The Legend of Mir 2

Shengqu Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. - Game Research & Design

Game Designer

“Give rebirth to a 20-year-old game.”

— Chengdong Gu, Design Director

BACKGROUND

The Legend of Mir 2, as an MMORPG, was the most popular MMORPG in China in 2002 and 2003, with over 250,000 simultaneous users being reported. The game has also claimed to have 120 million players worldwide. In the past 20 years, The Legend of Mir 2 has generated more than 40 billion CNY in value. The CNG shows that it still has more than 90 billion CNY potential value and will be released in 3 years. More and more Mir-like mobile games have been released in the past two years.

MY JOB

Shengqu Games, the company that released The Legend of Mir 2 back in 2001, believes that The Legend of Mir 2 still has broad market prospects and decided to remake it into a mobile game that can attract the PC players from the past and the younger generation. As a system designer, I need to re-design and polish it while not changing its basic mechanics, art style, and underlying code.

RESEARCH AND RESULTS

The interesting thing is that the user structure has changed a lot during the past 20 years. The player’s average age has decreased from over 30 to about 20. Also, more and more female players who care about avatars more than equipment have joined the game. Only a few of these new players chose The Legend of Mir 2 because it was once famous. Based on these differences, I have chosen three main directions to make the game more “modern.” They are gaming pace, usability, and player acceptance.

GAME PACE

After researching the Mir-like game of the day, I found that, in most games, the player has the fastest growth speed in the first 30 minutes. As you can see in the graphic, after 2 hours of gameplay, most games’ growth speed has gone back to its normal rate.

Compared to those games, the player needs to spend more than a whole day to get one level up at the very beginning of the gameplay. The old gaming pace is too slow for today’s game behavior.

As a result, I decided to speed it up to make sure the game catches the player at the very beginning, and I called this plan “Triple 3.”

TRIPLE 3: 3 MINUTES, 30 MINUTES, 3 HOURS

3 minutes — The player will get his/her first big reward and a “fake” boss fight within 3 minutes to let them know the highlighted part of the game.

30 minutes — Most functions should be unlocked within 30 minutes to prevent customer churn before showing them what we have.

3 hours —The first three hours of gameplay should be designed for the growth speed and the mechanics to ensure that the players have enough to play but are not too tired to learn and see too many things.

USABILITY

The usability of Legend of Mir 2 is outdated. I have tried to update it several times with the artist on our team to let it be both user-friendly and retro but not too old since we still want to keep our old fans while attracting new players.

MOCKUP

GAME SCREEN CAPTURE

PLAYER ACCEPTANCE

As a 20-year-old game, it’s classic but antique. The graphic quality is not enough anymore. However, my project didn’t have the budget to remake all the art assets, so I can only share this opinion with my leaders. The good thing is, in the new project, they decided to improve the graphic quality.

Besides that, the world view and the game's background story were weakened in the past 20 years. The Legend of Mir 2 has a grand world view about the birth and development of different species on the different parts of the land and the conflicts between those species. I decided to re-enable the storyline to reduce the conflict between the players and make the game easier for first-time players.

OUTCOME

· Generated over 200,000 CNY in 14 days.

· The player retention rate increased from ~20% to 43%.

The job we’ve done proves that The Legend of Mir 2 is still charming for players nowadays, and our theory of re-designing the game works well.

As a result, two more related projects have been initiated, and we have an opportunity to further develop our game.