泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 _ Character development and player development

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌
[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]
 
Character development and player development
 
Do you remember Street Fighter, the iconic '90s fighting video game? What about Super Mario a little bit to the past? If not, what about Tekken (Iron Fist) or Onimusha (literally 'Oni Warrior')? You would know StarCraft at least.

The reason why I mention video games of the past all of a sudden is to talk about auto-combat games which can be found easily in the recent mobile gaming market.
I don't want to criticize the auto-battle games like Monster Taming, the most representative auto-combat game. A gamer usually is required two things when he/she play a character-based video game which has developed steadily since the establishment of the video game.

One is character development. The character-based games usually, aside from genre characteristics, lead the players to develop a character through various factors. The character can be upgraded step by step through quests when the level requirement is met: character level-up, character replacement, or strengthening and replacing weapons and types of equipment. Particularly emphasizing these factors, Monster Taming-style auto combat RPG games lead players to focus on developing a character itself, which make them spend less time to directly play the game. Lots of Monster Taming-like games have been released because the intention of the game designing has been successful in today's mobile environments and some of them achieved good performance.

The other is player development. Fighting games: Street Fighter, Super Mario, and Tekken, which I mentioned in the beginning, as well as action-RPGs and RTS games in the past basically expected player's skill, so-called control, from gamers. Even an ultimate character often couldn't beat a weak monster due to a player's lack of control skill, however, Lim Yo-hwan, the Terran Emperor, on the contrary, greatly defeated the lurker with a very weak marine.

I don't want to talk about where you need to focus on for better planning. It is possible to prioritize one of the two for fun for users or put both of them into a game for balanced planning. But, with highlighting qualities of mobile device, a factory approach to make a game just focusing on character build-up seems less than desirable.

A market without various forms can never grow beyond the limits of the distorted market and unbalanced development. We already saw the declined Hong Kong film market due to mass production of film noir in the '90s. So, in that sense, I'm pretty glad to see a recent big-hit game Blade where properly requires player's control skill and development. I hope that many domestic mobile games in various styles will be released in the future.
 


※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.
   (http://www.khgames.co.kr)

    Translation by Kim Ki-hui

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