On August 12, 2024, in the office of Game Science Company in Zhuantang, Hangzhou, a general meeting was being held.The theme of this conference is “CE06 officially launched”.From August 12 to August 19, it is the sixth internal test time for the console game Black Myth: Goku.On August 20, Black Myth: Goku was officially released worldwide.
On August 20, 2020, “Black Myth: Wukong” released its first promotional film, and the broadcast volume of Bilibili broke 10 million on that day, and has exceeded 50 million so far, which is the highest broadcast volume of the game promotional film on Bilibili.The game, set in Journey to the West, claims to be China’s first 3A masterpiece in many years (a common but not accurately defined concept in the game industry, generally used to refer to high-cost, high-volume, high-quality buyout single-player games), which ignited the enthusiasm of players the moment the promotional film was released.
A word quickly circulated in the player’s mouth: “I was an assassin in Egypt, a hunter in the other world, a dragon hunter, a knight, everything.”.Now I finally see a glimmer of hope that I can return to the other world of my own country as a monkey brother.
In the future, every August 20, Game Science will release a new version of the promotional film to show players the progress.Finally, in 2024, this day became the release day of the game.
According to the internal statistics of Game Science, in the first two weeks after the release of most games on major platforms, complaints about the game focused on stability: the game was stuck, flashed back, reported errors, the screen crashed, the server was disconnected..These account for more than 50% of the bad reviews.”It seems that everyone wants to pursue those metaphysical and advanced things, but if these (basic things) are not done well, it will be counterproductive.”Said Feng Ji, founder of Game Science and producer of Black Myth: Wukong.
Every employee has to participate in the sixth edition of the test, and some of them will get targeted sections and play them repeatedly to find out the loopholes.As big as card clearance, black screen, flash back..As small as typos, punctuation marks and all other art problems, performance problems, game problems, difficult to reproduce problems, the purpose of the company’s internal members can smoothly get through the game.
There is CD-KEY (game exchange code) in the fifth round of the test version. After the overall clearance, the hidden achievements have their own special rewards, and the highest reward is the notebook computer co-branded by Black Myth.
I asked my colleague next to me how many times he could pass the customs. “I can’t pass it once. I have no time.”
“Can anyone do it all?””There must be a brave man under the heavy reward.”He said.
At the end of the meeting, Feng Ji read a passage from the game media for readers and players-after the completion of the game production in August, Game Science invited a number of game media to try and evaluate in advance.The media is generous with praise, but in the end it ends tragically: If “Black Myth: Wukong” is destined to become the fly ash of domestic 3A going to the world, then I am willing to be buried with it.
Feng Ji read it, and after a moment of silence, a burst of laughter broke out.
I asked Feng Ji how he felt, and he said, “I am very moved and grateful, but there is still a long way to go. Maybe we can do something ten times greater than now.”.This sentence says that if the game dies, he will die with it, but we are not ready to die.We are not so sad, just a group of people doing what they like.
Finally, Feng Ji said that he also had a feeling of customs clearance to tell the players:
“I’m going to be a man of destiny, too.”
“This is our first game and everything is being tested.”
Jiang Baicun, the planning director of Black Myth: Wukong, recalled a discussion with Yang Qi, the art director. Yang Qi thought that the production standards of world-class 3A masterpieces could be learned. Take God of War as an example. The character pushed a very old door. Kratos (the prototype character is Kratos, which is the deification of the concept of power) had great strength, pushed the door slowly, and dust fell from the door.With sound effects, it feels like a very heavy and old door. “These things are details for players. For us, this is the standard of production, the standard of 3A games.”Yang Qi said.
Under this standard, many pictures and plots are more demanding.In the first version of the promotional film, the exciting picture of Sun Wukong against 100,000 heavenly soldiers looks very smooth in the animation, but there are many difficulties in the actual production: the stick has to be stretched, bringing a large number of attacks and basic animation to be redone, every posture has to be like the Great Sage, walking, turning, jumping and being hit like the Great Sage.The production team wants to make a complete Great Sage who can fight for a prologue.
The bigger risk is that the fight is not fun.One person beats 100,000 people, which is essentially “mowing the grass”, and it is very boring to have no brain.Even if some plots and performances are designed, it is difficult to have interactive fun.
Even if these are overcome, there are performance issues.At the beginning, the production team planned to use 150 units to show 100,000 heavenly soldiers, but it was found to be deserted.The complete technical animation is added layer by layer, and the peripheral heavenly soldiers walk around the Great Sage, responding to the Great Sage’s behavior, which can guarantee both performance and quantity.But this effect is very bad on mainstream graphics cards and CPUs, and the calculation once dropped to 15 or 16 frames.”We have to face a trade-off.”.This is the climax of the prologue, but it will be boring in less than 30 seconds.Feng Ji said.The team finally abandoned the plan, taking into account the rhythm of the battle, the presentation of the picture, the performance of the game and other factors.
