Moonspeak Random Non-Japanese Asian RPG News Thread

[GuardHei]

As someone who just stepped into the Chinese video game industry, the general atmosphere was pretty negative. There is a lot of money, but that doesn't generate good games. Everyone's talking about making AAA games but rarely talking about making fun games. So i guess the result is fair...

Essentially the good games will come from Indie or AA studio instead. Taiwan is frankly not in better condition where all the game dev studio are aiming for gacha mobile games (or multi platform these days).

That being said Tencent is heavily investing in AAA single player titles so hopefully some Wuxia stuff will come out from one of their studios

Lol, I can tell you straight that Tencent has no chance to make any great games. A lot of industry seniors & talents joined, but the company culture kills anyone who wants to make a shoot. That's why they were shifting focus to invest & buy studios that have potential, cuz they realize they fail to make good games from a systematic level.

That concludes every giant tech companies

 

[Abu Antar]

Just buy smaller games. We recently had Hero's Adventure.

 

[GuardHei]

Not sure if anyone recommended The Matchless Kungfu绝世好武功 before, but I'll say give it a shot if you're interested in Kenshi-like Wuxia game. It's a system driven game with a lot of options and each NPC behaves on its own (the world is procedurally generated). One time I was knocked off by a monkey, later discovered by a friendly villager who carried me all the way to the nearby doctor. You can even play as a hobo and beg for money in front of the houses.
From the steam page it says there's english translation, though I can't confirm the quality.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1696440/_/

 

[felipepepe]

Not sure if anyone recommended The Matchless Kungfu绝世好武功 before, but I'll say give it a shot if you're interested in Kenshi-like Wuxia game. It's a system driven game with a lot of options and each NPC behaves on its own (the world is procedurally generated). One time I was knocked off by a monkey, later discovered by a friendly villager who carried me all the way to the nearby doctor. You can even play as a hobo and beg for money in front of the houses.
From the steam page it says there's english translation, though I can't confirm the quality.

I tried the demo during the last Steam fest, was one of my favorite games of the event. It's basically Wuxia Kenshi.

The English translation is... serviceable. Definetly inferior to Tale of Immortal or Hero's Adventure, it's more kinda like Tale of Wuxia.

 

[Abu Antar]

That one is on my wishlist.

 

[rickypeppers]

Felt like the appropriate place to post this:



Anyone here catch this at the Game Awards?
I ended up staying away to watch that pos and this was the only game trailer that caught my eye.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Felt like the appropriate place to post this:



Anyone here catch this at the Game Awards?
I ended up staying away to watch that pos and this was the only game trailer that caught my eye.

Didnt watch TGA but this game has been known for a while

Basically the first AAA Chinese (? or Taiwan?) Souls-like. Probably the first AAA Single Player title from China overall that has wide marketting and global push

 

[GuardHei]

Felt like the appropriate place to post this:



Anyone here catch this at the Game Awards?
I ended up staying away to watch that pos and this was the only game trailer that caught my eye.

This is that ONE game Chinese players are waiting for, cuz like InD said this was the first standalone Chinese arpg of AAA scale. (There are some salty gacha players talking shit on the game though, trying to prove the Chinese gaming market has to be gacha only with no room for large standalone titles).

They had held a playtest event in China back in August, presenting a bunch of the bosses from the TGA trailer. Have to say the game looks solid even though souls-like combat isn't my take (i've had enough with stamina-based combat, butinterconnected map design is welcomed).

IGN recently published a critic article on the game, claiming GS's "gender-discriminative" talks in the past (and they brought up the topic again when the TGA trailer was released). They basically took dev's words from the Chinese internet community but ignoring the local internet culture & memes. Luckily not many ppl give a shit nowadays.

I know IGN was terrible, but I was not expecting them to do cyber highway robbery businesses/

 

[Azarkon]

To add to the Chinese RPG topic, the future doesn't look bright.
The sequel to the Faith of Danschant which was announced 2 years ago has remained silent since the start of this year. I can't be 100% sure, but from what I've heard in the industry, the project is canceled.
The same goes for the other essential title under 网元圣唐, Gujian 4 was announced but the core team had left the company (i think they launched their own studio but there's no public news). The mother company 网元圣唐 is more into mobile anime Gacha games recently, seeing the massive financial success of Mihoyo's Genshin Impact & others.

