Although "Crossfire" is mainly popular in the Chinese market terminal tour and mobile game market, hanbok in overseas markets has long been discontinued, but this does not affect Smilegate's continued in-depth exploration of product IP.
On January 18, Crossfire: Legion, a real-time strategy game developed by Blackbird Interactive (BBI) and published by Smilegate and Prime Matter, officially announced that it will enter the EA phase in the spring and unveiled a game trailer and a game promotion plan for January and April.
Official trailer for Crossfire: Legion
Canada's BBI as one of the best RTS category development studios, its "Homeland: Karak Desert" and will be launched at the end of this year "Homeland 3" have a good reputation of players, this time their "Crossfire: Legion" with the classic real-time strategy gameplay instead of the "crossfire" shooting gameplay, honestly although BBI Studio's business capabilities are very strong, but this approach is still risky and radical, not to mention the RTS category in the current development environment is difficult, In terms of player audience acceptance, can FPS players who pursue manipulation and excitement really accept RTS?
Crossfire: Legion players play live video
However, it is not broken, and the product with the "crossfire" IP does not necessarily have to be an old fan, as the saying goes, "gold will always shine", excellent game content is naturally not worried about the player's entry.
It should be mentioned that according to Robert Wozinski, global brand manager of publisher Prime Matter, Smilegate seems to be very obsessed with making a suitable RTS game, so it seems that this mechanism reversal is logical.
Deck blessings are hard to hide the lack of detail
"What makes it stand out is the magic of its macro strategy." Commenting on the features of the game, Wozinski said: "The game has an army card system, adrenaline-oriented gameplay, and incredibly fast pace. ”
What is the Army Card System? After studying the live video of the beta version of the game "Crossfire: Legion", the author guessed that this card system is an opening setting to improve the strategy of the game, as can be seen from the above figure, there are a total of 8 card slots for players to choose, each of which has its own unique ability role, the player's card combination in the opening configuration is the type of army that the player can use in the game, and this personalized customization scheme is also as the official expects - Different combinations of cards will create different flavors of gameplay.
In fact, this setting is similar to that of hearthstone, Quint or the dungeon game "Illatus", which requires players to configure their own decks, and has card strategy elements, but here is a warning of the Hobson selection effect - usually the game will provide players with many reliable matching schemes, but the most widely circulated mainstream collocation schemes will also change with the change of version, and in the end there are often only two or three lonely choices.
The development stage at the beginning of the game actually makes the author have a feeling of dreaming back to the "interstellar" - the familiar two resources plus population limit settings, the game units without collision mechanisms, and the familiar UI layout settings...
The author deliberately glanced at the lower right corner of the monitor to confirm the next time: 2022, why use such a low design method? Interestingly, the development team doesn't seem to want gamers to discover this — unlike StarCraft, where SCVs overlap ghost animals in front of mines, where farmer mining is invisible.
Airplane: I'll just go through the motions
As with the usual RTS, the early operation, construction speed often determines who can take the lead in the duel who can take the first shot, this game may be to take care of novice players is not easy to notice the maximum limit of a single resource to accommodate the collection worker, deliberately added a number above each collection plant so that players can better carry out production planning, with enough resources also means the birth of new buildings, new units, but the game in the generation of buildings This piece of animation expression is rough and excessive - it seems that the plane is thrown, but it is actually up in the sky.
"Adrenal-oriented" and "fast-paced" battle scenes
The firefights and combat mechanics of the battle with the enemy are similar to the common works on the market, and the author who sees that the map has a high and low slope design thinks that the units located at high in the game can have more or less advantages in vision, but this is not well presented in the real camera video.
Crossfire: Legion's unit explosion effect is really eye-catching, not only the effect is realistic, but the explosion of the vehicle will also cause the camera to shake slightly. The aerial battlefield in the picture above is very cool, and the sense of blow is also extremely in place, although a single unit has no hit feedback, but this exaggerated and bright hit fire with the shaking of the lens can still show the player the fierce battle situation through the screen. In addition, advanced units can also unleash skills in the battlefield to fight enemies.
Official mention of "ultimate fast-paced"
"When playing this ultimate fast-paced RTS, Crossfire: Legion prepares you for something different." So what is the ultimate fast pace?
Its literal is very easy to understand, that is, the game is very fast-paced, the frequency of combat is very high RTS, such as the veteran game "Red Alert", its core is perfectly in line with the "attack is the best defense" saying, players do not need to spend their minds on how to plan and build a base, just need to follow the rules of both explosives and harassment to get started.
Ninja Gaiden 2 1 Hit 125 Classic Slope
How is this fast-paced RTS built? In fact, we can find the answer to this concept in the ACT game Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden 2, the fastest paced ACT game in the world, and it is worth noting that the RTS is pulled to ACT because the game rhythm is built in a very similar way between the various categories. For example, the first two are to speed up the game by increasing the number of times the player needs to react in a unit time, and the same is true for Crossfire: Legion: the use of dual resources and population mode encourages players to pour more energy into the battle without losing the content of the business module, because it is a PVP two-side battle, which also increases the amount of information that both sides need to process in unit time.
In fact, this dual resource plus population limit setting has appeared as early as the Blizzard RTS series of works such as "StarCraft" and "Warcraft 3", which is the optimal solution obtained by the verification and comparison of various games over the years, and the setting of the three resource categories is relatively perfect and balanced, reducing the cumbersome degree of the game on the basis of controlling the speed of technological climbing.
For example, Sid Meier's "Civilization" series, Microsoft's "Age of Empires" or the "Alien Factory" of the simulated business slpwnd, etc., in a word, for RTS, the more variety of resources, the more complex the relationships that players need to deal with per unit of time, and the slower the pace.
After understanding this ultra-fast-paced approach to building games, what Wozinski called "adrenal orientation" above is a matter of course for Crossfire: Legion.
The single gameplay is a hard injury
Although a relatively mature structural framework is adopted in the design of the gameplay, this kind of game rhythm and battle scenes that can provoke the player's adrenaline hormones still cannot become a shield for its single gameplay and rough details.
On the other hand, we should note that the development team of Crossfire: Legion is from BBI Studios, which has a good reputation for Home, and in addition to the dynamic vision of the battle scenes, the static vision in the game does not have the creativity of "Homeland", whether it is the base building, empty terrain or some landscape, it seems that it can only be described as "simple".
Interestingly, Crossfire also seems to be an FPS game that wasn't graphically competitive when the product first launched, but it didn't affect its popularity in Asia in the slightest, which in some ways increased Smilegate's willingness to adopt this approach - to attract low-end PC players.
The style is highly similar to "SC" and "CNC"
Will Crossfire: Legion go this way? I don't know, but the game's strengths and weaknesses will be influenced by the direction and audience of the development team: for those who are eager for RTS to return to the Command and Conquer (CNC) era or the original StarCraft era, this game can be described as excellent, if for the group of players other than the above-mentioned players, the "this road is not open" logo will be ruthlessly placed in front of them.
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