"A good game for people who don't have time to play games".
At yesterday's TapTap press conference, "Sword and Crusade: Departure" announced the open beta time of the national server: August 8. In the finalized PV, a lot of fixed words have been added in front of the game's various content displays, such as "don't roll the player, only roll yourself", "super easy placement and hang-up", "strategy battle world RPG" and so on. And the longest one is the opening sentence:
This may seem counterlogical at first glance – how to play if you don't have time to play. But in the fourth month since I played Sword & Crusade: Departure (let's call it "AFK2" for convenience), I think this sentence is really appropriate. Regarding AFK2's "what are you playing" itself, I have talked about it in two articles before, talking about the short-term experience when the international server is launched, as well as the feeling of continuing to play for a long time.
In the long run, "I can play without time" really occupies my AFK2 routine. Recently, the frequency of my login to the game has decreased, and I basically just go up every two days to click the button and collect the food, on the one hand, because work matters take up more time (after all, the job of a game editor is not just "playing"), which happens to allude to the "no time to play games" in the Slogan at the beginning; On the other hand, in the middle and late stages of the first season of the international server, the content of the experience is almost experienced.
The life of the upline has become a real idle game with other players
But this "desire to land" did not slowly decrease until three months later, and it was already amazing in itself. It's not because I haven't played any idle games, but because I've played too many similar games.
In a placement/AFK game that emphasizes the numerical experience, players will usually be "hooked" for the first two or three weeks: every day it feels like you're getting stronger, every day there's a new level to push and a new lineup to try...... The feeling of being stuck in the "magic of numbers" is something that players who have played idle games understand.
In the jargon of the game industry, this kind of game should do a good job of "second stay" and "seven stay", which is a traceable work, and the production specifications are in place and the numerical experience is exquisite enough. However, on the monthly scale of play, the threshold for this excitement will become higher and higher, and often before you know it, the player will not be motivated to turn it on. However, I have already contributed "60 stays" to AFK2, and my colleagues and friends who came to play with Amway have basically played for two months.
The reason for this is that I think AFK2 has not intended to "race for time" with other games from beginning to end - or rather, it has never relied on progress and numerical anxiety to push players.
To achieve such an effect, the quality of the game's production is a prerequisite. I don't need to go into the details of AFK2's production specifications: the full extra-long narrative content, the top-down world adventure that can be played as a single-player RPG, the exquisite 3D art often makes me feel like I'm playing a modern deluxe version of King's Bounty, and so on.
Exquisite diurnal variation
But after the prerequisites, the source of this feeling of "no contention and no grabbing" is actually the balance that AFK2 tries to achieve in terms of commercialization, digital experience and content orientation.
In terms of payment model, AFK2 is indeed still a gacha game with Pay 2 Win elements: paying allows you to get a better lineup, better ranking, and a "faster" experience than others. However, even if you don't pay for it, there are no real "assets that can never be obtained" in the game (of course, this is already the case in AFK).
The most common phrases in our guild are "> krypton gold", it's better to see the scenery than to recharge, and to leave the card draw for your sweetheart - AFK2 does provide a sense of companionship that I didn't expect to find in the "card game" at all. For example, after the start of the first season of the international server, although some players were not very satisfied with the initial content and value delivery methods, and in my own small Buddhist guild, there were also some players who gradually lost or went to other guilds, but we have been chatting and farting in the group, and the first few guilds in the server basically have experience exchanges with each other.
It's a rarity. From this point of view, I think AFK2 is a big step forward in breaking through the "life cycle law of numerical card games". After the national server is finalized, more players will be able to participate in Lilith's attempt to change the "card game values".
So, at this juncture before the open beta, I also found Hongchen, the main planner of "Sword and Expedition: Departure", to chat. I talked about my experience in the past few months, and shared some of my mental journeys - with more important questions: what kind of AFK2 does Lilith plan to bring to Chinese players, "can play a good game without time", is it a concept that can stand?
(The following is the content of the interview)
1. "You don't have time to play a good game"
Youyansha: How did you position AFK2 and who players do you want to play?
