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玩家视角论述优秀电子游戏的4大必备要素

发布时间:2011-10-08 17:45:36 Tags:,,,,

作者:Adam Saltsman

我得设计游戏,撰写游戏理论,及准备会议演讲,因此没有很多时间玩电子游戏。最近为奖励自己的工作进展,我下载和体验了系列Playstation Network演示游戏,其中包括:

* 《无限回廊》——优秀谜题设计,但以乏味方式呈现,镜头控制模糊。

* 《皇牌空战 7》——优质飞机控制&流动,糟糕直升机控制,重复音乐和玩法。

* 《超越善恶HD》——依旧是个无可匹敌的经典之作。

* 《九宵云外》——优秀控制装置,玩法富于变化,画面令人愉悦。

* 《血腥莱恩:背叛》——优质控制装置,重复玩法。

* 《Pac-Man Championship Edition DX》——优质控制装置、机制和音效。

* 《声名狼藉 2》——黑夜版《声名狼藉 1》。

* 《天使之王》——以疯狂方式呈现,存在重复性。

* 《恶魔城:暗影之王》——普通控制装置,重复战斗,以优质方式呈现。

* 《Hoard》——糟糕呈现方式,整齐玩法机制。

* 《战利品时代》——缺乏灵魂和粘性。

* 《From Dust》——画面迷人、唯美,存在重复和缺陷。

* 《Motorstorm: Apocalypse》——糟糕轨道,老爷车,删除默认方向键控制。

我一口气体验完这些游戏。这有点“暴饮暴食”,但非常有满足感,我开始发现某些促使我放弃许多游戏的潜在趋势。我将这些趋势记录下来,旨在更好记住,同时以相同标准严格要求自己的作品。

这些都是主观观察结果,根据之前所玩内容得出。因此这些游戏也许并非所述优缺点的典型代表。下述各部分后面的经验总结纯属个人偏好和目标,并非瞄准整个游戏设计社区。

多样性

多数游戏在30-60分钟的体验中都缺乏变化。我喜欢只涉及一个内容的游戏,但拥有足够深度和趣味非常重要。尤其是动作游戏,我忍不住将它们同我最爱的游戏《怒之铁拳2》进行比较。在《怒之铁拳2》的首个关卡中(游戏邦注:这只需不到10分钟便能够完成),玩家将经历3个不同场景(街道、酒吧和穷街陋巷),同5个以上的不同敌人作战(刺客、流氓、持刀人士、持鞭条女子和首领),他们大多都以不同服饰和色彩呈现。但不论是《恶魔城》、《血腥莱恩》,还是《皇牌空战》,游戏内容都缺乏变化,因此持续涌现无趣重复感,尽管其控制装置和呈现方式存在内在优势。《天使之王》的确拥有多种敌人,其内容不含成群暴民;但玩家需点击50多次敌人才会消失,这很快让觉得像是1次击败1个敌人,击退50多个敌人。

经验总结:我更希望游戏包含稳定粘性,不论我是深入探索某个有趣构思,还是持续临时发挥,应对新挑战。一旦我破解这样的难题:“什么是驱逐敌人的最有效方式”,我便开始对此失去兴趣,讨厌自己的进展反复受“解决”问题阻碍。

呈现方式

hoard from ps3media.ign.com

hoard from ps3media.ign.com

我所体验的内容中,有一半的呈现方式非常有趣,有一半则非常无聊。虽然只有《Hoard》和《战利品时代》的画面令人生厌,但其实《无限回廊》也非常无趣。我觉得这是制作能够被接受,且内容清晰作品的最低付出。这些投入只能够实现这个目标。《血腥莱恩》充满精致细节和样式,但其前景和背景都非常模糊,我常常无法把握自己在游戏情境及众多敌人中处于什么位置。《天使之王》的奇怪呈现方式颇鼓舞人心,但这致使我常在缝隙跳跃和其他简单运动原理中判断失误。

《九宵云外》是在这类游戏中唯一表现突出的作品,开发者在这款“轮廓清晰的平台游戏”中投入《像素垃圾》般的细节关注度,同时在背景中填充树木、葡萄藤、青蛙、土块或者链条悬挂的堡垒。每个轮廓边缘都充满有趣和复杂细节,制造环境氛围,同时又传递有关游戏状态和互动方式的充足信息。

经验总结:呈现方式具有双重任务——愉悦玩家,同时提供有关潜在游戏机制状态的暗示和更新内容。习惯上讲,我觉得后者是呈现方式的主要职责,但我对于前者的容忍程度要比以往低。

控制装置

我体验的所有内容控制装置大多非常糟糕(游戏邦注:除《皇牌空战 7》的飞机关卡,《九宵云外》和《超越善恶》外):运动有时过快有时过慢,形成出乎意料的结果,输入和游戏活动缺乏清晰联系。我通常对此非常敏感,我在自己的作品中非常注重此方面。若游戏无法确定最基础的互动原则,我很对此难视而不见。若呈现方式普通,玩法重复,情况将更加复杂。

经验总结:保持对控制装置的关注。这更多关乎艺术,而非科学,特别是当其延伸至游戏逻辑和呈现方式。但若其感觉糟糕,游戏体验也会受到极大伤害,就像在鸡块中发现鸡头。

用心制作游戏

这在这些评估中最为主观,但我发现我用爱制作的游戏更加赏心悦目。《恶魔城》和《血腥莱恩》充斥大量不必要的细节和人物,《From Dust》和《天使之王》亦是如此。《战利品时代》和《无限回廊》让人觉得像是出自机器人之手。

