series were the same team, under such genetic influence, "Worker Language" played with a strong construction and management game color, and the same was true for this "New Worker Language".
Compared to other RTS games that focus on combat and strategy, "New Worker's Tale" is slower and friendlier to novices; RTS bitters like me, who will not multi-thread at all, will only farm F2A, and can also get a pretty good experience in this game.
Since the content of this beta trial only opens three very short novice tutorials and the "conflict" mode for quick battles, the content is quite limited, and the more fun campaign mode of the "Worker Language" series has not been opened, which is a bit regrettable, but in the conflict mode, it has also included a complete construction combat gameplay, allowing us to get a first glimpse of the doorway.
The "Clash" mode is actually the "Encounter" mode in other RTS games, and the player can fight with the player and the AI for 1V1 or 2V2. Before the game officially begins, players can choose their own factions, different factions have special bonuses and unique classes, such as reducing the cost of food buildings, increasing building damage, etc., will also affect the appearance of buildings and classes, which is now standard in RTS and strategy games, but there are only two factions to choose from in the test, and there is one "fighting nation" that has not yet been unlocked.
2
At the beginning of the game, the player will have a warehouse similar to the mother base in other RTS games, all production and construction must be carried out around the warehouse, and what the player has to do is to continuously develop the scale of their settlement, expand the territory, build more warehouses as the core of the settlement, improve the resource output of their own forces, thereby accumulating strength, and finally pile up enough troops to bulldoze the enemy to victory.
Overall, it is still a standard RTS game framework, but the shining point of this game is the small workers who are constantly active in the screen, and the core system of the game is also built around them.
In the early works of Worker's Tales, players could not fully control the specific movements of villains, they automatically completed their own work content, and this concept was also inherited in this game, and some traditional RTS game gameplay was incorporated.
There are three types of units in the game: military units, engineers, and porters, of which military units and engineers are more similar to the control of ordinary RTS, players can control them to complete specific goals, and the most basic level of movers, can not be directly controlled, but is the basis for the entire settlement to operate.
You can build a house building to increase the maximum number of porters, and in the 19-year A test demonstration, the new porters would come to your village from the big colonial ship on a small raft, but this B test did not see such animation details, and the little people came straight out of the house.
In the Alpha demo, a new porter ashore on a ship
The porters will automatically complete the building materials handling and production work in the scene, although you may ignore their existence because you can't directly control them, but their impact on development is real, if the number of porters is insufficient, then the overall operation of your settlement may come to a standstill, the things produced by the workshop are not moved, piled up there, resulting in the inability to carry out new production, the lack of manpower to carry out building materials, and the construction of a simple watchtower may have to be repaired for half a day. The advanced military units and engineer units need to be transformed by the trained "certified post" of the porter, so maintaining the growth of the porter population is one of the core ideas of the game.
These busy little people also add a lot of life to the game, making you feel that they are really living in the settlement you have built, zooming in and watching the animation of the little people's work is also a very pleasant game experience.
3
As for the engineers upgraded by the porters, they bear almost all the development tasks: building buildings, expanding territory, investigating ore veins, and even exploring ruins, and the command of the engineers in the early stage of the game is very important, because not only do they have to build houses and roads, but also many key resources are not available in the initial territory, and engineers need to be sent to knock out more territories one grid at a time, and then build official affairs on the open territory to obtain resources.
Limited by these untapped resources, you can't train more engineers at the beginning, and knocking on the grid outside of your own territory will also face the danger of being killed by the opponent's patrol squad, who will not even escape on their own, a proper high-risk profession. In addition, you can spend tools to allow engineers to explore hidden locations on the map, and you can get rewards such as resources and even military squads (why can you dig up armies in ancient ruins?). ）
Model engineers
Military units are also trained by porters, here I have to mention the production supply chain in this game, there are players who have played "Anno 1800" should feel very kind, of course, the production chain of this game is shorter and better maintained than "Anno 1800", you only need to build the corresponding workshop, maintain the number of raw materials and a sufficient number of porters, they will automatically run, without you spending energy to manage.
