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With the launch of "War of the Immortals" on WeGame on July 10, Buming Technology and Tencent, two former rivals, shook hands and made peace, and a battle that started more than ten years ago came to an end.

Since then, Buming Technology has obtained WeGame, its second domestic distribution channel; and Tencent has won over "War of the Immortals", an opponent that once defeated it.

This statement is actually not accurate, because in the field of cold weapon warfare, "War of the Immortal" has now lost its real opponent.

In the field of ancient warfare, the positioning of "War of Immortal" is very special and pleasing. Unlike various SLG mobile games that frequently occupy the players' field of vision on the market, its quality is closer to independent games on consoles or PCs. It allows players to kill on the battlefield with swords and shadows, and command their soldiers to deploy troops. It is a game that literally allows players to lead troops to fight.

From today's perspective, this kind of game design that combines action and strategy should have great market potential and many competing products should emerge. However, the current situation is that "War of Immortal" is at a loss in this field, and it is difficult to find competitors of similar size.

In fact, if we go back to about ten years ago, the concept of "Mount & Blade" did cause a wave of popularity. After Mount & Blade became a big hit in foreign markets, many domestic manufacturers wanted to make this kind of gameplay into online games and promote it to the domestic market. At that time, Tencent's Blade of the Dragon, NetDragon's Tiger and Leopard Cavalry and Yunchan Network's Ironclad Warrior were all products of this trend, and War of the Immortals was one of them.

However, there are no mature commercial cases for this category in the online game field. All manufacturers can only learn from and make choices in different directions according to their own understanding of the market and games, and then push their products to the market for players to rate. After so many years of market competition, "Blade and Iron Cavalry" has withdrawn from the market, "Tiger and Leopard Cavalry" has almost stopped updating, and "Iron Armored Heroes" has survived by relying on beautiful skins with full special effects. Recently, it is trying to use various social media to get traffic from "War of the Immortals" on WeGame...

Does the skin in "Iron Man" look familiar to you?

When the tide receded, only "War of the Immortals" remained to be the orthodox "ancient war game".

It is not only domestic manufacturers that have hit a wall in this field. Even Creative Assembly, which made the "Total War" series, also hit a wall in "Total War: Arena", a project that wanted to turn cold weapon warfare into an online game. It seems that this category is inherently incompatible with online games. "War of Immortal", which has survived to this day, has become an outlier among its peers.

Total War: Arena

To be honest, among the batch of Mount & Blade-like games back then, although "War of Immortal" had fine graphics, rich details, complete dubbing, and a self-developed CHAOS engine that supported thousands of people on the same screen, and overall surpassed similar competitors in terms of technical strength and quality, it was the one that was the least like Mount & Blade in terms of gaming experience.

Friends who have experienced "Mount & Blade" should be familiar with the "four-way block/attack" gameplay that requires attacking and defending according to the direction of swinging the sword. This hardcore realistic feature gameplay has made players talk about it with relish. At that time, almost all Mount & Blade-like games except "War of the Immortals" followed this setting. Some even eliminated the strategic gameplay of leading troops to fight in Mount & Blade and turned it into a cold weapon combat simulation game.

Mount & Blade 2

However, judging from the market performance, this design, which was highly praised by players of single-player games, suffered a great loss in online games. For online game players at that time, it was almost impossible to balance close combat and troop command at the same time, and the intensity of PVP confrontation in online games was far from comparable to that of computer AI. As a result, the cold weapon war games on the market today either abandoned the strategic elements and turned into cold weapon combat simulators, or abandoned the action gameplay and turned into strategy games. At present, only "War of Immortal" can achieve a certain balance between action and strategy gameplay.

Perhaps it is precisely because of this eccentricity that "War of the Immortals" was able to get out of the "version trap" of that year.

"War of the Immortal" abandoned the overly realistic high-threshold design of Mount and Blade, and simplified the action part into three skills and one big move, greatly lowering the threshold for playing. While players are fighting with other players in front of the formation or rushing into a pile of soldiers to show their invincibility, they can also command their soldiers to assemble into various formations to deal with different battlefield situations. The battlefield atmosphere is very strong.

Facts have proved that this kind of eccentricity is necessary. When the once popular trend became a thing of the past, and the overall decline of PC games coincided with the decline of mobile games, the cold weapon legion competition gameplay did not become the next hit as the major manufacturers wished. The competitors that were once high-spirited also became unpopular, and in the end, only "War of Rights" survived the test of the market.

After landing on Steam, the value of this gameplay was also recognized by foreign players. It was at this time that Buming Technology launched the Asian server that mainly promoted the season battle pass payment in addition to the national server that paid for numerical values. Domestic players not only had one more choice, but also could compete with players from all over the world.

Since its launch on Steam in 2020, "War of the Immortals" has been updated to an all-encompassing international game that integrates Eastern and Western cultures. Arms, weapons and maps from different civilizations and countries are used to stage a war blockbuster of Guan Gong fighting Qin Qiong in "War of the Immortals". The 15V15 map in the game is like a kind of cold weapon arena that spans time and space. You may see the Knights Hospitaller charging into the Macedonian spear forest, the Shenji Battalion and the British longbowmen shooting at each other, and Viking warriors wielding battle axes and fighting Japanese samurai holding crossword spears...

Through the adjustment and balance of mechanisms and numbers, "War of the Immortals" successfully allowed the troops and arms that once dominated the world history to fight on the same battlefield, thereby attracting players from different countries and cultural backgrounds.

This undoubtedly satisfies the long-standing debate of war enthusiasts around the world about Guan Gong's battle with Qin Qiong, and the fantasy of leading a war all over the world. In the Steam review of "War of the Immortals", there is a review that vividly describes the essence of this experience: I attacked Constantinople with a team of Chinese peasants speaking Jiangsu dialect, 9/10.

The same appeal is not only for Chinese players, but also for players all over the world. Today, overseas players account for more than 55% of the total number of players in "War of Immortal". Even in the context of the trend of games going overseas, few domestic games can reach such a high proportion of users. It can be said that when it comes to "fighting", most players around the world share the same brain.

The cold weapon war track is like a gold mine waiting to be mined, but due to the high R&D threshold and the lack of mature commercial cases, "War of the Immortals" is one of the few lone rangers that has carved out a niche. Although "War of the Immortals" today cannot be compared with the first-tier big IPs on the market today, Buming Technology is indeed constantly exploring the upper limit of this category, and is working hard to make "War of the Immortals" an ancient war game that can compete with "World of Tanks" and "War Thunder".

We don’t know whether Buming Technology can realize their ambitions, but there is no doubt that in the field of cold weapon warfare, "War of the Immortals" has become a version answer that latecomers cannot avoid.