Chapter 185 - A Hack and Slash Game (1/2)

“Wow, you’re working too hard, manager, you just got back from your break! Anyways, could you tell me what kind of game you’re going to make?” asked Zou Zhuo.

Chen Mo smiled, “Hold your horses, I’ll need to do some research and see if feasible.”

Zou Zhuo nodded, “Alright! Manager’s new game has got to be good!”

—

Chen Mo did some quick research for standalone RPG games on both PC and VR.

Basically, no matter in or out of China, MMORPG was the dominating genre. There were many points for MMORPGs, and the best point was that the interaction between players could extend the lifespan of the game, which in turns extends the profitable window of the game.

There were still traditional RPG games, but it was gathering far less attention than it did, and naturally there were fewer high quality games.

This was one of the greatest pitfalls that this world had fallen into as placing too much emphasis on MMORPGs bought a series of chain reactions.

Most MMORPGs were in first person view and had a focus on the artstyle.

This was because first person perspective was widely accepted to allow players to immerse more into the game. And combined with high quality arts allow players to spend more time in the world.

However, this introduced a problem, the information that the players get becomes incredibly limited as their field of view is smaller, making it harder to deal with large groups of enemies.

And in most MMORPGs, players fight in groups. There were already many players, and if many monsters are introduced, the screen will be incredibly cluttered as the players get overwhelmed with information.

This was much better on VR, but because most VR games are imported from a PC version, it would still be more or less influenced by their PC counterpart.

And combined with various other reasons, this led to a lack of hack and slash games in this world.

This was one of the reasons RPG maps in Warcraft were so popular. Players still liked the feeling of being powerful, killing many enemies in one hit, but they didn’t understand what they wanted. Therefore, their voices would never be heard by the developers.

Of course, they might not execute it even if they noticed. Although hack and slash might seem easy to execute, there were a lot of technicalities to it. If the design wasn’t done well, the players would quickly leave the game.

And coincidentally, Chen Mo has a pretty good hack and slash game on his hands that he could use as a transitional work to pivot into an RPG, filling out gaps in this world in the process.

At the front desk, Chen Mo turned on his laptop and started writing a concept design document for Diablo.

It was harder for Chen Mo to develop Diablo than Warcraft. The game must be comparable in quality to Diablo 3, therefore the resources required was much more than Warcraft.

Most of the maps in Warcraft can be done in the map editor, but the same couldn’t be said with Diablo as maps in Diablo are dynamically generated with very high quality. This was a major challenge for Chen Mo.

Diablo was a decent traditional game as Chen Mo had never made an RPG in the past and it would be risky to rush into MMORPGs.