"Spring and Autumn" first review: domestic games indomitable and full of enthusiasm

As a domestic ARPG game, the game quality shown by "Spring and Autumn" is far beyond my imagination.

But it is difficult to evaluate "Yi Chunqiu".

Because it is difficult for you to choose a fixed score in a pile of numbers to properly represent the game quality of Yi Chunqiu. The reason for this is that you can clearly feel the passion and effort of the production team Danorange Games in the process of the game. But at the same time, this enthusiasm and effort, and the immature technology and lack of experience, have a strong confrontation.

The product of this binary confrontation, is what we see now "Spring and Autumn" - it is limited to many realistic conditions, it may be difficult to say perfect, but whether from the design idea or the underlying design point of view, it has to break the shackles of domestic single game indomitable and full of enthusiasm.

This kind of confrontation, the natural contradiction, can be seen everywhere in the game.

For example, in the opening of the game, the production team made use of a fantasy dream of the main character, Ling Gu Cong, and cleverly combined the game's world view setting, the protagonist's backstory and the beginner's tutorial. In the whole process, the player will not have the discomfort and irritability caused by the tough plug setting and tutorial in similar games, but can further integrate into the narrative rhythm of the game itself. In the first few minutes of the game, you will have a general understanding of the game's setting and get to grips with the core combat system.

Whether it is from the creative level, or the design point of view to talk, can be said to be valuable.

But here, too, is the paradox. This game is the first work of the production team Dantangi game, and both in terms of development technology and production experience, Dantangi game is not familiar with, and the consequences of these immaturity are obvious - the exquisite tutorial design of the game is delayed by the quality of modeling, accuracy of action and performance.

This may be the biggest problem of Yi Chunqiu.

From the point of view of the general public, Yi Chunqiu can hardly be described as exquisite. The low precision of modeling, the unsmoothness of action and the incoordination of performance are all the problems that exist objectively and cannot be ignored in Yichunqiu.

So, what are the causes of these problems? As I mentioned above, the production team of Danorange Game lacks sufficient technical precipitation and experience accumulation. The inadequacy of "Yi Chunqiu" in hard conditions is helpless.

But if we set aside some of the requirements for modeling, action and performance, deconstruct Yichunqiu from a holistic perspective, and build the underlying logic of the entire game, you will find that the core of Yichunqiu is very good, Danorange knows what it is doing, and it is firmly moving toward its goal - although it has stumbled along the way.

Many problems in modeling, action and performance are inevitable due to objective conditions, not subjective conditions of "we fool and finish the job".

This is particularly evident in the design of the combat mechanism of "Yi Chunqiu".

Of course, before talking about combat mechanics, let's talk about the core gameplay of Spring and Autumn. The core gameplay of the whole "Spring and Autumn" is roughly divided into four directions: plot narrative, combat mechanism, puzzle solving elements and cultivation system.

Because the current "Spring and Autumn" is sold in the state of "early access", the entire plot narrative is not good to jump to conclusions. At least in the current process, the rhythm of the main story and the sub-story is reasonably allocated. In addition to the main story with a clear and compact process, each new location will also be scattered with a large number of sub-stories, which are not clearly marked on the map for you. These side quests can be further pursued through the player's exploration of the map, which often requires the player to listen carefully to the unintentional dialogue between NPCS for clues, which is quite interesting.

The plot of the side mission is not only designed to send supplies to the main character's team, at least for now, the plot of many side missions are closely related to the main story and world view setting, from another Angle for the player to understand the story of Spring and Autumn, make a choice.

With this design, whether you want to quickly pass the customs party that only plays the main line, or want to complete the collection of branch lines, "Spring and Autumn" can provide enough fun.

In addition, the puzzle elements and the cultivation system can also be said to be the two right designs in the entire "Spring and Autumn" game process.

While the game's core gameplay, along with the narrative and combat mechanics, the puzzle elements and upbringing system were very restrained from the beginning of the design, and did not appear to dominate the situation as Dark Descent 2 did.

The puzzle elements are properly interwoven into the battle flow, and the difficulty is moderate, the hints are obvious, and most importantly, the amount is extremely restrained. The benefit of this is that the player doesn't have to disrupt the rhythm of the game just because the puzzle element is there.

This is a very important thing.

As an ARPG game, the focus is on story and combat, naturally there is no problem. The design elements that have a certain threshold, such as puzzle solving, are only used to icing on the cake, and once the primary and secondary are wrong, then the player's game experience may not be so good.

The same is true of the upbringing system.

In "Yi Chunqiu", whether it is refining, condensing 炁, recasting, making symbols or cooking, you can do it yourself. But at the same time, the game also provides another option: if you don't want to play these cultivation aspects of the game when the in-game resource system overflows badly, then you can ignore them and just go straight ahead. Although I do not know whether it is inadvertent, but at least for me, such a non-mandatory cultivation system, in fact, is still more acceptable.

After talking about the end of the side, finally return to our focus this time: combat mechanism.

Why did I say above that the combat mechanism is the design that best reflects the heart of Dan Orange game in Yi Chunqiu? The answer is very simple, as soon as you get started, you will immediately understand what I mean - the feel, percussion and rhythm of combat, Yi Chunqiu has maintained a level line, which is rare for a studio that has never made such a game.

One of the most worth mentioning is the concept of "interruption", to some extent, the entire "Spring and Autumn" combat mechanism design, are around the concept of "interruption", which makes the game's combat experience, very refreshing.

So what is "interruption"? In fact, when the enemy performs some skill release, in the presence of the blue circle indicator, by hitting or switching weapons and other methods to interrupt the enemy's action, and get the reward nature of the "witch time". Almost all battles are fought around how to "interrupt" the enemy. Through the right time to hit, skill combo and teammates assisted attack, how to control the battlefield, so that the "witch time" cover enough fighting time, has become the focus.

This is a very interesting design. New players can get output opportunities by tying up kite flying, while advanced players can naturally control the whole process, no matter what your level, always experience the fun of combat.

The number of bosses in the game is very large, almost every BOSS will have a unique mechanism design, in the face of different mechanisms, players around the "interrupt" to carry out the strategy will be different, as long as the rule is found, the overall difficulty of the battle is acceptable, and also very interesting.

Overall, the whole "Spring and Autumn" in the game core design, in fact, there is not much problem. Its more problems may lie in the lack of technology and experience of Tangerine game itself. But this is not such a terrible thing, because "Spring and Autumn" is still in the "early access" stage, Danorange game still has a lot of time to slowly modify some problems.

A long time ago, Dan Orange Games once gave an interview. In their plan, "Yi Chunqiu" is a series, and there may be other works in the future. And this time, they may not have done well enough, but at least in the moment, you can also clearly see that "Spring and Autumn" is trying to break through the shackles of domestic stand-alone games and full of enthusiasm.

That's always a good thing, isn't it?