On July 12, the mobile game "Obi Island: Dream Country" was officially launched, and topped the App Store free game rankings on the first day. It is another childhood memory after the mobile game "Moore Manor".
web game " Obi Island " was launched in September 2008. It has been almost 14 years now and has more than 300 million registered users, with the highest monthly active users exceeding 11 million.
asked around among my editor colleagues, but no one knew about this game, probably because I am a few years younger than them.
html The children who landed on Obi Island 113 years ago have grown up, graduated, and worked. Can the mobile game version bring them back to their childhood?
is a casual mobile game that is a bit tiring to play.
officially positions this mobile game as a "casual community-building game with simple gameplay" and is suitable for users aged 12 and above.
The first thing he entered was the character creation interface. Obi's inverted triangle bangs were still there, but the web game style was no longer the same, and it didn't have the original "bear" look. However, the web game version also turns the bear into a human, and the traditional image of Little Obi has become a tear of the times.
▲ The traditional Little Obi (Part 1) and the mobile game Little Obi (Part 2)
then enter the main line of the simulation business game, launching various tasks around decoration, dressing, farming, social interaction and other factors.
After experiencing it, I feel that it is not "casual" enough and is much more purposeful than playing web games when I was a child.
What players have to do during the land reclamation period is to farm and raise animals in their homes, collect materials and fish in specific locations, and then use these things to make cooking, furniture, and clothes. They will continue to level up, unlock open spaces, expand islands, upgrade buildings, and decorate. Home, do similar tasks again, and the cycle continues.
is not difficult, not even for the liver. I feel like I just complete the task numbly, without any emotional "stimulation point".
The intuitive feeling is that there is constant waiting during the task process.
has a task to milk a cow 5 times. A cow can be milked once every 5 minutes. The level is only enough to raise 2 cows, so it takes a full 15 minutes to complete the task.
In addition, waiting for cherry tree, bear melon, blueberry , and quinoa to mature takes 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 1 minute, and 20 seconds respectively.
Don’t forget that when making items or completing orders, more than one kind of material is often used, which means it takes a lot of time to repeatedly plant crops and wait for them to mature.
In addition to the time required for planting, basic materials with high consumption such as "cedar wood" are collected very frequently. Although it can be quickly transferred to the collection point, there will always be a loading screen that is neither fast nor slow. It will be very unpleasant if it is used too many times.
Some materials can be purchased directly with money in the market, but they can only be purchased once within a certain period of time, and then they will enter the "skill cooldown".
At the same time, collecting materials, harvesting crops, etc. requires physical strength (called "fatigue value" in the game). Upgrading to
can increase the upper limit of fatigue value. The fatigue value will be restored to full the next day. However, the fatigue value of the day can only be eliminated through eating, sleeping, krypton gold, and in-game props. It will not be restored automatically when offline.
Krypton gold is naturally the most trouble-free. If you choose to eat, you cannot rely on your own hard-working hands. You must go to someone else's house to eat. If you choose to sleep, you must stare at your character and lie in bed to slowly eliminate fatigue points. Can't do it either.
Krypton Gold solves not only the fatigue value, but also all tasks can be skipped with one click using "Crystal Diamond". When players do novice tasks, the system gives crystal diamonds very generously. However, some players reported that after level ten, the income from crystal diamonds is very small, and taking shortcuts requires krypton gold.
There are no shortcuts in the world, and there are no shortcuts in casual games. It either costs you time or makes you money. In addition to the main line of
, there are still some detailed issues.
It’s 2022, and there are only two directions for placing furniture, plants, and animals, which is to turn 90 degrees.
Some tasks require the participation of 2 or more people, such as two people repeating facial expressions and soda shaking games, which are not very friendly to social fearful players/lone wolf players.
The direction of krypton gold is also quite obvious. The clothing store has gold coin clothes, but the entrance is not direct. The department store with the most conspicuous main interface has a row of pink diamond clothes.
In addition, there are different types of easter egg draws, similar to the ten consecutive SSR draws, which are divided into gold coin costumes, love costumes, and crystal diamond costumes. There are limited free opportunities. The crystal diamond easter egg is once every 48 hours, and the gold coin easter egg is three times a day. The drop rate of bulky clothes and furniture is relatively low, and they are basically shoes, floor tiles and other accessories, which is very consistent with the profit formula of mobile games.
More experience requires level unlocking, such as level 16 or so to unlock the pet function.
’s best memories are from his childhood.
has a story to say. In the emotional part, "Obi Island: Dream Country" did a pretty good job.
It retains the original Obi Plaza, Taobao Street, Aoki Forest, Orbis Snow Mountain and other scenes in the web game on the map.
▲ Web game map (top) and mobile game map (bottom).
In Orbis Snow Mountain, take the cable car to the top of the mountain; in Taobao Street, play seesaw with strangers; in Friendship Manor, make a wish in the pool; in Qingmu Forest, Click the turtle statue three times a day and you will get 5 "Lost Crystals".
Friends visit each other, irrigate the friendship tree, and remove bugs from the apple tree. It feels like they used to step on each other's QQ space.
NPC are also familiar faces. Aunt W, editor-in-chief of "Obi Weekly", fashion designer Xiaoye, furniture designer Pan Pan, bearded uncle, navigator Longwa... But chatting with them in order to increase their favorability is still a bit boring. The best option is to "skip" without expression.
