OGP CH86
No one in the industry had anticipated that Palace Storm — a story-driven RPG — would remain a runaway hit for six solid months.
When the game first launched, the general consensus was that this sort of “playing house” narrative experience would lose its appeal after a single playthrough.
No one had anticipated that Xie Yunfan would wring so many rich, inventive mechanics from such a simple premise.
Players grew more and more electrified with every session. Their peers in the industry grew more and more miserable.
At Wings of Dream headquarters.
Tang Tonghai glanced over the project progress report and frowned. “I asked you to make a role-playing game. It’s been four months — and it still isn’t ready to ship?”
He slapped the report down on the desk and looked up at Yu Sheng, the lead designer on City of Home, his expression glacial. “Are Wings of Dream’ professional staff really outclassed by a scrappy little startup like Yangfan Studio? I’m paying you people top-tier salaries and I get this?”
Yu Sheng bowed his head, his face a picture of misery. “Director Tang, integrating the intelligent NPCs into the engine has run into some genuine difficulties in R&D—”
“Pick up the pace,” Tang Tonghai cut him off. “It ships during New Year’s. Keep dragging your feet and the whole role-playing trend will be dead before we get there.”
Yu Sheng nodded quickly. “Understood. We’ll accelerate.”
Back at his desk, Yu Sheng stared at his monitor and let out a quiet sigh.
When Palace Storm had launched back in August, Director Tang had tried to kneecap it through a PR offensive — hiring an army of astroturfers to flood the internet with talking points about “harmful values” and “the dangers of intelligent NPCs.” The campaign had failed completely, not making so much as a dent in player enthusiasm. Realizing the genre was profitable, Tang Tonghai had immediately reversed course: he reassigned some of the company’s best people, formed a dedicated design team, and ordered them to ship a comparable game as fast as possible.
City of Home had been greenlit at the end of August.
Clone games were nothing new in the industry. As long as you didn’t directly lift the other game’s settings, storylines, or concept art, there was nothing your competitor could do about it in court.
It was the sort of move players would look down on, but Tang Tonghai’s only goal was profit. A few harsh words from the community were a price he was willing to pay.
For Tang Tonghai, the only metric that mattered in evaluating a game was whether it made money.
Yu Sheng, as the one actually doing the work, was bearing the full weight of that philosophy.
Four months since the project was greenlit, and the game was still half-finished, riddled with bugs that needed round after round of testing — and yet his boss was insisting on a New Year’s launch.
With a helpless sigh, Yu Sheng posted in the design group chat: “Everyone, the pressure from upstairs is serious. We have to hit the New Year’s date, which means crunch for the next two weeks. I’m sorry in advance.”
A handful of “Noted” replies trickled in.
In truth, the design team’s resentment had been simmering for months. They had already been working overtime to keep the project alive. The boss made a snap decision without a thought for the people carrying it out — the salary at a place like Wings of Dream was good, but everyone felt like they were trading their health for their paycheck.
Over at Yangfan Studio, meanwhile, the design team was happily on vacation.
The final Faction War DLC had launched without a hitch. In Xie Yunfan’s words: “The child has grown up. It doesn’t need us hovering anymore. Routine maintenance is all it needs.”
Since its release, the game had not only earned tremendous goodwill — it had also proven to be an exceptional earner. Holographic game players were a far smaller market than mobile, but their average spend dwarfed it. When the numbers were tallied, Palace Storm‘s net profit ran neck-and-neck with Journey to the West.
In late December, Xie Yunfan gave the whole studio a week off — December 28th through January 3rd.
By law, the New Year holiday was three days. The boss was giving them seven. The team was thrilled; more than a few took their families on trips.
Then, on December 29th, a splash ad materialized on Weibo seemingly out of nowhere: Wings of Dream’ holographic RPG, City of Home, launching January 1st — New Year’s Day.
The industry’s collective jaw dropped.
Xie Yunfan was at home, on vacation, idly scrolling through Weibo when he saw it. He couldn’t help a wry twist of the mouth. He screenshotted it and sent it to Luo Hang: “City of Home? Is this that clone you mentioned Wings of Dream was working on?”
