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Title image | Dragon’s Breath: Divine Silence

Author | Eel

On August 23, Tencent's independent studio Silver Heart(SGRA Studio)The Team-RPG card game "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" released its first PV in China and opened reservations.

(Original video address: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1T4421f74H/?t=1.413915&spm_id_from=333.1350.jump_directly&vd_source=2d8388c4389da33907808e4537b1faee)

A while ago, GameNews was invited to visit the project team. After visiting their office, the first impression left was that they must like "Three Body" very much. For example, the entire space is basically a circular design, with a circular meeting room, a circular tea room, and an office area that can return to the starting point after walking around the field. They also gave each space a name such as "Ball Lightning", "Breakthrough Plan", and "M78 Nebula". Although the area utilization rate is not high, the special appearance is quite eye-catching and also matches the company name of Silver Heart.(Center of the Milky Way)Echo each other.

This pursuit of aesthetics and content is also reflected in the game. The project team told us that "the R&D cost of a general card project in China is about 50 million...(Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence)It is a down-to-earth investment of 300 million yuan. "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" is also one of the only two card games in China that has a sandbox map.(The other one is "Sword and Expedition: Departure")It is estimated that more than 370 heroes are reserved for the national version.

This level of investment is rare in card games.

When talking about the original intention of developing "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence", the core members of the team told us that this game is also similar to "Black Myth: Wukong》It is somewhat related. "In fact, I had this idea in 2020(Refers to the start of development of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence")The time it took to actually make a decision… It sounds a bit sentimental, but it was actually when I watched the video of Black Myth: Wukong, and I felt very envious when I saw that video.”

At the end of 2020, SGRA Studio was established in Guangzhou. Recalling the early days of the project, the R&D team faced two choices - to raise funds to start a business, or to join the system of other companies. In the end, out of conservative considerations, the team gave up starting their own business and chose to join an emerging traffic giant to carry out R&D work.

According to the team, its core members all came from NetEase and Tencent, and were formed through introductions between people in the early days. Before starting to develop Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence, the team members' main experience was not in card games, but more in the MOBA field.

The core members have been deeply involved in the development of NetEase's MOBA PC game "Heroes of Three Kingdoms"(It is also one of the earliest MOBA games in China)Later, he also participated in the development of NetEase's "NetEase All-Star" and "Battle! Onmyoji" and Tencent's "Pokémon Unite" MOBA games, and has certain experience in the development of traditional and alternative MOBA games.

Due to the team's understanding and research of MOBA products, the card game "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" is obviously different. It is made to be particularly heavy and strategic.

When talking about the market opportunities facing "Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods", the project team said that although this track seems unpopular and niche, it can also be managed slowly and made into a business.

We also asked whether the recently launched "Sword and Expedition: Departure" in the domestic market would bring pressure to them. The game is currently ranked in the top 10 of the domestic iOS best-selling list. "If there are more competitors like us in high-quality card games, people will not play those re-skinned numerical card games in the future."

Perhaps just like in the MOBA field, Silver Heart still maintains its pioneering spirit in category exploration and plans to open up a new path in the card game track through "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence".

Upgrading mature gameplay categories

Focusing on the gameplay itself, Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence hopes to differentiate itself from numerical cards and further refine and upgrade the strategic team matching. Compared with the vertical development that numerical card games focus on, Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence hopes to emphasize the horizontal collection and team matching of cards. Therefore, the game created hundreds of heroes in one go and divided them into detailed categories.

The heroes in the game are classified into six elements: fire, ice, poison, and summon. In the battle, some enemies will be resistant to a certain element type, but there is no element to restrain them, which breaks away from the fixed thinking of "rock, paper, scissors" element restraint and allows more possibilities for team matching.

Instead, the game has added an "element affinity" design, where every two elements can be matched with each other. When the number of heroes with affinity elements reaches 3/5, an attribute bonus will be formed.

Moreover, heroes are not only classified by elemental attributes, some heroes also have tags of "support", "defense", "fearless", "wild", and "inspiration". "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" uses this to replace the traditional professional positioning in traditional card games, and makes more detailed content classification for output-type characters. For example, "fearless" characters are good at generating chain effects through ordinary attacks, "wild" characters will perform a roll point check when casting spells, and will cause a lot of damage if successful, and "inspiration" characters can consume the inspiration state to enhance the effect of skills.

The enemy design also has a lot of innovations in terms of mechanism. "Elemental Monster·Lightning" can cause ricochets to friendly troops, and players need to disperse to deal with it; "Poison Spores" will fly to friendly troops and explode, and players need to stop them in time; "Imitator" can copy the nearest hero on our side.

Dragon's Breath: Silence differentiates between objective and numerical cards. As a result, we can see that the game is more strategic. Even if the player just uses a set of lineups repeatedly, they still need to change their positions according to the changes on the battlefield, rather than just mindlessly placing the cards and pushing the map.

Not only is the gameplay strategic, the overall content of "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" is also relatively large in size.

Under the development goal of content-based cards, "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" has achieved a large amount of content. According to reports, the game has produced more than 800,000 words of text content and the number of heroes has reached 291. More importantly, "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" shows a strong role-playing element in the process of presenting content.

