I Just Want Players to Save Money, They Insist on Giving Me!
Chapter 402 - 143: The Game Goes Live!_2

Chapter 402: Chapter 143: The Game Goes Live!_2

Every time he thought about his days at Tengjing, the most frequent orders he’d received from his superiors were:

Design some in-game monetization features.

Analyze the hottest games currently on the market.

Test the limits of what players will tolerate.

But as the top player, his tasks had become—

You have full responsibility for this masterpiece, make sure to polish it well.

Instantly, Bao Jingbi’s heart surged with fiery blood rushing to his head!

The feeling of being heavily relied upon excited him beyond measure.

The excitement on his face was too evident to hide!

His cheeks flushed and his spine straight, he spoke out loudly, "Mr. Ke, I will not let you down! If this game doesn’t sell for 300 million, I’ll resign right on the spot!!"

"Wait..." Ke Jin nearly ran out of breath.

Three hundred million?

I sure would like to make 300 million.

You should ask the system first if it will give me a quota of 300 million...

After taking a moment to breathe, he continued.

"I’ll handle the monetization system myself; you just make sure to polish the game with Oasis."

"I only have two requirements."

"First, make the graphics more detailed. On the basis of not changing Ezio’s character design sketches, try to achieve an average graphical representation from the past few years."

"Second, make the assassination scenes more realistic, so that players can truly feel more stealth, swiftness, agility, and danger. Under these conditions, once the assassination succeeds, the pleasant sensation will soar exponentially."

In fact, these two requirements roughly boil down to different aspects of the same demand.

This is because on Earth in a previous life, the second point was not perfectly presented, partly due to the limitations of computational power and device specifications.

To be specific, when players were assassinating an important figure living in a palace,

The guard force around him was often only a few people, allowing players to assassinate him almost without hindrance.

The reason it was made this way is because if too many NPCs were crammed in,

It would cause a massive amount of realtime motion calculations, spiking the processing demand and causing severe frame drops.

In that era, all of this would cause the console to lag or even crash instantly.

But to simplify things as a fallback detracted from the coolness of the stealth assassination.

Just think of the shock players felt during the "Revolution" era when the game displayed thousands of NPCs at the same time—truly taking the enemy leader’s head amidst a sea of people!

The sense of cold elegance in drifting through the crowd, swiftly escaping after a successful strike,

Watching as chaos ensues, with people panicking and running like wild animals, while you effortlessly blend with the streaming crowd, tip down your hat, retract the blood-stained blade, and vanish among the masses.

This stunning feat of ’killing in the midst of mayhem and escaping through the thicket of blades’ was infinitely more satisfying than taking down a key leader in a contrived surround of a mere three unconvincing actors.

However, Ke Jin didn’t explicitly require Bao Jingbi to achieve the same level of having thousands of characters on-screen.

Ezio was also a test of Bao Jingbi’s abilities, to see how insightful he was.

Not to demand thousands on-screen, but at the very least, the tension and danger leading up to the assassination had to be laid out properly, so as to elevate the player’s feedback to a climax upon a successful kill.

If Oasis didn’t do a perfect job,

The old team of top players could still make the final tweaks and adjustments.

Quickly, Bao Jingbi took his orders and went to work.

Ke Jin also began pondering the monetization system for Ezio.

In his past life, as a one-time purchase game, it had no in-app purchases.

Even though later sequels began bundling gold editions and enhanced versions, offering skins for assassin robes, weapons, steeds, and various trinkets,

It was in reality just an extension of the buy-to-play model.

After some thought, Ke Jin decided not to break it down into a system of in-app purchases.

On one hand, he had seen how the tycoons of this world would crazily spend on character skins.

Many gacha games were almost turned into dress-up games by them, with every ’wife’ having a huge wardrobe.

Not to mention a game like Assassin’s Creed that took coolness to a certain level.

Even if you released seven sets of assassin skins in red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and purple, just changing colors without altering appearances,

Tycoons would still dare to go for a full seven Dragon Balls collection.

The risk was too great.

The best approach for now was a standard 3D blockbuster buy-to-play price, something like 198, a price point acceptable to players.

"But there is one problem."

If we tie the 198 price point to running, the results would be quite good.

Either you run first, and only after completing it can you pay the 198.

Or you just don’t play at all and watch others’ gameplay videos in the cloud.

But the system probably wouldn’t allow it.

After all, the completion of the ultimate mission has to be built on the completion of the regular tasks first.

If all the regular tasks were like ’total player gameplay time of 5 million hours’

At that point, Ke Jin would require a portion of free players to make up the numbers.

After much consideration, Ke Jin decided to follow the same route he took with "Dark Trickery."

Charge by Chapter!

AC2 itself had very clear Chapter divisions.

The first Chapter, ending with Ezio getting his assassin’s robes, would be completely free, as a demo integrated into the game itself.

It would be given to all the players to play for free.

To unlock subsequent Chapters, apologies, but go run a 1000 meters first.

And if you want to play the next Chapter, the difficulty gradually increases.

meters

meters

...

Until a month after release, when I’ve completed my own task.