The fast-paced action games represented by “Devil May Cry” and “Ninja Gaiden” bring players a strong sense of pleasure and control, which satisfies players’ fantasies about martial arts masters, but their extreme pursuit of operation makes there are only few players who can realize the ultimate sense of achievement of such masters, and the gap between ordinary players and divine players is large.
Especially with the rise of online video and live streaming, more and more players see the operation of master players, this sense of frustration and powerlessness is more serious than before, more and more players simply choose to just watch video, they simply give up.
After all, for the vast majority of players, the game is a haven of reality, and what players need is a sense of growth that is easier to obtain than the price-to-performance ratio in the real world, but if the performance-to-price ratio of this sense of growth is too low, it is even harder to get than in the real world. only the real core “fans” will stay!
There will also be a chain of disdain between them, which is hard to break. Fighting games and RTS games are typical examples.
In the golden age, another great game came out and opened the way for slow-paced action games, and that is “Monster Hunter”.
What kind of game is “Monster Hunter”? to put it simply, players play hunters, hunt dragons, get materials, and build equipment…
Then, when they grow up, they go hunting more advanced dragons, get more advanced materials, and build more advanced equipment…
The cycle sounds simple, but it’s really not that easy to do.
In the first few generations of the game, the difficulty threshold was set so high that many people could not really experience the fun of the game.
Moreover, players who are accustomed to fast-paced action games have just started to play “Monster Hunter”. They feel that all the movements of the game are several beats slower, just like being in the deceleration magic, and it’s not easy to adapt.
But it is precisely its original slow motion design that makes it an alternative success.
Unlike many wooden stake-like enemies in fast-paced games, the enemies in “Monster Hunter” are all ancient dragons, whose bodies are several to dozens times larger than players, and each dragon has completely different attributes, habits, attack methods, attack rhythm, and so on. They are all difficult opponents to deal with.
Looking back at the role of the player, it is not a hero or even a character, it is just called a hunter.
According to this setting, the hunter played by the player can only do some realistic basic actions, cannot fly, has no magic, and can rely on only a few huge weapons, and the speed of waving these weapons is super slow motion compared to “Devil May Cry” and “Ninja Gaiden”.
This kind of design difference forms a sharp contrast with the fast-paced game. In front of the dragon, the player is no longer a “God of War” or a master, but should carefully observe every movement of the dragon, do everything possible to survive from the dragon’s claws, and seize the fleeting opportunity to launch an unremitting attack on the dragon once or twice…
Countless attacks, until the dragon finally fell, the player’s hands are even trembling, tense nerves are instantly liberated and released, this great sense of achievement is unprecedented.
By the way, the dragons in Monster Hunter don’t show HP Bar, so hunters never know when the dragons will fall.
This deliberately created “you never know how close you are to success” tension, so that players do not dare to slack off, but also full of expectation and excitement.
We introduced earlier that the combo, of “Devil May Cry” provides a deep space for players to play, so after the pace of the battle of “Monster Hunter” slows down, can it still guarantee the depth?
Will it still be endless chopping, chopping, chopping…and then the players will be tired and bored?
“Monster Hunter” gives a beautiful answer.
First of all, “Monster Hunter” has designed more than a dozen weapons, and there are great differences in the attack range, attack action, battle rhythm, and forward and backward shaking time of each weapon, and even the same tactics of the same weapon are also different.
For example, if you fight with a big sword, the damage is different if you hit the enemy with the tip of the blade or near the hilt.
Secondly, the precision requirement of space judgment of “Monster Hunter” combat system is higher than that of other action games, because the action speed becomes slower, and the accuracy of time judgment of the game decreases, so it specially increases the precision requirement of space judgment.
There are few combat system-assisted features in “Monster Hunter”, such as automatic turning to aim at the enemy, and players need to accurately manipulate their every move position, defense and attack.
The super special effects that are common in other action games are rarely used in the game to highlight the sense of attack and feedback.
Because “Monster Hunter” requires players to see whether each attack is hit or not, and how much deviation there is, if the special effect is big, it will only dazzle.
Third, the huge body of the dragon has been cleverly designed by the designer into a variety of meat attributes, destructive parts and weak points, and so on.
Different attacks on different parts will have different effects, such as using sharp weapons like knives to attack the tail of some monsters to a certain extent, the tail of the monster will be cut off, commonly known as “broken tail”. When the head of a monster is attacked with a blunt hammer to a certain extent, it will make the monster dizzy for a short time, and so on.