When you open up the territory with iron ore veins, you can build mines, and then build coal burning yards, blacksmith shops, tool workshops and other buildings, so that you have a complete production line, the energy continues to produce weapons and tools, but the disadvantage is that the types of weapons produced by the blacksmith shop need to be manually selected, and you cannot choose the minimum number of automatic production, or some inconvenience, but if you build multiple blacksmith shops, there will be a shortage of raw materials.
Well-distributed production workshops can improve a lot of efficiency
When you have enough weapons in your inventory, you can start "riot soldiers", the porters will run into the warehouse to take out the corresponding weapons, carry the weapons into the training ground and start dancing swords, after a period of training, they will change into military uniforms and become military units.
If you have spare time, you may wish to close the camera and take a closer look at their training process, which is quite interesting. Observing the conversion process of each military unit is also a great pleasure in the game, such as the priest unit needs to consume gems, the porters will take out a bunch of gems, put the gems into the altar building that looks sacred, start meditating on the "epiphany", and suddenly the body begins to glow with golden light, becoming a priest, very metaphysical
enlightenment!
In the confrontation with AI opponents, as long as your production chain can operate correctly, basically there is no worry about the cost of resources, you can free your hands and feet to indulge in the riot troops, and then provide bonuses for the production workshop through various food resources, accelerate production, cooperate with scientific and technological upgrade units, and soon establish a powerful army to destroy the enemy settlement with overwhelming advantages.
Even with annoying Blood Priest units in enemy armies, it's easy to control archers alone to kill them from a distance, and the battle starts to get out of the way. After you have won a big battle, the AI opponent is obviously in decline, due to the high cost of time and resources of the production unit, the enemy has been difficult to overwhelm your offensive, the next thing is already very obvious, with the advantage of troops to slowly advance, tear down one enemy building after another, to win the game.
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In general, this beta trial open AI game is less difficult, AI likes to quickly open up a large number of territories, while sending patrol squads to harass your territory, but as long as the simple fortifications are built early, enemy harassment is basically not a threat, and the enemy will also be weak due to excessive expansion, unable to turn resource advantages into military advantages.
But the game doesn't have the option to adjust the difficulty, which makes me an RTS struggling to figure out whether this kind of gameplay is correct.
However, looking back on the conflict mode experience for several hours, "New Worker's Tale" really brought me a pleasant farming experience, whether it is a bright and refreshing picture, or the melodious music that sounds from time to time, with the light smoke wafting out of the workshop and the busy figure of the little people, you are very relaxed and comfortable when playing this game, which is the game atmosphere that belongs to "Worker's Tale".
Although the content currently displayed in the conflict mode is far from the level of pre-promotion, it is enough to make me look forward to the official release of this game, hoping that "New Worker Language" can send the best "Worker Language" works to fans of the series and new players who are looking forward to this game.
After the beta test of "New Worker's Tales", we also got the opportunity to interview Mr. Nadim Affani, the director of the game, who answered some questions that arose during the trial, the following is the content of this interview:
Q1: It is a pleasure to see that "New Worker's Tales" has re-entered the public eye, this new work does not use subtitles like previous works, but adopts a name that returns to the original point, does this mean that the "Workers' Tales" series will take this work as a new beginning and start again?
A1: This time, "New Worker Language" can be regarded as a reboot of the series, the core gameplay of this game is inspired by the series of "Worker Language 3" and "Worker Language 4", but the experience is more modern and some new features have been added. Since the Worker's Tales series hasn't launched an orthodox large-scale work for more than a decade, we hope to make a new game that can satisfy both old fans and new players.
Q2: There are a lot of players who care about this game want to ask a question, we all know that the game was originally scheduled to be released in 2020, and in the play demo released in 19 years, it can already be seen that the game has a high degree of completion, so what exactly is the problem that caused the game to enter the state of "indefinite skipping"?