Luo Hang replied: “That’s the one. I heard the project was greenlit at the end of August. Four months from greenlight to release — the pace is impressive, I’ll give them that.”
Even with AI-assisted development accelerating everything in this world, six months of production was typical for a holographic title.
But something didn’t add up. “How did I miss any large-scale testing news?” Xie Yunfan wrote back. “They’re going straight to launch? That’s an enormous risk for a holographic game.”
“I’ve had an eye on this project,” Luo Hang replied, “and you’re right — there was no public beta recruitment at any point. They must have done internal testing only, under NDA. Nobody has any idea what the actual gameplay looks like.”
For mobile games, the tech was mature enough that a single-player title like Journey to the West could go straight from internal QA to launch without issue — which was why Xie Yunfan had been bold enough to do exactly that. But going cold to launch on a holographic game without a proper testing period? Either Wings of Dream were supremely confident in their technology, or they were in a mad rush to get people’s money in the door before anyone looked too closely.
Xie Yunfan frowned. “They’re in a panic. They probably want to cash in while the RPG wave still has momentum.”
“Should we prepare a countermove?” Luo Hang asked. “Run some activities to lock in our player base?”
“Your call,” Xie Yunfan said. “It’s the New Year anyway — good timing to roll out some promotions and show our players some love.”
He wasn’t particularly worried. He simply didn’t believe in Wings of Dream’ new game.
With Palace Storm setting the bar, if Wings of Dream had no major technical breakthroughs to offer and was delivering yet another single-player RPG, it had no realistic path to surpassing what already existed. Their only lifeline would be a fully online multiplayer experience.
Xie Yunfan settled in with a bowl of popcorn, metaphorically speaking, to watch what unfolded.
January 1st. City of Home went live.
With the New Year holiday giving the whole country three days off, many parents were taking their children out to play — and Wings of Dream’ gaming pods had an excellent reputation with kids. Their perennial classics, Big Player and Pet Paradise, had been running for over three years and were beloved by young players. A holiday event could push monthly revenue past a billion without even trying.
This new launch was also designed with that demographic in mind. Unlike Palace Storm‘s adult-rated content, City of Home was all-ages — explicitly welcoming to children.
A flood of young players poured into the new game.
Xie Yunfan also booked time in a Wings of Dream pod and logged in, curious to see it for himself. Understanding the competition was something every designer had to do.
He spawned inside a gleaming metropolis. A mechanical system voice greeted him: “Welcome to Dream City!”
This was a fictional city the design team had built from scratch. Players began aboard a helicopter, soaring high above the skyline, with a sweeping aerial view of the entire cityscape laid out below.
Towers rose in every direction. The streets below coursed with traffic. A clear river ran through the heart of the city, and countless bridges stitched the north and south banks together. From up here, the view was genuinely breathtaking.
Whatever else could be said about them, Wings of Dream’ modeling team was top-tier. The effect was strikingly realistic. Sitting in the helicopter, Xie Yunfan felt almost as if he’d stepped into a real city.
The helicopter descended and landed on the roof of a high-rise.
SYSTEM: This is our city — the place we call home. Everyone can carve out a piece of it for themselves. Please choose a district and acquire your property.
Xie Yunfan blinked.
Hold on. You had to pay for the house?
Knowing Wings of Dream, he wouldn’t put it past them.
He kept reading. To his relief, they hadn’t gone that far — the starter apartment was free, with several districts to choose from.
He selected a riverside unit with a decent view. The interior came furnished with a basic sofa and bed. Naturally, if you wanted something nicer, you’d have to visit the in-game furniture store.
SYSTEM: In Dream City, you can step into any role you’ve ever imagined. Become a delivery courier for a day. Walk the hospital floor as a doctor. Stand at the front of a lecture hall as a university professor. Take the stage as a singer and perform a sold-out concert… The possibilities are endless. In this city, you are free — your identity is yours to choose and change every day.
SYSTEM: Now, enjoy your first day in Dream City!
SYSTEM: Received [Identity Swap Card ×3] — a single-use consumable. Spend one to change your role.
The system UI flickered into view. In the top-right corner, the shop button gleamed — a Wings of Dream signature. Xie Yunfan opened it and scrolled through.
