Chapter 67: China Release and the Changing Era
Chapter 67: China Release and the Changing Era
Or perhaps it would be better to make it like a progressive tax, where the more spells learned, or the more capacity assigned to magic, the more time was required whenever that capacity exceeded a certain level.
[It feels a little disappointing that even after struggling to become a noble, it only lasts for one generation.]
Realistically speaking, becoming nobles across generations would make sense, but if they did that, the early part would be an RPG, and after a certain point, it would simply become a strategy simulation.
Moreover, this was a system added with MMORPGs in mind. If players became nobles after long playtime, turned into vested interests, and that status continued, one of the major weaknesses of MMORPGs would become even more pronounced.
One of the reasons Insu added lifespans instead of making characters live forever was to reduce the gap between entrenched veteran players and new users. Having another system offset that would make the design neither here nor there.
Insu came up with an idea where the character would become an ordinary adventurer again, but the family would continue ruling that region, giving small benefits such as being able to buy items slightly cheaper or more easily gain favor from characters in that area, thereby preserving immersion.
As for world events, they had been implemented simply for now, but the system had too many interlocking parts, so it was difficult to properly evaluate through the prototype.
[Still feels fresh.]
[It was good to have variables introduced.]
[It felt like becoming the protagonist of a real fantasy.]
Still, the evaluations were not bad overall.
Lastly, there was the evaluation of multiplayer mode.
[Definitely interesting.]
[Too unstable. I’m not sure whether it can be included in the official version.]
They had somehow managed to implement it, but it was truly only at the level of barely getting a feel for it. Errors and bugs erupted wildly from who knew where, making proper testing difficult.
Even so, while the team members felt uneasy, none of them denied that it was an interesting system.
Insu also had doubts about whether it could be made to work properly, but he would have to create an MMORPG later. He could not afford to get stuck at this level, so after some thought, he decided to keep pushing forward.
Afterward, Daniel systematically organized the bugs and submitted them.
He did not simply list what bugs existed. He divided them by severity, namely Critical, Major, and Minor, and also classified whether they were planning issues, development issues, or art-related issues.
In the past, Insu’s development team had been so small that classification itself held little meaning. But now that the team had grown, and more importantly, considering his plan to develop an MMORPG later, he needed to increase their systematic structure, so he demanded this approach from Daniel.
It would’ve been nice if we had BTS too.
Of course, he was not talking about the boy band. BTS was short for Bug Tracking System. Simply put, it was a bug management program.
It recorded where a problem occurred, who needed to fix it, whether it had been fixed, and so on. It was convenient when fixing bugs immediately, but it was also useful when secondary bugs occurred, since one could quickly find the problem and the person responsible. It could even be used for personnel evaluations.
However, tools like that only appeared in the late 1990s, so there was nothing he could do. More precisely, bug management tools existed even now, but they were not GUI-based and the systems were not integrated, making them inconvenient.
In truth, it was not an especially difficult program, so it was not impossible to make one themselves, but unfortunately, Insu did not have that kind of time. He simply used spreadsheets as best he could.
Insu desperately wanted to dump the debugging task distribution on someone else. But no matter how he thought about it, this was not something a QA manager could handle. It was the team leader’s job.
“Phew.”
In the end, he sighed and began breaking up and distributing the work. First, each bug went to the person who had made that module or code, but this did not mean the person who created the bug had to take responsibility. It was simply because debugging one’s own code was easier.
However, this method alone could not complete the distribution.
Sometimes one person had too many bugs to handle, while other areas had strangely few bugs.
Bugs were not something that automatically appeared less often just because someone was good at coding. Anyone who developed a few times would realize that immediately.
So the next step was dividing them according to each developer’s specialty and experience. Put more simply, he divided them based on the developers’ abilities.
They were all colleagues, but differences in ability could not be helped.
At least in Insu’s current development office, most people still lacked much experience, so their levels were not clearly divided yet. But as time passed, those evaluations would become clearer.
Among the team members who came from Korea, Park Yoonsu was rated higher than Yoo Juyeon. But for now, the difference was not that large.
In any case, Insu finished distributing the work, and the development office became hectic for a while with bug whack-a-mole.
During that time, Bit & Brew released TLF in France and Germany, and the results were also good. In fact, since these three countries combined accounted for sixty to seventy percent of the entire European market, it would not be an exaggeration to say it had achieved successful sales in Europe as well.
Bit & Brew seemed to have made the same judgment, because they did not wait until the game was distributed across all of Europe and immediately proceeded with the contract for MFN.
The revenue split was thirty-five percent, similar to TLF. The European market was apparently too fragmented, and localization and distribution costs were too high, so even for a hit title, anything higher seemed impossible.
Then TLF was released in China as well.
“Huh? This has an official version?”
This was an electronics shopping street in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, China. Liu Hai was a young man who liked computers and had great interest not only in domestic games but also foreign ones.
Because of that, he often visited this electronics market, and when he saw a poster saying that the famous TLF had officially launched, he approached the display stand.
At first, he thought it was a pirated copy or a counterfeit game. But when he saw the proper package and the YoungGun Soft logo stamped on it, he realized it was an officially imported product.
