[Game-Timespecialarticlenoreproductionwithoutauthorization!】
Game-Time report / “If you don’t feel anything, the main thing is to fix the problem.” Faced with the reporter’s question, Li Zeyang, CEO of Liangwu Games, hurriedly gave a few lines of response. For Cool House Games, there is no time for lengthy chats right now, because the development team members still have a mountain of matters waiting to be dealt with on their desks.
At the moment, this Shenzhen team is experiencing happy troubles: on the one hand, players have given unusually enthusiastic feedback on their new ARPG “Vitality Knight Prequel”. Since the public beta on November 24, the game has been at the top of the iOS free list for three consecutive days, and its ranking on the best-selling list has also been rising, finally maintaining it at 22nd. Even products from major manufacturers rarely have such explosive online performance.
The game, on the other hand, is facing serious technical issues. The influx of a large number of players has overwhelmed the game’s servers, and the resulting problems are obviously quite difficult – although the development team has been conducting rescue operations for three consecutive days, the game is still experiencing frequent disconnections and loading problems. As a result, the ratings of “Soul Knight Prequel” on platforms such as TapTap have plummeted.
Due to the popularity of the previous game “Soul Knight”, the name Suangwu Game has remained in the hearts of many players. This server launch is also the first time the team has dealt with such large-scale server pressure. However, despite this not-so-good episode, this product launched by Liangwu still brought a lot of impact to the popular track of Diablo-like, and even showed its potential to become the next “top hit” game. ” full potential.
A better treasure-grabbing experience than “Diablo 4”?
As a prequel work, Suowu directly follows the world view of the popular mobile game “Soul Knight”. However, unlike the top-down perspective meat pigeon gameplay of “Soul Knight”, the main gameplay of this game is changed to an equipment-driven mode with the core of treasure farming and mowing grass. Because of this, many players call “Soul Knight Prequel” the “pixel version of Diablo”.
In “Soul Knight Prequel”, players need to form a knighthood, lead various characters that have appeared in the “Soul Universe”, go to various locations on the continent to fight bravely against enemies, and thwart the conspiracy of the villain Vakorn.
The game adopts a top-down perspective combat mode similar to that of “Soul Knight”. In addition to normal attacks and charged attacks, characters can equip two sets of eight skills to kill enemies. During the process of opening up the map, players can collect dropped equipment by defeating bosses, opening treasure chests, etc.; at the same time, they can also perform various operations such as adding points to the character’s ability value and changing jobs as the level increases.
Readers must be familiar with the classic “white, green, blue, purple, gold, red” equipment quality system in the Diablo-like category, and the core cycle of this game also follows the tradition of the category. After the player unlocks the entire map and clears the plot, the game provides four multi-week options with different difficulties. As players level up and challenge higher difficulties, rarer and more powerful equipment can be dropped in battle. With the addition of high-end weapons, players can build builds by combining equipment entries to unlock a richer mowing experience.
After completing one game, players can also unlock the endless tower climbing gameplay option from the NPC “Valkyrie”, and can obtain the tower climbing rankings, career points and other information of all game players through the world rankings. In addition, this game also adds a multiplayer game mode. By creating a room and sharing invitation codes, you can play online with friends.
According to traditional understanding, in categories such as “Darkness Like”, where benchmark products have taken hold early, have relatively mature gameplay, and have a fixed user base, it is not easy for small and medium-sized teams to break through. But faced with the challenge from the latecomer “Soul Knight Prequel”, players gave quite positive reviews.
The comments made by an old player in the category on the forum are quite representative. In his opinion, thanks to the reasonable simplification of elements such as map exploration, the grass-cutting experience in “Soul Knight Prequel” is even more enjoyable than in masterpieces such as “Diablo 4”. At the same time, “Vitality Knight Prequel” has more advantages in user experience design such as point washing and equipment entry display.
In addition, although the game adopts pixel art, the “sense of impact” element that is important in the treasure hunting game has been carefully crafted. Skill special effects, attack feedback and skill movements are all presented in a very realistic way.
In fact, as early as during the testing period, many players spoke highly of its core gameplay. Around Game-Time, many friends in the industry even praised the gameplay of the game after experiencing it after launching the server. As a game company famous for producing meaty pigeon games, Cool House Games delivered a good answer in its first game of Diablo-like.
“We made a rolled car into a mascot.”
However, even though the product quality is excellent, serious server problems still affect the experience of first-time players. After the game was launched, many players discovered that the game would frequently disconnect during battles, and a gear loading pattern would appear on the game screen, making the character unable to control for a certain period of time. They could only wait for reconnection, or even have to exit the game. Re-enter.