The monetization was aggressive. Identity cards: you received three at the start, and after that, each one cost eighteen yuan. Costumes, furniture, and cosmetics all required separate purchases. There were bundle packs, and even a “Quest Speed-Clear Card” that let you complete daily tasks with a single button press.
Classic Wings of Dream.
Xie Yunfan’s expression had been growing steadily more pained.
The core concept of City of Home was genuinely good. A fully realized holographic city to inhabit and explore — the design team had clearly put real thought into it. But the monetization was so nakedly desperate that it had turned what should have been an immersive role-playing experience into a pay-to-function cash machine. The short-sightedness of it was almost impressive.
If this project had landed on Xie Yunfan’s desk, he would have waited until holographic networking technology was truly mature, and then built a proper community — a virtual world where players could own a home, make friends, and live freely. Not rush a half-finished skeleton to market to squeeze out as much money as possible before the illusion collapsed.
He tried the singer career path, curious about what putting on a concert might look like. The process turned out to be a handful of lines of dialogue with a manager NPC before the system dropped him directly into the venue. The performance outfit he’d want to wear? Paid. Covering any popular song? Required purchasing an in-game “rights license.”
The audience in the front rows was copy-pasted from the same three or four character models.
He’d seen rougher work, but not often.
The concert atmosphere had its moments — fans in the crowd held glow sticks and cheered on cue — but the polish was surface-deep. And then the microphone cut out, with no system prompt, no workaround, no indication that the bug even registered. The performance just… stopped working.
Xie Yunfan shook his head and stepped out of the pod.
He checked online reviews.
Wings of Dream’ astroturf operation had clearly been expensive. On launch day, the reviews were wall-to-wall glowing, all variations on the same script: I finally got to experience what it’s like to be a professor! My best friend spent the day living out her dream of being a doctor! Posts reporting bugs had been systematically deleted.
Suppressing player feedback like this always backfired. It was only ever a matter of time.
While Xie Yunfan was watching the spectacle unfold, a message from Luo Hang arrived: “Played the new game. You can relax.”
“Yeah?” Xie Yunfan typed back. “How bad is it?”
Luo Hang’s reply was brief: “Consistent with prior form.”
Xie Yunfan grinned. “Did you spend money on it?”
“Eighteen yuan,” Luo Hang admitted. “Bought one identity card.”
“You paid our competitor eighteen yuan?” Xie Yunfan sent back. “You gave them money. You’re telling me you handed them money.”
There was a brief pause before Luo Hang’s reply appeared: “It wasn’t a total loss. I found quite a few bugs.”
They had both, independently and without discussing it, gone in to see what Wings of Dream had built — and arrived at the same assessment.
If Wings of Dream had been willing to slow down, do the work properly, refine the experience, deepen the narrative, pare back the monetization, and actually build the virtual city they were advertising, Xie Yunfan would have been the first to tip his hat to them.
What a waste of a genuinely good premise.
On the first day of the New Year, the internet was saturated with glowing coverage of City of Home — and an organized campaign of pointed comparisons had sprung up alongside it.
Palace Storm is honestly terrifying. City of Home is so much more relaxing.
City of Home is easygoing and fun for everyone; Palace Storm is just constant scheming and backstabbing.
Wings of Dream is in a league of its own. The world-building is stunning — so much more immersive than Palace Storm.
The talking points were clearly coordinated, and the PR budget behind them had clearly been generous.
Xie Yunfan ignored it entirely. Palace Storm‘s players took care of that for him.
“Don’t believe a word of it — I’ve played both.”
“Played both. The modeling and music and art? Roughly the same level on either side. The storytelling? Palace Storm wins by ten miles, no contest.”
“City of Home is mind-numbingly dull. The NPC dialogue amounts to about three lines, and you feel the whole time like you’ve wandered into a fake city with the lights on and nobody home.”
“The immersion just isn’t there. Your neighbors don’t say hello, they just stand around like malfunctioning robots.”
“I spent a whole day delivering food, and when I checked my earnings, they’d given me gold coins — not the premium currency you actually need to buy anything. I worked myself into the ground for completely useless money. Why would I do that?”