Jiang Baicun is the one who let all kinds of unrestrained ideas fall to the ground. In the process of making Black Myth: Wukong, he was very concerned about the rhythm.
His accumulation comes from many 3A masterpieces and Hollywood movies all over the world. He believes that all narrative content should revolve around the ups and downs of narrative emotions, which is a high-level narrative presentation.
Take the first chapter as an example, the planning team first determines that there are three big leaders in this level, and the emotional high point focuses on these three points, while the rest of the elite monsters and small monsters are arranged in a certain order. “For example, Guangzhi is a 3-point experience, then the next ghost (the strongest and challenging elite monster in this chapter) may be 4 points, and Lingxuzi (the first leader) drops to 3.5 points.”Guang Mou continued to drop to 2.5 points, and the next White Scholar (the second leader) rose to 4.5 points.Jiang Baicun said, “We make sure that it is a rhythm with ups and downs, and the time in the middle will not be too long or too short.”
The main character meets the leader in the lake, the White Scholar (normally, you will meet him in an hour or so after entering the game), after three adjustments.In the original case, he had three transformations, which were triggered in different ways.After the level design was completed, the internal thought that the leader’s share was too heavy, and the design was more complicated than the final leader of this level. Not long after the player entered the game, he met such a heavy leader, which greatly affected the experience, so his third form was cut off.
After the design of the first level was completed, the team thought that only the protagonist and the monster were too neat, so they added NPC (neutral game characters) such as a monkey who sent gourds and a passer-by who provided shops.”Let players establish more connections with the game world, knowing that the world is not only an abstract space composed of me and cruel monsters, but also people whose purposes are different from mine, but who are willing to help me and need me to help them.”Jiang Baicun said.
There are many details he needs to pay attention to: whether the air wall seal is in the right position, whether the character has the right reaction when stepping on the water, how the footsteps are different in different places..”I will focus more on the realization of ideas and some details.”
In the process of various calibrations and corrections, he deeply felt the gap between domestic games and world-class 3A masterpieces in industrial standards.Sometimes these problems are very intuitive, but they just can’t be solved.For example, the mouth shape of the character in the game animation can not match the language perfectly.They want to refer to the methods of the world’s advanced teams, but their resources are not necessarily open, so they can only find other ways.
The gap also lies in “yes”and”no”. After years of development, the first-line factories have a complete set of program standards, such as how to set up the role movement, how to step on high and low places, how to climb over obstacles, and how long it should be to reach out and hold the wall when approaching the wall..Some players complain about the protagonist’s “sliding” problem, which is a direct reflection of the lack of standards.
Even if we can borrow the standards of other big companies, it may not be applicable in Black Myth: Goku.A big factory has set the height of the monster in the game not to exceed a certain height according to experience, but Black Myth: Goku has flying dragons, huge bears and rainmakers, each of which is far beyond the standard.”Games happen in every field and every dimension.”.We can only find our own standards after many iterations, at the cost of a lot of manpower and time.Jiang Baicun said.”We don’t have a standard right now. As development evolves, it’s a very expensive thing to deal with standards, because it requires all the assets in the whole game, or all the designs, to follow the standard. The standard is meaningful, and the premise of following the standard is that the standard is correct or appropriate for the product.”.But this is our first game, and everything is being tested.
Among the details that more players don’t care much about, there are also the exploration of technology and time investment in game science.
The main character picks up a fallen knife and puts it in his ear.It took the team two or three months to make the move look smooth.The ideal state is that no matter where the protagonist is, it is natural to pick it up.Feng Ji and Zhao Wenyong, head of technology, found that Ubisoft, a game company, had proposed “Motion Matching” as a solution to automatically produce character movements by recording animation data of a batch of task-based movements according to a set of rules.
They found an open source version on the Internet, but it was immature and could only be pushed back through the details of Ubisoft’s scheme to achieve the final action of the protagonist in the game.
The game screen is undoubtedly the most intuitive standard to judge the quality of the game.On May 26, 2021, EPIC GAME released a preview of the game engine Unreal 5.In the same year, Game Science decided that Black Myth: Goku, which was originally produced by Unreal Engine 4, would be developed by Unreal Engine 5, which meant that 20% of the games were produced and most of them had to be rebuilt.”Fortunately, the engine was released in 2021, and if it was a year later, we would be more confused about whether to change it or not.”Yang Qi said.
Most of Yang Qi’s works are based on realism, and the new engine can be more realistic and realistic.In the game, players can see Yan’s Diamond Sutra on the cliff carvings, the Xixia stone tablets standing in the north, and the broken arms of Buddha statues after weathering.