The longtime "opponent" of Gujian, and the starter of the Chinese "jRPG" genre, Sword & Fairy will no longer have any new standalone sequel according to Softstar. They have sold the IP to Chinese Mobile Gaming 中手游, whom're making a Genshin-like online open-world f2p RPG. It upset me when I realize S&F7 was made by a core team of 20ish ppl. (but it doesn't change the fact that the game plays like shit) And even then the game doesn't earn enough profit to justify the cost.

Pathea, the creator of great titles like Planet Explorers and My Time at Portia/Sandrock, had already turned into a shit hole years ago. They're hiring for a new arpg title, but i have no faith in them now.

There are dozens of indie studios making "souls-like" games using Unreal, basically re-skin of each other.

Giant tech companies like Netease, Mihoyo, and others who succeeded in f2p/mmo games are now investing in RPG areas. There's this on-developing game called Where Winds Meet from Netease that presented some interesting ideas. But it's Netease and they said "f2p", "mmo", "multi platforms", so fuck it. Arknight Endfield from Hypergraph is a game mixing Xenoblade & Factorio that looks fun, but again "f2p" "multi-platform". And then you have Mihoyo which I don't think I need to elaborate too much.

As someone who just stepped into the Chinese video game industry, the general atmosphere was pretty negative. There is a lot of money, but that doesn't generate good games. Everyone's talking about making AAA games but rarely talking about making fun games. So i guess the result is fair...

Is it any surprise that in a country well known for its piracy of anything digital, that "games as a service" have become the dominant form of commercial game development?

I thought that'd have been obvious.

China - and the rest of developing Asia's - propensity towards piracy has basically guaranteed that it becomes the center of "free to play, pay to win" gacha games. It's the only business model that could conceivably work there. That and the fact that most people don't even have PCs so mobile gaming dominance is basically inevitable.

We shouldn't expect any PC gaming renaissance to come out of China or any where in Asia.

We should expect them to seriously disrupt the mobile space, though. Actually, it's already happening; I can't even name a Western developer even trying to compete with the Chinese on "AAA mobile games" any more.

 

[GuardHei]

To add to the Chinese RPG topic, the future doesn't look bright.
The sequel to the Faith of Danschant which was announced 2 years ago has remained silent since the start of this year. I can't be 100% sure, but from what I've heard in the industry, the project is canceled.
The same goes for the other essential title under 网元圣唐, Gujian 4 was announced but the core team had left the company (i think they launched their own studio but there's no public news). The mother company 网元圣唐 is more into mobile anime Gacha games recently, seeing the massive financial success of Mihoyo's Genshin Impact & others.

The longtime "opponent" of Gujian, and the starter of the Chinese "jRPG" genre, Sword & Fairy will no longer have any new standalone sequel according to Softstar. They have sold the IP to Chinese Mobile Gaming 中手游, whom're making a Genshin-like online open-world f2p RPG. It upset me when I realize S&F7 was made by a core team of 20ish ppl. (but it doesn't change the fact that the game plays like shit) And even then the game doesn't earn enough profit to justify the cost.

Pathea, the creator of great titles like Planet Explorers and My Time at Portia/Sandrock, had already turned into a shit hole years ago. They're hiring for a new arpg title, but i have no faith in them now.

There are dozens of indie studios making "souls-like" games using Unreal, basically re-skin of each other.

Giant tech companies like Netease, Mihoyo, and others who succeeded in f2p/mmo games are now investing in RPG areas. There's this on-developing game called Where Winds Meet from Netease that presented some interesting ideas. But it's Netease and they said "f2p", "mmo", "multi platforms", so fuck it. Arknight Endfield from Hypergraph is a game mixing Xenoblade & Factorio that looks fun, but again "f2p" "multi-platform". And then you have Mihoyo which I don't think I need to elaborate too much.

As someone who just stepped into the Chinese video game industry, the general atmosphere was pretty negative. There is a lot of money, but that doesn't generate good games. Everyone's talking about making AAA games but rarely talking about making fun games. So i guess the result is fair...

