Offside game

After driving the Land Rover for a while, Ji Feng replaced it for various reasons. Su Yi continued driving his Benz.

Ji Feng and his team are extremely nervous. The "Dream Cup" qualifiers have concluded, with 35 teams from various regions across China, including Hong Kong and Macau, advancing to the group stage. These 245 players from these 35 teams will soon arrive in the capital, Yanjing, with their travel and accommodation expenses covered by Dream International. The 35 teams for each game will be divided into five groups for a round-robin tournament. The top two teams from each group will advance to the knockout stage, determining the top ten in each game. Then, a draw will be held for a single-elimination tournament, and the remaining top five teams will compete in a round-robin format, with the final rankings determined by points.

As a seeded team, Dream Team joined the CS competition, making it one of the 36 teams. Unlike other competitions, CS is divided into four groups, making the competition for the top eight even fiercer. For the five members of Dream Team, who have already become professional players, not winning the championship is a failure, thus putting them under immense pressure. They have been practicing continuously.

Amidst speculation from the media and players, on April 25th, Fantasy International held a press conference, drawing a large number of media outlets to Yanjing.

President Liu Jun personally announced that DreamWorks Games has completed a new online game, "Evolution," based on "Evolution: The Prehistoric Era." This game will be operated by Lechang Networks, a subsidiary of the group, and will officially begin open beta testing on May 1st. At that time, Lechang users worldwide can log in to the game with their Lechang accounts and experience the joy of gaming.

In response to reporters' questions, Liu Jun also revealed that after a month of public testing, "Evolution" will begin paid operation. It will be operated globally by Lechang Networks. Since Lechang Networks has mastered the latest server architecture technology, players worldwide will be able to experience the fun of millions of people playing online simultaneously on the same server.

On the same day, the client for the public beta version of "Evolution" was released in the game area of ​​Lechang Mingcheng. Players could download and install it and wait for the public beta to begin on May 1st.

This news immediately caused a sensation in the industry and among players. Although some people had thought of it, the current technology is completely unable to allow a single server to transmit too much user data. Therefore, all online games need to open new servers to distribute players after the number of players reaches a certain level. Now, Fantasy International has announced that it will launch a game that can bring together players from all over the world on one server, which is very tempting.

At 8:00 AM Beijing time on May 1st, the open beta of "Evolution" officially began. Players who had been eagerly anticipating the game immediately entered the game to experience this online game that claims to put players from all over the world into one server.

Upon entering the game, players first see a character selection panel similar to many games, where they need to choose various character attributes, including gender and appearance. However, this game's settings are more detailed. There are nearly a hundred character appearance templates to choose from, followed by adjustments to hairstyle and hair color using a dedicated color palette. Players can even fine-tune the colors. Then, players can choose skin tone, with four options: white, yellow, black, and brownish-red. As for body type, men have four options: tall, obese, average, and short; women have four options: tall, full-figured, average, and petite.

These detailed adjustments to character appearance allow players to create more personalized characters, and only with the unique technical support of Fantasy International can we ensure that doing so will not cause server crashes due to massive data.

After making these adjustments, players can enter the game. When the character selection screen appears, many players already sense that this will be a very different game from "Evolution of History," and indeed, after entering the game world, players are even more certain of this.

Upon entering the game, the player character is dressed in the simplest fur and stands in a rather dilapidated village—their tribe's village. When the player leaves the village and sees the monsters, those familiar with *Historic Evolution* will find them strangely familiar; they are the original character templates from *Historic Evolution*. Gradually, as their abilities improve, this suspicion becomes more certain: the so-called monsters are all various characters and their evolved forms from *Historic Evolution*.

Unlike other games that offer experience points for leveling up, this game requires players to learn a skill called "Gathering" from their tribe's elders. This allows them to collect powerful components from their prey and then use a talent-based fusion ability to integrate these components into their bodies, thereby optimizing and modifying their physical structure and abilities. The more powerful the monster, the greater the fusion value. However, the direction of the fusion is difficult for the player to control, similar to games like *Evolution*. All fusion attributes must be explored by the player themselves.

You can determine your abilities using the crystal ball in the village. This ability value is simply a set of ten general levels represented by Roman numerals from I to X.

Evolution and Mechanical Civilization use the same game engine—Pangu Engine—and both have four levels of effect adjustment. Many players have upgraded their computers specifically for this game so that the game effect can reach at least level II.

It's worth mentioning that on the very day of the closed beta, a foreign player, using a top-tier configuration costing tens of thousands of dollars, achieved Level III effects in *Evolve*. After he uploaded a video of the game with cinematic quality online, it greatly impressed players who had only seen Level II effects. Fortunately, Fantasy Westward Journey International released the Lom video compression format at that time; otherwise, given the current internet speeds, downloading that video would have taken an unknown amount of time.

On the first day of the closed beta, according to statistics, "Evolution" reached a peak of 300 million concurrent online users and a cumulative total of 2200 million concurrent online users, creating terrifying figures for an online game. And according to data from the monitoring system, these numbers are still increasing, with more and more players joining the game "Evolution"...