Secret Weapon
How Naraka: Bladepoint is delivering a long-overdue shake-up to the battle royale
Put aside for a moment the fantasy setting, and the brace of swords and spears – if you want hard proof that Naraka: Bladepoint is doing things differently to most battle royale games, you need look no further than the very beginning of a match. There is an island, yes, and there are 60 players all trying to survive within its ever-shrinking circle, but it’s missing what must be the genre’s single most iconic moment: the drop. There’s no plane or bus to jump from here, just a simple gridded map with players claiming squares like this is some massively multiplayer game of Minesweeper. Once spots have been picked, and the countdown reaches zero, players are magicked over to the island in a shower of bright petals. Instead of entering from the sky, you all begin the game on the ground. Just don’t expect to stay there for long.
Every piece of scenery on Naraka’s Morus Island – the trees, the cliff faces, the tall slope of its buildings’ Xie Shan roofs – is there to be climbed. Every vertical surface can be run along, clambered up, clung to, every inch providing a potential handhold, a point where you can catch your breath before the next stage of your ascent to the peak. Or you can take the easy option, and simply grapple your way there.
Powered by spools found among the usual colour-coded loot, the grappling hook is perhaps the single most important tool in Naraka’s arsenal. It can grab onto any point and launch you headlong in its direction. This can be used to set up treetop ambushes, to flee when you’re outmatched, or to stay right on the cusp of the circular boundary as it closes in. It can also attach to another player, letting you close the gap instantly and – if you can time it right – land a blow that will knock them off balance, which can be enough to swing the entire fight in your favour.
Once weapons meet, Naraka veers entirely from the battle royale formula, revealing itself as an accomplished action game. Every melee weapon has a horizontal and vertical attack, each of which can be charged up to unleash a more powerful variant. However, these are vulnerable to parrying, which not only creates an opening for your opponent but has a chance of disarming you entirely. It’s a simple rock-paper-scissors foundation for a combat system whose skill ceiling we suspect will be considerably harder to reach than that of the local architecture.
Naraka might be the debut game from Hangzhou-based 24 Entertainment, but its origins stretch back to 2002, when lead producer Ray Kuan began work on a game series called Meteor, Butterfly, Sword. It soon became the most popular action game in China, installed on practically every computer in every net café in the country. Kuan calls it “one of the highlights of my career to this point”, and it established a pattern for the projects he’s worked on ever since: 3D martial-arts games with a focus on player freedom. “Little did I know,” he says, “I would be walking this path for almost 20 years.”
After the launch of Meteor, Butterfly, Sword’s mobile version in 2018, Kuan decided to move on. At the time, battle royale
games were in the ascendancy, with Fortnite and PUBG drawing record-breaking numbers of players, and Kuan saw an opportunity to take the style of game he’d been honing for decades and make a push beyond China’s borders.
“We thought that the two were a perfect match,” 24 Entertainment marketing executive Raylan Kwan tells us. “Battle royale was, and still is, a very popular genre in the global community.” But while other studios rushed to join the fray with similarly styled spins on the battle royale concept, 24 could see a glaring gap in the market. “We realised that there are still a lot of players who want fighting games,” Kwan says. “We think there are just too many shooters already – but we’ve been lacking multiplayer fighting games in recent years.”
At a time when the battle royale’s big four seem like unshakeable fixtures, this is how it’s hoped Naraka can carve out its own space. The early signs are good – when we preview the game, it’s alongside the hundreds of thousands of other players who have rushed in to try the game’s final pre-launch beta – but 24 Entertainment isn’t resting on its laurels.
Naraka is not strictly the first of its kind – The Swordsmen X, for example, is another Chinese battle-royale action game which launched in 2018, back when Naraka’s development was just beginning. “And I think there will be more,” Kwan says. “Naraka
“WE THINK THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY SHOOTERS – BUT
WE’VE BEEN LACKING MULTIPLAYER FIGHTING GAMES”
will not be the first nor the last of this kind of design.” With that in mind, the studio is not content to apply its sharp combat system to the battle royale genre and call it a day; it’s also working to improve on what it sees as weaknesses of the current model.
