Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 483 - 466: The Five Harsh Conditions

Chapter 483: Chapter 466: The Five Harsh Conditions

Players had been arduously searching and groping for answers, and another three days had passed.

During these three days, Zhuge Jun had also been trying. He had now entered the second playthrough, but compared to the first, the numerical difficulty of the second had only slightly decreased, and it hadn’t become a breeze to play through.

Of course, the actual experience was much better.

Generally speaking, games like this would set the second playthrough to be a "victory lap" to give players a thrilling experience. The monsters’ stats wouldn’t increase significantly, and the players’ weapons would be fully enhanced, with greatly increased experience gain, hence providing the player a clear numerical advantage.

But "Blood of Lies" wasn’t designed like that; its second playthrough stats were still not low. Overall, although the difficulty was slightly easier than the initial challenge of the first playthrough, it wasn’t by much.

Fortunately, Zhuge Jun hadn’t skipped much during the first playthrough, so he had mastered the tactics against various bosses and the timing for using GP; hence, the game progress was relatively smooth.

However, compared to other streamers and players’ exploration, Zhuge Jun had no special discoveries.

He could only copy other people’s answers.

After three days of intense trial and error, players online finally achieved the God-making ending.

The first to post this ending online was the speedrunner from next door, Wang, who had previously posted a guide.

As a speedrunner, he had the skill, time, and energy, and he was already adapting quickly to "Blood of Lies." After receiving hints, he tried directions that happened to align with the official conditions; thus, with a bit of luck, he was the fastest to achieve this ending.

Only once the details of these requirements were confirmed did players begin to exclaim how outrageous they were.

Could it be that the developers never expected players to figure out this ending on their own from the start?

Wang from next door further detailed the five requirements to reach this ending, although specifics on certain data points couldn’t be determined accurately.

The modding guru, seeing that someone had achieved the true ending, went ahead and clarified the exact values.

First, the game’s dynamic difficulty changes over the entire playthrough must remain at the lowest difficulty level for at least 70% of the time,

Second, the success rate of GP in the game must be above 70%,

Third, the game’s choices of lies must be the same as those required for the "Freedom Heart" ending, that is, the "humanity-conforming choices" must be completed at least 8 times.

Fourth, the game must not detect any data modification throughout.

Fifth, concerning the game’s "beast-transformed bosses" (that is, bosses that were originally humans and later turned into monsters), one must survive for 1 minute when the boss’s health is below 10%. If a new cutscene appears when defeating the boss, it is considered complete.

After seeing the standard answer, Zhuge Jun couldn’t help but exclaim how preposterous it was.

No wonder he had tried for three days and still hadn’t figured it out!

He couldn’t even meet the first criterion!

Overall, this ending seemed to have been tailor-made for a top-tier expert like the speedrunner Wang next door. Average players could spend hundreds of hours on this game without a chance of achieving it.

To start, this game has a dynamic difficulty—the more flawless your gameplay, the lower the difficulty becomes.

Therefore, to keep above 70% of the game time at the lowest difficulty level, players must maintain a no-damage run, since it takes time for the difficulty to drop back down after increasing. A slight mistake could use up the 30% buffer time.

To ensure a margin for error, one still needs to strive for "maintaining the lowest difficulty throughout" the entire playthrough.

Secondly, GP is a core skill in this game to play well. If you don’t use GP, the difficulty of many boss battles increases significantly, drastically reducing the margin for error.

However, achieving a success rate of 70% or more is a tough condition, especially since the data doesn’t reset and start over each time you die and replay a boss battle.

The "humanity-conforming choices," in fact, involve lying based on the actual situation. This was relatively player-friendly since the "Freedom Heart" ending also required this.

However, being truthful in various choices would increase the difficulty further.

The last requirement has appeared in many other games as a "no-kill" or "martial virtue" ending. In essence, it means not executing the opponent when they’re at low health but continuing to let the fight drag on for a certain period.

Except "Blood of Lies" had a much higher time requirement—one entire minute, which is a considerably long duration.

You have to understand that in such fast-paced combat, if a player efficiently completes GP, a normal fight might end in three minutes, or at most, not more than five minutes.

Games with similar mechanics typically set the time around 30 seconds or even shorter.

However, the only benefit of "Blood of Lies" is that, because of the limb destruction system, if you can damage the boss’s critical parts during the battle, causing them to move slowly or attack in a more predictable pattern, that one minute becomes bearable and doesn’t result in a situation where the boss goes berserk like a mad dog, causing the player’s margin for error to plummet.

In short, once these five specifics were out, they almost explicitly stated one thing:

This was not an ending meant for normal players to achieve!

Upon careful consideration, Zhuge Jun figured he must be slightly above average among ordinary players, right?

But if he wanted to achieve this ending, he would have to practice specifically for at least a hundred more hours.

