On June 27th, Phantom Beast Palu launched its first major content update, and I reopened the game for the first time in a long time.
In fact, before this update, the game also released a lot of patches to fix bugs and improve the game experience. For example, they launched the consumable return-to-city item "Homecoming Thundercloud", which allows players not to travel long distances every time they return home; and the player can finally choose to kill themselves on the spot and resurrect (with death drops turned off); There is also an item called "Mercy Ring" that has an effect similar to the Pokémon skill "Knife Back Hit", which helps players capture Palu more easily.
In addition, the game has also gradually added Palu standby action and dress up elements, and the overall content is still much richer than when the server was launched.
The large-scale update "Sakura Island" launched on June 27 can indeed be called a "free DLC" level content expansion.
The new area "Sakura Island" added this time is located in the northern part of the second game reserve, and players will not have the opportunity to see it until the late game. The area is mainly based on the Japanese style, with spectacular buildings such as torii gates and shrines, and a large area of cherry blossom trees.
The regional tower boss Palu "Tezuki-i" is also a reference to the Japanese mythological character "Kazuki-hime".
In addition to the new style, "Sakura Island" also embodies more possibilities of "Phantom Beast Palu".
For example, although torii gates and shrines are simple buildings and do not introduce special functions, they have not appeared in such a complete architectural shape on the game map before this. On top of that, Palu Beast may further enrich the details of the original map in the future, adding more spectacle (the most striking World Tree areas are not yet available), or adding some specific interactive elements.
The same is true of the hostile zone "oil field fortresses". This area is located in the ocean to the southeast, and if the player rides to Paru, they will be intercepted by the anti-aircraft guns in the fortress on the way. After capturing this area, players can also obtain a large number of relatively scarce resources in the later stage for a short time.
From the design point of view, these contents are also more recommended to explore in a team, and it is indeed difficult to attack alone
Of course, if you've played Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain, you'll probably think this oil rig is a little familiar.
However, "Phantom Beast Palu" did not sew in the infiltration gameplay of "Metal Gear Solid" as everyone imagined. The main thing is to add more random events on the map, such as the random drop of meteorites, which will bring relatively scarce supplies, or Palu from the aliens.
The new weapon, the Meteorite Launcher, requires the special resource "Meteorite Fragments"
Of course, the production team didn't forget the "hell joke" that made the game out of the circle - this time the addition of an automated "dismemberment" tool that can more efficiently dispose of palu that players no longer need, and even send other palu to recycle the resulting materials......
Putting Palu on the conveyor belt to sleep is probably the last mercy
In addition to these, this update also improves many of the issues that players have raised in the past, such as optimizing the number of strongholds, the maximum number of working paru in the stronghold, and so on.
Players can also customize the adjustment, and now the maximum number of stronghold work Palu can be maxed out to 50
In general, the content of this update can basically correspond to the "Early Test Update Plan" announced in January, and the pie that was drawn is indeed on the circle. It's also hard to imagine that without the benefits from the success of Palu, the Phantom Beast, these updates would have taken the year of the monkey to make up for them, and the development team would have abandoned the hole as they did with their previous works.
For example, "pillars" have been added to buildings to prevent the player from collapsing due to load-bearing issues while building a house
Looking back now, the picture of "Phantom Beast Palu" becoming popular on the whole network half a year ago is still vivid. At its peak, the number of simultaneous online users on Steam exceeded 2 million, which also led to the spring breeze of paying to build servers.
With this update, the number of online users of the game has also ushered in a significant rebound, with a single-day peak of more than 100,000 people again, and it has come to the 11th place in the Steam online number list. It's just that compared to the original popularity and the richness of this update, this reaction is obviously still a bit bland.
In mid-April, the president of the developer of "Phantom Beast Palu" publicly stated that he was aware that a number of Chinese manufacturers were developing "Phantom Beast Palu" clones for mobile phone platforms, with a budget of 10 billion yen, 10 times that of "Phantom Beast Palu". He also predicted that a large number of Genshin Impact-quality monster (or beautiful girl) breeding games would be released next year, and he lamented that "it is really a prosperous world".
But now it seems that perhaps even "Phantom Beast Palu" may not be able to reproduce its glory.
Of course, for subsequent players, the more complete the game, the better the experience provided, and the more possibilities there are. The goal of Palu in the future should also be to gradually implement what they have shown in their past promotional videos, and to advance the game's technology to modern and even futuristic. In this way, even if the old players return to the pit, they can find many new experiences that have never been seen before.
It's just that judging from the game's existing update frequency, the update interval of new content in Phantom Beast Palu is still a bit long - perhaps because they spent a lot of time adjusting and fixing some of the game's original problems after launch. But as the player said, "At your update rate, when will I be able to drive a tank in the world of Palu".
"Driving a tank" is also an element that appeared in the original promotional video