On Thursday, Tencent Photon Studio Group's open-world survival game "Dawn Awakening: Life" was officially launched without restrictions and deletions, and rushed to the top 1 of the iOS free list. With the end of last night's "Survival Night" live broadcast on all platforms, the hot search of major platforms has officially come to an end.
In the live broadcast of "Survival Night", for the user attributes of different platforms, "Dawn Awakening: Life" can be said to have made a lot of good work. For example, on Douyu, PDD and Da Sima formed a combination of "banknote-level landlords and beautiful tenants", and the two "sweet double rows" together in the open world; On Kuaishou, Hi Clan and Firewire Girl also incarnated as CP to team up under the quest, and showed the manor and life gameplay.
On station B, the game invited Phoenix Legend as an interviewer to interview different survivors. Each survivor is not only the pendant of station B, but also represents a different gameplay in the game. For example, the architect Shengyu interviewed for the construction of the manor, and the fitness owner Liu Tuo brought physical training in survival... Through live broadcasting, the game naturally brings out the unique gameplay of open world exploration, personal survival, camp socialization, free construction and so on.
However, we all know that in previous years, survival games were on fire, and various manufacturers rushed to enter the game, but there are not many successful products on the market at present.
The reason is simple, one is that open world survival games, as a composite gameplay category, have a very high production threshold. Shooting, building, big worlds, cooperation, confrontation... Each gameplay alone requires a huge amount of energy from the production team.
The second is that the product form of the current category is not mature enough. Too hardcore will raise the threshold for players to get started, and if it is too light, it will lose the urgency of survival games; In addition, non-core players risk losing their gameplay objectives before, during and after the game; How to continuously provide freshness and ensure long-term operation is also a major problem for this category.
So, what answer did Dawn Awakening: Living, which first mentions the SOC concept (i.e., Survival, Open World, Crafting), deliver? Can it become a new benchmark in the category? What does its appearance mean for photons?
01 What is the core competitiveness?
The first competitive aspect of Dawn: Life is its immersion around the open world, which is also key to survival.
Why is immersion so important? In the past, traditional categories such as MMOs and cards mainly met players' spiritual demands for growth and social interaction. The reason why survival games are attracting more and more players is because they provide more basic pressure in terms of physiology and safety. Once these pressures are overcome, the sense of accomplishment becomes stronger. Therefore, if "Dawn Awakening: Life" wants to eat survival category users, it must first make them feel the danger of the surrounding environment and be immersed enough.
The worldview of Dawn Awakening: Life is set in a post-apocalyptic world set in an overhead setting. At the most intuitive art level, in order to highlight the contrast before and after the disaster, the production team proposed the art setting of "urban forest".
Take the early Lost City map, for example, filled with rusty cars, fallen billboards, crashed airliners on the streets, and vines growing uninhabited. Such a scene should remind you of many classic similar movies.
Specific to the game, at the beginning, the player survives an accident and must collect resources from the surrounding environment in time to survive himself, during which he needs to pass through a dilapidated warehouse, an abandoned gas station... These deserted places convey the dangers of the environment at all times.
In order to maximize the quality standards of the product, the production team designed a seamless map of 100 square kilometers, and each feature of the landscape was made to maximize the difference of artistic expression. The undulating trends of different landforms such as islands, deserts, hills, etc., the representative vegetation and stone distribution of each area, and the transition between different hues of terrain are all restored with reference to real scenes as much as possible.
At the same time, according to the world view, the different faction strongholds entrenched on the map also have their own art settings. For example, the Night Lords, a force from street racing teams, built a fortress called the "car graveyard" by stacking discarded car parts on top of each other in the desert plains. As players explore the map, they can immediately establish a background understanding of each new area through highly recognizable buildings.
In addition, Dawn Awakens: Life elevates the overall look quality with Unreal Engine. In terms of lighting, the game adopts a layered full-real-time lighting scheme, which not only allows the lighting to change the effect with weather and scene changes, but also restores optical phenomena in the natural environment, such as sun and moon halos and fog. In forest scenes, light rays passing through the jungle also exhibit the Tyndall effect.
In terms of materials, the game makes extensive use of photo scanning and PBR correction, and special materials such as moss, black sand beach, and ice cubes have been customized.
According to the production team, they also did a lot of customization work on the character's skin, hair and other materials for the mobile game pipeline, and the effect of rain wetting clothes and moisturizing skin was clearly visible. The NPC made after the spokesperson Will Smith has 62,000 face models, and you should be able to intuitively feel the fineness of the modeling from here.
However, if the open world is only large and the picture quality is good, I am afraid that it will still be empty. The production team has also said that high freedom and uncertainty are the charm of the open world, so when players are exposed to the external environment, they will always be affected.
For example, high temperatures, sandstorms, water shortages and other factors in the desert area will threaten the survival of the characters; In changeable weather, players standing under trees may be struck by lightning, trees caught on fire by lightning, and electrocution may be electrocuted when swimming during thunder.
