Almighty Video Game Designer - Chapter 133

Chapter 133: Chapter 132: RPG map

Chen Mo hadn’t heard of news from anyone else during the time when Warcraft was gaining popularity.

It wasn’t that the other designers weren’t jealous and weren’t willing to copy, but they couldn’t copy!

Warcraft couldn’t be replicated, no matter story or playstyle. Most of the designers knew that there was no way this could be copied.

Therefore this had been a one man show by Chen Mo, all the other could do was just watch on.

Chen Mo hit the ground running by breaking to the PC market with a game like this. He became a pretty well known video game designer from this, especially being the king of the RTS hill.

Of course, when his demonic performance on the ranked ladder taken into consideration, he gained his popularity much faster than designers of a similar grade.

One good thing to come out of this was that the players were now closer to the developer.

Many players didn’t care about the developers, they would either butcher their Hero/race, or force a certain playstyle onto the player, and sometimes would only care about money and block off all communication from players.

There were a large number of players who felt that designers didn’t know who to balance the game at all, nerfing whichever seemed strong.

However, as Chen Mo also happened to be Silent, the gap between designers and players was significantly closer. The players felt that he was the same as them, people who loved playing games, someone who was good at games at that, which further increased the trust players had in him.

Chen Mo was ready to set Warcraft aside at this point.

Just like Plant vs Zombies, many felt that Warcraft would pave the way for RTS games, but Chen Mo knew that it wasn’t an opening, but the peak.

The learning curve for RTS games was incredibly steep. RTS players could play it forever and ever and not get bored of it, but for the average player who wasn’t good at RTS games, they would only play one to two years.

Many knew after playing for a few months that they were a one thousand point noob with no chance of climbing.

A majority of players didn’t think that micromanaging was fun.

Under these circumstances, their interest in RTS games would decrease rapidly, in turn making the RTS player base smaller and smaller, and the game would slowly die off.

It was actually one of the most enjoyable genres, but the only reason it didn’t do well was because of the difficulty of growing its player base.

It had been smooth sailing so far for Warcraft and tournaments were appearing left and right. However Chen Mo knew deep down that there is a limit.

Which was why Chen Mo was preparing to release a new version of Warcraft, and started laying the foundations for a new game.

There were two points he wanted to focus on. One being to spend money to ensure the cinematics were high quality to allow it to be a flawless classic; the other was to have a complete editor to allow players to explore what the game had to offer endlessly.

Chen Mo did some planning around the cinematics, if he were to do everything before making cuts, it would cost around forty million RMB.

Chen Mo didn’t need to spend this money as the sales for Warcraft have already been made, and the players’ interest in the story was fading, it didn’t matter too much if he added the cinematics or not.

But Chen Mo felt that there were some in the previous version that left a bit more to be desired. As he wanted to recreate this classic, he must recreate every part of it perfectly.

Just like a high quality artwork. How could you put it in a cabinet for display before it is patched up?

The other problem was the editor.

So far, players were still focused on progressing through the story and versus mode. They didn’t pay much attention to the world editor at all.

Of course, this was mainly due to players not realising the potential of the editor.

Just like in Plants vs Zombies, the best way to keep the players interested in the game was to allow them to create whatever they want and allow them to pick whatever they want.

Therefore, Chen Mo decided to give the players a little help.

First were the controls. The hotkeys for Warcraft were quite illogical. They would pick a random letter from the name of the ability as its hotkey. This created a problem as different Heroes, units, and buildings from different races would have different hotkeys.

This seemed like a small problem, nor did Blizzard have the desire to correct it, but it actually dramatically increased the difficulty for players to get into the game as many players struggled to remember the hotkeys.

This was easy to solve. Cen Mo included the ability to rebind keys into the game to allow players to customise all their hotkeys.

The second was improved to the editor.

The original editor was relatively complicated, and would take new players some effort to pick it up. As he was making it simpler to use, he included a small tutorial to make it easier for players to learn.

At the same time, he included some classic RPG maps as inspiration in order to attract the attention of the players.

As this update was relatively simple, Chen Mo finished the plan in no time, allowing Su Jinyu and Qian Kun to take over.

—

“Here are the plans for the new update. The editor tutorial will be done by the Goldfish. You’ll have to write it in more detail, take the learning abilities of our players into account.”

“Qian Kun, I’ll need you to design a few RPG maps. Hongxi, do some planning for the design too. Take a look at the dialogues while you’re there.”

Chen Mo introduced the new update document to the three of them.

Qian Kun looked at the document, shocked, “‘Protect Athena?’ ‘Escape Pyramid’? ‘Chenghai 3c’? ‘Tower Defence’? What are these? Are these maps for Warcraft?”

Chen Mo nodded, “Yep, I’ve given a brief overview for each of them. You guys will have to work on the initial drafts and I’ll give you the go ahead when it’s good enough.”

Qian Kun nodded, “Alright, I’ll take a look.”

They didn’t question as they have now developed an unconditional trust for Chen Mo especially when it comes to Warcraft.

Qian Kun took a quick look at the update plans, isn’t this just a few maps? How is this a new update?

But as he looked more into it, it didn’t seem like just a few maps. These maps made changes to hero abilities and items.

Who knows!