Chapter 931： Add more details and necessary trade-offs

931

The Assassin's Creed series of games can be regarded as a game with a lot of color in the history of video games.

At the beginning, the unique art style of this game and the coolness of assassination at that time attracted many players to buy and play.

It is the same in this parallel world, no one will refuse cool things.

However, when Assassin's Creed develops into a new year's game, its essence will change unconsciously.

On the one hand, people’s tastes have begun to adjust, and on the other hand, players have gradually developed tolerance to canned sandbox games.

When the world came in 2014, Zhuyouxing had launched Assassin's Creed to the third volume of Assassin's Creed Ezio, subtitled Apocalypse.

In the original game, Apocalypse was the last of the old-school Assassin's Creed, and later it began to gradually develop into that very popular stalk: Berserker's Creed.

But even if it gradually deviates from the original game style, sales will still rise steadily.

Zhu Youxing understands that there is actually only one fundamental attraction of this game.

It’s not the so-called assassin’s elegant assassination and gorgeous identity, but a very simple and pure purpose: to make it cool enough.

Each of the later Assassin's Creeds tried to be more cool than the previous generation, and it seems that Ubisoft in the original world has also discovered a rule. One style of Assassin's Creed can probably be popular for three generations of works. After the third generation of works, it must Look for other styles to attract players' attention again.

So there will be the Victorian period of the third, fourth, and fifth generations of Assassin's Creed, and then the three behind-the-scenes Assassin's Creed Origins, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and Assassin's Creed Valhalla. element.

But in the final analysis, no matter what the style of the game is, besides being cool, Zhu Youxing believes that such a game should have another attractive enough feature.

That is to have rich and sufficient content outside the main line.

In the GTA world, players can rampage on the street with relish without playing the main line of the game, or participate in an elaborate and exciting racing car, or engage in a robbery mission.

This is what a sandbox game should have, not Ubisoft’s standard stronghold capture mode, and it’s still the same, even the most patient players will vomit.

Just so, in order to make Cyberpunk 2077 more perfect after its release, the game Assassin’s Creed Ezio: Revelation, which is going to be launched this year, is a good opportunity to try.

In the original game, the protagonist Ezio will continue to fight against the Templars with his old body.

At the same time, he will also establish the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood in a brand new land, so that the organization can be more perfect.

The final ending of the story is that Ezio successfully found a wife who was willing to accompany him for life, and also had a child he loved, and passed away quietly in a satisfied state.

Zhu Youxing is still very satisfied with the ending of this story, it is a rare happy ending in Assassin’s Creed, there is no need to add anything to the ending, but in the process of the plot, Zhu Youxing let the team pass the first generation AI The artificial intelligence NPC system has trained a batch of more varied side stories.

And try to make the player's experience as different as possible.

The side story is not just as simple as letting you go here to get the task, and then go to another place to complete the task, even if it is a side task, it should also carry a certain meaning and purpose.

In Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Yuxing Electronic Entertainment added more side content that extends the entire Assassin’s Creed world view, so that players can better understand the entire world view, and it is no longer simply running errands like part-time jobs.

"Boss, look at such a branch tree. From the beginning, the character will randomly appear in the city of Constantinople or in the wild. The NPC that appears in different regions will randomly do different things. The protagonist can choose to help this The NPC is busy. After solving the current problem of the NPC, the NPC will briefly introduce how he struggled to survive under the pressure of the high-level through our performance. There may be other ending effects, and this NPC branch probably made hundreds of chaotic models, allowing players to experience at least two or three hundred different story endings."

In Zhuyouxing's office, Zhuyouxing is communicating remotely with one of the development teams in the United States through video conferencing.

That team is the main development team for this generation of Assassin's Creed Revelations.

And they just got the latest AI artificial intelligence NPC system from the headquarters, and started researching it.

However, they didn't understand how to operate this thing at first. At first, they just imitated Japan and put AI artificial intelligence on the enemy, so that it has a very flexible dynamic difficulty.

Later, Zhu Youxing personally showed them a function called the Chaos Story System. By setting the basic logic rules of an NPC character in the system, the NPC character in this Chaos Story System began to create stories by itself.

Some stories will be very outrageous, far from the story structure understood by normal people. At this time, it is necessary to manually filter out these abolished story lines, and then select good enough story lines to add them to the chaotic story system. Through continuous self-learning, let this chaotic story system understand what it should do is the most reasonable and easy to pass, and then start to produce more and more high-quality side story tasks.

When the US team found out that the system was played like this, they were shocked.

Before they wrote stories, they needed the screenwriters to rack their brains to study, write as much as possible and reasonable enough story content, and then realize it in the game.

But now with the function of AI self-task training, the screenwriter only needs to give a general framework of the story, and leave the rest to AI to train day and night to give the results, and then let the screenwriter choose qualified stories. up.

"There are more than three hundred different story endings, tsk tsk, it seems that the development speed of this artificial intelligence is quite fast."

Seeing that there are so many storyline branches in this branch alone, he lamented that the technological development in this world is really rapid. At least in this world, it has been gradually realized that AI artificial intelligence can be used in game development.

And there is a more terrifying thing, that is, not only the story of the characters in the game is created by AI itself, but even the voice is matched by AI itself.

It’s just not as good as the real artificial dubbing. You can hear the obvious sense of dissonance. In addition, the model trained by artificial intelligence will be relatively stiff when it is in motion. These are the directions that need to be continuously overcome in the future.

"President, originally we wanted to train more content, but you also know that we are targeting ordinary users, and their equipment may not be able to support such a huge amount of calculations, so we can only provide fixed Routine story."

"I know that." Zhu Youxing nodded and said.

In fact, the artificial intelligence AI researched in the company is still in its infancy.

It’s not that the company cannot provide high-performance equipment, but that the game equipment of the players may not be able to support the storyline calculated solely by calculation.

If you want to make a breakthrough in this area, unless you have a greater breakthrough in the field of processor hardware, this is beyond the control of Zhuyouxing.

The most reasonable rhythm now is to add more details to the characters within a certain range around the main character.

Even if it’s just an NPC wandering on the side of the road, if the player is interested, you can observe such an NPC for at least an hour without seeing that the NPC will have repeated actions.

If it was any longer, the player's device processor would blow up.

And one hour, maybe it is enough now.

"Continue to develop according to the current plan, and the game will be released before Christmas, right?"

The person in charge of the game development team far away in the United States patted his chest and said: "Absolutely no problem boss! Don't worry about our efficiency, you have given us so many convenient development tools, and you have also explained the core gameplay and main story of the game clearly. , if our development speed is slower, we will not be able to accept it ourselves!"