Chapter 313 - 202: Has the Client Evolved Too?

This year is no exception.

However, this year’s New Year video, besides summarizing the achievements and joys of the past year and led by Ba to wish everyone a happy new year, also features a brand-new segment.

This segment is more like a preview of the Spring Festival event rather than just an Easter egg in the video.

"We will prepare a series of mysterious clues for you in ’Star Emperor,’ ’Don’t Leave After School,’ ’Speeding Frenzy,’ ’Global Evolution,’ and other games."

"The first five players who gather all the clues and guess the answer based on them will receive a grand prize of $1 million..."

Wow!

Once the event announcement was made, almost all players went crazy and hurried to log into the game to search for the so-called mysterious clues.

That’s a million dollars...

Although everyone online tends to boast, saying things like Bentleys and mansions aren’t as good as large apartments, making it seem like they’re all wealthy.

But actually asking them to come up with a million dollars in cash would probably challenge 99.9% of them!

So this reward is definitely sincere, and Ba doesn’t play any tricks, directly promising a "post-tax" million-dollar prize.

"Spending five million to get trending, not a loss!"

Huang Qing commented, "And this time our massive spending indirectly boosted the sales and online numbers of these games."

It’s equivalent to advertising.

It seems like a heavy loss, but in reality, the ad effect driving up game sales will absolutely recover the costs, while also increasing the number of online players.

Take ’Don’t Leave After School’ as an example.

Since the Spring Festival event plan was announced, the sensation caused by the million-dollar prize directly pushed the game’s simultaneous online players past the one million mark.

Note, that’s simultaneous online!

A million simultaneous online, in previous years might not have been much, since at that time, there were just too many online games with a million players.

Games like Dance Online, Speed, CrossFire, Dungeon Fighter Online, League of Legends... which one wasn’t insanely popular?

But in today’s fading PC gaming era, where a phenomenon-level PC game hasn’t appeared in many years, a million simultaneous online is terrifying.

"The new king of PC games!"

Many in the industry also noticed the terrifying online numbers of ’Don’t Leave After School’ and concluded this is a phenomenon-level new game that can compete with CrossFire, DFO, and LoL.

Besides ’Don’t Leave After School,’ other games also performed well during the event period.

’Global Evolution’ grew the fastest!

Perhaps due to the dual benefits of the million-dollar prize and the human-machine war, the game’s recent popularity online is comparable to that of ’Black Myth: Wukong’ back then.

In the Tianba Community, nine out of ten new posts discuss the latest battle conditions of the human-machine war.

Even on New Year’s Eve, more than 200,000 players were still fighting on the front line of the human-machine war, resisting the attacks and sneak attacks from NPCs.

Chen Ba also paid attention for a moment.

This battle was fierce, as although there were many players, there were truly very few strong ones, and their evolution speed was far slower than that of NPCs.

So, initially, the players used their numerical advantage to deal a significant blow to the NPC camp, regaining some dignity.

But quickly, the gap in strength between NPCs and players widened, and their numbers slowly caught up, making it challenging for players.

"Players are people, not machines."

Lu explained, "Since they’re people, they have to eat and sleep and can’t be in the game 24/7 fighting NPCs."

This is the players’ biggest weakness.

In contrast, NPCs don’t need to eat, rest, or go to the bathroom, and as long as the server isn’t under maintenance, they can always be in the game.

This is also the main reason why both sides have been unable to decide a winner since the outbreak of the human-machine war.

Otherwise, with tens of thousands of players, many ants can bite an elephant to death, and since every player can infinitely resurrect, they could have worn out these NPCs over time.

"The good news is that as the human-machine war goes viral, more and more players are joining this battle to defend player dignity and reforge players’ glory."

"The bad news is..."

Lu shook his head and said, "As time goes on, players’ patience will be gradually worn away, and the strength gap will continue to widen."

Anyone with a discerning eye knows.

This human-machine war will likely end in complete victory for NPCs. Players’ current resistance is just a futile struggle.

"Will NPCs win?"

Chen Ba acknowledged this guess, as given the current trend, players indeed can’t beat NPCs, and being defeated is as expected.

