The barb feels good for a while, and the barb always feels good.
To this day, I still remember the experience of playing Werewolf with my friends.
After a day of classes, we would huddle up on our respective beds to keep a safe distance, put on wired or wireless headphones, and get ready to star in "Cat and Mouse" and enter the game. The distance ensures that everyone's mobile phone screen will not be peeked, and the headphones allow us to communicate with teammates in the game without hearing the surrounding sounds.
After each game ends and the identities are revealed, there is always an afterthought discussion involving the winners and losers.
The atmosphere is always lively, but the content is nothing more than chicken-and-duck talk. The conversations are basically "Why don't you get XX out? It's so obvious" and "I can tell you are XX from the Nth day."
To be honest, I am really happy to be happy. This is almost the only opportunity to lie to my friends casually without affecting my relationship. But it’s really tiring. No matter which camp you are in, you have to burn your brains and plot against each other. Playing several high-quality games in a row, your brain will be somewhat overloaded.
The popularity of "Goose and Duck" brought this memory that I would never think of back to my eyes again.
Although signs began to appear at the end of the year, many people thought this game would become popular, but no one expected that this game, popularized by anchors, would become as popular as it is now.
On January 2, the game server crashed due to too many online players at the same time. As a result, it became a hot search topic on Weibo. The production team from abroad urgently apologized to the players, saying that they were not prepared to handle 250,000 simultaneous online players and were simultaneously expanding the server capacity.
However, the speed at which the production team expanded the server could not keep up with the skyrocketing number of players. Just one day later, the same crash occurred again.
Starting from January 2nd, January 3rd, January 4th, January 5th and January 6th, "Goose and Duck Killing" was on the hot search almost every day due to server crashes. On January 2, the production team said that the number of simultaneous online players was only 250,000. By January 6, it had risen to 563,000, and the number will obviously continue to rise with the popularity.
There is no doubt that Chinese players account for the majority of the player base of "Goose and Duck".
Those KOLs in the gaming circle who are in different fields but equally influential are the "culprits" of this "fraud".
In the LOL circle, there are veteran professional players PDD and "Teacher Ma" Wuhu Da Sima; a large number of anchors in the APEX circle have also given up their "own jobs" and started a side job in "Goose and Duck Killing"; KPL of "Glory of Kings" Professional players became a hot search topic because of their game "Goose and Duck Kill" and "Goose and Duck Kill formed kpl team building"; "Yiaotuan Tuan", which started from PUBG short videos and now has 40 million fans on Douyin, has also become "Yiaotuan Tuan" The "tap water" of "Goose and Duck Killing" has a "passionate" interaction with "Teacher Ma" in the game.
When "Goose and Duck" appears on the screens of many anchors in different fields, fans watching the anchor will naturally be eager to try it.
Some people want to "snipe" the anchors as much as possible and have the opportunity to "appear on TV", while others simply want to "play" and invite a few friends to join the game. The two directly form a network of hundreds of thousands of online players. denominator.
Obviously, the total of LOL players, APEX players, PUBG players and "Honor of Kings" players will be an extremely scary number.
Although it is limited to the host's fan base, in addition to the fact that the fan base itself is large enough, the naturally high spread of social games will also continue to increase the number of "early adopter" players.
There is no other reason why anchors have joined "Goose Duck Killing" – the live broadcast effect is really great.
As for how to play "Goose and Duck", we won't go into details here. You can think of it as a new "Space Werewolf". Let's directly talk about the similarities and differences between the "rookie" "Goose and Duck" and the most popular example of domestic "killing games" "Werewolf".
The biggest difference between the two is the reason why the live broadcast of "Goose and Duck Killing" is so effective——
Free mic at close range.
In "Werewolf", which is not the originator but has far greater domestic influence than the originator, the order in which players speak is determined and there are not many opportunities to speak.
"Werewolf" has a concise and pure action process. Each character's turn of action has strict rules, and the speeches also have a rigid order of precedence. The once popular "Werewolf in Space" and "Among Us" Basically the same rules continue.
But this is not the case with the popular "Goose and Duck".
Although there is almost no difference between "Goose and Duck" and the former "Among Us" in terms of specific mini-game gameplay, player vision and action flow, "Goose and Duck" has the same characteristics as "Werewolf" and "Among Us". There is no close range free microphone, which ensures almost full voice communication between different camps, that is, the killer and the murdered, greatly increasing the possibility of interaction within the game.
Imagine that in "Werewolf", most of the victims are unable to interact with the killers, cannot experience the process of being "killed", and may not even know who killed them.
Similarly, in Among Us, although players can know who killed them, they still cannot communicate and interact with the murderer.
"Goose and Duck Killing" changed this process.