Some of the effects of these attacks will directly affect the damage value, while others will affect the dragon’s behavior and attacks. For example, after the tail is severed, the dragon’s tail will also carry out sweeping attacks, but the range is small. Moreover, the broken tail is a precious resource that needs to be collected.
Therefore, although the dragon has a large body, the player’s attack is not aimless, and the attack on specific parts has become the player’s most pursuit in battle.
But it should be noted that these parts grow on the dragon, which is not a motionless stake, it moves all the time and even flies.
How to accurately hit these “target parts in motion” requires players to explore and understand the behavior patterns of dragons, understand and control their own weapons, so as to grasp the position of time and space in battle more and more skillfully.
All these require a lot of time and energy to practice.
Finally, there are a large number of dragons, each of which has its own characteristic behavior.
Due to the large size of the dragon, their attack range is often large, the damage is also high, coupled with the complex map environment design.
The behavior of the dragon will be different when the location, terrain and environment of each battle are different.
Players need to observe carefully, understand all the surrounding information, and focus on the scope and timing of each attack by the dragon.
Because this not only affects whether you can hit, but also may affect the life and death of the player, this kind of timing and space test throughout the “Monster Hunter” battle.
As the HP bar of the dragon is all too long, and there is a time limit for each battle, players can not just defend and avoid, which requires players to take into account the subsequent attack while defending and avoiding each time. This multi-dimensional thinking and accurate operation is also a challenge to players.
The above designs combine to form the combat system of “Monster Hunter”, and finally form the depth of its combat.
Often a new player from groping for the first weapon, opening up wasteland to kill the first dragon, to skillfully master a weapon…conquer all the dragons, dozens of hours have passed.
Then when you go out with a new weapon, it feels like you’ve opened a new game.
Therefore, the game duration of “Monster Hunter” players is at least dozens of hours, and there are plenty of people who enjoy playing for two or three hundred hours.
Another laudable advantage of “Monster Hunter” is the setting of its background worldview and the creation of atmosphere.
Around the “hunting” world view: the game is carefully designed, including exploration, footprints, investigation, tracking, preparation and so on, a series of foreplay.
There is no lack of ecological knowledge in the introduction of monster materials. Hunters played by players can explore and collect in the map, drink hot drinks when you are cold, drink cold drinks when you are hot, and light up dark places with torches, and so on.
When it comes to finding monsters to fight, Monster Hunter should not only have a good grasp of the space and rhythm of the battle, but also make full use of the props in their backpacks, as well as the surrounding terrain and environmental creatures, and so on. You must not casually go up and hack at the dragon.
The shape of monsters in the game has real biological characteristics and habits: some monsters will be angry and tired, eat and drink, sleep, destroy map scenes, and fight with each other, which are all elements that players can use in combat.
“Monster Hunter” wants to provide players with not only a hunting ground, but a whole world of lifelike hunters and ancient dragons, which is not only packaged, but closely integrated with the way the game is played, which brings hunters a great sense of immersion and constitutes a unique play experience of “Monster Hunter”.
But as we said earlier, although the design innovation of “Monster Hunter” is good, it still has a certain acceptance threshold when it was first launched, so it did not catch on immediately. The first few generations sold only a few hundred thousand units on the PS2 mainframe platform.
It can finally be successful, but also have to mention its original common fight system and online functions.
There is a little gossip here. In the late 1990s, some online games became popular all over the world. CAPCOM had planned to develop this game into a MMORPG online game like World of Warcraft, with the intention of seizing the opportunity in the online game market, but at that time, the network environment was so bad that they had to join the offline game mode of a single player to achieve the core combat experience of “Monster Hunter”.
Although the original “Monster Hunter” actually had the ability to connect to the Internet, in an underdeveloped era, the experience of online combat was bad, but fortunately it had a small multiplayer network function that was designed at the beginning of the project.
At that time, it was the heyday of the handheld PSP, CAPCOM made a beautiful move against the online function of PSP: it gave up the immature wide area network online function at that time, and completely changed to the offline face-to-face online mode, which suddenly detonated the hunting frenzy of Japanese students with a PSP.
“Monster Hunter” even set a precedent for the “fight together” game.
Many people hunt together, greatly alleviating the difficulty threshold, although the monster’s HP bar has also doubled, but multiple players can defeat the dragon through more cooperation, to achieve a sense of achievement of the challenge.
When many people play together, sometimes players can cheat each other, which brings more joy.
“Monster Hunter” brings the convenience of the Internet, the portability of the handset, and the fun of forming a team to the extreme. Playing a game with friends and classmates anytime and anywhere in 10 to 15 minutes is really a social weapon. Playing two sets after work and school every day is like a “daily task.”