“I tried playing a taxi driver and my car just started floating through the air while the road disappeared underneath me. Nearly had a heart attack.”
One day after launch, a news story went viral and shot to the top of the social trending charts: a child had been reduced to tears during a session of the all-ages holographic game.
The bugs in City of Home were genuinely alarming in their variety — elevators that plummeted without stopping, taxis that crashed into pedestrians, delivery cyclists that got caught under trucks. In a holographic environment with this level of sensory realism, these weren’t just glitches. More than a few players had been genuinely frightened, and at least one child had witnessed an in-game collision vivid enough to leave real psychological marks.
The “light and cozy” game Wings of Dream had promised had curdled into something else entirely.
Outrage poured in from every direction.
“You built a realistic simulation of a city with real physics and real traffic and you didn’t think to run serious safety testing? Did traffic safety not cross your minds once?”
“You called this half-built mess suitable for all ages. You put children in a holographic city, let them play as adults without any supervision — who is supposed to be looking out for them?”
“Holographic role-playing was never meant for children in the first place. This isn’t kids playing house — this is a child sitting behind the wheel of a virtual taxi and accidentally killing someone. How do you undo that kind of psychological damage?”
“Yes, they only hit an NPC. But your NPCs are modeled to look exactly like real human beings. That makes it terrifying.”
The anger went critical and sent Wings of Dream’ new game trending — for all the wrong reasons.
The taxi crash was traced to a critical failure in the intelligent navigation system. Left unaddressed, the traffic systems across the entirety of Dream City would continue generating similar traumatic experiences for any player who happened to encounter them.
Wings of Dream’ design team had no choice. They took the servers down for emergency maintenance.
In the aftermath, players who had spent time in the chaos of City of Home returned to Palace Storm with fresh eyes. They noticed, for the first time, just how carefully it had been constructed — every sequence that might cause genuine distress was handled with a tasteful cut to black; the hunting grounds and other complex environments had clearly been exhaustively tested, and even if a player couldn’t ride properly, the horse’s AI would navigate around them rather than trample them.
City of Home was an unfinished product. It had gone live, imploded, and been pulled from service within twenty-four hours — a spectacle that left the rest of the industry genuinely speechless.
The irony was that all of it had sent Palace Storm trending.
Xie Yunfan spent the day enjoying the show, then messaged Luo Hang: “You can’t buy publicity like this.”
Without a competitor rushing in to serve as the perfect cautionary tale, players might never have stopped to notice just how much work had gone into every detail of Palace Storm.
He mentally thanked the competition for volunteering as a negative example.
Luo Hang seized the moment and posted a New Year’s event to the official Weibo — substantial discounts to celebrate the holiday, plus a complimentary limited-edition New Year’s costume for all players. The response was overwhelmingly positive.
The contrast only made Wings of Dream look worse.
After City of Home went dark, Palace Storm caught fire again, buoyed by the comparison. Concurrent players reached twelve million — a new all-time record.
A wave of newcomers arrived, drawn by curiosity, ready to begin their own tense journeys through the ancient imperial court. Veterans returned to replay old storylines with new characters, taking advantage of the holiday promotions.
The messages flowing into Yangfan Studio’s official Weibo told their own story:
I cannot bring myself to quit. I’ve been playing for months and I’m still not done.
The only thing that’ll top Palace Storm is whatever Yangfan makes next. Wings of Dream just showed up to embarrass themselves.
That competitor rushed something completely broken to market and charged people for it. Hang in there, little sailboat — hurry up and make something that actually wows us.
Tried to paint a tiger, ended up drawing a dog. I haven’t laughed this hard in a while.
Still the most reliable studio out there. Any news on the next project?
I’ve played through fourteen endings in single-player mode. I’m done with PVP. Is the next game in development yet? I’m not above begging.
At this particular moment, every single person at Yangfan Studio was happily in the middle of their vacation.
Xie Yunfan aside, the rest of the team had been following the drama from their couches. In the group chat, messages were flying:
“Wings of Dream’ stock crashed yesterday. I can’t stop laughing.”
“They really just rushed that out there to get roasted, huh.”
“Launch day. Emergency maintenance by the next morning. Stock price down forty percent. Honestly iconic.”
