Chapter 139
Chapter 139
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 139
Chapter Title: Malice (1)
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The year had passed, and a few more months had gone by. It was now April 2018.
Development had proceeded without any major incidents, which was undoubtedly a good thing, but that didn't mean it was all smooth sailing.
It had been exactly one year of development, the perfect time for the first wave of monotony to set in.
‘It's about that time.’
It was an unstoppable current.
After all, humans are creatures of adaptation.
They eventually grow accustomed to any hardship or stimulus, and that familiarity soon turns into stagnation.
So, the only thing to do was to stamp out this burgeoning monotony in its early stages.
I wasn't going to use any extraordinary method.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say I'd use a very classic one.
“Let's take a week off.”
A break.
“Eh? Really?”
Broad smiles bloomed on the employees' faces.
I nodded and repeated myself.
“Yes, it's about time for a refresh.”
They might be happy now, but not later.
‘It'll be tougher when they come back.’
The point at which you start seeing things you missed while buried in work is right after your brain has had a chance to clear out.
In other words, this vacation was meant to release all their tension and refresh their minds.
By the time they returned, they would all start to feel a strange sense of disconnect from the work they were doing just before.
The work would become difficult again.
“Development Team 1 is closing for the week. Everyone, get some rest.”
The same went for me.
Lately, I'd fallen into a rut with the production of *Hellic 4*.
The path forward had already been found in the earlier stages of development.
‘I should catch up on some games.’
I needed to get *Hellic 4* out of my head.
* * *
“Yeon-ho! Dinner's ready!”
“Okay.”
When it comes to relaxing, nothing beats my parents' house.
If I stayed at my own place, there'd be no one to cook for me and no one to interrupt me, so I'd quickly fall back into thinking about work.
That's just how your childhood home is, isn't it?
For some reason, coming back to the room I lived in as a kid makes me feel like I've returned to that time. Like I've become just as immature as I was back then.
Anyway, what I mean is that the desire to just eat, sleep, and play surges within me.
The scene at home was always the same.
My mother would be simmering a stew, its aroma filling the house.
My father would be watching baseball again, shouting, "Ah, for fuck's sake!"
Suddenly recalling the time right after my regression, I felt a wave of nostalgia.
Come to think of it, hadn't my father, who once declared, "I'm a son of a bitch if I ever watch baseball again," been proving his canine lineage for ten years now?
It was even more so when I looked back at my memories from before the regression.
‘Was it 2023?’
I remembered my father, with the happiest face I'd ever seen, saying this year was different because the Giants had somehow started the season with an eight-game winning streak.
Of course, they tanked afterward... but well, he must have been happy during the winning streak.
There is a grand flow of fate.
No matter that I was a regressor, I couldn't defy the corrective forces of the world.
Regrettably, my father was a man I could not save.
So I should just focus on my own work.
“Mom, there's no meat in the stew.”
“I put tuna in it.”
“Eh.”
“Aish, how old are you to be complaining about side dishes?!”
“What about ham?”
“Wait! I'll fry some for you!”
Soon after, Spam was served on the table.
It was salty, packed with sodium—the taste of your blood vessels being destroyed.
In other words, it was delicious.
“Thank you for the meal.”
After getting up from the table, I went straight to my room and sat down.
I started a game.
‘The timing is perfect.’
The release of 'Legend of War,' the game that would sweep this year's GOTY awards, was just four days ago.
Funnily enough, playing this game reminded me of *Hellic 1*, my first project after regressing.
‘This was the inspiration for the one-take technique.’
In my memory, this was the game that implemented the one-take style most cleanly, so it left a deep impression.
Beyond that, evaluating it on various other points, the thought 'this is on another level' kept coming to mind.
‘It's so polished.’
There's a reason why games that sweep the GOTY awards do so.
Above all, what made this game so praiseworthy was how it magnificently revived an IP that had been dormant for over a decade, showing the protagonist's growth.
In the game, enough time had passed for the warmongering protagonist to become a dignified father.
In reality, the players who had enjoyed this IP in the past had also become much older.
I was no different.
Having rewound time and lived through a much longer period, I was now playing this game again.
The reason I felt so sentimental about it was simple.
‘Because it was well-made.’
It was a masterfully completed game that ensured the memories of the past weren't tarnished in the slightest.
The immersion created through narrative and directorial devices, and even the sense of impact achieved by utilizing the controller's vibration.
It wasn't without its flaws, but it was a game full of strengths that far outweighed them.
A game must speak for itself through its results.
If this game had been completed as a product that fell short of expectations, it would have been dismissed as a shoddy work that ruined memories.
That was the reality, and the reason why, as a developer, I had no choice but to respect them.
Lost in thought, I reached the ending before I knew it.
Three days had passed.
‘When does the sequel come out again?’
Since the story was split into Part 1 and Part 2, it would be a few years before the next installment.
It was a similar case to *Demon's Relic*.
Thinking about that gave me another headache.
It was because those two had been sparring more frequently lately.
—I'll bring a proposal that will make your eyes pop!!!
—President! I told you to wait!
I had pulled all the Team 2 members who had been temporarily assigned to *Hellic 4*.
Now that we had firmly established ourselves in the subculture market, we needed to finalize the proposal for *Demon's Relic 2*, review it, and push forward with a development announcement.
The result was sparring.
What was it again? They were arguing about whether Part 2's story should be about corrupting the angels or embracing them with love.
I wished they would reach an amicable agreement either way, but the reality was I was afraid one of them would get injured and have to take sick leave.
Heavy sighs escaped me.