In truth, he had already played this game.
Most famous games were copied and brought in, after all. But the version he played was the Japanese version.
Since it mixed in Chinese characters, there were quite a few words he could at least recognize. However, the characters used were not completely the same, and with Chinese characters, meanings often changed depending on their combinations. So he had truly only been able to barely grasp the meaning.
I couldn’t really immerse myself and enjoy it. To begin with, there were many parts where I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Because of that, although he had enjoyed it quite a lot early on, he eventually stopped playing at some point.
There were translation patches, but their quality was terrible, and many carried viruses, so he had never bothered to find and use one.
Ah. I really do want to enjoy it properly in our language.
[Complete Translation]
That was why the phrase on the package stuck in his eyes and refused to leave. In the end, after some hesitation, he picked up the package.
Afterward, he returned home and was able to enjoy TLF in Cantonese. Playing while properly understanding everything felt like an entirely different experience.
“Ah! So that’s what this meant.”
If this had been the internet era, there would be walkthroughs for everything, but even in China, magazines did not publish guides for pirated games without official releases. If he got stuck while progressing, there was no solution.
Because of that, he had abandoned many quests, but now, solving them one by one felt incredibly refreshing.
Moreover, becoming stronger through the equipment he received as rewards multiplied that pleasure.
Afterward, he shared this experience with his friends, and several of them rushed to Tianhe District.
Insu felt good when he heard that China’s response to TLF was not bad. Honestly, since he had heard piracy was rampant there, he had almost no expectations.
He had thought of it as salvaging even a little and creating a foothold for entering China, but perhaps because the market itself was so large, or perhaps because the distributor was skilled, things had gone well regardless.
On top of that, the prototype had come out mostly as intended, so now there was nothing in particular to worry about, and he could focus on development.
That day as well, after devoting himself to development until six in the evening, he went home, finished dinner, and opened a gaming magazine in his room with a light heart.
“Huh?”
Then one article caught his eye.
<HOLLOW WARFARE>
At first, he only thought it was a newly released game. But he paused at the genre, first-person shooter, and when he saw the color-printed game scenes, he realized something.
Wolfenstein?
Unlike existing first-person games, the graphics clearly gave a sense of three-dimensionality. The simple and intuitive UI, along with the sense of speed he could imagine just from the images, reminded Insu of a game he had seen in his previous life.
It was Wolfenstein 3D, famous as the predecessor of Doom.
Instead of fighting in a Nazi stronghold, the player fought humanoid robots and soldiers in spacesuits inside a space base, but the distinctive first-person perspective of FPS games, with only the gun barrel and hand visible, immediately brought to mind Wolfenstein, the beginning of the modern FPS.
“So this came out.”
Doom was more famous, but most of its foundation began with Wolfenstein. Doom made that system feel “natural” through overwhelming popularity, but without Wolfenstein, Doom would not have existed either.
It was a great game that created the modern FPS and had an enormous influence on every game that came after it.
Insu felt strange.
In truth, if his goal had been to leave his name in gaming history, making Wolfenstein instead of an MMORPG would have been faster.
Though whether I could make it is another question.
If Insu had memorized the entire source code of Doom or Wolfenstein, that would be one thing. Otherwise, developing it would have been extremely difficult.
No, honestly, it would’ve been impossible.
Since he knew future FPS games, he could create a more advanced concept, but implementation was the problem.
In particular, understanding low-level environments like x86 assembly and DOS boxes, asset creation tools that considered pixel-level sprites and limited palettes, and above all, implementing a 2.5D graphics engine were honestly outside Insu’s range of ability.
(Translator’s Notes: DOS — Disk Operating System. A command-line operating system widely used before Windows became dominant.)
Wolfenstein and Doom were games made possible because a genius named John Carmack existed.
Once his thoughts reached that point, Insu unconsciously searched the article for the developer and company names.
[Sandfire Studios]
Raiden Cole.
He already had the nickname “Wizard.” Thinking of him as the name of a true genius of this world and this era made the hair on Insu’s body stand on end.
But he did not feel any inferiority complex or jealousy.
After all, this person and Insu belonged to different genres. That applied not only to the games they wanted to make, but also to their goals.
Of course, that’s assuming this person walks the same path as John Carmack…
And since Insu was not developing games through pure genius in the first place, rather than jealousy, what he felt was desire. If his development office had a genius like that, Insu’s ideas could probably be implemented much sooner.
Moreover, if this person was truly as much of a genius as John Carmack, he would likely possess the network development ability Insu desperately needed most.
John Carmack was an insane genius who created a system capable of real-time FPS multiplayer in the modem era, and even introduced a dedicated server structure for internet-based multiplayer in Quake.
(Translator’s Note: Quake — A landmark 1996 first-person shooter developed by id Software in the real world, famous for pioneering true real-time polygonal 3D graphics and online multiplayer FPS gameplay.)
However, no matter how much Insu wanted him, he was out of reach.
[The world is going wild over this new game!]
The fact that the article used such an expression meant the game was already enjoying successful sales. Common sense said there was no way the head of a development studio who finally achieved success after years of work would enter someone else’s company.