For a game, especially a linear game, there will always be a lot of things that don't have much to do with the content of the game itself to kill the player's time.

And most of the classic designs, whether or not they were designed for this method in the beginning, will slowly turn it into a time killer that kills the player's time in later games.

For example, the development element in the game, which is called leveling up.

Players can start at LV1 and work their way up to LV999, including skill trees and equipment upgrades.

These development elements are used as time killers for players, and of course, the sense of accomplishment brought by this cultivation also makes players happy.

But the alternative derivative time killer setting makes players less comfortable.

The most common example is the long-distance mission, Uncle Wang of Lijia Village asks you to investigate a terrible thing, but this matter requires you to go to another village to find an NPC named Uncle Li to help, and after you find Uncle Li, an NPC, he tells you that if you want to solve this matter, you have to go to another place to kill a monster and bring back his blood.

After a series of missions, players find that they have walked through the entire map.

At the same time, in order to make players less bored when they are in a hurry, players will occasionally be given some points to explore on the map, as well as side quests.

There is no doubt that these are all common time-extending designs in games, as well as the so-called mazes and lightning encounters in RPGs, which are designed to kill the player's time.

With the progress of game design concepts, players have begun to hate and even feel disgusted with the design of this game, so this design has slowly been eliminated in the game field, but there is another mode, that is, decryption.

Including many ACT type games, there will be a variety of puzzle levels.

But the question is, do players need these?

It is true that the decryption elements are attractive enough, and players are indeed enjoying it, and they can even feel the joy of 1+1>2.

However, for ACT players who simply want to experience the exhilarating battle, the experience of decrypting for five minutes and one hour of decryption is definitely terrible.

Imagine that you are fighting well, and then a level requires you to activate your clever little brain, looking for various clues before you can embark on the right path, if it is simple, it is nothing more than opening a mechanism or something.

But if it's a little more difficult, it's definitely the heart of smashing the keyboard.

For this part of the game, there will be in the normal main story, but it is a very easy kind, for example, you will encounter elite monsters in the place of the guardian switch, and after defeating them, you will not only be able to open the right path, but also reap some item rewards.

The more complex and slightly hardcore decryption is placed on the collection of other items, and in the linear main plot from the beginning to the end, this kind of hardcore decryption mechanism will not be encountered.

Soon, Yang Chen determined the direction of "God of War" on decrypting the elements.

As for the perspective, the previous three did not use a over-the-shoulder perspective, but a more God-down perspective, which was designed on the one hand because of the characteristics of the game in the "God of War" series.

The huge bodies of the Greek gods and monsters filled the entire screen and compared Kratos' 'thin' body, and finally launched a smooth kill with Kratos's flowing QTE finishing moves, in this case, so that players can feel the shock to the greatest extent.

But at the same time, this is also for technical reasons, not that it can't be done to the extent of the over-the-shoulder perspective, but to achieve that degree there is a counter-effect, because of the picture effect.

It's like the countless pixel bricks in "Minecraft" piled up into a large-scale building, which gives people a shocking feeling when viewed from a distance, but if you get close to find the pixel bricks, the shock will drop significantly.

Similarly, the game screen technology has not reached a certain level, and the shock brought by this kind of closeness is not as shocking as God's perspective.

Imagine the legendary Poseidon fighting Kratos with the god of the earth Gaia, this should be a very shocking performance, and it is true from a distance, but if the player zooms in and suddenly sees the polygonal modeling of Poseidon and Gaia, the god of the earth, in the game, the experience is not as shocking as God's perspective.

The rest is the element of QTE, what is QTE? Simply put, it is a quick response system, and there are two kinds of QTE systems in ordinary games: the first is a system that tests the player's immediate reaction, in the actual game process, the player has to react quickly to the buttons that appear on the game screen, and press the buttons corresponding to the screen, and the buttons that appear have a single button and a combination of buttons.

The second is a specific or random symbol that moves back and forth quickly over a length of time, and the player needs to press the corresponding button when the symbol moves into the valid area of that length, otherwise the QTE event will be triggered again or again.

The early use of QTE in "God of War", from Yang Chen's point of view, is more like because of some technical trade-offs, including the development team in charge of "God of War" in the dream memory, the chief designer also said that he did not want to see the QTE mechanism become the label of "God of War" and its series, so the element of "New God of War" in the later part was canceled.

But this does not mean that QTE has no trade-offs at all, on the contrary, QTE is a kind of finisher-like reward in God of War, rather than just as a game mechanic, which can be said to have been completely used to the top.

Compared with freestyle control, the QTE system brings a more shocking visual performance, because players don't have to worry about the operation, just quietly enjoy a gorgeous slaughter show brought by Kratos after completing the QTE.

It is precisely because of this design that unlike "Ninja Dragon 3" and "Asura Fury", which heavily reference the QTE system and are ridiculed by players as "Monkey 3" and "QTE Fury", the shocking visual impact brought by the QTE system in "Victory" does not affect the normal smoothness of the game at all, and even makes it a classic, and even labeled.

In the trilogy of Greek mythology, the design of QTE is still retained like a dream memory, and Norse mythology symbolizes new beginnings.

Soon Yang Chen made a corresponding decision, and at the same time, the flow of the game almost needed to be changed appropriately, and the story of Kratos was presented to the player in a single-line mode with its Greek mythology.

In addition, the difficulty of QTE should also be appropriately reduced according to the difficulty of the game, aside from the more complex decryption, in fact, there is another problem of "God of War" in dream memory, that is, the speed that needs to be pressed when QTE is too fast.

It's like testing whether the player has a unicorn arm.