Almighty Video Game Designer

Fifth, in terms of online and extended functions, continue Diablo 3’s online functions, but hold off on Challenge Rift and Ranked.

Diablo 3’s Challenge Rift system was an excellent design, except for the fact it was a double edged sword.

When the players want to just kill a large number of enemies, they would obviously default to levels in the story with high spawn rates. Blizzard decided to release Challenge Rift to allow players to do so with ease without the need to go through the story again and again.

This was a good news to the players who liked the feeling of hacking and slashing as they saved them time. However, this damaged the lifespan of the game to a certain extent, making something that the game is incredibly repetitive.

Chen Mo planned to release Challenge Rift in an update after the main release. By that time, the players that remained are loyal fans who are sick of the story who would enjoy something like Challenge Rift.

Competitive seasons, ranked ladder, and increased difficulty would all be added in an update as something that extends the lifespan of the game.

—

With a general plan in mind, various aspects of the development process were running along smoothly.

With the foundations of the story in place, artwork can be worked on. Chen Mo gave out concept art for some of the key areas to allow Zhou Hanyu to have a better grasp on the theme Chen Mo was going for.

Chen Mo explained some of the key aspects of these scenes to Zhou Hanyu.

“Leroic’s place should be scary and old. The ground could be made to look gritty and worn. Consider adding spider webs in corners of the wall too. You should also use a cooler colour scheme to make it look dead.

“Remember, do not make it look too fancy and cut down on the lighting too as it would feel out of place and the players wouldn’t be as impressed.

“The Keep should be here. The players should have a wide field of view and the walls should give the players an impression that the keep has seen many battles, so you should add some destruction. You could even add some animations of the keep falling apart as the players walk by. The monsters will also attack the player from different angles so the players must feel that they could be swarmed at any moment.

Chen Mo went through each scene in detail to ensure that Zhou Hanyu could capture the scene as he wanted.

Zhou Hanyu nodded as Chen Mo explained, “Sure, no problem, understood.”

He was shocked as even though he was responsible for art, he didn’t need to do too much thinking as Chen Mo did most of the considerations for him, even drawing concept arts himself!

And Chen Mo’s drawing skills might even be better than his!

In previous companies, Zhou Hanyu would take a look at a concept art and release a few different renders to allow the designers to pick the best one before slowly working out the rest of the graphics.

But he didn’t need to do that at all. Chen Mo gave the art style as he wanted, even drawing out concept art for the monsters and scenes. All he needed to do was polish it up and outsource it to a company with some quality management work here and there.

This was the same with Fu Guangnan, Chen Mo gave a few BGM melodies, evidently of a certain style. He even specified which instruments to use in these pieces, including which to use in which scenes, and what emotions it should convey, all in great detail.

This meant that they saved a lot of time as there wasn’t a lot of time spent in communicating or considering, all they had to do was execute.

The other employees were shocked too as they were never involved in the development of a game that was as easy as this.

No endless meetings.

No redoing.

No arguing.

Only ‘doing’.

We can make games this way? Zhou Hanyu and Fu Guangnan felt like they were involved in something new. It was their first time experiencing something like this for the eight years they’ve been in the industry!

—

Many players on the forums seemed a bit lost after Chinese New Year.

“I’m so bored, any game recommendations?”

“Nope, I’m also bored.”

“It’s just after Chinese new year. Most companies probably just resumed operation. We’d probably need to wait until March even if it was a game that started its development last year.”

“Geez, I’m bored of all these games. The games nowadays take so long to develop.”

“By the way, have you guys seen Heavenly Ring 3’s new year movie?”

“You should ask who hasn’t seen it instead, it’s such a huge work!”

“Yeah, the box office is over one billion dollars, and it’s still expected to increase. People who liked movies like these probably already watched it right?”

“It’s kind of weird that the movie is really popular in China, but the game was a complete flop. Heavenly Ring the game entered the Chinese market two years ago before calling GG soon after.”

“It probably has to do with the gameplay. Their tastes overseas aren’t the same with us in China.”

“I really liked the theme, but it’s sad that there aren’t any good games.”

“Previous poster, I recommend Warcraft.”

“That’s an RTS game, I can’t play those games at all.”

“There are maps that aren’t RTS in Warcraft, you should check out Holy Land.”

“Holy Land? Isn’t that another Western novel?”

“Yeah, there’s an RPG map in Warcraft that’s basically a fan creation. You should try it out, I quite like it.”

“Alright, I’ll do that.”

Nobody expected that an overseas movie like Heavenly Ring 3 would bring another wave of popularity to the Warcraft RPG map Holy Land

There were noticeably more strategy guides in the forums with thousands of concurrent players every day.

This was normal as Western fantasy themed games were in an awkward spot in the parallel world.

There were many huge western works, but most didn’t match the tastes of Chinese players. It was difficult for them to enter the chinese market without the help of a game like World of Warcraft.

Although Chinese developers knew the tastes of Chinese players, they struggled to make a western fantasy game that was true to the original, and the players weren’t taking any of that.

Therefore, the developers defaulted to Xianxia and fantasy themes, showing no interest in western fantasy.

The result of that was that Chinese players struggled to find western fantasy games that suited their tastes, and it was one of the reasons Warcraft got so popular so quickly.

But as Warcraft was an RTS game, it couldn’t take up a large amount of players like RPG games.