Although the good guys still need to complete various mini-game tasks and encounter the enemy camp on the map, and although the bad guys still have to destroy the good guys' camp's tasks, "Goose and Duck Killing" has close-range free wheat, which increases the variety of killings. The interaction between the perpetrator and the victim before the "killing" behavior occurs, thus maximizing the live broadcast effect.
For example, pretending to be a good guy by pretending to be a "Da Sima" and saying "What do you mean, don't come close to me, do you want to kill me? How do you say, don't come close to me, do you want to kill me?" to gain trust. After getting close, He shot out the knife in an instant, and successively prepared a live broadcast slice that started with killing several people. Because of the "full live broadcast effect", it received nearly 3.5 million views on station B.
The creative team of "Goose Duck Killing" is well aware of the uniqueness of the "free voice" design, and in order to strengthen voice interaction and diversify the gameplay, it also specially designed an interesting neutral character Pelican – the Pelican can swallow (confine) any Role. After being swallowed, these characters' original short-range free microphones were changed to "squad voice", and they could only interact with the characters who were also swallowed and the pelican voice.
The creative team intentionally made differentiated voice interaction gameplay, which directly became the favorite part of the anchors – a large number of intuitive voice interaction opportunities, which is the origin of the live broadcast effect.
Obviously, this wave of popularity will continue to rise. "Among Us" once had as many as two million simultaneous online players, and "Goose and Duck" currently has a high of 560,000, which is obviously just the beginning.
But problems have arisen.
A few days ago, the Steam comment section of "Goose and Duck Killing" was still a joke about "destroying CN APEX by oneself", but now, there have been many words attacking each other between players.
"Written to the little princesses" "To all the boiling ducks and beautiful ducks" "Can you please stop letting the village chief continue to formulate village rules?"
This is almost a common problem in social games like "killing games".
With the continuous influx of a large number of "early adopter" players, domestic "killing game" social games will basically have such contradictions – although "social" and "game" appear in the same word, the difference between the two is almost The players were divided into two groups.
The saying with high emotional intelligence is that players whose main purpose is "social" will care less about the rules and care more about and be familiar with the interaction between players.
The term "low emotional intelligence" is rather ugly, so I won't go into it here.
In short, whenever this happens, the player whose main purpose is "game" becomes part of the other player's "game". To a lesser degree, those who play the game according to the rules will perform "vendetta", "cheeking", "into the game" and other "operations", while to a more outrageous degree, they will even perform "peeping on the screen", "resurrecting the dead", etc. "Operations" outside the rules.
A player who had a similar experience made a very appropriate comment: "I am playing the game, they are playing me."
Ultimately, this behavior will greatly reduce the experience of serious game players, causing those players who do not have a stable team to gradually withdraw from the game. Then gradually, the "game" part was greatly downplayed, and "social interaction" became the most important element.
"Village rules" are something similar.
In addition to the officially provided custom rules, players will add rules similar to other games such as "Werewolf" into "Goose and Duck" based on some mysterious and mysterious "experience". However, this rule obviously does not necessarily apply to "Goose and Duck Killing", which is mainly based on the voice system and has a specially differentiated design.
But if you don't follow the "village rules", the player will be "exiled".
Although it has only become popular not long ago and is still in the "rocket-like continuous rise period" when the number of players is skyrocketing, the game environment of "Goose and Duck" has gradually appeared these various problems. Even "Brother Selling" All have appeared.
This is actually the old path taken by "Werewolf".
In the early years, with the popularity of the online game "Werewolf", coupled with subsequent efforts, video programs such as "Lying Man" or "Panda Kill" were played by anchors on major live broadcast platforms and high-level players. It has indeed given players many wonderful memories. The high-quality famous scenes of players such as JY, Huoshu, Li Si, Li Jin, etc. can still be vividly remembered in retrospect.
At that time, "Werewolf" naturally became the well-deserved "King of Social Games" in China.
But in the end, with the influx of a large number of "social players" who disregard the rules of the game, even if major manufacturers join the game one after another, trying to add new content and launch multiple versions, "Werewolf" can only gradually lose popularity and return to To the "niche scope" of offline board games.
Of course, social games like "killing games" played online have never been niche since "Werewolf".
With various works that enhance "interactivity", such as "Werewolf in Space", "Werewolf in Snow" and "Werewolf at Sea", as the popularity rises and falls, players who like similar games, You can always play a "cat-and-mouse game" starring each other with your familiar friends.
However, a sufficient number of "familiar friends" are required, which is already a very high "software" configuration.
The questions left to the creative team are equally daunting.
For them, who are still expanding their servers, it is possible that this free-to-play "Goose and Duck" can use its popularity to generate revenue, how to continue to introduce interesting enough new maps and characters, and even the most important thing, how to fight against "plug-ins". It's still on the planning list, but it's not an "in progress" issue yet.
Of course, the most important thing is how to ensure that the game experience matches the players.
And that is the "Werewolf" left to game creators.