Although Lin Lixin was reluctant to say this, he still shook his head after watching the new demo of v2.2.
"No, let's try again."
To be honest, after this period of discussion and learning, the Blizzard five-person team, oh, with Bandura included, should be a six-person team.
The six of them had a basic understanding of what Lin Lixin wanted.
The result presented to him now is indeed acceptable.
but...
If it's just "okay," it's not enough to be associated with Gamenova, or even its subsidiary Blizzard.
Compared to the real Diablo, this demo is still quite far from even the original prototype.
"It's difficult for us to expand the global scale any further, but there's still a lot we can improve in terms of gameplay depth."
Lin Lixin explained.
Although he would love to create the entire map from the High Heavens to the Burning Hells, like in the second or even third installment, it's not realistic with the current limited CD storage capacity.
Keep in mind that even the original Hellfire version was a whopping 500MB in size.
With the Lord of Lord of Destruction expansion for the second generation, the size expanded to over 1GB.
High-definition graphics, extensive sound effects and voice acting, numerous CG animations, and story text caused Diablo to take up a huge amount of hard drive space.
Fortunately, we've caught up with a good era. Storage capacity is becoming increasingly worthless. What might have been an exorbitantly expensive 1GB a year ago is now cheaper than sand.
By the time of Reaper of Souls III, it had reached a whopping 20 GB.
but...
It's 1990 now, and storage is more expensive than gold.
700MB is the current technological limit.
Want to go even higher?
Yes, but that would require spending a lot of money and time to gamble on a new CD-ROM.
At least in the short term, optical discs remain the most powerful storage method. However, developing a new optical disc standard is not an easy task...
"Hiss... Huh?"
Despite limitations in industrial base and various materials science foundations, even with extraordinary abilities, it would be impossible to create a DVD, a capacity monster, in a short period of time.
but...
He could have easily settled for a less reliable alternative.
However, before that, Lin Lixin still had to explain the underlying equipment design principles of Diablo to them.
"I've noticed that your thinking hasn't broken free from the traditional RPG framework."
Lin Lixin patted Mike on the shoulder.
"Don't be disappointed. It's not that the system is bad, it's just that, as always, it's not ' Diablo ' enough."
Mike nodded helplessly, without saying anything more.
To be honest, by now, he's gradually starting to get used to this rhythm.
He had in-depth discussions with Magic Bull and his team, a group of developers at Activision, and even several "geniuses" from Gamenova itself. It seems that Lin Lixin suddenly jumping out and overturning all their projects is nothing new.
Rather, it would be more problematic if a project were completed smoothly and Lin Lixin himself had no objections.
That means either the project is absolutely perfect, so perfect that even Lin can't find a fault with it.
Or... this project might just be something Lin gave him to practice on, and he didn't take it seriously at all.
On the contrary, it's a good thing that Lin is doing his best to control everything, like this.
Let's redo it, this time we'll definitely win.
"Lin... so what exactly does ' Diablo ' feel like?"
"Hmm..."
When Mike asked this question, Lin Lixin really couldn't find a way to explain it in a single sentence.
After thinking it over, he stroked his chin and said:
"In short, you only need to remember its most essential core idea."
"What is it?" "--Equipment driver."
In the vast ocean of video games, drive modes are a very interesting topic.
The term "driver" does not refer to the program in a computer that adapts to the hardware, but rather to a design philosophy.
Simply put, it's about "what motivates players to keep playing."
In genres like RPGs and incremental games, the most typical driving mode is actually number-driven.
Level, panel attributes, damage numbers...
The core of data-driven approaches lies in making these numbers more exciting.
The other, more mainstream driving model has been the main force since the birth of video games, and it remained the largest driving force even after the millennium and into the 1920s.
Technology-driven.
Simply put, it encourages players to actively hone their skills and improve as they progress.
Of course, the classics are the MOBA and FPS games, two indispensable elements in the esports world.
Even today, Tetris offers various advanced gameplay modes such as marathon endurance races and speed races. Of course, there's also a truly bizarre and technically driven game... Soulslike.
Besides these mainstream driving models, there are also knowledge-driven puzzle games, collection-driven games like Pokémon and Animal Crossing, social-driven social games, story-driven JRPGs, survival-driven survival games...
If you can do any one of these things well, you can make your work a remarkable masterpiece.
Many works do not focus on just one driving method.
Take Pokémon for example. It actually integrates various driving modes such as collecting, numerical values, social interaction, and technology, and cleverly combines them together.
Diablo is precisely such an excellent work.
Around a core driver, various drivers are combined.
However, its core driving force... is rather unique.
