Project Hwarang (2)
Friday evening, the promised day. The demo version of Hwarang was released on Sting, the world's largest ESD platform.
People who'd built up expectations from the pre-released videos on Neotube, people who had nothing better to do and wandered over out of curiosity, and people who'd been trashing it saying there's no way it'll live up to the trailer — all of them downloaded the game at the same time.
"…The file size isn't that big?"
Seong-hun, who'd become an overnight celebrity after clips of him screaming about selling his stocks were exported all over the world, felt a twinge of suspicion when he saw the demo was only 15GB.
Looking at the trailer footage, the full game would easily be over 100GB, so seeing even the demo clock in at only 15GB made a sense of unease creep over him.
"Well, let's just try it."
As a streamer whose main job was internet broadcasting, his download speed was one thing he had going for him. He hit the download button, went to the bathroom for a bit, and by the time he came back, it was done.
"Just a quick taste?"
With a casual mindset, Seong-hun pressed the launch button and prepared to get up for more water when he saw all the additional files being installed. But the screen instantly went black, the two characters for Hwarang appeared, and then immediately cut to a rain-soaked forest.
"What the... nothing else to install?"
He started moving the character around following the control prompts on screen to properly taste the freshly launched game, and found goosebumps spreading all over his body.
"No way, guys, can you see the water splashing off the bamboo hat?"
From the puddles on the muddy ground to the raindrops interacting in real-time with the bamboo hat and clothes. Since he was a broadcaster who'd invested heavily in his setup, there was zero lag.
"Whoa... the graphics are just insane?"
He'd been half hopeful, half worried after watching the trailer, but actually playing the released demo made those worries melt away like snow — though tears threatened to spill from regret over the stocks he'd sold off.
After the tutorial ended with that visual shock and he started properly exploring the open-world map, the only word that came out was "insane." Walking around stepping on all kinds of twigs, pebbles, and rain-soaked mud, it already felt like a crazy game.
As he roamed the map, the tutorial boss appeared. Along with it came the difficulty selection screen.
"Hmm. If you're a man, you go Hard, right?"
With baseless confidence in his gaming skills, he skimmed through the instructions, selected Hard difficulty, drew his sword, and charged at the fierce-looking boss.
THWACK—!
Seong-hun's character took a direct hit to the head from the boss's massive club and died.
"The impact and action are really good, but I'll lower the difficulty a bit. I don't think I can beat it."
He barely tore his eyes away from the chat spamming "loser" and lowered the difficulty to Medium before clearing the boss.
"Ah. This is it."
With the boss defeated, the content offered in the demo came to an end.
The chat was filled with positive reactions, which was nice to see — probably because the stream was entertaining — but Seong-hun himself couldn't believe a Korean game company had produced an AAA-quality game of this level.
"Ah... please just release the full game already. Releasing just a demo is such a tease, what are we supposed to do...!"
The concerns that had dominated public opinion before the game launched had completely vanished, replaced by anticipation about how good the full release would be if the demo was already this impressive.
At the same time, in the top-floor conference room of Empire, a game company famous in South Korea for all sorts of reasons. The room was filled with employees in a somber mood, while the chairman sat at the head of the table with a displeased expression, arms crossed.
"Why is everyone silent? Department head, how about you say something?"
At the chairman's sarcasm, the department head bowed his head and silently prayed for this meeting to end.
"How much money have we poured in over the past few years?"
He threw the question at the executives gathered in the room with a voice laced with anger, but no one answered.
"Why no answer! I asked how much we spent!"
At his voice, which had finally exploded from pent-up frustration, one employee jumped up and spoke with a trembling voice.
"Approximately 480 billion won, Chairman..."
"Right. 500 billion. We dumped 500 billion over the past few years trying to make one successful game. And how much have we recovered? Maybe 100 billion?"
"I'm sorry, Chairman."
As the employee who'd stood up to report the figures bowed his head in apology, the chairman's anger flared even more.