“Their official page is an absolute pile-on right now. People are telling them to take notes from Yangfan.”
“Our boss got dragged into this completely by accident. Wings of Dream probably loathes him.”
Wings of Dream did, in fact, loathe Xie Yunfan.
Before he’d come along as a reference point, their games had been perfectly well-received, hadn’t they?
The company was in chaos. Tang Tonghai, furious, had stripped Yu Sheng of his position as lead designer and brought in a replacement to start making emergency revisions.
Changing commanders mid-battle. No one could predict where the game would end up from here.
What the industry did know was that Wings of Dream — once formidably self-assured — had tried to imitate Yangfan Studio and produced instead the greatest self-inflicted disaster the gaming world had seen in years.
A game launching and losing forty percent of its parent company’s stock value in a single day? That record seemed safe for a long time to come.
January 3rd. The holiday was almost over.
Luo Hang called. “Yunfan — now that we’re back tomorrow, are you already thinking about the next project?”
Xie Yunfan paused. “How did you know?”
“Educated guess. You always give everyone time off before a new project kicks off. Let people rest and recharge before the real work begins.”
After enough time together, Luo Hang had picked up on that particular habit.
Xie Yunfan smiled slightly. “You guessed right. The scope of the next project depends on how far the multiplayer networking tech has come. Let’s meet tonight and talk through the details.”
“I’ll book a table,” Luo Hang said. “Same place as before.”
Xie Yunfan hesitated. “Same place?”
“That private restaurant I took you to last time. It’s quiet enough to have a real conversation, and the food suits you, doesn’t it?”
Xie Yunfan thought back and nodded. “It does. Six o’clock — and this time dinner’s on me.”
At six that evening, they drove separately and met at the restaurant.
Parking was easy, and even in winter — with the courtyard roses long faded and bare — the space had a certain tranquil quality that made it well suited for talking. It was easy to see why Luo Hang kept coming back to it.
“Where does the multiplayer matchmaking tech actually stand right now?” Xie Yunfan asked.
“At the moment, we can support around twenty concurrent players in a shared scene,” Luo Hang said. “The servers can handle data from tens of thousands of players simultaneously. Full-scale MMO infrastructure isn’t there yet, but instanced multiplayer is completely viable.”
Xie Yunfan smiled. “Good timing. I was already thinking about starting with something instance-based — working our way up gradually.”
Palace Storm had only ever implemented co-op for two players at once, bringing a pair of players into the same holographic scene to alter the story together. True multiplayer meant building something different: self-contained instanced content where larger groups could play through an experience together.
Twenty players per instance was more than enough.
Luo Hang’s interest sharpened. “What kind of game?”
“Murder mystery,” Xie Yunfan said.
Luo Hang considered this. “I know Werewolf. Is it something like that?”
The entertainment landscape of this world had developed differently from the one Xie Yunfan had grown up in. He’d done some searching over the past few days and confirmed that what he knew as “murder mystery games” — jùběn shā, script murder — hadn’t emerged here yet.
The underlying logic was the same as Werewolf. Players each took on a role and worked to complete their own objectives within a shared scenario. Multi-player, demanding equal parts acting instinct and psychological acuity. Significantly more interesting than outwitting NPC opponents.
“Think of it as a fully immersive holographic multi-player narrative — mystery-focused,” Xie Yunfan explained. “The scenario comes with NPC guides to keep players oriented. Everyone is trying to identify the killer. And of course, one of the players is the killer.”
In his previous life, he’d played plenty of murder mystery sessions with colleagues — but the format had a fundamental limitation: everyone had to be in the same city, had to coordinate their schedules, and had to physically show up at the same venue. Getting friends’ calendars to align was a logistical nightmare, and playing with strangers never felt quite comfortable.
As a holographic game, those constraints vanished. Players from anywhere in the country could log in, queue up, and play a round together at any time of day. Write enough scripts and the game could sustain itself for years — four, five, maybe seven or eight without any trouble.
Wuxia-flavored mystery scenarios. Following the trail of a legendary detective. Arriving at the scene of a crime and piecing together the truth.
Volume Five: The Cases of Di Renjie.
