Text / Mobile Game That Little Thing Jimmy
Qiyuan like is ushering in the golden age of SLG.
It may be a bit hard to believe, but if you want to do a vote for the "hottest track in the mobile game market in 2024", then SLG will definitely be in the top three.
And just when there are already new products breaking through strongly, and the old head products are also actively seeking changes, there will soon be another heavyweight product to join this battle: the official announcement of the "World Qiyuan" on July 16 a few days ago opened a new round of its own "tasting test" last Friday (June 28).
Among the SLG products that have been exposed on the market, "World Qiyuan" can be said to be an "outlier". First of all, it is very "fast", it was only exposed to the public for the first time in March this year, but it will be open beta on all platforms in July, which is tantamount to a well-planned "surprise attack" for most competing products and even the entire market.
Secondly, it is also very "fierce", not only got the IP cooperation of the "civilization" series, the ancestor of 4X strategy games, but also as of the end of June, the number of pre-orders for the game exceeded 5.5 million in just 4 months. The good attention and the reputation of players accumulated in the test make people have to believe that the phrase they shouted before: "Fun strategy, not expensive and not tiring" is not just an empty phrase.
What's more, behind such a remarkable product in terms of topicality, popularity and quality, there is a strong alliance developed by Tencent Northern Light Studio and published by Ruyi Jingxiu. And this time, their ambition does not seem to be just to make a product that can "gain a foothold" in the SLG track, but also to change the entire SLG category.
01
Really brought the price down
In fact, this "tasting test" is basically the same as the actual online version in terms of completion, so we can also see from it that "World Qiyuan" has made adjustments to the previous tests and the current situation of the SLG market, and Tencent also fired the first shot in this test to change the SLG track: the "price" was knocked down in the core paid design.
Many friends who participated in this test may have found that "World Qiyuan" has significantly reduced the price of gacha in the "tasting test", from the first 5 draws requiring 900 gold coins to 5 draws of 388 gold coins, which is equivalent to a discount after cutting in half. At present, the price of the 5 draws of the top SLG products on the market is about 950 gold coins, so in this comparison, "World Qiyuan" is undoubtedly the most "affordable" one in the gacha price.
It is worth mentioning that although the "price" has been lowered, the corresponding "value" has not been diluted. On the one hand, they have increased the explosion rate of five-star cards with high rarity to 6.66%, and there is no lock card design; On the other hand, the hero card pool in the game is not mixed with tactics, and there is no strategy to add red.
In addition, in this test, they also significantly reduced the number of five-star cards required to redeem advanced classes. For example, in the previous test, the Firearms Age class exchange required 1 5-Star card, but this time only 10 4-Star cards were required; In the industrial era, the exchange of troops required 2 five-star cards earlier, but now only 1 five-star card is required.
In other words, according to the "tasting test" card gacha mechanism, players have a higher chance of drawing five-star cards, and the role and effectiveness of these cards in the game have not shrunk, but have been expanded to become more useful.
In addition to the drastic reform of the card gacha system and card value, Tencent has also prepared another killer move this time: it is also very "powerful" in terms of server opening benefits, such as giving away a total of 130 draws, 16,000 gold coins, as well as 7 five-star heroes and 5 five-star card cultivation materials in the first season. According to the 6.66% gacha probability of the 5-star card mentioned earlier, players can get at least 34 five-star cards in the first season, and even the J-20 linkage content officially announced earlier is directly given away for free.
Judging from this series of actions, "World Qiyuan" has undoubtedly taken a big step forward in the direction of "service-based payment" in the understanding of SLG payment. And at present, in addition to "World Qiyuan", there are other products and teams trying in this direction, which also proves from the side that this trend has formed a certain consensus in the industry, and then the entry of civilized IP, Confucianism, Jingxiu and Tencent has also given another "fierce medicine" to this trend.
02
Fight your way out
SLG stands for the "new generation".
In addition to the paid reform, this "tasting test" also shows the determination of "World Qiyuan" to "let more people feel the charm of strategy games" in the core gameplay content, and integrates the "era development" system with the characteristics of the civilization series in the gameplay part, deconstructs and reorganizes the "resource game" of SLG gameplay from another perspective, and at the same time cooperates with the lightweight design to cater to the game habits of more ubiquitous users, making its own unique "new generation" difference.
In terms of the choice of subject matter and art style, "World Qiyuan" follows the "multi-civilization" setting of the civilization series, and the art inherits the latest work in the series "Civilization 6" with a point card ventilation, bright colors, and highly recognizable style, which makes them effectively avoid the user's aesthetic fatigue caused by the proliferation of themes such as "Three Kingdoms", "Magic" and "Animals" earlier from the world view setting.
Moreover, the gameplay system introduces the "development of the times" system with the characteristics of the civilization series, which measures the development level of players through the two dimensions of "technology" and "productivity", and divides different eras, and promotes the progress of the times from the two aspects of developing technology and improving productivity. The development of technology will unlock more buildings and troops, increasing the player's combat power and productivity; Increased productivity unlocks the threshold for the next era.