Hongchen: The core users of AFK1 are traditional card and idle gamers, and this is still the user we want to serve well. But in AFK2, if you look at the product, you can also see that we are expanding in a different direction: some are social players, and the other part is content players, who will prefer to watch the story and enjoy the RPG experience, which also brings us new design challenges.
You Research Club: It's not "transformation", it's "expansion"?
Hongchen: Yes, we're not talking about designing AFK2 as an MMO, or a content-only game. We wanted to be able to design some fresher fun for players while retaining the core fun of AFK, but this is not a complete transformation of positions and battlefields.
The core of AFK2's gameplay is still character-based card development
You Yanshe: But in fact, the cost of the whole project, the size of the team behind it, and the players who have played it should be able to feel "quite large".
Hongchen: Yes, there are more than 200 people in the team. It may not be possible to benchmark the team size of some content-based games, but it is already very large in the track of card games, and it is still a 3D asset project, so the cost can be imagined to be much higher than similar games.
You Research Club: Is it the most "heavy asset" of Lilith's exposed projects?
Hongchen: I can only say "one", after all, we are still working on other genres, such as 3D shooters. But for a card game to be able to benchmark itself against a shooter, I think it's very, very heavy.
You Yanshe: Why did you make such a big leap in the first place?
Hongchen: The root is a sentence, we want to make a "long-term card game". On this basis, we have made a lot of considerations, such as how to match better and more sincere gameplay, and how to fill in high-quality RPG content, so that players can better experience these characters in the game. This is also a constant challenge to our team's ability, because Lilith has never done this kind of game with RPG playable content as the story carrier before.
You Yansha: So it can also be said to be a higher pursuit at the company level.
Hongchen: That's understandable. In fact, there are many IPs in the card track that have achieved the second and third generations, but they will not make a big breakthrough in the core gameplay, or they will not take a big risk. But from "The Legend of Xiaoice" to AFK1, and then to AFK2, each work has a relatively big change, which is Lilith's style.
You Research Club: If you want to talk about pursuit, there is a slogan in the final file this time that "you can play a good game even if you don't have time". How do you define both "no time" and "good game" at the same time?
Hongchen: Let's talk about two points. "No time" corresponds to "fragmentation", a concept that has been mentioned too many times in the era of mobile games. Like idle and cards, these types are inherently more fragmented game forms.
But when AFK2 was established, we were thinking, can the RPG content of the serious Bajing be made more fragmented? Can we try to give players the feeling of being able to play and stop RPGs?
The AFK2 is very close to a single-player top-down RPG
I first thought of the first time I picked up a PSP when I was a child, and I used to have to play some very large titles in front of the computer "seriously", but once I had a PSP, I just took out the handheld. Now playing some works on the mobile platform, the picture quality and smoothness that can be achieved are not much different from those of the PC, so we want to make a meaningful product that players can open and play at any time when they want to play RPG. Even if you have only a moment of free time, you can pick it up with one hand and play with it.
The concept of "good games" is very simple, all games actually want to be fun to do, and we want to ensure that there is enough fun in each of our gameplay modules.
You Yansha: It's not easy for these two concepts to be compatible with each other.
Hongchen: Yes. For example, for example, our Honor Duel (note: an auto-chess synchronous PVP game in AFK2) is actually the kind of game experience of traditional auto-chess, but we don't want it to start a game for ten or twenty minutes like traditional auto-chess, so we need to do some play-and-stop design. The main body of the game is indeed fragmented, but we hope to make adjustments and changes based on player feedback, so that the fun of these gameplay modules can be retained in the fragmented experience.
You Yanshe: In my own experience, I have indeed seen a lot of gameplay adjustments all the time. For example, the Honor Duel, there was a "Beta" corner mark at the beginning, and then it was officially implemented, is it because of the good feedback?
Hongchen: Yes, we actually have a very important indicator from the background data, that is, when the player gets the reward, how many people will play this independent game, and we are actually quite satisfied with this ratio. When we remove the beta, our expectations and future plans for it will be similar to Hearthstone's Tavern Wargame, and we will operate it as a separate, closed-loop auto-chess game.
2. "Achievement, Learning, Growth"
Youyanshe: It's been three months since the international server was launched, are you satisfied with the overall results?
