The prevailing wisdom of the Chinese games industry is that if it's not an online free-to-play game then no one is going to play it, but The Legend of Sword and Fairy (also called Chinese Paladin) is the exception. The Legend of Sword and Fairy (Chinese Paladin) Unlike CS:GO, Crossfire heavily leans into pay-to-win systems that reward those willing to shell out. Weapons have a durability meter that depletes as you use them, forcing you to repair them every so often for in-game currency or real money. It's that more casual pace and low hardware requirements that made Crossfire a hit across China and the rest of Southeast Asia.Īs you would expect, though, nearly everything in Crossfire is heavily monetized and wrapped up in a progression system where players earn currency to spend on new weapons, skins, and various boosts including armor bonuses that make you harder to kill. Crossfire's outdated graphics might also seem like a negative, but it means the game can run on practically any system. This abundance of more chaotic, arcadey game modes makes Crossfire extremely easy to play-a far cry from the tense and unforgiving Counter-Strike. There's still the usual team deathmatch and demolition modes, but Crossfire also includes a ton of novelty modes like Ghost, which turns one team invisible but they can only use knives, and Escape, where one team must get to a portal while the other team tries to prevent them. But that's where the similarities end as Crossfire has readily expanded to include a whopping 400 guns that players can use across 110 different modes and maps. What makes that even more astonishing is that Crossfire is basically a shameless Counter-Strike 1.6 clone on steroids-it even uses a lot of the same sound effects and graphics as the original mod. First released back in 2007, Crossfire is one of the top 10 most successful games of all time, grossing over $10 billion dollars-putting it comfortably in the realm of franchises like Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, and Warcraft. To put that in perspective, Fortnite only has 250 million total registered accounts as of early 2019. What that brief announcement didn't really communicate, however, is that Crossfire (the original version that CrossfireX will be based on) is the world's most popular videogame boasting an astonishing 660 million registered accounts. If you watched Microsoft's E3 2019 presentation this year, you might've been a bit confused by one announcement, CrossfireX, a new FPS developed by Korean Smilegate Entertainment with Remedy Games helping out with a singleplayer campaign.
Staying up to date with it isn't easy, so you should read our in-depth report that covers the past, present, and future on PC gaming in China.
It's not clear exactly how the event ended or what happened to the offending player and guild.Ĭhina's PC gaming scene is enormous, influential, and rapidly changing. Over the course of days, 80,000 players swarmed that particular server to protest the ban, creating crippling lag. With over 700 members, this guild was one of the top-five groups in the game. A day later, the developer also announced that the guild this player had founded called "The Alliance To Resist Japan" would be disbanded. In July of 2006, moderators placed a player named "Kill the little japs" (when translated) in prison and forced them to change their name. Though they borrow a lot of ideas, these sister MMOs also have some unique systems like being able to marry and have children who then grow up (or you can auction them off for adoption if you're a cruel bastard) or the ability to build and run your own stores.įantasy Westward Journey is also notable for hosting the largest virtual protest in the world when one of the top-five guilds was forcefully disbanded by NetEase due to racism. The series, like a lot of domestically developed Chinese games is an adaptation of the literary classic Journey to the West and is deeply rooted in Chinese mythology and history, which is probably why it resonated so deeply with Chinese gamers.
Though the mobile version plays like an action RPG, the original PC versions both have turn-based group combat where you can summon monsters to help you fight.