Moreover, the official game wouldn’t display these specific data in real-time, such as what the current dynamic difficulty level was or the exact GP success rate, etc.

That meant Zhuge Jun would have to download special plugins or mods to display the dynamic difficulty levels and related data in real-time, and he would have to save manually every so often. If he noticed something was off, he would have to immediately load the game from a manual save to remedy the situation.

This difficulty was much harder than obtaining a Platinum Trophy in other games!

Of course, the Platinum Trophy difficulty in "Blood of Lies" was insanely challenging since the trophy list included the "achieve the God-making ending" stipulation.

What kind of game is this?

Isn’t this just intentionally prolonging players’ gaming time?

Of course, players could simply give up on achieving this ending themselves and just search online to experience it quickly, and that would be that.

But many players would definitely still feel that it’s better to reach the ending on their own.

As for something like the Platinum Trophy, many players are quite open-minded about it, but now all four endings have obvious flaws, and the officials won’t let players enjoy a good ending?

That’s just ridiculous!

Zhuge Jun doesn’t even need to look at the online discussions to know that everyone must be angrily charging at Nitiandang again.

But that kind of charge is meaningless because everyone knows that when it comes to playing dead, Nitiandang’s skills are top-notch in the country. You can swear all you want, and they’ll just respond with ’you win’.

Looking at the experience stores again...

Well, President Gu seems to have guessed something in advance and hasn’t been here for days, making it impossible to catch any of Nitiandang’s developers.

At most, you’ve got a few employees of these experience stores, and they know nothing, so taking it out on them is useless.

"Damn it!"

Zhuge Jun was furious, he obviously wanted to achieve this God-making ending, but considering the current situation, was it worth spending so much time and effort just for such an ending?

"Forget it, let’s give it a try."

After some hesitation, Zhuge Jun decided to give it a try. However, he also set a rough timeframe for himself, which was 50 hours.

If, within 50 hours, the ending still seemed far off, then he would give up. After all, enduring so much suffering for such an elusive ending seemed hardly worthwhile.

Although with Zhuge Jun’s current skills, playing the regular game wouldn’t be too painful, aiming for a goal that requires "maintaining the lowest difficulty throughout" would make it a real struggle.

"Let me see if there’s a corresponding mod...

"Oh, there it is.

"I’ll go with this one."

Zhuge Jun did a quick search online and found the mod file he was looking for.

The mod was simple in function, using the game’s backend data to display the current dynamic difficulty in real-time and to track the player’s success rate with GP to date.

Without being able to display these two pieces of data in real-time, aiming for this ending would be too hard, like groping in the dark.

Apart from expert players like Wang, who would genuinely aim for a no-damage run throughout, other players might find themselves having "died within the first hour and only realizing it at the very end."

After installing the mod, Zhuge Jun began his attempt.

And then...

He met a glorious death in the first Chapter.

The prologue went smoothly, but once he got to the real Chapters, he carelessly got ambushed by a minor monster, sending the dynamic difficulty skyrocketing, and even after killing several monsters without taking damage, he only just managed to bring the dynamic difficulty back down to its original level, not the lowest.

As a result, it was a wasted fifteen minutes right off the bat.

Zhuge Jun scratched his head in some speechlessness and chose to restart.

That’s tough!

Of course, the entire game’s process is long, and even under smooth conditions, it still takes about ten hours to play, so a mere fifteen minutes isn’t much.

But the problem is, the game has just begun. If you’ve already wasted fifteen minutes at the start, can you guarantee a no-damage run from then on?

Just like speedrunning, a perfect start is essential to continue, and if the start isn’t perfect, it’s better to restart early and avoid some sunk costs.

"Damn it!!"

Zhuge Jun tried three more times, getting smarter and cautiously advancing in the game, trying to avoid damage and stockpile resources as much as possible to quickly lower his game’s dynamic difficulty.

Once the dynamic difficulty was at its lowest, he continued to play without taking damage and stockpiling resources to keep the difficulty as low as possible.

Every little touch made Zhuge Jun wince for a long time.

With great difficulty, he completed a Chapter and hurriedly saved his game manually, copying the save file out. If a mistake happened later, he could just copy this save back into the game and start over.

Of course, players could also opt to use save editors and directly download someone else’s no-damage saves just to tackle the final boss and see the ending.

But that would be somewhat self-deceptive, just achievement hunting, it would be better to just watch a video and experience the ending.

So, Zhuge Jun soldiered on through the second area with hiccups, carefully saving this area’s game progress as well.

But frequent mistakes gradually made him more irritable.

"Damn it, the requirements for this ending are simply anti-human!

"Although Nitiandang has pissed off players before, it turned out there were some hidden mechanics.

"Why doesn’t this ending have any hidden mechanics? That’s not scientific!"

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