I just finished downloading "Voyage and Home", and when I saw that the installation package was more than 2 gigabytes, my old Android phone almost gasped. I remember when I played "Age of Discovery 2", I could travel around the world with a floppy disk. Drawing a port route map was all done by hand. Staying up late to memorize the route was like memorizing English words. It's better now, the graphics are gorgeous, the wind and grass have particle effects, and the weather system can rain or snow, but as I play, I always feel that something is missing.
Maybe it's because I'm older and wear filters on everything I watch. To be honest, the foundation of this game is really good. The 3D modeling is very smooth. The waves from the Mediterranean to the New World almost made me seasick. 🌊 The camp gameplay is also decent. You can choose one from Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands, which instantly brings back memories of gang wars when playing "Age of Discovery Online". There are quite a lot of systems such as equipment attributes and constellation bonuses. At first glance, it looks like the routines of web game veterans. When it comes to numerical development, you know it all.
But the problem is that after I played for two hours, in addition to automatic path finding and automatic combat, even the navigation chart was automatically marked by the system. I remember when I used the mouse to click on the sailboat and drifted on the sea. I was really nervous when there was a storm. If the boat sank, it really sank. I saved the files manually. What now? Fragments, cards and cards are drawn, and even the captain system is controlled by rock, paper, scissors, forcing the navigation game to be played as a card battle.
The most annoying thing is the "global dynamic event", which sounds ridiculous, but is actually a world boss that is regularly spawned, and all players in the server can attack it together. This thing was broken in Age of Empires Online ten years ago, okay? I thought there could be a real accident such as a pirate raid or a merchant ship drifting... Forget it, after all, free games, manufacturers have to do what they want.
But to be fair, the performance of this mobile phone can indeed support a game of this size. When I was playing "Age of Discovery 4", I had to buy a special memory card and plug it into my Nokia. Now 2G games can run smoothly, and technological progress is visible to the naked eye. It's just that one game lasted half of my childhood, but now hundreds of games are gathering dust on my phone. When I open one, I want to quit and look at others.
Maybe it's not that the games have gotten worse, but that our generation's patience has been worn away by fragmented information. But don't blame the players entirely. If the game company could make a good sailing simulator and not spend so much money on it, I would be willing to support it even if it charges a buyout fee. But the reality is that if you keep making high-quality products, people will already make a lot of money by exchanging skins and drawing cards.
Hey, let's not talk about it anymore. I'm going to see if I can catch a fish or catch something in this "Navigation and Home", so as to regain some of the happiness of being in a daze on the virtual sea. I hope it won't be too confusing in subsequent updates. If a free exploration mode can be added, I would be willing to play it for a while🧭