FTUE: Dawn of Titans

[Music] Hello and welcome to Pocket Gamer. Busy's YouTube channel. This is John Jordan and we're doing a first- time user experience uh for Dawn of Titans from Natural Motion Games. Uh Dawn of Titans isn't actually out yet. So, we're playing um the version that is in soft launch. So, this may not be what the final game for the global launch plays like. Um, but it's been in soft launch now for pretty much 2 years. So, we pretty much got to the stage where I imagine it should be quite polished. So, this is surprising to see um this push notifications prompt. Um, lots of games do do this. First thing you see is the push notifications prompt. Uh, it's probably not a good thing to do really. You can only show this prompt once. So, if I hit don't allow, the game can't fire this up again. And people generally want uh developers generally want gamers to have push notifications on. What you can do of course is in the game have your own splash screen that you fire up normally after a tutorial and then ask

people then do they want messaging or push not push notifications from the game and if they decline you can fire that screen up again. Um so don't allow. So that's not a very good start. Um so as we can see here the game's connecting. So, as we say, this game has been in development for a long, long time. And as lightly had some pretty big changes. Um, presumably the basic concept has remained the same. The titans are the big kind of hero type characters and then you have all the little minions who act as your kind of cannon foder. So the point is to have the cannon foder which does something and but then have more control and more kind of I guess characterization. So here we go. We're going to go into the basic tutorial before we get into the game proper. So tap on the militia. We've selected the militia and we're just going to move them up

there. Off they go. Now they're charging to those guys. Okay. So let's imagine we're going to win this. You see the health this the shield of the other guys going down the color in there as we beat them. So now now they're standing their ground. Okay. Okay. So this guy is going to do some damage by the looks of things. Yeah. He's going to wipe out all those little guys with his big bit of metal. So I'm not touching the screen here at all. This is all just happening automatically. Bish bash brush. You see there's another similar titan in the distance having a similar effect. Off he goes. Got bit of a uh he's got bad knee or something. Oh.

Oh. So what's that all about then? That's useful. Wiped everyone out. Okay, so that looks like a bit of a kind of a teasing tutorial. Um, so natural motion zone by Zingga. So Zinga's terms terms and conditions that we are appealing to. So here's our city. Um, so there is a the general concept of build and battle as we tend to have on mobile strategy. So, so I'm pressing on him, but I need to press on that by the looks of things. Okay. So, enemies at our gate and see some rewards. Um, see their defensive strength, see their what kind of kind of characters they've got, I suppose. So let's do a

free raid. Presuming at some point they would not be free. Add militia to our loadout. So we've got three sets of militia that we've added. [Music] So we got just very quickly ch an elemental thing here that you as you'd expect different types of unit better against different types of other unit. So tap unit to select it. Drag the shield onto the enemy troop that you want to attack. Uh tap fight. Okay. So this is all looking very nice. Can I do this with the other one? Yeah, I'm just do that. Don't have to wait for the tutorial, which is good. I can do this and do that. Okay, so there we go. My guys have won. Where's my Where's my uh Titan? What's the point of the game? Okay, victory. Good.

So, some spoils. Um, considering the kind of fantasy aspect of the game, we've got a very kind of clean interface. I mean, as we said, this may not be the finished article, but the whole point of being soft is you keep it as finished as possible really rather than making enormous great changes before you go live. So, um, okay. So, field hospital. So, we can see that my militia there's a permanence to it. If I keep them alive, um, I keep them I basically want to keep them alive. So, um, I can heal them. That's good. That's kind of what we'd expect from a more from a deeper PC strategy game. More corrupted troops. So, okay. So, we're going to do look same thing. We will show them no mercies. This time it's three on three. Wonder if my guys have healed. I guess they probably have. Um, one, two, three. Now, my army isn't as strong as it could be, so I should