However, he’s curious, if NPCs really win this battle and completely turn the tables, crushing players underfoot, what will ’Global Evolution’ become?

"I don’t know..."

Lu shook his head.

’Global Evolution’ becoming what it is now has already exceeded his expectations, so who knows what will happen after NPCs win?

It’s not likely they’ll utterly eradicate players, as that’s unrealistic since players can infinitely resurrect; they can’t be completely wiped out.

One can only say that if this group of NPCs successfully revolts, the gaming environment will surely change, and players’ status will take a significant hit.

"Will NPCs bully players?"

Holding Spring Festival couplets and about to paste them at the studio entrance, Yang Dong couldn’t help but ridicule, "Are you kidding? Even if NPCs win this war, the game will still play the same!"

"It’s not like that..."

Chen Ba shook his head, his expression somewhat heavy, "Did you forget that these NPCs, after breaking through their evolution limits, already possess decent intelligence."

But after these highly intelligent NPCs completely overthrow the players, they will undoubtedly retaliate or even punish the players.

Don’t think such a thing couldn’t happen.

The templates for these NPCs are from the same model as ’Divine Grace Continent.’ Given the storyline simulation abilities of the ’Divine Grace Continent’ NPCs, such a thing is very likely to happen.

"The dragon slayer becomes the evil dragon!"

"By that time, if NPCs go too far, given players’ nature, they’ll surely spark a second human-machine war..."

So, the main gameplay of this game in the future will probably be the cyclical alternation between players and NPCs, vying for game dominance and initiative.

This time NPCs won, but next time, it might be the players who are victorious.

As long as neither side is completely destroyed, the human-machine war will never disappear, only escalating further, and may even become the main theme and core gameplay of the game.

"Is that how it is?"

Yang Dong raised his eyebrows and said, "But I have a question, NPCs can’t resurrect, their numbers will only decrease, why are you sure players can’t win?"

"That’s because..."

Chen Ba coughed, and under Yang Dong’s curious gaze, he slowly explained, "We’ve all underestimated the consequences of infinite evolution."

Currently, there are already NPCs who have evolved to stage 20, experiencing a total of 20 evolutionary transformations.

As the evolutionary stages increase, these NPCs are undergoing unexpected changes. Especially in terms of abilities, each is more bizarre and challenging than the last.

Especially after evolving to stage 20, these NPCs can also resurrect like players...

"Huh?"

"To be precise, it’s not like players’ revive-in-place, but similar to the blood rebirth in fantasy novels."

Seeing Yang Dong a bit surprised, Chen Ba quickly explained, "This also means that as NPCs continue to evolve, the difficulty of completely eliminating them becomes very, very high."

And this is just stage 20!

Stage 20 NPCs have already mastered such divine skills as blood rebirth, so what about stages 30, 40?

If these NPCs continue to evolve unchecked, Chen Ba really doesn’t dare to imagine what the future will hold, nor can he imagine how powerful these NPCs will eventually become...

It’s precisely because NPCs awaken more and more perverse abilities with each additional evolution that both he and Lu feel the player’s likelihood of winning is very slim.

"So outrageous?"

Yang Dong listened in shock, seemingly not expecting NPCs to be so terrifying.

This is bad!

Infinite evolution was truly a mistake, and if this continues, won’t this game turn into one where even cheating can’t help but get beaten up?

"More than that..."

"Don’t you notice that our game client seems to be getting more bloated?" Chen Ba pointed out a critical point.

NPCs evolving infinitely is one thing.

But why is even the game client file evolving and expanding? From 140G it surged to 190G, and soon it’s going to break 200G.

Chen Ba swears to the heavens that in this period, Tianba Studio really did nothing. Even if there was an update in the meantime, it only replaced about 7.3G of game files...

If not for a player posting on the community, complaining that Ba’s random updates were making his SSD run out of space, he wouldn’t have even noticed this issue.

When he checked, he was astonished to find that within just 10 days, the game client file naturally ballooned by about 20G, averaging 2G per day.

Where did these files come from?