Hypergryph (Arknights) Recruits at University of Southern California
(media.scored.co)
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About the image, and this is all personal notes: What a solid summary of Chinese game development. If you told me 20 years ago that China would be producing anything that we could call AAA, I wouldn't have believed you. I'm sure a lot of you will still deny it, but more from a standpoint of raging, furious hatred over the gacha model and sold virtual goods in general.
We all know and have forever heard the Western propaganda: Chinese nationals cannot create, only copy, their talent and skill for copying has been perfected into an art. All your beloved consoles are likely banned in the state. Curfews for the children. Every company being mandated to have a representative or department/board that reports directly to the CCP. All that stuff.
And in those early days, there's World of Warcraft, becoming as big in China as Starcraft is to Korea, if a to us strange and unusual censored form where undead and skeletons have to be cleaned up and made presentable to Chinese sensibilities. And here we are in the present, Blizzard cast aside like an old toy after bending the knee for so many years, not needed anymore.
Even 10 years ago I was still believing all this. Then this international, intercultural Chinese renaissance started springing up when I wasn't paying attention.
When I believed the hype that Kancolle was one day going to be the Touhou Killer, I missed the boat on Azur Lane. When Girls Frontline released, I missed the starting gun, never heard of it until the collab with VA-11 HALL-A.
So when Arknights started pre-release advertising on Twitter, I started getting interested, not knowing all of these titles were Chinese, not knowing the only thing authentically Japanese were the voice actors, not knowing the company was birthed from a split of Girls Frontline devs disagreeing with the direction the game was taking at the time, not knowing the game was even tower defense (if IMHO more like a blend of "real time strategy RPG" mechanics that just happen to mostly distill down to "things are moving toward your blue boxes, don't let them do that").
Now here we are with Mihoyo as king of the hill, boasting the first of a new generation of F2P Breath of the Wild-likes. We have that Wukong game. And it's only going to keep progressing.
And no, not once have I brought up or blamed anything on "woke"
Just make a better product. Because right now, the great and powerful capitalist West is getting out-capitalized by skilled, motivated developers of the East, whether or not the watchful eye of the CCP and the money of giant megacorps like Tencent have anything to do with it.
since chinese games started to come over to the west I have found myself really wanting to know what chinese developers have been doing over there regards single player experiences that we just haven't been able to see due to the great firewall
unfortunately very few are available over here and those that are don't have english translations, one such game being gujian (sword of legends) is on steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/570780/GuJian/ but no english and the english translation mod has vanished into the ether after some people on that project got worried about the consequences of being involved with it (chinese laws i guess?)
mihoyo have shown with genshin that they can take inspirations and create regions based on non-chinese cultures and countries and not fuck it up, yu pengchen the main composer up until a year ago did an amazing job and is currently up there in my list of top contemporary classical composers
also, outside of gacha there have been other games coming out that I didn't realise were chinese until I looked into it
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2452280/Mecha_BREAK/
mechabreak I thought was japanese, the mechs look extremely gundam (to the point where I was wondering to myself if they had perhaps hired one or two of the designers from the more recent anime) and the beta testing they did a month or so ago had full japanese voice acting. (from what I played mechabreak is the gundam game bandai should have made already but they are too busy shoving their collective heads up their arses)
there are chinese people out there making some great games, its just a shame about the chinese state
Pretty sure there is an actual licensed Gundam FTP game. I have no idea how good it is, though.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1367080/MOBILE_SUIT_GUNDAM_BATTLE_OPERATION_2/
its a PS3 game (battle operation 1) ported to the PS4 (operation 2) playable on ps5 via backwards compatibility ported to PC
there is as far as i can tell no crossplay between pc and ps4/5 so there is a very small community
additionally the game uses a gacha mechanic to get new suits AND THERE IS NO PITY *
* many gacha games have a "pity" mechanic that means players are guaranteed to get the "banner" character after so many pulls
this apparently first came about after a fate grand order (i think?) player spent thousands of dollars and did not get the banner character and people got mad then apparently gacha games started to have pity mechanics
this gundam game has no pity so you can have really bad luck and never get the suit you want ever
I was thinking of one, I had to go look it up, but it was called "Gundam Evolution." Evidently it shut down, however.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1816670/GUNDAM_EVOLUTION/