The biggest feature of the game is that it incorporates the elements of a group game. Before the game starts, players can make a car card and choose different races such as dwarves, lizardmen, and half-elve. In the subsequent game process, they can choose different identities such as soldiers and archaeologists and add points to form differences in attributes such as strength, intelligence, charm, and induction.

In addition, Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods has created a large number of small gameplays that require dice rolling for identification. Players can steal from NPCs, debate and persuade some enemies during the exploration of the large map, all of which require rolling D20 dice to determine success or failure. In some stories, the results of the test and choice will also lead to different endings for the NPC's story.

As the proportion of role-playing content increases, the design framework of card games is also affected.

The cards that the player picks up are not limited to the role of commander. The protagonist needs to be upgraded and developed like other card characters, and can also go into battle. In order to increase the protagonist's appearance rate, "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" has even created elemental transformation content for it, so that the protagonist card can be adapted to different team configurations.

The immersion brought by Dragon's Breath: Silence can also be felt in many aspects during the game. For example, when players need to challenge dungeons or sell equipment, they need to teleport to the corresponding destination on the map or find NPCs, instead of jumping directly between functional interfaces. Including in the process of map exploration, if the player persuades the robbers on the roadside, they will not only make way for them, but also turn against them and become temporary teammates in subsequent battles.

As a content-based card game, Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods seems to want to do not only the high quality of the content itself, but also to enhance the immersiveness of the presentation, so as to achieve better content communication.

Realize long-term operation through the season system

Based on the in-depth strategic gameplay design, Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods adopts seasonal production as a long-term operation solution.

The production team revealed that they believe that most of the past numerical cards focused on short-term benefits of three months, and "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" wants to solve the problem of long-term operations in a more systematic way.MMOWe have weighed and referenced the long-term operation plans of SLG and SLG, the former relies on social relationships, and the latter relies on the season system. Given that the social nature of card games is relatively weak, we have embarked on the direction of the season system.

The card game Sword and Expedition: Departure, which was launched in the domestic market some time ago, also adopted a season system and planned to achieve long-term operation. According to the team of Dragon's Breath: Silence, the two sides coincidentally adopted the same idea.

In the past, the season system was more common in RPGs such as Diablo III. In addition to preventing the gameplay from becoming increasingly bloated, it also ensures that the player base can continue to have fresh blood flowing in. In recent years, the season system has begun to be used more frequently in MMO, card and other categories, including Against the Cold and Sword and Expedition: Departure.

At present, "Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods" has been online overseas for nearly a year, and has already reserved 4 season versions of content.(12~14 weeks is a season). After each new season, the levels of heroes and artifacts will be reset.Elemental AffinityThe rules will be rotated, and the content of world exploration will be completely reset. As the game environment changes, the player's team and development strategy will also change accordingly, and players will return to the same starting line to explore the wasteland.

Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods performed well in overseas markets in the early days of its launch.SensorTowerIn the overseas revenue list of October 2023, "Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence" ranked 27th on the list. The US market is its largest source of income, followed by South Korea and Hong Kong and Taiwan markets, which also provide a lot of income.

However, during the operation of the overseas version, the team found that the performance of "Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods" was somewhat different from expectations. After the release of the S2 season version of "Dragon's Breath: Silence of the Gods" in December 2023, the revenue rebounded, but began to feel pressure after the S3 season. In addition to the impact of the company's business changes at the time, the team also felt that they faced design challenges.

Unlike the seasonal system of SLG, card games lack the driving force of social aspects, and the repeatability of the content is not that high. In this regard, Dragon's Breath: Divine Silence plans to adjust the social content around the Chinese version in the future, so as to bring more hierarchical social relationships. At present, the social content in the game is closer to traditional card games. The PVP gameplay is mainly asynchronous social arena battles, which bring players a sense of accomplishment through the leaderboard.

The production team used sports as an analogy. The current social gameplay in the game is like a single-player marathon, and the players feel more lonely. They hope to be closer to ball sports, where players can have more direct confrontations and richer changes. They are also preparing to produce fair competition gameplay, which is similar to the "Honor Duel" in "Sword and Expedition: Departure".

After being released overseas, the Chinese version of Dragon's Breath: Silence has more optimization plans, hoping to retain players by reducing the amount of time spent on gameplay and krypton and enriching the content. In terms of reducing the amount of time spent on gameplay, the game plans to reduce the repetitive gameplay of obtaining development materials, and the gameplay rewards will be settled on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis; in terms of reducing krypton, the game strives to make the price of a single draw the lowest in the market, and its operation plan will also focus more on welfare distribution.

Conclusion

From working at Galaxy Studios to forming Heart of Silver, the team has experienced the ups and downs of the industry, but what has kept them going is probably their geeky spirit towards game development.

During the conversation, I suddenly remembered a sentence from Feng Ji, the producer of Black Myth: Wukong: embarking on the journey to obtain scriptures is more important than reaching Lingshan. The process of opening up a new path may not be smooth, but you must move forward in the face of challenges to gain something else. Currently, Silver Heart is alsoHiring for Dragon’s Breath: The Silence of the Gods and new projects, looking for more like-minded people.