On the whole, "Obi Island: Dream Country" is a moderately casual game. The tasks are not difficult, but they are a bit cumbersome and highly repetitive, especially when you keep collecting the same materials. The experience of spending krypton gold will be much better, but there is no need to spend krypton. It is somewhat related to feelings, but it is also expected. It is suitable for Buddhist players with a childish heart.
"Obi Island: Dream Country" plays a clear emotional card, and it may not necessarily serve today's children. After all, minor users can only play on Fridays and Saturdays. The users it wants to attract should be the Obi Islanders from the web game era.
The most fun time in Obi Island was when I was a child.
Before playing web games, I rarely stayed at "home", and I didn't even have the impression of farming and decorating.
Raise mutated animals in the zoo, make wishes on the drift bottles in Dingdong Creek, throw out the fishhook and wait to catch the big fish, serve dishes in the restaurant, and play endless Obi Star Picking (my favorite little boy back then) game), a pleasant half day passed.
didn’t think about achieving any goal. He just went wherever it was fun, just like playing a collection of 4399 or 7K7K mini-games.
I don’t only play Obi Island, but also Rock Kingdom , Moore Manor, and Purcell. Rooted in web games, business simulations, virtual social interactions, entertainment activities are abundant or scarce. To put it in a fashionable way, they are the metaverse social network.
I said goodbye to the web game "Obi Island" for about ten years. I only paid attention to the current situation of web games because of mobile games. I heard that it was changed beyond recognition. In June 2014, the "Magic Transformation" system was launched to turn a bear into a human. The style of painting is becoming more and more exaggerated, and the means of attracting money are becoming more and more abundant.
The mobile game "Obi Island" focuses on the nostalgic factor, but it still can't make me really return. Just comparing the fun of the gameplay, there are also many options for business games.
The so-called "enjoying simple happiness" also requires the right time, place and people. The times are no longer that era, the game is no longer that game, and I am no longer the same me.
"Gu Yu Laboratory" once reported a story. Two young people who had never met met in the form of two bears on Obi Island more than ten years ago. They had no contact with each other until one of them searched for a message. The other party posted a post on Weibo, and then the two of them added friends on the post bar and contacted them on WeChat.
This Weibo post happened to be related to childhood, which led to an Internet-style romance. The story is almost over here. There is no more dramatic development. They are running their own lives as usual. This is the normal state of life.
Can web games that have been eliminated by the times swim against the trend with mobile games?
In recent years, there have been many nostalgic games that have been converted from web games to mobile games. On Children's Day last year, the "Moore Manor" mobile game was launched; at the 2021 Tencent Games annual conference, the "Rock Kingdom" mobile game was officially announced. It will be created by the original team of IP, and the launch time is still far away.
Interestingly, both the mobile games "Moore Manor" and "Obi Island" were published by Thunder Games. The web game versions of these two games were very popular back then, one was a forest fantasy, and the other was an island style. Now The way to survive is exactly the same.
In 2009, "Moore Manor" ranked first among users of community dating websites for children in junior high school and below. In 2012, "Obi Island" ranked first in the number of active users in the national character development youth community, accounting for 10% of the monthly coverage. than 29.5%.
At that time, game resources and Internet access were limited. I still remember that in the computer class in elementary school, we were all racing against time to play these web games.
Within a few years, the situation took a turn for the worse. " Hedgehog Commune " reported that after 2015, the Baidu index of major children's web games has fallen sharply. Almost no products can break through the 100,000 level, and most of them are less than one-tenth of their peak levels.
At the same time, the number of Chinese mobile game users increased by 62.3% in 2014 compared with 2013, reaching a total of 504 million. " Tiantian Cool Running " was the most popular mobile game this year.
The decline of children's web games is not only related to the changes in media technology and the advent of the mobile wave, but also because the gameplay of children's web games itself is homogeneous and lacks competitiveness. "Entertainment Capital" put forward a very interesting point of view:
The reason why young players are willing to continue playing is not because of the game mechanism, but because, in that era when everyone competed to see whose QQ and sun were more powerful, social relationships in reality It is indeed a cool thing to be able to continue on the Internet and even experience the structure of social division of labor in a game.
But social relationships have long changed with age. In an increasingly atomized society, we no longer gather together like primary school students. There are new ways to play and socialize. Competitive mass games meet to play black games, and buyout games are divided independently. It feels good to cut the grass, play role-playing games and play plots. The only thing in childhood has become indispensable now.
has lost the social advantage of primary school players, which means that mobile games based on childhood IP must deal with two problems at the same time. First, it must have a nostalgic factor and cannot destroy childhood; second, the gameplay must be sustainable and preferably innovative. These two points are even somewhat contradictory.
But at present, on the one hand, the plot is younger, on the other hand, the tasks are more purposeful but not more interesting, coupled with krypton money methods such as card drawing, "Obi Island: Dream Kingdom" and other mobile games Not much different.
"Moore Manor", which was launched on Children's Day last year, has been popular for a while, but due to "too many bugs" and "the gameplay is monotonous and boring", it has now disappeared from the public. The Obi Island mobile game has not received as much attention at the beginning as Moore's Manor. I don't know what kind of ending "Obi Island: Dream Country" will usher in in the expanding mobile game market.