Which brings us back, once again, to the beginning of a match. “One thing that we feel we have to improve is that the early game experience in all the battle royale games is kind of boring,” Kwan says. “It’s just loot, loot, loot. You do that for the first 15 minutes and then, bang, you get sniped from someone you never even see, and you’re dead. It’s very frustrating, and it’s no fun at all. And that’s why we’re adding the restoration system.”
If an early skirmish doesn’t go your way, and you find yourself skewered on a rival’s steel, you can simply leave behind your earthly vessel and become a spirit. In this form, you’re invisible to living players but able to move freely around the map, until you find a Soul Altar – marked on the map with a lotus flower icon – and reincarnate. You’ll spawn with basic weapons to give you a fighting chance, and can start building your inventory back up to its former glory. You can even find your corpse and, if you’re lucky, maybe reclaim your previous equipment. “We encourage players to engage in early fights,” Kwan says, “because you’ve got nothing to lose.”
Even when the opportunities for resurrection disappear, following the first shrinking of the circle, you’re likely to find that encounters have a better survival rate than your average battle royale shooter. Thanks to the historical nature of the game’s armaments, you can generally take more hits before dying, while your grappling hook offers more opportunities for a successful retreat. The parry plays a role here too: coming up against a foe with a superior weapon needn’t be the end, given that a welltimed counter will knock it from their hands and give you a chance to grab it for yourself. These are small but impactful choices that combine to give players more opportunity to get to grips with the combat system – which is, after all, Naraka’s greatest draw.
It’s worth noting that melee isn’t the only combat option available to you. That was the case in the game’s initial iteration, we’re told, but now there is an assortment of ranged weapons: bows, muskets, cannons and, very occasionally, a flamethrower. The explanation for why these were introduced can be summed up in a single word, one that comes up repeatedly during our conversation with Kuan: ‘unchained’.
“Freedom is a feature I have always felt is particularly important to players,” he explains. “The freedom I’m referring to here isn’t like being able to explore a vast singleplayer game, or being able to choose a large number of sidequests. It is more about an unrestricted feeling of being unchained.” The idea is to provide as many options, and as few boundaries, as possible,
to allow players to approach each situation however they like. It’s a design philosophy that led to the creation of the grappling hook and parkour systems, we’re told, and the generosity with which you can use them. “Many players, even members of the development team, have asked me some questions like why climbing trees does not consume energy,” Kuan says. “Why is there no fall damage in the game, or why is it that players can use powerful moves for each weapon without limits? The answer always revolves around this concept of ‘unchained’.”
And so, in the first pre-alpha playtest of Naraka, in an incarnation that only offered melee weapons, Kwan says: “We realised that the players were still chained. We needed to give them more options.” In the latest version of the game, there are two weapon slots, which can be used for any combination you prefer. You can be a generalist, chipping away at a rival’s armour with arrows before closing in to deliver the finishing blow. But perhaps you decide it’s better never to engage in close combat at all, with a musket and pistol ensuring you can be effective at multiple ranges. A combination of spear and katana can achieve the same at a tighter scale; then again, it might be sensible to keep a greatsword in your back pocket, just in case.
These weapons work in tandem with each character’s abilities, undeniably the most eye-catching of which belongs to warrior monk Tianhai. A flash of light removes his figure from the battlefield and replaces it with a Vajra warrior three times his size and with three times as many arms. The Vajra can grab two opponents at once, smashing their skulls together until they wriggle free, or stamping to send out a disabling shockwave.
This is Tianhai’s ultimate, while a main ability (on a faster cooldown) throws up a Qi barrier in the shape of a glowing bell, resisting attacks and sending projectiles back at their shooter.
Other characters’ abilities are less obviously transformative, if no less effective. Kurumi is a magical healer, able to link herself to a teammate, removing her ability to attack for the duration while restoring health and even allowing her to teleport to their side. Matari is a speedy stealth specialist, with a short-range teleport ability and an ultimate that makes her all but invisible.