It was so unique that it pioneered an entire new direction.
"Equipment-driven? Isn't that still a stat-driven system?"
Mike looked slightly puzzled.
However, after spending these past few days together, he's learned to ask questions when he doesn't understand, and he's no longer as hesitant and clueless as before. With such a great master standing here, it would be foolish not to make good use of him.
"If it's gear-driven, then isn't RPG also a gear-driven game? Players need to collect different equipment to create stronger stats and so on."
That's why I said the current one won't work.
Lin Lixin smiled and shook his head.
"Dude, use your brain. I'm telling you to incorporate the experience from slot machines, not just some newbie-friendly mechanism like the chance of getting equipment from monsters."
"Um..."
Mike pondered, trying to piece together in his mind what Lin Lixin had just said.
The core idea is obviously randomness, which is the root of addiction and is absolutely correct.
He thought to himself.
"How can randomness be combined with equipment...?! Wait, could it be...?"
Thinking of this, his eyes suddenly lit up, and his mind immediately cleared.
"I get it! We shouldn't hardcode equipment attributes into the code, but... but something dynamic, something that fluctuates within a range! Each piece of equipment should be an instance, not a clone of a template!" "Hehe... Congratulations, you've officially become a bad guy."
Lin Lixin laughed heartily and patted Mike on the shoulder with satisfaction.
It seems he has grasped the essence of it all, and is just one final step away from mastering it.
"You're right, I call it the 'attribute' mechanism. We can turn every attribute of the equipment into a container for attributes; equipment is essentially an object that carries attributes."
Lin Lixin took the initiative to help Mike complete the last piece of the puzzle.
"However... you can be even bolder. Attributes aren't just limited to numbers. They can also be... special effects, or even part of a set."
Upon hearing this, Mike's eyes twitched.
It felt as if something in my mind had been shattered by a hammer blow.
The concept of equipment-driven development truly materialized at this moment.
"Slot machines... slot machines?... Slot machines! Diablo is a giant slot machine!"
And "dropping treasure"... is like pulling the lever on a slot machine.
It turns the player into Skinner's mouse in a box. Once the mouse discovers that pulling a lever has a chance of producing food, it can no longer let go of the lever.
Equipment itself is a system; different equipment combinations can create countless unique strategies.
Some may be very strong, and some may be very interesting.
This is what equipment should be like, not just providing simple numerical enhancements.
"Got it?"
"Understood..."
"So what is your current mission...?"
"Start from scratch, completely over!"
Yes, faced with this truly groundbreaking equipment system, what they are doing now is more like a template product from an industrial assembly line.
While outsourcing honed their skills, it also led to an uncontrollable rigidity in their thinking.
What they need to do now is to completely dismantle the "toxic experience" accumulated during the outsourcing period and retain only the necessary knowledge.
Summarize and refine. Starting over is the right thing to do!
It's hard to imagine what kind of shoddy, mass-produced product Blizzard would have ultimately served up if Lin Lixin hadn't personally woken them up.
"Keep it up and get this finished. I'll help you complete the last important component later. But before that, I need to go talk to Vivian about the capacity issue. I just had a great idea."
micronova.
Vivian stared speechlessly at Lin Lixin in front of her.
"What do you mean you've invested in another semiconductor company under the name of Micronova??"
"Chill isn't a big company, but I think their technology is quite interesting. I'm thinking of supporting them; maybe it'll have a surprising effect?"
Lin Lixin smiled and pulled a young Chinese man in front of him.
"Let me introduce you. This is Sun Yansheng, the chairman of C-Cube, who lives in Santa Clara."
"Okay...?"
c-cube, a technology company founded on August 8, 1988. Judging from that date, its boss must be someone with some Eastern influence.
And that is indeed the case.
Before founding c-cube, Sun Yansheng was already one of the founders of Weitek.
A company that specializes in high-performance coprocessors, but it doesn't have its own wafer fab and can only do design work.
As for c-cube, it's just an insignificant semiconductor company with nothing particularly noteworthy.
However, Lin Lixin must have had his reasons for taking a liking to them.
"I've been working on a new game at Blizzard lately, and considering the CD capacity issue, I was originally planning to look for a breakthrough in manufacturing technology to create higher-density discs. However, I later discovered that c-cube is doing some very interesting research."
Lin Lixin patted Sun Yansheng on the shoulder beside him.
"Hardware-based encoding and decoding offloads compression and decompression to a dedicated chip, rather than relying solely on software algorithms."
He introduced it with a smile.
Who would have thought that this unassuming guy and his unassuming company would one day become the world's most powerful MPEG chip manufacturer?