The creature-capture genre of gaming is in the midst of a huge surge, with recognizable names and fresh IPs continuing to crop out, but Roco Kingdom’s developers are confident of standing out in the crowd.
After 16 years of the franchise in China, amassing over 100 million players, Roco Kingdom is making a long-awaited journey west to land on the laps of a new audience, and the signs are extremely promosing.
During a hands-on preview session at Gamescom, I learnt first-hand about the franchise, the huge depth planned for future content, and just how confident the developers are of making an impression and standing out as one of the biggest titles in the entire genre.
A Living World
Key to that large scope is the way Jinies, the creatures you’re on a mission to collect and train, interact with the world, having different behaviours and reactions to both the player and the other creatures around them.
That helps bring the game to life, with a memorable moment occuring when I saw a large, sheep-like Jinie followed by a slightly smaller creature, then a crop of ‘babies’. These were all from the same evolution line, interacting as a family, like you’d see animals do in the wild.
“We want the world to be believable. The original idea for this, we were not trying to remake the browser game, but trying to make it a modern version. A key part is, the world should be believable if we want the players to like the open world,” Xiaoye, Narrative Director on Roco Kingdom, told Insider Gaming,
‘What’s really immersive is what the ecology is like. Players can compare it to real life, how it is in the savannah, how it is in a real-life basis. We know that every species of real animals have their distinct behaviour, they have distinct relationships with other species.
‘Some are afraid, some have a mutually beneficial relationship, they react differently to humans too. We applied these real-life experiences to the design, that’s our idea.”
The creatures themselves have some brilliant designs, with it already becoming clear to me what some of the fan favorites will be, and there was no shying away from what provided the inspiration for these creatures, whether that be from animals or fantasy creatures.
Naturally for any title entering a creature-capture genre that has been dominated by the Pokémon franchise for the past three decades, there will be questions about some designs and implementations, as the world saw with Palworld, but Roco Kingdom isn’t a new player in the space, and the developers do not foresee any issues.
‘Super Confident’ on Character Designs
‘We are super confident. Our creature design is inspired by a lot of things, we have creatures that some may find familiar, originating from fantasy creatures, and then, a whale is a whale, a dog looks like a dog, unicorns are unicorns,” Xiaoye explained.
‘Beside the traditional animal-like creatures, they’re based from our creativity. For example, there is a broomstick Jinie, we thought of a witch’s broomstick, and you play as a mage, so why not have a broomstick as a thing you can use?
“But we don’t want it to be a literal broomstick, that’d be boring, so how about an insect, that looks like a broomstick because of its environment, where it grows up. Sometimes we take something that might be very weird, we think, what if a certain type of animal has to develop itself into the shape of a bottle, how would that change in that evolution line?”
Bringing a popular franchise from China to the west also comes with it’s own levels of pressure, though it lands amongst a period of extreme growth for the region in the global videogame scene, one where other parts of the world are stripping things back, and there’s a huge sense of pride on the line.
“We are very proud, but also very nervous. In China, there is an existing fanbase, in the west, it’s a new IP from the ground up. We’re very proud because of the heritage, and the accumulation of characters, but we want players to get into the ip for the first time and really enjoy the game.”
I ended the interview with one final question, which earned a response that shows just how big Roco Kingdom could truly be. In a market that is becoming increasingly packed, why should players jump into Roco Kingdom?
“This is the multiplayer creature collection game, with an open world, and a richer story, that you’ve always dreamed of but never had the chance to play,” Xiaoye declared.
There’s certainly no short of confidence, and from everything I’ve seen so far from Roco Kingdom, that confidence is well placed.
Check out the Roco Kingdom trailer below.
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For more from Insider Gaming at Gamescom, check out the preview of Once Human’s Isles of the Abyss expansion, and don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.
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