Fragpunk Preview: Exclusive hands-on map with new characters Chum and Dongtian
Blog Andrew Joseph 26 Feb , 2025 0
Netease followed the global success of global competitors and other popular live service games, and once humans, Netease once turned its attention to the hero shooter type with Fragpunk. New In-house Development Team Bad Guitar Studios consists of young, hardcore FPS fans who, after joining them for an hour of competition meetings, tried a new character and revealed specifically in this preview , The team's detailed program is very clear and clearly visible.
FragPunk's main game mode is 5V5 fragment conflict mode. On the surface, this mode resembles your typical Overwatch-like hero shooter game skirmish, but it also pulls out of various influences to mix gameplay. The rounds in this mode are closer to the counterattack bomb tainted target, with a team planting bombs in designated positions and another defensive bomb, and the relatively small arena makes the round tight and focused.
Like any hero shooter, players can choose from a variety of characters (called Lancers), each with a variety of unique skills, which means a lot can be learned from personal character preferences and team makeup. In our meeting, we tried the newly unveiled character Chum, a stone robot that accompanied a mechanical pet fishing fish with a mechanical pet called Chomper. In addition to using the game's satisfying gun arsenal, Chum can toss the projectiles similar to sticky ore and smoke bombs and send Chomper out as support. Chomper can track and bite enemies for multiple low damage attacks, essentially like walking turrets, or can be modified with pet snacks to explode on contact or trail feet explode in its end, adding a few more A strategic level that makes several strategic levels pleasant to move upward.
Made of stone, Chum is also a powerful defensive character, making him an excellent choice for new immigrants.
Many other lancer abilities are not only offensive, but also defensive or tactical – covering walls, traps, speed-enhancing walls, skills that highlight enemies on the map, and more. We tried several Lancers and discovered various effects on gameplay. With Nitro, she can directly control the four-legged drone and turret, and we are able to make multiple assists. Although Axon is another favorite due to his more aggressive skills, including projectile bombs and cool guitar pistols. In the Lancer selection screen, you can watch a short video clip to learn about each ability to help you quickly grasp their work.
But what really sets Fragpunk apart is its fragmented card system. At the beginning of each turn, each team will randomly assign a set of three cards that can be swapped, and each card will change the wheel rules of the entire team. Some are simple statistics percentage boosts or enthusiasts, while others do things like increasing the size of enemies' heads, reducing their helmets or equipment, affecting the difficulty of headshots of the turn. Others are still more unusual and have completely changed the gameplay.
For example, a fragment card provides our team with a proximity detector, so whenever the enemy is nearby we get audible and visual signals while another slowly recovers our health scale, Both give us a welcome advantage. Some cards can affect the environment, such as sank the map in fog, as enemies are hard to spot, thus increasing tension. Others have positive effects – press Z to swap the health bar with enemies, or exchange equipment with them, or jump into a parallel world where you can see the new location intrinsically invisible and then pop up back to Ambush your enemies in battle.
It takes a lot of time. You only have about 30 seconds to complete the final hand of each round, and initially, each of the 150+ cards is new. “We deliberately made the rules for each card as simple as possible so that they can be understood quickly,” Xin Chang, creative director, told us. “We also made the description text of each card as short as possible and used visual design to make it more effective.” obvious.”
After a few rounds, the fragment card system started to make sense and it really paid off in terms of making each round different. We are forced to react differently to each round, rethinking strategies not only to our team’s current hands, but to the enemy team.
Interestingly, the rule set card is inspired not only by other video games, but also by sports. The development team's building features a large gymnasium with facilities for activities such as basketball, table tennis and badminton, and its walls are decorated with photos of competing developers.
Zhang explained: “I play football and basketball, so I like games with two team systems. I've also watched a lot of NBAs and they often change the rules to make the sport fun. Based on this idea , I also want to develop a system that adjusts the rules in the game.”
Sports also influenced the team's approach to using Fragpunk maps. Level designer An Yuan added: “In the level of design, we divide the map into areas that are beneficial for the attack or defense phase, so the player has to keep moving forward. It's a bit like basketball, in court you have different space designs that fit The different roles of the player. We applied this concept in the game as well as in the fragment cards, which can turn a good hidden place into a bad place.”
Fragpunk also has duel mode. When a game ends in a draw, it turns into a one-on-one showdown, kind of like Mano AAA Mano in Call of Duty: Warzone's Gulag Gulag) confrontation, but inspired by the penalty shootout in football. Each player had a turn to the queue for a series of short, sharp championship matches in a small but vertically layered arena. As all of our teammates looked out through our turn, we felt the pressure completely, and it was a fun and different victory mini game. It's so cool that developers even added it as a separate standalone mode called “Duit Master.”
Each map has interactive heads that players can use strategically to gain the upper hand. First, we tried the newly revealed map of Dongtian. This is the stab wound of the Chinese-based development team on an Asian-style map, with its two bomb sites being rotated by players to gain tactical advantages. When the transition in the middle of the map is activated by the player, the core cover of the bomb scene rotates, changing the offensive and defensive team strategy.
“We want to use these rotating walls to switch the edge between the offensive and the defensive team,” Yuan explained. “So we encourage players to fight for this core area to maintain their own advantage or their own advantage.”
Other maps have their own heads – the manual control bridge of the black market allows players to change the layout of the map and even pull the ground from the opponent's feet; Akhet has an underground river that allows sneaky players to move directly from the middle area to the bomb Location; Tundra has a magic portal that can instantly eliminate Gates between players on another team. It's fun to explore these maps, and obviously players who take the time to learn them correctly will gain an advantage.
Dongtian is Lancer Kismet's home environment. Narrative Director Wenhe Fu explained: “The game has a multiverse concept, which allows us to have each character coming from a completely different universe. We will spend some time introducing these background details to the players at a later stage.”
The Eastern aesthetic of the East is built into the hills, scattered with ancient wooden temple buildings, mysterious statues and long-lasting trees with elegant twisted trunks, bringing a clever visual twist to the colorful world of Fragpunks.
Art Director Yiming Li told us: “We want to mix ancient buildings that look like they come from China with near-future scientific and technological elements as well as some religious elements. Although each map has its own unique cultural characteristics, we want them all.” The overall sci-fi feel that fits the game. Just like in Star Wars: Every civilization is very different, but when they are seen as a whole, they also exist in a harmonious sci-fi environment.”
This brings us to the visuals of Fragpunk. This is a very beautiful game. The fluorescent aesthetics of punk and science fiction are rich and attractive, and its killing animations are pierced by dazzling color bursts. Its map is very readable and the player character pops up, making it easy to follow the action. Even its menu is beautiful, and you're expecting a glitz-like demo of the character game or Street Fighter 6 with a bold layout with a doodle graffiti. It really stands out in the hero shooter space.
FragPunk will be available for free, offering a small number of lancers from the start so players can learn them step by step, with more unlocking of currency in the game obtained through the game or paid microtransactions. Other optional purchases will be strictly made. We have to wait until it launches to see how the service aspect is gone – other NetEase games like Marvel competitors and Naraka: Bladepoint has seen complaints about the price, but besides they manage to keep players happy, so hopefully this is a good sign .
In addition to the fragment conflict and duel modes we tried, Fragpunk will also adopt various modes at launch or after launch, which are targeted at hardcore and casual players, including all players who are forced to use the same lancer or only Use melee weapons, etc. Obviously, the development team consists primarily of parent players, but it is clear that they have also taken steps to make the game accessible to novices and even streamers and their audiences.
