Chapter 178
Chapter 178
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Translator: Vine
Chapter: 178
Chapter Title: DLC (3)
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“The reaction is great, as expected. For the Warden.”
Han Seo-rim, the community forum addict, remarked.
The sight was particularly striking: she was smiling brightly and talking to me, but her eyes never left her phone.
“Seeing everyone dying left and right makes me feel strangely proud. I think you've given me a weird taste in things, senior.”
“That's because you're on the forum...”
“I'm not. I'm just here to check the game's reception.”
“...Right.”
An awkward silence fell, and I shifted my thoughts.
I decided to focus on the current situation.
‘It's going well.’
The plan to release the GOTY Edition and the DLC as a bundle was a success.
It wasn't just anything; it boosted initial sales, allowing word-of-mouth about the DLC's content to spread wider and faster.
Truthfully, I couldn't have been more confident about the DLC's content.
This was because we used the most memorable bosses from the evaluation samples we'd accumulated throughout development, and their mechanics were already perfected in previous titles.
All I did was tune them to fit the soulslike format.
How could it possibly fail?
If I had to pick something memorable from the process, it would have to be the Warden.
‘This one was quite difficult.’
The Warden is a boss who has appeared in every Hellic game, his stature growing with each installment.
There was plenty of data and samples to create the core of its patterns, but weaving them together and molding them into a soulslike form was a headache.
First off, there was the Warden's position within the series.
Invincible, the strongest, the judge, a walking disaster, and terror itself.
The Warden had to be overwhelming.
Furthermore, the battle had to be fearsome and grotesque, not flashy and grand.
But that was difficult.
Because typically, as a game's graphics improve, the visual horror or grotesqueness it conveys tends to diminish.
In pixel graphics, the Warden's straightforward slaughter felt grotesque because almost all of its lore-based expressions were obscured.
In polygon graphics, the Warden's grotesqueness was amplified by the way its clay-like body contorted bizarrely as it charged.
But in Hellic 4, this creature, crafted by the art team pouring their souls into the latest engine, was a model that couldn't rely on the horror element of the brain's "imagined images."
The fully rendered visual image limited the scope of horror processed by the imagination. How could we use this to instill even greater fear in the player than previous games?
No matter how well we made it, to players with a tolerance for gore, it might just come across as, "Its eyes and nose look weird."
Thus, the entire planning team wracked their brains and came to a conclusion.
- If we can't do it visually, how about we compensate in other areas?
- For example?
- We create an atmosphere. We add impact through sound and direction, and increase the psychological pressure by raising the difficulty of its patterns and mechanics.
The idea was to make up for the visual shortcomings in other areas.
It was the most realistic plan, and so the entire staff threw themselves into creating the perfect Warden.
The art team created dozens of models for the Warden's movements alone, selecting only the best.
The motion capture team, under Kim Bae-seok's direction, hired acrobatic dancers to set the attack trajectories into an unconventional range.
The sound team poured in so much labor that Jo A-yun worked overtime through the night.
In the programming team, some people even fell ill from the stress of controlling variables that occurred during the execution of mechanics.
That was how it was created.
The most soulslike Warden, destined to be rated as the most difficult of all time.
Of course, there was one more thing to consider.
Since the Warden appeared in the game as a boss monster, the player had to defeat it.
In other words, we were in a situation where we had to inflict defeat upon the Warden, a character whose narrative setting was "does not lose."
The solution was, in fact, easy.
It was a problem that could be solved with direction.
『LordOfBlood_Bangbae : Aaaah!!! I beat it!!!
But I guess a prisoner can't really beat the Warden.
What's with the final phase being to push him into a rift? lolololol
StolenHellic: But it would have been weirder if the protagonist actually won lol
┕OneMoreKing: fr lol』
The way Jade Wilson defeated the Warden.
It wasn't by winning, but by 'chasing it back to where it came from.'
The Warden had what the industry commonly calls a "zero-bar phase"... a mechanic that appears after its health bar is fully depleted.
***
One of the absolute propositions of the hell that Hellic portrays.
Those who fall into hell can never harm those who belong to hell.
The clearest example of this was the existence of the 'Warden.'
No matter how skilled he was, Jade Wilson was a prisoner.
And the mere possibility that he might one day reach the choice of self-destruction made him a target for the 'Azure Warden,' the one in charge of the Hell of the Self-Destructors.
He could put up a good fight, but he could not win.
As the proposition dictated, Jade Wilson fought the Warden for a long time.
At the end, he sensed his own defeat.
*Screeeech—*
Jade's body was covered in wounds from the Warden, who swung its saw-blade in bizarre trajectories from all sorts of unimaginable directions, as if defying the laws of physics.
Convinced that fighting further would not change the outcome, Jade's expression grew even grimmer.
It was then.
-...!
Jade's eyes widened.
A rift in space-time had appeared in his vision.
Not the rift he had arrived through, but another one.
Anyone who wasn't a fool would know it was the one the Warden had come through.
Jade gritted his teeth and rushed at the Warden.
He aimed his revolver at various parts of its body, guiding the Warden toward the rift.
Then, he created an opening.
-Screech...!
