Chapter 191: Turn Back Before It's Too Late
In addition, there's the environmental factor to consider.
Soulslike games didn't start off as a big success—they also went through a process of low to high sales over time.
From the earliest Demon's Souls, to Dark Souls, Bloodborne, then Dark Souls 3, and finally Sekiro, the overall trend shows a gradual decrease in difficulty.
While retaining the core essence of Soulslike games, the difficulty was gradually toned down, and sales steadily increased.
This proves one thing: increasing difficulty does reduce sales.
Moreover, the success of Soulslike games was regional.
Demon's Souls was originally completely at odds with the publisher's expectations. During development, Miyazaki pulled some sneaky moves—he didn't fully follow the directives from above and instead made a game entirely in his own style.
By the time the higher-ups realized this, Demon's Souls was mostly complete. They were furious, but there wasn't much they could do—so they just rolled with it and hoped for the best.
Even the publisher had little faith in the game at first. If it hadn't been for the persistence of project lead Takeshi Kajii, the game might never have made it to the public.
Right before release, the well-known gaming magazine Famitsu even gave it a low score—29 out of 40.
The game flopped hard in Japan, and Miyazaki struggled to reach out to Western publishers—only for the game to unexpectedly blow up overseas!
The key reason was that Soulslike games happened to match the tastes of hardcore Western single-player gamers.
In China, however, Soulslike games didn't really become popular until around 2015.
As for the current domestic gaming environment, it's largely the same as what Pei Qian remembers—high-difficulty games are still niche and unpopular.
If that's the case… why not make a super hard Soulslike game that's only released in China?
To prevent Western players from discovering it, he could even set it in a Chinese historical/fantasy context, adding a cultural barrier so Westerners wouldn't even understand it if they wanted to play!
He couldn't help but feel incredibly pleased with himself. Truly, human creativity is limitless.
If it weren't for his goal of losing money, he never would have realized he could come up with such a brilliant idea!
…
Pei Qian then succinctly outlined the positioning of this game to the team. In total, there were five main requirements:
First, the game must be set in a Chinese cultural context, filled with numerous puzzle-solving elements. A large portion of the puzzles and text must be written in Classical Chinese.
This is mainly to stop Western players from picking it up and making it popular.
By requiring solid Classical Chinese reading skills to progress, should any foreign players try to play the game, they won't even last a minute!
And since the game is only being released domestically, not having versions in other languages won't count as a violation under the system's rules.
Second, the game must be extremely difficult.
Pei Qian instructed Bao Xu and Lu Mingliang to rack their brains and do everything they could to make players fail.
Their primary mission was to discourage as many players as possible from continuing to play.
Third, the game must be a large-scale action game.
It must contain tons of models, animations, and environments. The art asset budget? Max it out!
Use every trick in the book to spend as much money as possible!
Of course, this so-called "spending a lot of money" is measured relative to Tengda's usual game development budgets. In truth, Pei Qian's mental ceiling for this game is only 20 million yuan.
Any more than that—well, he would like to spend more—but the system funds might not be enough.
If you compare it to foreign AAA titles with development budgets of tens or even hundreds of millions, it's not even in the same league. But when compared to the average budget of domestic studios, it would still qualify as a major production.
Fourth, the game will adopt the longest refund window possible.
According to the rules of the official game platform, players can request a refund as long as they've played less than 3 hours. This limit can be extended, but not shortened.
In fact, most developers would love to shorten or even eliminate the refund window. Why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily make it longer?
But Pei Qian decided this game would use the maximum refund time allowed by the platform: five hours!
For many smaller indie games, the total playtime is only three to four hours. Offering a five-hour refund window is practically insane—you might as well make it free!
However, from Pei Qian's point of view, three hours isn't long at all. Some people spent all three hours dying at Iudex Gundyr's gate in Dark Souls 3 and only realized too late that they'd missed the refund window.
Pei Qian decided that for his game, players will be allowed to refund up to 5 hours, and at 4 hours and 50 minutes, a prompt will appear in the top-right corner of the screen:
[Reminder: You are approaching the refund time limit.]
This way, no player who wants a refund will miss the opportunity.
Fifth, the name of the game.
To avoid misleading potential players or attracting casual gamers by accident, Pei Qian decided the game title must be as direct and clear as possible.
So, the game will be called: "Turn Back Before It's Too Late".
A sincere warning from him to all would-be players.
After hearing Pei Qian's five key requirements, even Bao Xu was stunned.
In Pei Qian's memory, Demon's Souls came out in 2009. But in this world, that game doesn't exist. So even someone as experienced and well-read as Bao Xu had never heard of a game this insanely cruel.
Sure, there were a few hardcore games known for their difficulty, but a game that outright demanded the developers "do everything they can to make players fail"? That's practically unheard of.
Everything else made sense. But the difficulty level—that was where both Lu Mingliang and Bao Xu felt completely lost.
"President Pei, about the difficulty—could you be more specific? For example, for the final boss, how many players do you expect to fail there?" Bao Xu asked.
Pei Qian almost blurted out: "99.9999% failure rate!"
But in that moment, a line of red text appeared in his field of vision:
[Warning! A game where the overwhelming majority of players have no chance of completing it is considered a violation. The maximum allowed difficulty is one that the host (you) is capable of clearing.]
Pei Qian's smile froze on his face.
System, are you serious right now?!
The difficulty should be based on me being able to beat it? I'm totally a scrub!
He couldn't even get through Ocean Fortress without being destroyed—now the system expects him to beat this monstrosity?
Why not just tell him outright that he's not allowed to make the game?
Still, Pei Qian wasn't panicking. He had seen plenty of strange situations by now, and this little roadblock wasn't going to stop him.
Based on whether he can beat it?
Well then, that's easy—he'll just secretly hide something in the game.
He'll set it up so there's an incredibly powerful weapon hidden in the game, but the only way to get it is to trigger an extremely convoluted hidden storyline and follow a completely illogical progression path.
Then, with this overpowered weapon, his understanding of Soulslike games, and his complete foreknowledge of the level layouts, he should be able to grind his way through it in two to three weeks.
For the sake of losing money—he'll suffer through this!
After this idea popped into his head, the system did not issue another warning, which meant—it was allowed.
Pei Qian smiled faintly and said to Bao Xu,
"We won't design the game to hard-block any players. In theory, almost anyone can finish it—they just need a bit of skill."
The implication being:
If they give up on their own, that's not my fault.
"You guys go ahead and make it as hard as you possibly can. I'll personally tweak the final version."
When the time comes, he'd simply add the secret weapon, and adjust the difficulty to the highest setting he could beat using it. That way, the game wouldn't trigger a violation warning from the system.
As for the players?
Without the weapon, they'd be stuck on hell difficulty. Combined with the 5-hour unconditional refund window, most players would definitely give up and walk away!
Lu Mingliang then asked, "President Pei, since the game is called Turn Back Before It's Too Late, and it has a traditional Chinese setting… what's the specific worldbuilding like?"
Pei Qian smiled and replied:
"You guys can decide on the minor details like that."