Through this core setting, "World Qiyuan" has reshaped its own gameplay cycle. It is worth mentioning that the tech tree has three different branches: "Military", "Productivity", and "Technology", and there are sub-schools under each branch. Despite the limited amount of time to experience it at the moment, based on years of experience in the Civilization series, the balanced advancement tech tree of "want everything" is bound to lag behind, which means that players will have to make trade-offs.
For example, in the "military" technology tree, players need to choose the appropriate branch of military technology according to the class they draw the hero is good at, instead of spending useless efforts to light up the technology they don't use, this idea is obviously not a "numerical pile", but a real "strategy game".
The introduction of the "Tech Tree" has undoubtedly enriched the game's strategy game, but at the same time, it will inevitably make people worry: won't this cause the game to become very "liver"? In this tasting test, "World Qiyuan" also gave its own answer: no, because they also carried out obvious "burden reduction" in the resource accumulation link of SLG, so that players can focus more on strategic games.
For example, in the common military general leveling link in SLG, in "World Qiyuan", players can quickly improve the level of heroes through "special training", and can also quickly practice to improve the level on the occupied plots, and also add the "non-destructive replacement" function of military generals, so that military generals can directly inherit the training degree, and there is no card fee setting in the team matching link. These settings not only allow players to match the team more freely to "open up the wasteland", but also can replace the training degree at any time after drawing out more powerful generals in the later stage, so there is no need to worry too much about the problem of teaming.
The occupation of resource tiles has also been reduced, and now players only need to select the target plot to capture to achieve automatic paving and occupation, and even after the occupation is completed, it will automatically abandon the low-level plot, saving time and ensuring that the player can have the highest income.
Even in the PVP link, it has also become the focus of the burden reduction of "World Qiyuan", the emergence of "automatic siege" allows players to get rid of the alarm clock at two o'clock in the morning, players only need to respond to the siege order of the alliance leader in advance to let the troops participate in the assembly, and the automatic siege can be completed under the operation of the alliance leader, and the "automation" of the national war undoubtedly liberates the alliance leader in charge, the core backbone of the battle, and even the players who provide support on the front line from the previous tedious and time-consuming "prison sentence" experience.
The great "liver reduction" combined with the innovation of the gameplay cycle has made "World Qiyuan" jump out of the boring sense of the existing SLG category in the "development" link. In the process of development, the player also retains a considerable degree of freedom in the selection and combination of science and technology routes, and the spare time after the completion of science and technology research will be converted into technology points, and even before the 12th chapter of the main story, players will be provided with a "novice buff" of science and technology research speed +50% and main city construction time -90%, accelerating the player's development efficiency.
After triggering the technology "Eureka", the investment in technology research and development can also be greatly reduced
It can be found that the "light" direction of the gameplay of "World Qiyuan" is not to make the gameplay more simple and brainless, but to simplify the road, which can highlight the fun of strategy games after eliminating distractions. It can even be said that "World Qiyuan" has carried out a "deconstruction + reshaping" of SLG's gameplay cycle, making the focus of the game more inclined to "game" rather than the accumulation of resource gaps, which is the real core charm of strategy games.
03
This "shuffle drama" has added another protagonist
As mentioned before, the competition in the SLG category is now more like trying to break the competition barriers of the category than the "alternation of kingship" between the old and the new of the head products, which can no longer be summarized or analyzed with a simple "involution", they now seem to want to work together to further expand the boundaries of the category and make this classic category "great again".
Take "World Qiyuan" as an example, it is not so much to "kill" a benchmark product, but to say that it is trying to find a new way in a field that no one has tried before and create its own "Qiyuan like". From this point of view, including a series of price reductions and burden reductions made by the game for the payment model and gameplay content, it is actually not a price involution initiated for other SLG products at all, but a step that must be taken in order for SLG to step out of the original circle and move towards a larger stage.
One of the biggest sources of confidence for their ambition is the inclusiveness of the theme attached to the civilization IP itself, in addition to providing multi-civilization choices in the subject matter, this inclusiveness also allows "World Qiyuan" to have rich imagination in the follow-up gameplay update and expansion.
On the one hand, the gameplay of "World Qiyuan", which was born out of the civilization series, is very scalable, such as the aforementioned naval battles, governors, golden ages and other settings, which have mature experience and systems under the deep accumulation of civilization IP, and do not need to start from scratch, and this experience is also the shortcoming of other products in gameplay innovation.
On the other hand, it is "the richness of gameplay that brings the expansion of the user level", like this, through price reduction, lightness, and even the reconstruction of the gameplay cycle to expand their player base, so that more users from different circles can feel the core charm of "strategy" games. From these aspects, it can even be said that "World Qiyuan" has built a cornerstone of the SLG genre.
As for what kind of height "World Qiyuan" can reach, it will be clear in half a month, but there is one thing that can be directly judged now, that is: as more and more "ruthless" characters like "World Qiyuan" appear on the stage, the "reshuffle drama" of the SLG track is becoming more and more exciting.