The moment the Warden's center of gravity shifted forward, Jade Wilson intentionally let its saw-blade strike his shoulder, twisting his body slightly to position the Warden in front of the rift.
Immediately after, he kicked the Warden's back with a loud *thud!*, shoving it into the rift.
-Screeeech...!
The unpleasant noise grew more distant.
The rift wavered, and then closed.
Jade's body collapsed forward.
He lay on the floor, panting heavily, and as the cinematic ended, text appeared on the screen.
[YOU ALIVE]
You have survived.
It was the only clear notification in Hellic 4 that could be seen by defeating the Warden.
“Phew...!”
Sujin let out a long breath and slumped her shoulders.
The mental fatigue was on another level.
Above all, her number of attempts had reached double digits, including the time she died in a panic from the zero-bar phase that appeared just when she thought it was over.
This was a monster you could never beat unless you got used to it.
It was different from other bosses... an enemy on par with the hidden bosses from the main Hellic 4 game.
“We beat it!”
Seok-hun cheered, clenching his fist.
Sujin chuckled and replied.
“Wow, that was really hard. But this alone makes buying the DLC worth it.”
Indeed, the Warden was a boss monster that perfectly embodied the concept of being 'satisfyingly difficult.'
As a player who had now tried several soulslike and roguelike games, Sujin could grasp this level of difficulty.
‘Someone at Oppa's level...’
Well, I guess he'd finish it in around twenty tries.
In any case, it wasn't her concern, so Sujin put down the controller and stretched her neck.
She was thinking of stopping there, but at that moment, Seok-hun's eager gaze reminded her of something she had forgotten.
“Ah, I haven't checked the Warden's reward.”
“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
Seeing Seok-hun's eyes sparkle like a child's as he urged her on, Sujin burst out laughing.
“Alright. Let's see it now.”
She picked up the controller again.
And so, the two of them were able to check the item from this dreadful boss.
“Oh...”
Scream-Devouring Saw-Blade
On hit, inflicts an additional 300 bleed and infection damage over 3 seconds.
A superior longsword-class item with decent stats.
And one more thing, a firearm accessory.
Seeing the name of the item that dropped, Seok-hun let out a sharp laugh.
Deep Azure Wing Fragment (Body)
A wing fragment from a certain prisoner executed by the Warden long ago.
Upon an execution attack, summons phantom butterflies equal to the number of bullets used.
Each butterfly grants 130% additional attack power to the next melee attack, consumed on use.
There was no mistaking what this item was.
“Look at this guy, Cheon Yeon-ho, and his marketing tactics.”
Seok-hun immediately thought of the next title in the release lineup: the Hellic 2 remake.
This was probably a build-up to promote its sales.
Apart from that, another thought came to mind.
‘As expected...!’
When it comes to fan service, no one does it better than Rewind.
***
The DLC's popularity was nothing short of sensational.
Despite its short length, the compact content had no dull moments and definitively provided 'value worth the extra money.'
Setting aside everything else, the prevailing opinion was that the boss fight with the Warden alone was worth the price.
In addition, the final boss fight against 'Jade Wilson of the Bad Ending' received a response just as enthusiastic as the Warden's.
『RetakingTheExam: Seriously, forget everything else, the execution counter animation was insane lololol
I was playing and got so mesmerized by the animation that I just spaced out
I had to retry because of it...』
The final boss fight featured a mechanic called the 'Execution Counter.'
Since the concept was the present and future of the same being, the boss's patterns naturally included a revolver execution.
The player could carefully observe the telltale signs and use a tactic to counter the boss's execution with their own.
Doing so would add a bonus to the execution damage and, at the same time, trigger a new animation.
The experience of two revolvers, two gunshots, and two impacts weaving together into a single symphony of ecstasy for the eardrums.
The beauty of the interlocking bullets and the lines formed by their subsequent trajectories, visually showing the traces of countless nights spent pondering 'how to make this insanely cool.'
And on top of that, the controller's vibrations were subtly synchronized, allowing you to feel it all through your sense of touch.
Everything was perfect.
It was designed for the player to feel an overwhelming sense of catharsis from the battle itself.
It was an example of utilizing the soulslike genre to its absolute limit.
It was an instance where the control over tension and its explosive release was perfected.
And so, Hellic 4, which had already achieved substantial sales, began to see its sales figures pump up once again.
For Rewind, it was a virtuous cycle.
The DLC gained popularity, which spread through word-of-mouth and became a trend among internet streamers, which in turn served as its own promotion to people who hadn't played Hellic 4, thus forming a new inflow of players to the Hellic series.
Yeon-ho's goal, Rewind's ultimate mission, was truly just around the corner.
Around that time, the entire global game industry, not just in Korea, began to pay close attention to whether a soulslike game could achieve the unprecedented record of 10 million sales within a year of its release.
[Luka: Seems totally possible, doesn't it?]
[micetester: What's the record at now? Hasn't there been an official announcement?]
Eager voices could be heard from all over.
Somewhere, spiteful prayers that it would be absolutely impossible also leaked out.
Then one day.
An article finally made its way to the media.
[Hellic 4 Surpasses the 10 Million Mark.]
Impossibility is proven futile when a counterexample emerges.
In June 2020, an achievement that shattered the industry's common sense was established.