Is it any surprise that in a country well known for its piracy of anything digital, that "games as a service" have become the dominant form of commercial game development?

I thought that'd have been obvious.

China - and the rest of developing Asia's - propensity towards piracy has basically guaranteed that it becomes the center of "free to play, pay to win" gacha games. It's the only business model that could conceivably work there. That and the fact that most people don't even have PCs so mobile gaming dominance is basically inevitable.

We shouldn't expect any PC gaming renaissance to come out of China or any where in Asia.

We should expect them to seriously disrupt the mobile space, though. Actually, it's already happening; I can't even name a Western developer even trying to compete with the Chinese on "AAA mobile games" any more.

What you said is mostly correct but I guess you didn't really get my previous point. The point is not the sudden turn to GAAS -- it already happened 15years ago during the MMO era. More so, it's those well-know standablone developers in the industry are now giving up and completely give ways to GAAS.

Also personally i wouldn't blame to much on piracy. Piracy is merely the result; economy, institution and social recognition were the root causes. I don't wanna go deeper for cyber security reasons. But if you check out recent news about the new Policy Draft on the Chinese video game industry, then you probably get what I'm talking about.

 

[Modron]

Didn't realize the Tale of Wuxia's peoples next game is set to drop in 10 days:

Is Tencent really involved? I am kind of unwilling to touch any of their stuff with a ten foot pole.

 

[Jinn]

No English as usual anyway, so who gives a shit.

 

[Retardo]

No English as usual anyway, so who gives a shit.

I'd expect MTL fan-translation soon

 

[InD_ImaginE]

No English as usual anyway, so who gives a shit.

I'd expect MTL fan-translation soon

Assuming Heluo is using latest Unity version it won't be that easy.

The LCCP Unity is not playing bice with usual translation tool (Xunity translation using Bepinx) and probably require an actual programmer

And unlike PoW, right now not everbody is hime stuck with free time like during Covid

That being said I have access to GPT API which is much better so if a team is formed I will try to contribute a bit and use my paltry Chinese for editting

 

[abnaxus]

 

[pakoito]

Are they still using Google Translate for these? The LLMs are much better at translation, specially of longer paragraphs or connected text.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Are they still using Google Translate for these? The LLMs are much better at translation, specially of longer paragraphs or connected text.

In case of image like this, Google Lens (Or a similar name kinda forgot), is still the best for OCR purposes (e.g. extracting the text from the image). The free alternative is Tesseract but it requires manual training by user (well theoretically you can upload the trained model online later for other people to use).

For the actual translation, for Chinese to English, Google Translate is not really good. DeepL and Baidu are best in my experience so far, stil fiddling around with GPT. That being said CN - EN in general are still miles behind more established language. For moonrunes Japan - EN is probably the best these days due to massive ammount of translated Japanese media that is used for training.

 

[abnaxus]

New Heluo game out for some hours, mixed reviews

Gonna be a gud game in three-four years like Ho tu lo shu

 

[InD_ImaginE]

New Heluo game out for some hours, mixed reviews

Gonna be a gud game in three-four years like Ho tu lo shu

A lot off asshurt of the game basically almost having 0 sound effects. And seems to be buggy with performance issue

 

[abnaxus]

can't believe this even works

 

[notpl]

can't believe this even works

Reviews are terrible, let us know what you think.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

can't believe this even works

Autotranslator?

 

[abnaxus]

The Reipatcher that worked with Ho tu lo shu works for me.

The game has the investigation/Ace Attorney stuff from Fate Seeker 2 which I don't mind. Performance wise it runs on Win7 10+ year old pc.

There's huge butthurt that main character has crush on the "senior sister" who's murdered in the prologue, then spends rest of the game moping while the male party members get all the wifus. Chink players want their harem and fukk it too.

 

[abnaxus]

I put down some $hekels and tested various ChatGPT models once I got it working with autotranslator

Spoiler

still needs some work but playable enough

 

[Jinn]

That's not bad at all. Like, much better than Tale of Wuxia's "official" translation, and miles better than Lash's Ho Tu Lo Shu patch.