"How many games have you developed in that time? How much money and manpower did I provide? And not a single one has recovered its development costs! The company's image is in the gutter. And yet those Neo Gate nobodies made something like this, while you — you take your salaries and bring me crap like this as a finished product?"
Their own game, developed and released with the mindset that it was their last chance, had vanished without even receiving any attention. Scheduled for release next Thursday, the roughly 200 billion won invested in this final all-out development effort was about to become worthless scrap paper without receiving any interest at all.
"I'll admit we were short on time. But what excuse do you have for this difference in quality?"
The CTO stood up to calm the chairman, who'd started pointing fingers with a face flushed red, and began to explain.
"Chairman... I'm sorry to say this, but it's not an excuse — achieving results like that is simply difficult. Considering that even a graphics card nearly a decade old can maintain 60 frames per second on the demo version, the development from compression algorithms to physics engines has overturned industry common sense. I'm sorry, but we don't have the capability to make something like that. Neither does any other company."
In a situation where the CTO was clearly about to face the chairman's wrath, the business director stood up and shot the CTO a look.
"We can still make money anyway. If we abandon the originally planned operation model for this new release and run it with the BM we do best, we can recover the development costs easily enough. As the CTO explained, the other side developed a game of that quality — in my view, there's absolutely no way they'll recover their development costs."
Trying to calm the chairman down and end this meeting as quickly as possible, he spun all sorts of sweet-talking nonsense around him.
"We'll introduce special equipment and additional BM."
This was Director Choi, the person with the most influence here and the one running their cash cow, Revolution.
"It seems the CTO was so shocked that his words came out a bit off. Honestly, if we had enough time and investment, we could make something like that too. Those Neo Gate idiots are stupid — they made something like that and didn't even include mythic weapons or mounts, that's why they'll always be a mid-tier company. So don't worry too much, Chairman. We'll squeeze as much money as we can from the users, invest big, and if we succeed, I'm confident we can hit 200 billion in sales in the first month."
Rather than the loyal subjects who gave realistic yet unpleasant advice, knowing the chairman's wrath would fall on them, the chairman's face lit up with a smile at Director Choi's sweet-talking flattery.
"As expected of you. First, scrape together as much money as you can from those pig-dog bastards for about a year. The rest of you, bring in as much money from outside as possible. We have history and scale — why wouldn't we be able to make something like that? Those Neo Gate guys are idiots too. They make something like that and can't even think to include PVP and mythic weapons."
"That's right, Chairman. Thanks to them making a good game, we're going to fill our bellies."
Watching the chairman laugh heartily and gulp down water, apparently cheered up by Director Choi's flattery, the CTO sensed that the future of the company he worked for was dark and thought he should prepare to change jobs.
"User response is very positive. Especially since higher specs allow for deeper graphical enjoyment, the reaction among users with high-end PCs is particularly good."
Of course, that doesn't mean the response from mid-range and low-spec users is bad. Setting the graphics options to Medium or Low means you can't enjoy the spine-tinglingly realistic graphics, but since the game was developed to still provide sufficiently good graphics and a smooth experience, there aren't any particular complaints.
"At this level, we could skip most of the promotional process and just release it directly, right? Since there's no negative feedback either, it'd be better to launch before this buzz dies down."
"Then shall we make it next week? The game is already complete, so there's no issue with releasing it."
"Let's do that. Looking at the hot response, we don't really need to promote it anyway."
The media, having learned that a Korean game company produced a well-researched historical game of high quality, was promoting it on their own, and even without any advertising budget, Neotubers and streamers were all playing Hwarang and promoting it — so it looked like we could freeload on the promotional budget too.
"Freeload the development costs, freeload the promotion. Making games is easy, huh?"
Neo Gate had already taken off to Mars after the trailer reveal, and with the in-game response also positive, it looked like the stock price could cruise on Monday too.
"I'll develop the DLC based on user response after the official release."
"Do whatever you want with that, but give me the full release. Let me have a taste in advance."
I was planning to wait for the official release, but after trying the demo, I can't hold out.