In order to amplify this environmental impact, each area of the game is also designed with different sudden extreme weather. For example, rust rain will fall in the sky, and if the player does not dodge in time, it will be corroded along with the vehicle; When the sky hangs the Blood Moon, the player's mental state will also deteriorate, and they must hurry up close to the campfire.
These environmental impacts also lead to the player's own health indicators. Specifically, the character has four dimensions of body, spirit, hygiene, and metabolism, corresponding to 12 survival indicators, including physical strength, satiety, health, metabolism and so on.
These indicators are in line with our daily instincts: not bathing can lead to poor hygiene, odorous skin odors, mosquito bites at best, monsters with a keen sense of smell; Overeating can affect weight, and if you are too fat, you will walk and use the vehicle slowly.
On top of this, the game also provides players with a variety of solutions. For example, when the temperature drops, players can wear more clothes, walk into houses, and stay close to the fire for warmth.
The production team said that only when the game system can give corresponding feedback to the player's various behaviors can it ensure that the game experience is not linear and set, and the player can feel the fun of free exploration and survival from the open world.
And by doing this, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has found its core competitiveness in the open-world survival category.
02 How to popularize niche themes?
However, if you just do a good sense of immersion, you may just get the entrance ticket to the open world survival category, the real difficulty is how to get mobile players to accept this gameplay, if you want to achieve greater success, you need to find a way to make this niche theme popular.
In this regard, "Dawn Awakening: Life" comes up with three solutions. First, they try to guide players to get started better through content packaging.
The game gives players a long enough single-player main story in the first and middle stages, which sets a most immediate goal for players who have no exposure to the open world and exploration gameplay.
And the plot design of the game is not perfunctory. Taking cutscenes as an example, it not only has a skillful mirror that switches back and forth between vistas, close-ups, and close-ups, but also designs some white-space pictures according to emotional needs. According to the official introduction, the NPC based on Will Smith will also be deeply implanted in the plot, so from this point of view, the plot should be a major focus of the game.
At the same time, in terms of narrative techniques, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has also made many attempts at fragmentation and scene narrative. For example, players will collect "sightings" in many scenes, which not only provide guidance information collected by props, but also are coherent in content, consolidating the world view and NPC background from the side.
For example, when exploring the map, players may stumble upon a dark and closed basement, in which you can feel the oppression of the people who originally lived here, and at the same time become more curious about the world.
Second, in the era of mobile Internet, the public is experiencing the impact of various entertainment methods, and their patience for games is also declining. In order to maximize the number of users, Dawn Awakening: Life is also trying to lower the threshold in terms of difficulty.
Although the game has 12 survival indicators, players are well prepared for unexpected situations in most exploration environments. For example, as long as you find a river, you can basically solve the pressure on sanitation and drinking water; In terms of physical strength and metabolism, the system also provides a certain degree of convenience, and players can adjust their state at any time.
It can be seen that although "Dawn Awakening: Life" provides a certain amount of survival pressure, there are not many punishments for players, more in the hope that players will gain experience after experiencing difficulties, reduce the number of deaths and rebirths, and eventually adapt more and more to the living environment.
In recent years, many survival games have also adopted this approach, as was the case with the previously popular indie game "Valhalla" - the character does not die after the hunger value reaches zero, and the body temperature in the cold wind does not freeze to death, but obtains a relatively negative state, giving players the opportunity to experience the game more deeply. On the other hand, the overly hardcore "Scum", although the huge and complex body values look very interesting, but I am afraid that it has dissuaded many people to play it in fact.
While maintaining the foundation of survival, Dawn Awakens: Life further strengthens the feedback that combat brings to players.
The game provides a variety of weapons and equipment such as hot and cold weapons. In terms of gun polishing, photons have had enough accumulation before, the feel and sound effects of different firearms have a more realistic simulation, and the 3C experience when the character shoots is also a familiar formula, it is difficult to pick out what is wrong; In addition, the game also designed tactical actions such as sliding shovels, jumping and chopping, and tumbling for the characters, and with the use of melee weapons, players can also feel a little action game experience.
And in the open world, players will face a variety of enemies and battle scenarios. The game is designed with a variety of skill prop systems such as throwing, equipment, assault specialization, and demolition specialization, and players should be able to build a variety of exclusive gameplay around the skill tree. In the big world, the game also sets up scene interactive items such as explosive barrels to enrich players' combat strategies.
This variety of combat experiences also leads to the third point we want to say - Dawn Awakening: Life tries to allow different players to customize their own gameplay to maintain their gameplay goals.
As we mentioned earlier, open world survival games are a composite category, if the game forces players to set a good play route, it is bound to screen out some users, so the method of "Dawn Awakening: Life" is to provide enough playable content on the three main gameplay methods of open world survival, combat, and construction.