I forced the thought out of my mind.
‘Rest. I need to rest.’
I swapped out the game title.
*Demon Soul 3*. Even though it came out last year, I'd only managed to play through it once because of other work. I decided to finish playing the game from the originators of the Soulslike genre.
* * *
After a week-long vacation, the office looked a little unfamiliar.
Of course, I readjusted in an instant.
“Welcome back, President.”
“Yes, it's been a while.”
Yang Gil-sang, who had been holding down the fort, greeted me warmly.
His face was glowing.
It looked like he'd been taking care of himself lately.
I suddenly realized that in my memory, the Yang Gil-sang of this period was already bald, but the one before me still had his hair.
It seems recommending a hair loss clinic in advance had paid off.
“Anything happen over the week?”
“Same as usual. We agreed you'd be contacted if anything urgent came up. There was nothing of the sort.”
I couldn't just feel relieved at Yang Gil-sang's shrugged reply.
“What about Team 2?”
“The sparring, you mean? Well, about that...”
...Even without asking further, the answer was already written on his face.
I turned my head away.
I left him and went to my desk, greeting the employees as they trickled in. Jo A-yun approached.
“Ah, hello...!”
Jo A-yun's beaming face was free of any worries.
I gave a slight nod and asked.
“What did you do on your break?”
“Grinding...!”
“...Right.”
The answer came out like a bullet.
I let Jo A-yun go and exchanged greetings with others.
Myeong-gyu seemed to be really into interior design; he said he went furniture shopping.
The excitable duo said they helped Myeong-gyu, and Han Seo-rim...
‘She was in a flame war, wasn't she.’
She was obviously at home.
I had belatedly discovered traces of her lurking on game forums all week, acting as the self-proclaimed guardian of *Hellic*.
She doesn't even know how to relax. It's really worrying.
“Seo-rim, goo—”
“Yes.”
*Whoosh*. Han Seo-rim brushed past me with uncanny footwork.
Seeing her sit down and immediately turn on her computer, it seemed she was hungry for work.
She's a stimulating person.
‘I need to work hard too.’
I sat down and turned on my computer.
I roughly sorted through the piled-up paperwork and began a full review of the development progress.
That is, I started re-examining the things I had overlooked due to monotony.
The early chapters already had rough textures applied, giving the feel of running the main game on low settings.
There were bugs scattered everywhere, but it wasn't unplayable.
You could basically say I was doing the QA myself.
Anyway, in doing so, I realized something.
Just as I'd suspected.
‘Right, I thought things were going too smoothly.’
This game... it's blander than I thought.
* * *
What was the problem? Why was it so bland?
When I really dug into it, the answer came quite easily.
‘It's too easy. Especially the maps.’
In other words, the balance is a bit shoddy.
Come to think of it, that made sense.
*Hellic 4* had implemented several mechanics to lower the notoriously high entry barrier of the Soulslike genre.
Naturally, these were measures intended for the boss battles, the highlight of any Soulslike.
However, this had drastically lowered the difficulty in the pathfinding stages before the boss to the point where it no longer felt stimulating.
For example, it's like this.
—When were you under the impression you were making a Soulslike?
I had been under a delusion.
This was no longer a Soulslike, or even its sub-category, a Soulslite. It was just an ordinary adventure game.
No one playing this would feel the tension or pressure typical of a Souls game.
That was a huge misstep.
What does it mean for a game to have already deviated from its genre?
In cooking terms, it was like ordering a Western dish and getting Korean fusion instead.
But I couldn't just crank up the difficulty of regular mobs at this point.
The reason was clear.
‘The current combat balance, designed with bosses in mind, is at its most exquisite point.’
This was the framework we had built through a year of constant meetings.
Even if we tweaked the specific numbers, rewriting this framework entirely would be tantamount to scrapping everything we'd developed so far and massively extending the development period.
Of course, I'd do it if necessary, but finding another solution with less collateral damage had to be the priority.
‘What's missing?’
The unique tension, pressure, and the catharsis achieved through experience and effort in Souls games.
All those elements needed to be embedded not just in the boss fights, but also in the maps where players would spend even more time. But how?
‘Puzzles?’
Ridiculous.
‘A maze, then?’
No, that's just unpleasant fatigue.
A maze-like map would only add the stress of navigating to the game for most players.
The deliberation continued.
I began to sift through all the information and experiences from every game I had ever played.
‘A sense of danger that can be conveyed through the map...’
Just as I was pondering this.
A memory flashed through my mind.
—Ah! Who the fuck designed this game?! Seriously!!!
My head snapped up.
It was something I'd heard when I had Han Seo-rim play a Souls game once.
The words she had screamed after being killed by a mob that jumped out from a blind spot behind a corner.
A brilliant flash of light seemed to pierce through my brow.
That memory, the game currently in development, and the various difficulty balancing issues stemming from the difference between Soulslike and Soulslite all clicked into place in my mind like gears.
‘Yes...’
That was it.
*Hellic 4* had been neutered of the very foundation of Souls games.
‘...It was lacking.’
Malice.
The malice, that persistent, tenacious feeling of wanting to piss the player off no matter what, was absent.
Basic traps.
Unexpected monsters dropping from spaces behind corners or from the ceiling.
Or the malicious placement of things like unavoidable poison swamps.
None of those things existed in *Hellic 4*.
I opened my mouth.
“Mr. Ji-seok, Mr. Ho-su.”
“Yes?”
“You called?”
I stood up from my seat.
“Let's call a meeting.”
Now that I knew the problem, it was time to formulate a solution.