- l Definition of Soulslike Games
- l Aanlysis of Two Soulslike Games
- l Anticipation of black myth: wukong
Soulslike games refer to a selection of top-tier action games that offer immersive storytelling, challenging gameplay, exceptional gaming experience, and exquisite aesthetic design. Examples include Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Dark Souls trilogy (Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 3), Bloodborne.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an intense Japanese samurai-themed action game developed by FROM SOFTWARE. In this game, players assume the role of a skilled one-armed ninja seeking redemption for his tarnished reputation. Players will pledge their loyalty to a young prince who inherits an ancient bloodline and confronts enemies from the treacherous Wei Ming clan and various malevolent individuals.
Dark Souls 3 is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware, serving as the third and final installment in the esteemed Dark Souls series. The game remains true to its signature high difficulty, challenging players to navigate a vast world while confronting formidable bosses such as the "Salary King." Furthermore, it elevates the overall atmospheric experience by immersing players in a darkened environment that intensifies the apocalyptic theme through weather effects like dusk or fog.
Bloodborne is an action role-playing game developed by FromSoftware in collaboration with SONY Computer Entertainment Japan Studios. It is considered a spiritual sequel to the Dark Souls series and is characterized by its difficulty and challenge. The stage of the game is "Yan 'an", an ancient capital in the mountains, which is a cursed city, but also a strange place where demons and plagues have been spreading since ancient times. The player will take on the role of a foreign adventurer who comes to Yan 'an for medical treatment, where he fights a deadly duel with a fearsome and powerful enemy and wins the final victory.
In this particular genre of gaming, the concept of soul and soul system is categorized, with "soul" referring to gameplay mechanics and "soul system" denoting lineage aspects. These two terms do not contradict each other. Some individuals refer to these games as "soul games," but essentially there is no difference between that term and "soulslike." If we were to differentiate between the two, "soul" pertains to gameplay while "soulborne" relates to lineage. More specifically, these games draw inspiration from Fromsoftware's Demon's Souls, featuring similar play styles and design philosophies.
As the number of games in this genre increased, players and developers began classifying them under a new genre called Soulslike. The fs society's own contribution within this realm is referred to as soulborne or simply soulslike.But in a broad sense, all similar styles can be called soullike except demon souls. The soul describes the gameplay, the soul describes the lineage, and the two do not conflict. That is to say, the soul is not necessarily the fs society itself. Examples of soul games include Dark Souls, the Bloodborne Curse, a Wolf, Elden's Ring, and the Hollow Knight. There are three elements to a soul game: a fixed difficulty, a death penalty (like a ghost), and a campfire checkpoint. The fs club's own soul games have some mascot elements: Patch, can upgrade the player's fireproof woman (wife), moonlight big sword, Valkyrie boss.
This paper takes Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Elden Ring as examples to discuss the characteristics of such games and players' attitudes.
Sekirof: Shadows Die Twice
1. Genre: Many media refer to it as an action game (ACT), rather than the role-playing (RPG) of traditional soul games, which makes sense, because the game is still a soul game in terms of category, but has made some changes on the basis of soul games. For example, it simplifies the equipment system and character relations and other common elements in RPG games, but highlights the sword fighting system that emphasizes the completion of the beauty block, and tests the process of fighting the player and the enemy. These designs make the action of the whole game stronger.
2. Story:It tells the story of a ninja protagonist "Wolf" who continues to fight to save his master "God" from his immortal curse "Dragon Yin", and is generally approachable. In addition to the main line of the plot, its branch lines are free exploration, players can go at any time, but to trigger the plot task, the way is still relatively obscure, and even need to refresh the map repeatedly to achieve, which is the spirit of the plot has always been the style. This game has four endings, and the player's entire walkthrough is quite different. This is worthy of praise, after all, too little difference in the ending will make people feel boring. Although the difference in the ending is not throughout, it is already quite outstanding.
3. Map: The hook and jump design of this game makes the map unique, and the whole Weicheng city is built along the cliff. The Wolf needs to use the hook rope to climb the wall in various dangerous terrain to advance the plot, and the wall is set in line with the popular perception of the ninja image. This design logically naturally forms a closed loop, a very good worldview setting for the game.
The map of this game is small in scale and is typical of small level design. For example, compared to the Dark Souls 3 map, a medium typical box court level is about one-half to one-third the size of the Dark Souls 3 Undead settlement.
From the user's experience, although the map of this work has altitude differences, ups and downs, it is still roughly a plane. The advantage of this kind of tiling between maps is that the scenes can see each other, and the overall sense of the vista is stronger, giving the player the feeling of the whole world. This is not like the stereoscopic upper and lower layers of Dark Souls 1 and Elden's Ring.
From the above point of view, it is highly consistent with the "Dark Souls" series and "Bloodsource Curse" in the planning ideas of the big map, and does not change the overall planning direction of the big map because of the three-dimensional movement mode such as hook rope and push off wall.
4. Combat System:
It has been discussed the most is its combat system, the combat system of this game can be said to fully restore the essence of sword and halberd combat, the game process of this combat system is very successful, it can be said that at present, no similar works of sword and halberd combat can fully restore the repeated temptation of sword and halberd attack and defense battle, attack and defense and kill the moment. However, the core highlight of the combat system of this game is this but it is only limited to this, other types of combat in Sekirof are very ordinary, such as the axe, long lance, and short knife as ninjutsu have obvious flaws in balance or attack and defense game experience. Even a Wolf's extremely good sword fighting can only be applied to a humanoid opponent, and if the opponent is an animal or fantasy monster, the whole experience reverts to the regular combat style of the Dark Souls series.
