Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 134: Chapter 133: Warcraft’s Update

Su Jinyu, Zheng Hongxi and Qian Kun started working hard after receiving the update document.

In truth, these RPG maps weren’t the most classic or the most balanced, so why would Chen Mo pick these maps?

It’s because these represented the Warcraft RPGs that eventually branched off. These were prototypes of the classic Warcraft RPG, allowing the players to enjoy the fun of Warcraft RPG maps while not restricting their thinking.

Warcraft RPG maps eventually gave birth to DotA. Chen Mo didn’t want to shoot his own foot by giving map designers the inspiration to make something like that.

Defence map: Protect Athena

Defence maps were really simple, and yet managed to have the essence of Warcraft RPG games: Hero combinations and Hero training. As time goes on, the enemies will get stronger and stronger, and the players’ objective would be to find the best combination across numerous Heroes and items.

Tower defence map: Tower Defence.

This game came from classic tower defence games from his previous life. The core of tower defence games are similar to defence maps, the difference being players would need to pick towers instead of Heroes.

Casual map: Escape Pyramid.

This map was representative of casual maps. The players could pick from ten different modes and beat the game by dodging various traps.

PvP map: Chenghai 3c.

Compared to DotA, Chenghai 3c was quite primitive. It’s biggest problem was balancing, and yet it was also the fact that it wasn’t balanced that made it so popular. Many players played Chenghai 3c imba(imbalanced) just because of how imbalanced it was.

At the same time, players could play as multiple heroes, which balanced out some of the imbalance, making it an extremely entertaining map.

Chen Mo decided to only release three maps, leaving the others for the players to come up with themselves.

—

The new version didn’t take long at all, and was finished in under two weeks.

There were many different maps in Warcraft’s campaign, and the three of them have worked on them too. Therefore it wasn’t difficult for them to make the maps as they were already quite familiar with the editor. Most of the time was spent balancing the abilities as well as the difficulty of the levels.

Chen Mo mentioned specifically that the heroes in the RPG raps have to be completely different from the ones in versus mode. They need to match the heroes while being new ideas.

This required a lot of thinking from the three of them, but their imaginations were stimulated in the process, making it quite fulfilling.

Especially Qian Kun who was basically responsible for all of Chenghai 3c. Chen Mo was especially happy as it was pretty close to the quality of the one in previous life.

Chen Mo did one last check of the three maps, “Alright, it’s good.”

“Yes! We’re done!” exclaimed Su Jinyu.

Zheng Hongxi said, “But it felt pretty easy.”

“Manager, this new patch feels lackluster. Although it seems fun, are the players going to be happy? I feel like these maps don’t even come close to the game content.” asked Qian Kun.

“Don’t worry. Hongxi, could you work on the match notes then push the update?” ordered Chen Mo.

It didn’t take long for the patch notes to be done. Su Jinyu then posted the patch and the patch notes.

This patch was pretty small, there was only one extra cinematic, improvements on some foundations of the game, as well as the three RPG maps.

As the production of the cinematic takes a long time, it could only be pushed one by one. The patch would look sad without the cinematics, as it would be less than one megabyte.

Oh maybe very sad would be a better world.

Of course, Chen Mo could pad out the update with new encounters in the campaign, but players had their focus on Versus mode with little attention paid to more encounters, which was why Chen Mo decided against it.

Chen Mo didn’t want to charge for this patch, nor did he plan to charge for future maps.

As there was so little game content, it wouldn’t be good if he sold it as DLCs.

He could also charge per map, for example when a player makes a good map, the other players could pay one or two RMB for each, and the money would be split between Chen Mo and the maker.

But Chen Mo still decided against this.

It was simple, obviously they couldn’t start charging for the map from the start as it would never gain popularity. But it wouldn’t make sense to charge later either, why was it free at the start, and it starts costing money when it gets popular?

Therefore, although charging for maps would be good for the map makers, players would be less inclined to play them, which was completely against the point of Warcraft RPG maps.

Chen Mo wasn’t making RPG maps for healthy development of the gaming industry or anything, but to further boost the sales of the game.

RPG maps were a great reason for a group of friends to stay up late. Chen Mo’s intentions were to draw in non-RTS players, as their friends who play Warcraft would get them to get the game in order to play these RPG maps.

Moreover, RPG maps would further extend the lifespan of Warcraft, as it continues to grow and expand, paving the way for future PC games.

—

After some simple preparations, Warcraft finally got a new update!

Although this update was fairly low key, only made known to the players via a patch note.

Many players noticed a new patch when they logged into the game.

“Huh? New version? Chen Mo sure is efficient!”

“Yeah, Warcraft was already doing quite well with no balancing issues. Was there a need for a patch?”

“He’s so nice! Wow, is this the Chen Mo I once new? I’m so grateful I’m about to cry!”

“Yeah, how come he’s so nice all of a sudden.”

“So what did he include in the patch?”

Many of the players started complaining upon seeing the patch notes.

“My goodness, what’s this? One cinematic, a few settings update, and a few new maps?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“How is this a new patch? Chen Mo? Do we have different understandings of patches?”

“At least it’s free...”

“How dare he charge for something like this. That would be unreasonable!”

“I just watched the new cinematic, it’s great!”

“So is the new cinematic the only good thing from this new update?”

“So is Thunderbolt Entertainment rebranding to Thunderbolt Movies?”

“Do you guys produce games or movies?!”