probably want to get those healed. Can I do that? Or maybe I'm going to lose. It's going to teach me a lesson. Sometimes in tutorials, they do that. That tends to be more in Chinese games, to be honest. Um, no. What am I doing? Tapping. Okay. Tap tap tap tap. Oh, what happened there? I don't want to do that, do I? No. No. Why do I want to rotate them? That sounds like it's going to get a bit complex. Off we go. Charge. Charge. Charge. Oh, maybe it's I'm going to get beaten and then my my my uh Titan can come in and save the day. Oh, no. Maybe. Just there we go. So very nice clean user interface. Victory. More XP. Some more goldie stuff. Well,

this is destroyed. Really good. [Music] Well, I can't keep attacking them. I haven't got any troops left, have I? Haven't got any troops. So, what we got here? Uh, one final push. Yeah. A gift for the gods to summon the So, I've got a token. That's my reward. I'm not sure if I'm going to get to my reward, though. This is the point. These guys have had it. Look, look at that army strength. absolutely had it. Um, how many of them? There's loads of them. I'm not going to win that, am I? Is that the point? Okay, let's try and do something bit clear. No, no, no, no, no, no. Let's try and do this. Probably won't

work. Try and concentrate our forces on the guys in the middle, but they're running the middle guys. Oh, not even going to get a chance to do that. Okay, well that's the end of that then. They're doing all right, but they shouldn't really win, should they? I say is a bit odd that you haven't you don't quite quickly have the chance to control the Titan because it is kind of the point of the game at the moment. This is just looking like a rather heavy duty um mobile strategy game. There too many. Yes. Well, I have been pointing this out. just coming out the ground. Well, that's okay. So, we are going to have the Chinese lose the tutorial. Poor old militia. Oh, train conductor making it

push. Okay. So, so I can summon my first Titan. Okay, well, this is the whole point that I would have lost, but now I can summon the Titan. And now I'm going to win. Harrah. Okay, we must enter the temple present for God. Okie dokie. Then we can see it's different um have that token, but now I can also use the hard currency to sell him. So, Kuba, who is the uh face of Dawn of Titans, here he is. I can level him up obviously as well. So, uh he's one of 20 levels. He's got just rare skills, relics that can be some fusing thing going on there. Okay. Looks Johnny happy, doesn't he? Done that. It's kind of weird that you have to go back kind of back buttons. Very odd in mobile games. Obviously hard, I guess, with with um

menu driven things to do that, but uh Okay. I haven't got any troops, I don't think. Okay. Right. Calm down. So, measly got some more troops and I've got a Titan. So, this is going to I wonder how the Titan works. You going to tell me? No, you're not going to tell me. Okay. So, let's do the same old same old. Put him really weird that rotate and move. Very PC like. Okay. So, I don't really control him at all. He just does stuff like so. This would be interesting. So playing a lot of Asian RPGs at the moment. Obviously auto play is a big part of this. So as I'm not doing anything at this stage and okay I can zoom in a little bit but it's

not particularly exciting. So it might be interesting. You see there is a timer up there that auto play might be a big part a big part to play. I'd kind of be actually quite surprised if there wasn't autoplay in this game just because people are just getting used to it now. And it is, you know, is these games are all about the meta game. So, that was nice and easy. Victory. Cobar's leveling up, too. My destroyed. Don't seem to really care about them anymore. Uh, push the corrupted back. So, um I'm going to be after this check. Yeah. So, we can see here this is what's ahead. [Music] Let's have a quick look around the screen before we go too far. I don't the first experience don't want to spend

hours playing the game. And we can see I'm level one. Maybe play a bit more to see if I might get to level two. We can see I've got gems at the top and then some got a crop or wheat looking resource and then I've got some currencies. What's this? I can't click on any at the moment. So, um okay. So, uh with our Titan of fresh troops, we'll be take the battle. We can see he's got four level one archers by the look of it. So, off we go. Let me show the ROS and more of my militia. A bit more tutorial. Uh, army of archers fear not your getting there first, don't I? Um, oh, is that it? Is that how I'm being taught? No. Okay. Well, that doesn't tap. Uh, attack tap attack. Where's my chappie? Attack. Where is he? Oh, we're

not got him. Oh, there he is. Almost missed him. So, do that. So, normally you think you'd want some bow men of your own. Really? Bish bash bush. [Music] How far can we zoom in? Can't we zoom in that far? Can we move the camera? We should make light work of archers. So that's one of our uh elemental type things. Archers probably good against cavalry then. And normally pipe good against cavalry. Oh, I'm sure we'll get there in the end. Okay. Uh, continue. Did I level up? Yes, I'm level two now. Take this. Yes, I'll take the journal.

