168. The Masked Hero
In early January, Dragon Hunter, which had just entered the closed beta phase, underwent several minor updates that basically only affected the players who were selected for the closed beta.
They discovered that some text in the game had been modified to a more "safe" version, but the overall content remained unchanged.
So this update passed by without much fanfare.
Mingyan quickly shifted his focus to another new project that required his attention: the new game from the Dragon Slayer Studio, which was officially put into development.
The goal of this game is very clear: to satisfy the needs of a specific group of wealthy players.
When Mingyan finalized the first draft of the design, he had already decided on the official name of the game.
"Iron Horse and Ice River," Mingyan said. "This name is a bit chuunibyou... cough, I mean, it's more relatable."
The deputy chief designer, still engrossed in studying the design drafts, exclaimed in amazement, "Boss, is this really okay? Are we really not going to set a historical background for the game?"
"The most immersive background is the one that has no background at all," Ming said with a smile. "No guns, no cannons, the players will create them for us!"
The Dragon-Slaying Saber is quite efficient; the atmosphere here has always been dominated by the chief designer's absolute authority.
The "Iron Horse and Ice River" project was soon officially launched, and the designers began to work together on the earliest design content.
—Large map.
This is a technical job, and also a tiring one. It requires people to be creative and to be able to provide evidence.
Fortunately, Chief Designer Ming is someone who has created fictional worlds such as "Blue Star Apocalypse" and "The Soul of Mortals," so he is quite adept at arranging this kind of work.
The design work was proceeding smoothly, but just as Mingyan was about to step into the dark room, cries for help came from the Blue Star Studio again.
The problem this time still lies in external communication.
A prominent influencer has started openly criticizing "Dragon Hunter".
He not only demanded the removal of the pink dragon, but also directly denied the existence of the "hybrid" system... but that's not the key point.
The key point is that he actually released the internal design drafts of Blue Star, which were not made public.
At this point, Mingyan had no intention of going head-to-head with the top influencers. He considered it for a while and wanted to find a way to resolve the issue peacefully and achieve the best of both worlds.
But Xia Cheng calmly said, "Don't take that person too seriously—you're just too gentle."
He stated, "I'm just an honest and straightforward game developer; I don't actually like being in the spotlight with so much traffic..."
“Baby, don’t you know your own traffic? Compared to you, they are nothing.” Xia Cheng said with a wry smile, “Look carefully, you now have more than 20 billion fans. If each of them sends a single byte, the overwhelming data stream can be considered a cyberattack of the level of a planet-destroying cannon.”
Clearly stated: "..."
What kind of attack?
The veteran fossil hunter was terrified.
However, most of Chief Designer Ming's more than 20 billion fans are still unaware of this and are still immersed in the joy of the first closed beta test.
It wasn't until this influential blogger spoke out with righteous indignation that the post was pushed to the top.
[Masked Hero: I don't understand why some games like to push the boundaries? It's already at the diplomatic level, and the chief designer still has no clue, always out there running business and never coming back to the office. He has absolutely no professionalism.]
Mingyan was completely confused: Are you talking about me? Excuse me?
His secretary reminded him to check out this blog, and now he actually has quite a few followers.
At this point, the comments below were mostly in agreement:
Some games really push the boundaries too far, featuring female characters who are all about selling sex appeal. What about your male characters?
[These days, anyone can be a chief designer. Some are just people who lend their names and then...get sponsorships. Maybe their glamorous lifestyle is part of their job. *laughs*]
Perhaps encouraged, the influencer quickly posted new content.
[Masked Hero: Let me show you how serious this prohibited content is. I can't even imagine what our neighboring countries would think of us if they saw it. (Attached: Several internal design drafts of "Dragon Hunter")]
Clearly stated:…
Oh dear, there wasn't enough time to communicate before it was deleted.
Fortunately, these few drafts are not important. They are just two dragons with their necks intertwined, drawn by the artist out of boredom. They are not even considered official original artwork.
...Should I consider this fan art of someone drawing themselves?
When Mingyan first saw the news, it had just been refreshed, and the fans hadn't even reacted yet.
However, after Mingyan quietly refreshed the page, the blog post suddenly garnered over a thousand comments within two minutes:
[Is this Dragon Hunter?! I see the Blue Star logo on the notebook page!!!]
Who is this blogger, woc? Is he an employee of BlueStar? Why is he allowed to post design drafts for a new game?
[Brothers, wait a minute, this guy's last blog post was criticizing our Chief Designer Ming???]
The masked man may not be aware of Chief Designer Ming's standing among netizens in the Sixth Star Province.
Although things seem calm and peaceful most of the time, with little traffic except for news about new games... that's obviously because our veteran player doesn't like posting on blogs.
Once Chief Designer Ming posts a blog, it's foreseeable that the comments urging for more updates will skyrocket, instantly landing him on the trending topics list.
Of course, the situation is similar now.