I don't think Hoyo can just pivot so close to the release of the next map. Due to the sheer amount of work each version takes (months to a year), the most I expect is probably certain names and aesthetics to be changed around.
Chinese Video/Computer Games
- Thread starter AssassinsMace
- Start date
That's right, this game utilizes assets from a canceled project. The original prototype was based in Shanghai, so you'll notice some Shanghai-themed elements. However, overall it remains a recreation of Singapore.
Do you know why the Shanghai based one was cancelled? Overall much more potential
What I've heard is that Cai Haoyu, the major shareholder who personally led the project at the time, was dissatisfied with it. After several years of development, neither the technology nor the entire team met his expectations.
Great on Mihoyo if they go through with it. I’m tired of Chinese entertainment companies blatantly playing the “Japanese shill” angle. Just as there needs to be technological independence from the West & its vassals, there needs to be cultural independence from imitating foreign cultures.
This doesn’t mean everything needs to be Chinese coded (which would be boring). It just means there should be more critical & novel takes, less obvious copying of their styles. Hopefully the row with Japan will persist for long enough to effect a real cultural pivot among Chinese consumers, similar to how the THAAD controversy constrained the influence of the Korean Wave.
Where Winds Meet recently broke 250,000 concurrent players on Steam. Once again, the game is region locked, so the Mainland Chinese presence is minimal. Obviously being F2P helps, but it does seem that if this continues, especially with next week being the Thanksgiving holiday, its international audience will have essentially surpassed Black Myth Wukong's.
This is interesting to me. When Nezha 2's English dub bombed, people had discussions about the internationalization of Chinese culture and the difficulties it faced from geopolitical tensions to Westerners just being conditioned to see certain aspects of it as unappealing. And there are truths to those, but when all's said and done despite that the audience is there, its just a matter of approach. People might still criticize the gachas for example of being Japanese styled, while forgetting that all of Japan's early works and still to an extent to this day are European setted and only after the audience was won, did they start becoming receptive to Japanese culture. Gachas do the same by being anime styled and then working in Chinese culture like Genshin did with Chinese opera and Wuthering Waves with Qiuyuan.
As for the actual Chinese cultural stuff, like the things that are unmistakeably Chinese, I think the slow acceptance of Chinese mythological themed stuff by international audiences simply comes down to the fact that its only really started to be exported by China. Compared to Wuxia, where in case this was before anyone's time here, there was little a movie back in the day called Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Not to mention all the Cdramas, webnovels, and cultivation donghuas, so there is already at the very least a niche audience out there for Wuxia. So when WWM came out, despite the mediocre metacritic reviews its found its international audience quite quickly just by being a good game. Also I've said it before, a lot of these recent Chinese myth works do not make it easy at all for people who are already not familiar with Chinese myths to understand. Granted because these works are intended for Chinese audiences first and foremost rather than international audiences. But with the niche audience for Chinese myth building, eventually there will come someone making it palateable for international audiences.
So all in all, the ground work has been laid out and Chinese pop culture can only keep growing from here on out.
This is interesting to me. When Nezha 2's English dub bombed, people had discussions about the internationalization of Chinese culture and the difficulties it faced from geopolitical tensions to Westerners just being conditioned to see certain aspects of it as unappealing. And there are truths to those, but when all's said and done despite that the audience is there, its just a matter of approach. People might still criticize the gachas for example of being Japanese styled, while forgetting that all of Japan's early works and still to an extent to this day are European setted and only after the audience was won, did they start becoming receptive to Japanese culture. Gachas do the same by being anime styled and then working in Chinese culture like Genshin did with Chinese opera and Wuthering Waves with Qiuyuan.
As for the actual Chinese cultural stuff, like the things that are unmistakeably Chinese, I think the slow acceptance of Chinese mythological themed stuff by international audiences simply comes down to the fact that its only really started to be exported by China. Compared to Wuxia, where in case this was before anyone's time here, there was little a movie back in the day called Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Not to mention all the Cdramas, webnovels, and cultivation donghuas, so there is already at the very least a niche audience out there for Wuxia. So when WWM came out, despite the mediocre metacritic reviews its found its international audience quite quickly just by being a good game. Also I've said it before, a lot of these recent Chinese myth works do not make it easy at all for people who are already not familiar with Chinese myths to understand. Granted because these works are intended for Chinese audiences first and foremost rather than international audiences. But with the niche audience for Chinese myth building, eventually there will come someone making it palateable for international audiences.
So all in all, the ground work has been laid out and Chinese pop culture can only keep growing from here on out.