Hongchen: Generally speaking, whether it is the first month of new players or the players who come in later, their feedback and commercial results throughout the rookie season (i.e., the first 30~40 days of the game) have exceeded our expectations.
While we were satisfied with the commercial results, the reviews from the players at the time were also very good. This result is a testament to one thing: the game cards and the big world can really bring enough freshness to traditional card players, and our production team is very happy that their sincerity can be seen and accepted by everyone.
If you count the Rookie Season as the first stage, I think our approach is well proven. And then in the second phase, after the official launch of Season 1, we also faced some challenges, after all, this approach will have a very big impact on the tradition of some players, and we can talk about it later.
You Research Society: How exactly did you verify that this approach is feasible? For example, as an RPG, how can you be sure that some players stay because of the content and characters?
Hongchen: Through user research questionnaires, public opinion collection, etc., we found that a large proportion of players take plot and content as their main pursuit in AFK2. With the launch of Season 1, this trend has become even more pronounced, and you can see how much players love AFK2's story and characters.
To give you a small example, there was a character named Mankara in Season 1 who was currently just a story NPC and the hostess of the Arena (note: she is not currently a card pool character), but in various channel research, she is one of the best in the ranking of our players' "card pool" appeals.
There are quite a few "petition posts" on Reddit that appeal/speculate that Mankala is in the card pool
I think that when the strength and mechanics of a character are completely unexposed, everyone has a high enthusiasm and appeal for her appearance, which can show that the story and image of this character are interesting. Of course, this is only a small example, and there is still a lot of work to be done in this matter.
You Research Club: After the season system is implemented, it actually has some impact on some traditional card players. Why not do it with a pure chapter system and keep the content going backwards, but instead add a numerical soft reboot season?
Hongchen: There are a lot of other things to think about. For example, we now have a vision for AFK2, and its long-term retention is not limited to data such as "30 retention" and "90 retention", but aims at one, two, or even three or five years of retention.
If you want to make such an everlasting game, it is very important to ensure that players return. It's like World of Warcraft, if you don't play one version of the expansion, you can still return to the next version, right?
This has to be a low enough barrier to entry for players to return. In addition to the low threshold, players must also have a reason to experience your new season, which is why we have a rich plot, characters, and narrative content, otherwise just saying that the values are soft reset and have some new cultivation or something, then players will not have such a high interest and interest in coming back.
We chose the season system, in fact, the underlying logic is to solve the long-term play scenario of the game: first, the threshold for old players to return should be low, and they can come back to play if they want to play in a certain season; The second is that players can periodically see some amazing new content and characters, which can stimulate their interest. Only by solving these problems can we help the game to grow forever, otherwise the player base must be a long-term shrinking process.
Yukensha: But there were some things that were not well thought out in the first season.
Hongchen: Let's be honest, there were some designs that we didn't do well. For example, the pursuit of some players is to push the map as quickly as possible and promote the hanging cards, and then we found that the growth rate of the loss of such players is higher, because the rhythm of the content release at that time was problematic, so the difficulty of pushing the level at that time not only came from cultivation and strategy, but also depended on the player's liver and how clean the big map was "licked".
But at this time, we also have content-based players, who want to play for a long time a day after the new season opens, so if we don't do a good job of balancing the content release of these two sides, there will be some psychological gaps in the difference.
Later, we also thought about whether the progress of the day will naturally unlock one area or two, and how to release the stats and perks, which can vary greatly from player to player. Therefore, AFK2 is constantly improving whether the design is correct, and for a long time, the planning team has often opened "planning face-to-face" sharing to improve these details with players.
Youyanshe: How will the content of the national server be synchronized after it is launched, and will the experience be optimized compared with the international server open beta?
Hongchen: Yes, we hope that the national server and the global server will operate simultaneously, so after the national server players enter the rookie season in the open beta in August, it will be smoothly synchronized with the second season of the international server in mid-to-late September, but everyone will not miss the content that has been implemented in the first season of the international server.
We have a complete "Top of Time" system where players can experience all of the story content of past Seasons, including cosmetic rewards, which can be re-obtained, and there are almost no barriers to entry for this part. At that time, the game will accumulate more playable content than it does now.