In order to be closer to reality, Game Science has adopted the most seemingly stupid method: scanning the real scene and importing it into the computer.Most of the temples and Buddha statues in the game come from here.
To this end, the company set up a special team, which took four years to scan hundreds of temples and monuments across the country, so that these scenes can be reproduced in the game 1 to 1.This is largely due to the replacement of the engine.Scene scanning usually calculates hundreds of millions of models, while the old engine can only calculate thousands of building imports, while the new engine can upgrade to millions.
This seemingly sentimental and somewhat clumsy thing is also the consideration of game science after precise calculation.
If we refer to the real building and create it in the computer, the production cost of a building will reach hundreds of thousands to millions of yuan, which will take more than half a year.The team scanned the historic sites of Shisi Temple in Zhejiang Province for three months, swept 14 buildings inside and outside, brought them back for calculation, and formed them in the game in half a month.”If we make these dozen assets by hand, we will start in two years.”.(Scanning) efficiency can be improved exponentially.Yang Qi said.
In the first year of scanning, Yang Qi and the partners of the scanning team stepped on the spot everywhere to determine the scanning plan.According to his recollection of the course of ancient Chinese art history in the university, he delineated a number of wooden buildings in the Tang Dynasty, “Very few, we can put one in one.”Sweep down the Foguang Temple and other buildings.The second is the architecture and statues from the Wei and Jin Dynasties to the Song Dynasty, and then the utensils after the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
In many scanning sites, Yang Qi and his partners are fascinated by the buildings and statues in front of them. Oil paints and sculpture materials have been made by generations for hundreds of years, restored thirty or forty times, and weathered over the years, forming colors and damages that are difficult to restore, in which textures and folds are filled with time.
Several colleagues in the team are usually very extroverted, chatting and walking in, instantly silent, more than ten minutes later, they reacted and said: “What am I doing for so long?”
Yang Qi told his colleagues in the 3D group that they must keep the appearance of the scan, including the current color, damaged corners, weathered details, and even the grass stalks embedded in the statue and a small piece of wire exposed.”It’s a cool thing to look at it from the present perspective and observe the time at the same time.”Yang Qi said.
From this point of view, “Black Myth: Wukong”can be said to be a”Chinese tourism simulator”. The 28 star painted sculptures in the game come from the Jade Emperor Temple in Jincheng, Shanxi Province, the small Xitian where King Huangmei is located is based on the Shuilu Temple in Lantian, Shanxi Province, and the Pilu Buddha statue is scanned from Mingshan Temple in Anyue County, Ziyang, Sichuan Province.Hell in disguise, the Western Pure Land in disguise, and the Dharma Protection Shrine have reproduced the Dazu Stone Carvings in Chongqing.
So far, the material inventory has exceeded the actual needs of the game by six to seven times.Game Science plans to create a library of material that will be open to the world.
Many practical difficulties were encountered during the scanning.The team desperately wanted to sweep the Iron Buddha Temple in Shanxi, where a statue of a cast-iron Buddha’s head is enshrined under a towering pagoda.When they tried to apply for approval and finally entered, they found that the twenty-four clay embryo statues were placed in a room of 15 square meters. If they wanted to shoot, they had to put up scaffolding in all directions, which might damage the embryo, and finally they had no choice but to give up.
Shanxi Pingyao Shuanglin Temple is famous for its painted sculptures. After many setbacks, the team finally negotiated, but before shooting, the temple was flooded, and the statues were moved outdoors to dry and could not be scanned.
On August 20, 2020, the first promotional film went viral, and these live scans became a major boost.Since then, the scanning work has been much smoother.
From the beginning of making games, game science actively reports game progress, actual image, process planning and so on to the competent authorities in stages and according to the process.The whole process was strongly supported by the competent authorities.In February 2024, Black Myth: Goku received the game version number.
“We have just stepped into the mature stage of graphics technology and game engine, which can not be achieved three years earlier, requiring more people and greater investment, and the performance of our works is far worse than it is now.”.This is the dividend of scientific and technological progress.”At the same time, we also feel that national pride needs an outlet,” Feng said.Everyone is eager to have something about Chinese culture and Chinese themes, and the Chinese team will do it, which is a kind of strength.This power has chosen us.These two big backgrounds are the biggest amplifiers of Black Myth: Goku.
When making the English version of Black Myth: Wukong, some specific nouns are presented in Chinese Pinyin: the translation of Wukong is not monkey king but Wu Kong, and the golden stick is not golden stick but Jingubang.This term, unique to the Chinese mythological system, is not translated as monster but yaoguai.
So when foreign players see Wukong raising his golden cudgel to fight monsters, the translation is: “Wukong beats Yaoguai with Jingubang.”
