As 2021 is drawing to a close, we decide to share the latest development with the players who have always paid attention to The Swordsmen X: Survival on this special occasion of welcoming the new year, which is also a year-end review of our project team. Thank you for your concern and support!
1. The planning of the Open World
The Swordsmen X: Survival will build an open world of martial arts based on the real world, which will be divided into four major regions: Southeast, Northeast, Southwest and Northwest. Each region will be designed with different climate and ecological environment.
For example, in the Northeast plateau, the extreme cold is the biggest survival challenge, which requires you to prepare clothes and equipment against the cold, or look for hot springs hidden in various places of the region to keep you warm and maintain your life for better exploration and cultivation.
In the rainforest in the southwest, benefiting from the winding paths, the cultivation points are quite high-quality, and treasures can be stored for a long time. However, this place is also the location of Wudu Sect, the headquarters of the guinea pigs. It gathers a large number of guinea pigs, organizations and enemies who create them, which asks players to treat them with some sensitivity and be careful not to take water and food easy to make you poisoned.
We have planned a large number of contents that can be explored in each region, such as levels, exploration points, cultivation points, various main and side missions. Now the contents in various regions are under intensive development and production.
There are still lots of contents in the planning of the Open World, such as featured systems of celestial and astrological phenomena, which will increase players’ exploration contents and cultivation when corresponding astronomical events occur; a novice level created to ensure new players’ game experience; allowing players to build their own servers.
2. Realistic Combat
The Swordsmen X: Survival will present a battle with extremely realistic and expressive martial arts in the game. For this, we invited professional martial arts instructors and actors to record hundreds of real martial arts movements by motion capture, so as to make our game have a strong sense of hitting on the premise of reappearing the traditional martial arts. The whole process took more than six months, but we think it deserves.
The focus of our work now is to integrate and debug the motion capture resources of hundreds of new movements, as well as produce the supporting special effects and sound effects. We have carefully modified the previous recorded animation resources, including animation playback speed, the position of damage frames, the smoothness of movement connection, etc. In addition, we have also optimized the blowing performance and the rules of locking monsters. The following are some movements in debugging. You can have a preview first:
3. The Cultivation of Weapons and Martial Arts
In The Swordsmen X: Survival, various martial arts classics will be scattered in all corners of the world. Players need to explore and obtain them actively, and improve their martial arts level in the cultivation points. A road to becoming a peerless master may appear in front of you by chance.
We have designed different martial arts according to the different attack modes of unarmed combat, single sword, single saber, twin daggers, shuang yue, lance, long saber, twin hammer and great sword in order to let everyone better experience the unpredictable martial arts series in the real Jianghu. Now more than 200 different martial arts have been equipped.
Meanwhile, each martial arts can be divided into different parts for combination. You can create your own unique martial arts basing on your needs.
In addition, we have optimized the visual effect when you are cultivating yourself, and we will also enrich the forms of martial arts cultivation, such as reading the martial arts rubbings on the wall at the exploration point, so as to make your growing more diversified.
4. Challenging Martial Arts Bosses
The world of The Swordsmen X: Survival is full of crises and challenges. There will be strong bosses in each region waiting for your challenge. If you have made great achievements in martial arts, you can go to challenge them to test yourself!
At present, we have finished the related model designs of bosses, and we are now optimizing their AI, hoping their behavior can be more intelligent and complex. Here is a presentation of the design draft of some of the new bosses:
5. Forward-looking Art Design
When exploring and adventuring in the world of The Swordsmen X: Survival, players can customize their appearance and clothes after obtaining necessary items. New costumes and new scenes are under urgent development now. Here is a batch of art setting drawings related to the scenes and characters. Take a look in advance!
At last, I would like to say something to all players:
This is the first time that we have made an open world martial arts survival game, so we grope forward most of the time. For example, concerning the design of bosses, we hope to show the realness and fluency of the action performance as much as possible since our game is a martial arts game. In addition to taking more time to adjust and upgrade AI, we also have to consider the limitations in the networked environment. When designing a level, we hope it can be an open instance that allows players to explore freely instead of a traditional one, but we need to consider the mechanism design in the network environment when multiple players enter the level to challenge.
There are many formidable gaps between imagination and reality. We can only work long hours to overcome difficulties so as to create our ideal “World of Jianghu”. Considering the above situation and the quality of the game, we decide to postpone the release time of The Swordsmen X: Survival to 2022.
At the same time, a new plan has also brought into schedule. We plan to start a new round of game testing to players after the Spring Festival in 2022, and there will be more new contents for you to experience at that time. If you are interested in our game, you can join the official Discord server to learn the latest information of the game and participate in the subsequent testing.
I wish you all a happy new year in advance. We will continue making an effort to optimize our game so that it can meet you successfully next year!
The Swordsmen X: Survival Production Team
Twitter：https://twitter.com/TheSwordsmenX
Discord：https://discord.gg/gBuF5x5zsw