5. Experience: The interface design of this game is very pursuit of immersion, the player's game screen is very clean, whether it is resource bar or GUI dynamic effects are very small, because the visibility becomes smaller, so the designer will have many dynamic changes of the GUI to add special effects or dynamic effects to enhance visibility.
6. Art style: As Sekiro itself belongs to the East or is more friendly to the fantasy, it is also closer to the eastern aesthetics in style, with a large number of Japanese painting scrolls, Ukiyo-e also has Chinese calligraphy and the artistic style of traditional Chinese painting. However, the interface is highly restrictive, or deeply involved in game design. Many previous games will have an interface to show the part, "Only Wolf" either through the scene to "speak", or as little as possible to use exaggerated special effects or complex interface to show, such as lock icon is a small white dot, inaccessible areas are directly represented by the scene burning.
Elden Ring
1. Combat analysis: Overall, it is a simple combat system, without the complex combo system like monster Hunter. Players in the battle with the enemy, more is looking for an opportunity, a shot the best time, which involves the reward and punishment mechanism in the battle, through this mechanism, so that the battle becomes diversified, interesting, while driving the player's psychology, increase the immersion in the battle. At the same time, Elden also introduced a stalemate battle mechanic, in Elden's performance of the Tour, the enemy played kneel animation. In the Monster Hunter world, there is also such a mechanism.
2. Disadvantages:
a) Read instructions: Read instructions are obvious.
b) Interactivity in Boss design: The addition of the Ashes system changes the nature of the game. Different from the traditional boss battle 1 to 1 situation, Ashes play greatly reduces the difficulty of the game. There are a lot of bosses in the game, and each boss and boss is very strong, and the moves are very different, so that the learning of boss battles is not significant for the subsequent battles. As a result, it took the player five hours to fight the Valkyries in 1v1, and several more hours to wait for a completely different boss in Radaghan, which was extremely frustrating for the player.
c) Battle balance - easy to fall into the extremes of being too easy and too hard:
i. Ashes system: Because of the boss design problems mentioned above, 1v1 is easy to jail, but once the player uses ashes, the difficulty of the game will be greatly reduced.
ii. Game walkthrough: The emergence of many game walkthrough, so that the difficulty curve of the game appeared abnormal steep. Players can defeat the battle with a low fault tolerance rate by learning the way to achieve a great sense of achievement. If the good experience of playing the boss in this game requires players to choose "appropriate intensity of the ashes" to actively maintain, then this is undoubtedly the vast majority of players are screened out, and the high probability is the problem of numerical design and balance of this game.
The open world and Ashes system gave players mixed feelings about the game, and soul veterans felt that the experience of exploring the open world and multiple battles to achieve achievements was important, but the Ashes system and various walkthroughs made the game less like a soul game. In contrast, some light soul players or small white soul players find the combination of the Ashes system and walkthroughs to make their play easier.
3. Map: This game inherited the soul of the game exquisite box court map design, and the map is very large and detailed, can see the place basically can pass.
Black Myth: Wukong
This is an action role-playing game developed and released by the Game Science with the theme of the Journey to the West. From the current published information and internal testing, it will do well on the following points :
1. There are 100 kinds of little monsters, about 50 kinds of leaders, about 30 kinds of demon Kings, and the content is absolutely sufficient.
2. Game duration: Normal exploration main line + branch 30~50 hours, full exploration about 100 hours, perfect 100+. There are a lot of hidden quests, side exploration levels. The capacity can meet the needs of the players, which is also very stable.
3. Battle: The battle of the golden cudgel is very unique, the three sets of cudgel methods have their own characteristics, and more than 10 kinds of cudgel are also rich. Coupled with a large number of magic, body, a variety of equipment, the battle combination is very rich, you can build your favorite build.
4. Plot and setting. There are many unique moments for Chinese people that are very immersive, and the black myth follows the setting of the novel and ADAPTS the novel rather than making it up. In addition to the main story, there are fragments of the story waiting for the player to weave the truth behind the story.
IGN gave it a score of 8, mainly citing some technical issues, saying that it needs to continue to work on fixing bugs and optimizing performance. Game Science is not a huge team of manpower and resources, and it is the first time to do 3A volume games. lacking of experience, these problems are difficult to avoid. However, from the current information as a whole, "Black Myth: Wukong" has a unique combat system, a deep plot and superb art style, and the game volume is still huge, it is very worthy of looking forward to.
This game has strong cultural significance and milestone significance for Chinese players. The theme and protagonist of the game are related to Chinese culture, which makes Chinese players feel very involved. However, this is also a double-edged sword. For overseas players, they do not know the story and characters of Journey to the West, and there will be difficult plot, which will affect the game experience, so the game science is challenged in terms of game localization.
Regarding the milestone of Black Myth: Goku, I would like to quote the description of an article here:
"In this way, everyone is looking forward to a light, a light that leads the Chinese game to Pierce the haze." And the much-anticipated "Black Myth: Wukong" is the biggest hope for many game people. More than one practitioner in the exchange believes that the success of "Black Myth" directly determines investors' confidence in domestic games to some extent, and also determines the fate of China's game industry in the next two or three years. A large factory staff said frankly, whether it is the domestic 3A game people, or ordinary practitioners, will be "black myth" as the savior of the industry. "You could even say that black mythology is a lifeline, and we're all drowning people." The whole industry is pointing to this game to boost confidence, attract the attention and attention of the capital, the outside world and even the higher level of the game - but we all know that putting hope in a game, itself is not a healthy phenomenon. '"
Finally, expect tomorrow's Black Myth: Wukong to surprise us in terms of fighting, plot, art and technology.