In addition to frequent freezes, the irreversible consequences of the game being disconnected at some key nodes will have a deeper impact on the player’s experience. For example, disconnecting after defeating a boss may cause dropped high-level equipment to disappear. Many players have also reported that it took a very long time for their recharges to arrive. Affected by this factor, the game’s TapTap score dropped rapidly from 8.7 to less than 5 points after its launch.
Station B’s Up master “Xinyou Penpeng”
The player community also started a meme-making frenzy. Because the gear pattern loading action will appear when the game freezes, many players began to write “little essays” on the theme of gears in the comment area, attracting thousands of players to like it. Some players even created a modified logo called “Gear Knight: Spin”.
After realizing that there was a problem, Liangwu responded quickly and sincerely apologized as soon as possible. According to the official announcement, the cause of this problem is that “the underlying transmission and response efficiency of the database is not as good as expected, resulting in excessive server load, which in turn causes players to frequently disconnect in the game.” At the same time, the official also mentioned that even in the first place Expanding the server capacity did not solve the problem.
Following the investigation, Liangwu stated in the update announcement that the problem was quite difficult, and issued multiple apologies and promised generous compensation. As of the completion of this article, although the server has not yet fully recovered, the frequency of lags has been greatly alleviated.
It should be said that in the past, Liangwu, whose products tended to focus on stand-alone games, overturned on the server. This in itself is not unexpected. In fact, even Activision Blizzard, which has rich experience in game development, could not help but overturn – many players should still remember that after “Diablo 4” was launched, many players could not function normally for almost two days. Log in to the game. And for a medium-sized team whose team size is far smaller than that of Activision Blizzard, we cannot be too harsh.
However, even in the face of such problems, Game-Time still observes the huge appeal of the game to players. The most direct manifestation is that the game’s ranking of 22nd on the best-selling list is enough to prove that there are still a large number of players willing to pay for it. In various communities, Game-Time has also seen many players sharing their experiences of grinding through dozens of levels despite server problems.
On video platforms such as Bilibili, the strategy content of “Soul Knight Prequel” can quickly accumulate hundreds of thousands of views in a few days. Based on various signs, we can see that even if some players were “persuaded” to quit due to server reasons, the high-quality core gameplay still withstood the pressure and attracted a large number of users to retain.
Despite the great pressure, Liangwu officials did not forget to play tricks – according to the latest announcement, the gear image that has made many players grit their teeth will appear in the game in the form of pets in the future.
Small and medium-sized teams can also enjoy IP operations
Due to macroeconomic effects, 2023 is not an ideal year for the release of new games. At home and abroad, even large companies such as Playtika and GameLoft have chosen to temporarily suspend the release of mobile game products. But under such a harsh situation, a game product operated by an independent team has achieved a breakthrough, which in itself is fully worthy of praise.
If we were to attribute the popularity of “Soul Knight Prequel” to one of the most important factors, then it is undoubtedly the influence of the “Soul Knight” IP. According to data revealed by CEO Li Zeyang in an interview in 2022, the total downloads of “Vitality Knight” have exceeded 40 million times, making it one of the most successful casual mobile games in recent years. We can also see that a large number of players are willing to download “Soul Knight Prequel” just because they have played “Soul Knight” before.
To achieve this achievement, Li Zeyang said bluntly: “(We) have never over-bought, nor have we spent any money in the market. We basically rely on natural new purchases.” He explained that because the unit price of customers is too low, buying Quantity will inevitably lead to losses.
That doesn’t mean the team is giving up on marketing. The route of performance advertising is blocked, and the team focuses more actions on brand operations. For example, Suangwu launched the spin-off animation “Genki Miracle” of “Soul Knight” and opened up in-game viewing channels. Related second-generation works have a good amount of playback on platforms such as Bilibili.
The most convincing content is still the game itself. After “Soul Knight” was launched, Liangwu’s development team also effectively maintained its core audience through long-term content updates. According to the CEO, in the second half of 2022, “Vitality Knight”, which has been in operation for more than five years, will still be able to maintain 1-2 million daily active users.
For small and medium-sized teams, if “Vitality Knight Prequel” has any inspiration, it is that it proves that the accumulation and operation of IP are not exclusive to big companies. And excellent content will still be appreciated by the community.
It is true that building an IP ecosystem itself is not easy. Even Li Zeyang admitted frankly that the team once believed that the content depth of “Vitality Knight” did not reach the level of IP. But in the end they strengthened their belief: “As long as we make more content on this subject, it will have a chance to be known to more people. So, even if “Soul Knight” does not have the depth of content at the beginning, it will become more and more popular as it becomes richer. With its game matrix and prosperous community ecology, it still has the opportunity to become an IP brand with certain influence.”