A2: In 2020, we examined everything in the game and found that some of the gameplay systems didn't work as we expected, so we had to go back and take a closer look at every feature of the game and redesign the various gameplay with the goal of simplifying the content and enhancing the RTS gameplay. One of the results of this rework is that it allows players to directly control military units, giving them more control, strategic and tactical options. Another new element is "Landmarks", which indicate important strategic locations on the map to players, from which players can receive certain resource rewards. In addition to this we have added three different factions, all of which were not available in earlier versions.
The game allows you to explore the location of the signs on the map
Q3: This time, New Worker's Tales was developed using the Snowflake Lotus engine, and we all saw the power of this engine in making large-scale open-world games, such as The Division and Avatar: Pandora's Border, so what are its special advantages in developing strategy games like Worker's Tales?
A3: Snowflake is a very powerful game engine, and many Ubisoft games are now developed using this engine, which allows us to create a very detailed and colorful game world. In this beta and official version of the game, players can find a lot of small details in the game that look pleasant and can be explored. Oh, and we [Ubisoft Dusetdorf Studios] also have an in-house team of Snowflake Engines, and they have a lot of experience with the engines that allow us to do these things well.
Q4: "Worker's Tales" can be said to be a very long-lived series, and each generation balances between innovation and retaining their own characteristic elements, in this "New Worker's Language", what innovations do you feel are particularly successful?
A4: Some of the new features that impressed us the most were the landmarks mentioned earlier, as well as the Engineer Units and modern gameplay.
With the help of landmarks, players can find hidden story content in Campaign Mode, or find strategically important locations in Conflict Mode, such as rewards for players who meet special conditions.
Engineer units allow players to fully control their territory expansion, which is also a very important gameplay in this game, in addition to expansion, engineers also have important work to build buildings, resource search, if you do it properly, you can even control engineers to steal resources from opponents!
Finally, we've added something that's common in modern games, such as players being able to customize their game in many ways, and we've also prepared some additional challenges that will make a difference whenever you start playing.
Q5: Talking back to this beta test, there is currently only a clash mode for players to engage in quick battles, I noticed that players can choose their own faction leader, they will provide special effects and special classes, but also affect the building style and class appearance? But we can only choose two leaders at the moment, and a mysterious character who is locked, will there be more leaders for players to choose from in the official version?
A5: Actually, you didn't choose a leader, you chose a faction. There are three selectable factions in the game, and only two were opened in this beta test. The first faction, Elari, consisted of a group of skilled builders who liked to build thriving settlements, so had special bonuses that reduced the cost of housing and food production, and the engineers of this faction were skilled geologists who could survey ore veins faster, and Elari's unique military unit Ranger was able to help them protect their territory more effectively.
The second faction is called the Maru, who for many years lived in harmony with land and sea, had a trade advantage, and had a lower construction cost bonus when building and collecting related buildings, ports, and gold mines. Maru's special class is the Spearmen, who are always ahead of the curve in battle and are very strong.
As for the last unenlocked Jorn, a warrior faction with strong combat honors that likes to compete in strength and combat skills, the faction's population rises faster and costs less to build ranches, training grounds, blacksmiths, and smelters. Their unique class has faster attack speed and damage. In addition, their engineers were able to open up territory at a faster pace.
Q6: While playing this clash mode, I noticed that many of the elements I liked in the previous trailer disappeared, such as the galleon parked in the distance, and the small wooden boats that will come ashore with the little people, are these unique to the campaign mode, or have they been deleted?
A6: The elements you mentioned are from the old version and have now been removed. But you can still expect our campaign mode, which will have 13 exciting levels to play.
Q7: In addition to the campaign and "Skirmish" modes, will there be a large map sandbox mode that allows players to build and conquer freely? The construction and development gameplay of Worker's Tales is one of the reasons I like it, and it makes it fun for me to fight hard.
A7: There won't be a sandbox mode in the game because we're focusing on RTS gameplay now. Our new version focuses more on providing players with a challenging clash mode where players can play against other players or AI, each game lasts about 70 to 90 minutes, and there will be a raid mode, where you can play the map in conflict mode, but the settings in the map will be different, such as fewer resources. If you want to enjoy some of the easier gaming experiences, then campaign mode will be your choice.
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