Game Development Giant

ps: Read the exclusive story behind Game Development Giant, listen to your more suggestions for the novel, follow the official account (add friends on WeChat - add official account - enter dd), and tell me quietly!

Age of Empires was officially released on Christmas Day, and its sales once again broke the PC game record.

Including Jester and Mars Entertainment, it was expected to sell three million units within a year, which is already a very good number.

But, obviously, they misjudged the enthusiasm of the players.

On the first day of release, more than 800,000 units were sold in North America alone. As a PC game, except for Quake, there has never been a second game that can achieve such a level. sales volume.

For example, Civilization brought Sid Meier to the altar.

This game with extremely rich content has been on sale for almost two years, and its cumulative sales have only just exceeded one million.

Moreover, it was released in Europe the next day.

The sales volume of Age of Empires has increased by 600,000. You must know that although Europe has a larger population than the United States, in terms of game consumption, based on their previous experience, they are about the same as the United States, but it is hard to believe , they actually burst out with unimaginable enthusiasm for purchasing the game Age of Empires.

Even in Europe, many media reported on this grand event.

The release of Mars Entertainment's Age of Empires has caused Christmas traffic jams in many places. Because Christmas is already a busy time, and with so many people queuing up to buy in stores or game stores, traffic jams will naturally occur. Appeared.

At that time, a BBC reporter interviewed a young man in his twenties who had been queuing since Christmas Eve. This young man was a student at the University of Exeter. He came to London by train one day in advance and queued specifically. I hope I can get Age of Empires as soon as possible.

Excuse me sir. Why do you want to buy this game?

I am a history student who is very interested in ancient history. I was a fan of the Civilization series before. Then I heard about this game. It was developed by the development team of Civilization and is the chief producer. The person is still Jester Lee. You may not know him without playing games. He is the best game designer in the world. In addition, previous reports said that Age of Empires will be a real simulation of history. Those empire-conquest games, so I couldn’t hold back my excitement. I wanted to play them as soon as possible, so I came to queue!”

Many people have one reason or another, but without exception, they are all attracted to the game Age of Empires.

By the end of December, the total global sales of Age of Empires exceeded three million copies, approaching the PC game record of Quake's total sales of 4.4 million copies.

Jester was in South Korea at the time, and it was South Korea where he learned the news.

However, Age of Empires did not have a Korean version at the beginning. There is also no Japanese version, and the Japanese version will be delayed by one month.

Later, the Japanese version of Age of Empires was released, but the final sales were not very good, with less than 100,000 copies sold in one week. Of course, as a PC game, such sales are already very good in Japan.

When Jester returns to the United States, he will look at sales records and statistics. The hot sales period of Age of Empires has passed, and the total sales volume has stopped at 3.5 million units. The current sales speed is already very slow. According to previous experience in game sales, follow the previous curves.

It is generally certain that within two years, Age of Empires may break through to four million, but there is not much hope of breaking the record of Quake.

Moreover, in the recent game progress report, the research and development of John Carmack's Quake 2 has entered the accelerator. The new 3D engine is very powerful. Jester went to see it as soon as he came. Although Carmack's new engine is much worse than later generations, even the engine Carmack designed in its original history when developing Quake in the mid-1990s.

After all, there is a time gap, after all, four to five years are missing.

Many things that are no longer a problem in software are still impossible to achieve in hardware. 's engine has become much more powerful. In fact, in this world, when Quake was the first game, the engine was already better than the original first-person shooter game in history, which was also Carmack's. The work The Assassination of Hitler is much better. Just compared to , it is completely incomparable.

With sufficient time and funds from the development team, and the determination to change the draft three times, Carmack took his understanding of the 3D engine to a higher level and produced a game that, in this world, at least within two to three years, is basically It is impossible for anyone to imitate the new 3D engine.

Originally, Jester wanted to continue the name of the Unreal series.

However, John Carmack put forward a different opinion. He felt that this time the engine development was a rare experience and sublimation for himself, just like a silkworm chrysalis with its skin peeled off, so he wanted to change its name.

However, he lacked the talent to come up with names, and he was not very satisfied even after thinking of several names.

After hearing this, Jester naturally agreed.

He is naturally the best at picking names. He does not need to pick them himself. He only needs to find a few better names from his memory and let the other party choose them.

Hanshuang, what do you think of this name?

Frost is the name of an engine in Jester's Memory. It was specially developed by EA for Battlefield and is very suitable for the development and production of FPS games.

Of course, Carmack's brand new engine has nothing to do with EA's Frost engine decades later.

Hearing the name of the new engine mentioned by Jester, Carmack frowned and thought for a while. Although it has a deeper meaning than the Unreal Engine at the beginning, it is still a very good name. More importantly, The name that his boss casually said sounded much better than the ones he had thought of before.

In the end, Carmack nodded: Okay, let's call it Frost.

By the way, when will Quake 2 be completed? Jester continued to ask about the game after the name of the engine was confirmed, although Jester also participated in Quake 2 A small part of the design, but the first producer of this game is already John Carmack.

Soon, when I was developing the engine, my team actually started working on the modeling needed in the game, so our programming progressed very quickly. It is almost completed now, probably in April. Or in May, the alpha version will be available.

John Carmack said it with confidence.

That's what I think. Do you know about the previous question about Battle.net's hypothesis? Jester thought for a while and asked a question in a deep voice.

You know, it seems to be prepared for the large-scale online connection of Age of Empires? But when I heard this plan at the time, I felt that this thing is extremely suitable for the arena mode of Quake. Think about it, it can be compared with the entire Let’s play together in the United States! A Los Angeles talker can fight with a New York gunslinger. Who is better than the other? There is no need to brag on the forum, just have a fight and you will know...

Hearing Jester's question, John Carmack's eyes lit up and he spoke extremely excitedly. Apparently, he also saw the most important information about Quake from Jester's battle network. gameplay.

hehe.

Jester was noncommittal in the face of John Carmack's obviously excited and unreasonable remarks, and just smiled: You are overthinking. The battle network is still being built. To complete the battle network, I guess it will take a long time. It's June. The initial test plan only has about 2,000 to 3,000 places for Age of Empires. As for Quake... it can only be said that first-person shooting games have higher requirements for network conditions than RTS games are much bigger.”

After a slight pause, Jester saw the disappointed expression on John Carmack's face, but he continued: So, in a short period of time, at least within a year and a half, I will not to consider the idea of ​​adding Quake to Battle.net.

and……

With that said, Jester stood up and stretched.

The construction and testing of Battle.net will be a very long process. I don't want to see anything that can make profits at once, because I know that this is the development direction of future games. In the future, he It will definitely bring me countless profits.”

With that said, Jester once again described to Carmack how powerful he would be when a battle network is expanded into a game platform.

John, you can imagine that in ten, fifteen, or even twenty years, we will have such a platform. It is the largest and most technologically advanced gaming platform in the world. This opportunity will be provided to all companies willing to sell and play games on this platform.

“On this platform, it’s not just our own company’s games.”

But for many companies' games, we just provide a platform so that everyone can play online through our platform. At that time, when players are used to our platform, you said we can get What? (A great pie-in-the-sky event, cool mobile phones are waiting for you! Follow us~ Click on the official account (add friends on WeChat - add official account - enter dd) and participate now! Everyone will win a prize, now Follow the dd WeChat official account immediately!) (To be continued...)