We have also conducted a lot of analysis and deduction of some problems in previous seasons, hoping to solve some of the pain points that players have encountered before in subsequent seasons. Of course, solving some problems will expose new ones, but as season after season passes, we will go up a step further than before.
For the open beta time of August 8th, I think it is a suitable node for Chinese players, and everyone can play a perfect and very good rookie season.
3. The fruit of the AFK series
You Yansha: In a previous interview, you said that AFK2 has two big visions, one is to "try to solve the long-term life cycle of card games", and the other is to "make yourself not easy to be copied", considering that there are actually many games that "borrow" from AFK1, what do you think of this "not easy to copy"?
Hongchen: I think "irreproducible" has two connotations. One is the production specifications, AFK2's team size and asset magnitude are already relatively difficult to achieve for most card games.
Another connotation is that under this specification, we have to make our game content good enough, and this is something we are still working on. It's not that getting so many resources is called "having this specification", but that we have to really effectively organize so many people and use such a large team to continue to produce content for players, which in itself is a very threshold business.
You Yansha: What is the most difficult thing and the strongest sense of crisis in the current development process?
Hongchen: You may think it's a problem with the season system, but it's not really the "most". Because the problems of the season are somewhat of what we expected, and they are currently solvable and optimized.
So far, I think the biggest challenge, and the consensus among our current team, is "how to make better use of the big world". In fact, from last year's PTR pioneer test, to the official launch of the international server and the CBT test of the national server, we have a vision that after everyone plays our big world, they will not say that they think it is "ordinary", but a world that will make people feel more amazing and interesting.
How to make good use of such a high-cost big world asset, we think that this matter is only half done at present, 60 or 70 points. We want to make the big world of AFK2 more fun, more durable, and have the same protagonist and image as content-based games, so that the player's experience is more sufficient, which is a problem we have been trying to solve. We've got some new hits here as well, which will be available in a future release.
The big world in AFK2 already has a lot of interaction and social gameplay
You Research Club: Do you think that the requirements of Chinese server players will be higher?
Hongchen: Once you say that you are not just a card game, but also an RPG, everyone will use some higher standards for stand-alone and content-oriented, which is a very normal thing. However, from my own point of view, this is not only because the needs and tastes of players are constantly improving, but also because the domestic game industry has been improving.
Because in fact, even in the era of AFK1 (2020), the progress of mobile device performance and the improvement of development technology have supported us to make games with AFK2 specifications. Now in 2024, we definitely don't want to do it according to the competitiveness of the year, but to "open up the wasteland" and match it with better, more sincere and playable content.
You Yanshe: In the longer term, what do you think AFK2 means for this IP?
Hongchen: Generally speaking, we hope that the product form of AFK2 will make more people willing to pay attention to and care about the IP of AFK, such as the plot, world view, and characters. Many AFK1 veterans actually have feelings for the characters in it, and now they can see more attentive biographies and richer stories, which is a big step forward in AFK2's expansion.
Many popular characters in AFK1 have also been more three-dimensionally reflected in AFK2
Yuyansha: Yes, my own feelings are similar, even if AFK1 doesn't actually have any narrative content, many veteran players will remember the character very clearly, and will tell newcomers in AFK2 "who is this character" and "how is it in AFK1".
Hongchen: That's it, although AFK1 has no narrative content, it actually has a story, and the characters also have human design and narrative thinking, but they are not made into RPG content. In my eyes, the IP of AFK is actually that we want to constantly design some characters with characteristics and contain their own story connotations, so as to impress our players.
In AFK2, we are finally able to do a good job in the plot, a complete plot performance, and a complete plot experience, these three things can radiate to more players at the same time, whether it is an old player, a new player, or even a cloud player who is just interested in the character and story. In this way, Lilith hopes to really "hit" and spread the IP and worldview of AFK.
Compared with how much time it occupies the player and how commercial it compares to AFK1, we are more concerned about whether the gameplay of AFK2 is interesting and whether the characters are more worthy of being remembered. We hope that from this point onwards, the series will stay with you for a longer period of time, farther away, and give players a deeper feeling, just like a good RPG can do.