The idea is that players will be able to find their preferred combination of character and weapon, then customise it further with the Talent system. A single Glyph slot offers a straightforward boost to, for example, grappling-hook distance or stamina; meanwhile, each ability has two unlockable variants, offering some tradeoff of benefit and drawback – a more potent effect but a shorter duration, for example. This is presented as an extension of the ‘unchained’ design philosophy, extending the player freedom well beyond the heat of battle.
However, isn’t there a risk here of encouraging players to chase the optimal build? The aim, Kwan tells us, is that there
“THERE IS NO BEST SOLUTION OR METHOD. THERE’S ONLY
THE MOST APPROPRIATE METHOD FOR YOUR PLAY STYLE”
simply won’t be one to chase. “What we’re trying to achieve is that there is no best solution or method. There’s only the most appropriate method for you and your own play style.” To that end, 24 Entertainment will be constantly monitoring player stats and tweaking the balance between characters, weapons, ability variants and Glyphs. “It will be a huge task for the dev team,” Kwan admits, but one that’s absolutely necessary for a game that is selling itself on the notion of ‘unchained’ player freedom. After all, if a single best choice exists, then there’s not really any choice to be made at all.
There’s a sense that 24 Entertainment is already preparing for Naraka to thrive, well beyond its launch. This beta is the game’s third in the west, and the studio has held pre-launch tournaments in China in order to lay the groundwork for what it hopes could be a bright future in the competitive scene. But Kuan remains humble: “The latest beta, in particular, exposed some problems with aspects of our game. It demonstrates that, no
matter how much preparation and effort we have made, it’s never enough. We have so much more work to do.”
Not that this has held Naraka back so far. The June beta quickly nosed its way into Steam’s top five, reaching a peak of over 185,000 concurrent players on the service. That’s roughly the same as PUBG’s average concurrent player count in recent months, and Naraka has seen its playerbase grow reliably with each new beta. A successful launch, now just over the horizon, seems inevitable. When we put this to Kwan, though, his guard remains up. “This is a free-to-play beta right now – but Naraka at release will be a premium game,” he says. “So we are happy to see these numbers, but we have to be cautious and continue to work hard to provide more content, a better and more streamlined experience overall for our players in the time for the August launch, otherwise…” He trails off for a moment. “We just don’t want to fail our community.”
The decision to sell Naraka for an upfront price is a significant one, breaking the trend both for battle royale titles and games made by Chinese studios. It wasn’t an easy decision – “pricing, competitors, and also players’ feelings are all things we have considered and discussed many, many times,” Kuan says – but it ultimately came down to two factors. The first is what Kwan calls “the cheater problem”, something that has notoriously plagued CS:GO since it dropped the entrance fee. “Because if you ban one account, I can just open another and I’ve lost nothing.”
As for the studio itself, 24 Entertainment believes that the premium model is a safer bet.
The studio is a subsidiary of Chinese Internet giant NetEase but “we are kind of financially independent,” Kwan says. “So we have to make sure that we can recover what we spent on Naraka.” Three years in the making, with 120 developers now on staff: it’s already a big gamble for a studio’s debut game. Premium is considered a more “conservative” option than the unpredictability of free-to-play. “After all, the last successful free-to-play battle royale games would be Warzone or Apex Legends, and they’re created by huge studios, backed by EA and Activision, who would still be doing fine if the revenue didn’t cover the costs,” Kwan says. “But this is the first game from 24 Entertainment. And if we failed to do that, Naraka could possibly be the last game of 24 Entertainment.”
On the strength of everything we’ve seen, though, this seems rather unlikely. With most of Kuan’s previous games never reaching these shores, the promise of a wuxia action game where swordfights can play out among the treetops should be enough to draw a crowd of players. But it’s also a smart twist on the battle royale, arriving just as the genre is starting to feel overfamiliar and in serious need of a shakeup. We’re reminded of the game’s all-important parry, and the moment we use it to trip up a player with more experience and a significantly better weapon, disarming them to take the win. As it braces to launch into a space that has a tendency to whittle down competition to just a few survivors, Naraka: Bladepoint feels like 24 Entertainment preparing a well-timed counter of its own.