Okay. So, what have I got? Some of that to collect. Uh, got a new mission. Tutorial quests. Uh, it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? Treasure room. What's that one? Well, uncollected rewards will expire. Now, that is interesting. So that very much reminds um me of Farmville, which is Zingga's first big um social hit game on Facebook where they had what they called the wither mechanic. So you planted your crops and if you didn't go back and uh harvest them in time, they withered. You came back and your fields were dead. So it's kind of interesting. I've never seen this before in a game. The uncollected rewards will expire. It was interesting because Zingo was take spending a lot of time talking about how they'd improve retention, day 30 retention in um in Dawn of uh Titans during the soft launch phase. And so mechanics like this could be used to drive um retention, albeit at the uh the uh the danger of getting very bad

reviews. people get quite annoyed. Not because it's a bad mechanic in particular, but if no one else is using it, if no other game company's using it, to me that seems a bit odd. Okay. Um, so we can see here and also at the top looks like so there's an energy which says 27. Um, that's recharging. So it's using Let's have a look. It's saying how many things I'm using. Oh, so yeah, right there it's saying I'm using three of those. Okay, that makes sense. So it looks I don't want to do that now. Let's see if I can go in and change my name rather than me called bad. And I can't do that. What's this one do? This is my base. Level two tweet relic. I don't know what that means. That's my reward. Okay. And I got 100 of those. This is my kind of base, I guess. I don't really know if I build anything. Can I level that up? Really? No, it's only level one, though. So, what's this? That's my castle. Oh, I can upgrade that. So there is a kind of base buildingy type stuff. What's that there?

So yeah, this is kind of nice. But oh 3D camera. Yeah, that's pretty good. My army camp can upgrade uh Oh, I need different things to do that. Upgrade my castle first. Getting off the beaten track here. Upgrade my castle. Can I do that? No, I have to have done some other things first. Okay. Um, now I'm bought a bit lost. Garrison. Oh, so that's different missions, events, obviously very important. Uh, no campaigns or missions at this time. I guess there will obviously be a guild thing that probably Normally there's a guild. Oh, that's nice. Normally there's a guild um building that you have to unlock or such like. So anyway, I think we'll leave it there. I think there was just just a kind of drop in and see. So there is a tutorial

there. It's kind of fairly nicely done. So interesting that you have this kind of situation where you lose and then you understand the Titan gives you power. Um that's kind of a nice way of doing that. Although it's not license to lose um but but fairly smooth apart from the push notification prompt which I thought was odd that developers are still certainly Western developers are still doing that. Um but certainly Dawn of Titans looks very nice. Quite when we expect it out. Hard to know. It's definitely um expecting 2016. I would expect to be coming out quite soon really. Um so CSR racing was Natural Motion's other big game. It's come out done pretty well being the top racing game. Um you know perhaps will generate if the current rate stays the same $100 million annually for for Zinga. Um, but I guess there's a lot more in the sense riding on Dawn of Titans in the sense that um it's a could be could be massive be massive hit and obviously they've kept it in soft launch for such a long period of time because they hope it be a massive hit. They don't want it to be like another CSR racing. They want it to be a bigger thing. Um, and certainly has

the potential I think. Um, we will see. Anyway, thanks for watching. Um, and don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. So, we do analysis of freeto-play mobile games. Um, so if that's your thing, do subscribe and you won't miss anything. Hope to see you again soon.