For survival explorers, the open world has tons of random events, story missions, and over 2,000 Easter eggs. Depending on the degree of exploration, players can unlock booklets, rewards, and use them to improve their abilities;
For construction players, the game provides 3600 square meters of building area, more than 1000 construction props and more than 200 structural parts, which ensures the freedom of construction gameplay;
For players who like to fight and compete, the game sets up a large number of strongholds and quests, and provides a variety of gameplay and difficulty challenges such as PVE and PVP. To a large extent, this should satisfy the gaming habits of traditional category players. At the same time, when the game enters the long-term operation stage and the pressure of player survival decreases, these gameplay modes can also better retain long-term users.
Not only that, the above parts are closely coupled with personal growth, manor growth, and camp growth. For example, whether players explore in the wild or participate in camp missions, they can get real personal growth; Players who are keen to build, in order to achieve their own needs, will strive to increase the level of the manor in order to obtain maximum freedom of construction, and when they build a satisfactory house, they will invite friends to the manor to hold a party.
This means that when players are doing something, they always receive targeted feedback from multiple systems and generate a lot of potential social opportunities. As a result, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has more possibilities to retain users and expand the circle.
03 Game co-creation to build a player ecosystem
Finally, if the open-world survival category wants to operate in the long run, there is another key point: player ecology.
A producer of this category once communicated with me that in traditional survival games, the player's social mode is more concentrated in small rooms and small servers, while in the big server world on the mobile side, multiplayer PVP, player camps and other gameplay need large DAU support, which is a great test of the game's player community ecology.
To this end, "Dawn Awakens: Life" has been highly active on social platforms early on, actively communicating with players. Since the dawn test in 2020, the team has built a game project team represented by "Big Bear Planning". They wear low poly-style animal headgear, and encourage players to provide ideas and experience feedback through official live broadcasts, player visits, offline art exhibitions, and discussion meetings, which can be used for subsequent game adjustments.
For example, according to the player's suggestion, they added a "wooden house tavern" for craftsmen to rest in the mahogany outpost; On the large screen on the right side of the Joker Gang base, the "electronic pixel style animation" with the characteristics of the Joker Gang has been added; Even, according to the player's vision, the production team also opened the space under the giant signal tower of the western outpost and set up a mysterious warehouse full of materials...
In the live broadcast on the eve of the game's finalization, the project team also highlighted that they optimized the gameplay for the pain points previously raised by players. For example, weapons share a set of accessories, are permanently repairable, have a 100% enhancement success rate, and reduce the time of daily missions to less than 30 minutes...
Around the time of this launch, the official also launched the "Dawn Awakening Creator Program", linking 15 head platforms to provide huge traffic support and provide a large number of benefits to encourage players to co-create.
With the image of "Big Bear Planning", the team has built a UGC ecology on platforms such as B station, Weibo, Tieba and Kuaishou. For example, a face pinching video 3 years ago received more than 400,000 views on station B. According to official statistics, the relevant UGC content of the game before it was launched has exceeded 100,000.
If the game can keep such a community active after launch, then "Dawn Awakening: Life" may be able to gain a foothold in the core player base, and then gradually spread to the pan-user circle.
04 Opportunity to become a new benchmark in the category
Speaking of which, you should have some understanding of "Dawn Awakening: Life". But I guess you will also have questions, large teams, years of hard work technology, early began to spend energy on the operation of the player community, why should Photon bet so much on a track where success stories are scarce?
When the Photonic brand was upgraded last year, we reviewed its development history and lamented its praiseworthy technical and industrialization capabilities. But these capabilities are certainly not achieved overnight, and they reflect the accumulation of technology that began in the era of Duanyou.
Chen Yu, president of Photon Studio Group, once said that their next direction is to further elevate the main track category of the existing realistic theme to a global and full-platform big project. And "Dawn Awakening: Life"'s 100-square-kilometer map, free construction, survival shooting, and big world socialization are all important trends in the future of the game industry. With the help of this product, it is believed that Photon can accumulate a lot of valuable development experience and user awareness.
At the same time, the audience for the open-world survival category is expanding, and it is a key category that can influence the next generation of young people. Once Photon can set the benchmark in this category, then their brand can naturally be consolidated.
Of course, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has just been launched now, and it may face many specific problems later, such as how to let players continue to feel a fresher theme, gameplay, and content experience when the game enters the long-term operation stage; How to balance the gap between newbies and veteran players... These are all to be seen, so it is difficult for us to predict its future trend now.
However, judging from its results during this period, the open-world survival mobile game is indeed a blue ocean worth exploring, and there are still too many players who have not been satisfied.
As the first proposer of the concept of SOC, "Dawn Awakening: Life" has come up with a mature system framework and optimized the pain points of the previous category "too liver", meeting the basic needs of the audience in terms of content experience, and with Tencent's social network advantages and the rich multiplayer cooperation and competitive gameplay in the product, it also has the potential to raise the ceiling of the category DAU. If it can gain a foothold in long-term operations, "Dawn Awakening: Life" will have a good chance to become a new benchmark for this track, and even grow into a phenomenal hit.