经验总结:人物非常重要。我能够辨别设计师是否在意其所制作的内容,是否挤出有限时间完成游戏场景,带给玩家更有趣体验。若是如此,所呈现的将是美好内容。

《九霄云外》和局外人视角

outland from pastemagazine.com

outland from pastemagazine.com

在我体验的所有内容中,《九霄云外》(游戏邦注:除《吃豆人》和《超越善恶》外,《九霄云外》由Housemarque制作,该公司的代表作品还有《超级星尘HD》和《死亡国度》)是我想要继续体验的唯一一款游戏。这也是唯一融入多种机制和画面的富有粘性的游戏,游戏还包含准确控制装置,让人觉得团队非常关注游戏所有细节。如果我不是忙于其他事情,我想我会花整个下午玩这款游戏。

体验这些演示内容让能够扮演纯粹玩家,而非游戏开发者。作为开发者有很多事情对我而言非常重要,但与玩家是否觉得游戏富有趣味无关。我知道对许多游戏开发者而言,“发现趣味”是其终极法则,而我觉得粘性非常重要。但作为游戏开发者,我有其他许多需要考虑的内容,基本原理对我而言缺乏实际意义。

但我总是期望能够以局外人、以玩家视角审视自己的游戏,试着想象他们的感觉。体验这些演示内容让我想起视频游戏吸引我投身其中,放弃书籍或电影的要素:

* 多样性

* 鼓舞人心的呈现方式

* 完美控制装置

* 用心制作游戏

从游戏开发者视角来看,这些要点非常复杂,存在重复之处,但以玩家角度看,这些内容却非常鲜明。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Regaining The Outsider’s Perspective

by Adam Saltsman

Between training for the Austin Distance Challenge, being a dad, helping build a secret new iOS game (hopefully out in January!), helping to finish FEZ, working on an unannounced game design book, continuing to explore my own game ideas, both digital and otherwise, contributing to the GDC Advisory Board, and prepping for Fantastic Arcade and Indiecade, I haven’t had a whole lot of time for playing video games.  So last night, as a sort of self-reward for getting half my GDC talks reviewed and half the new book chapter written, I downloaded and played a dozen Playstation Network demos, including:

* Echochrome – great puzzle design, boring presentation, muddy camera control

* Ace Combat 7 – awesome airplane controls & flow, awful helicopter controls, repetitive music and gameplay

* Beyond Good & Evil HD – still an unrivaled classic

* Outland – good controls, great variety in gameplay, lovely art direction

* Bloodrayne: Betrayal – good controls, repetitive gameplay

* Pac-Man Championship Edition DX – good controls, great system, good sound

* inFamous 2 – inFamous 1 at night

* El Shaddai – insane presentation, but very repetitive

* Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – mediocre controls, repetitive fights, great presentation

* Hoard – awful presentation, neat gameplay system

* Age of Booty – soul-less, unengaging

* From Dust – fascinating, beautiful, repetitive, handicapped

* Motorstorm: Apocalypse – ugly track, lame cars, removed default d-pad steering??

…and played through them all in one sitting.  It was gluttonous and satisfying, but I started noticing some trends that were turning me off of a lot of the games.  I wanted to record them here if only to help me remember them better, in hopes that I might be as strict and critical of my own work as I was being of others.

Please note that tese are highly subjective observations, and drawn only from the demos I played last night.  Therefore, some of these games may not be the best examples of these particular flaws or strengths.  The lessons presented at the end of each section are merely notes to myself about my own personal preferences and goals, and not intended as mandates to the game design community!

Variety

Most of the games I played presented strikingly little variety over the course of 30-60 minutes of play.  I enjoy (and sometimes make) games that are only about one thing, but it’s important for that one thing to have enough depth and interest. For the action games in particular, I can’t help but compare them to one of my favorite beat-’em-ups, Streets of Rage 2.  In the first level of Streets of Rage 2, which takes less than ten minutes to play through, you walk through 3 distinct environments (street, bar, back alley), and fight at least 5 distinct types of enemies (thug, gangster, knife guy, whip girl, boss guy), many of whom are presented with differing costumes and colors.  However, whether it was Castlevania, Bloodrayne or even Ace Combat, the lack of variety and hence sense of uninteresting repetition was severe and pronounced, whatever the inherent strengths of the controls or presentation.  El Shaddai actually had a good variety of enemies, no mobs to encounter in that game; however, enemies took 50+ hits to dispatch, which quickly amounted to feeling the same as fighting 50 guys that took 1 hit each.

Lesson: I prefer constant engagement, whether I am diving deeper into a single fascinating idea or constantly improvising to handle new challenges.  Once I have solved a problem like “what is the most efficient way to dispatch this enemy” I begin to lose interest in it, and resent my progress being halted to “solve” that problem again, over and over and over.

Presentation

The demos I played were split about 50-50 between engaging presentation and boring presentation.  While only Hoard and Age of Booty were actually unpleasant to look at,Echochrome was very uninteresting.  I got the sense that it was the absolute minimum amount of effort in order to create something both acceptable and clear.  It was functional to that end, but nothing more.  Bloodrayne was full of nice details and flourishes, but the foregrounds and backgrounds were often unclear, and I frequently lost track of where I was in the environment or in a mob of enemies.  El Shaddai was inspirational in its bizarre presentation, but as a result I frequently misjudged leaps over gaps and other simple fundamentals of movement.

Outland was the only title that really stood out in this category, taking the indie cliche of “silhouette platformer” to an almost PixelJunk level of attention to detail, filling the backgrounds with trees, vines, fog, and lumps of earth or fortress suspended from enormous chains.  Every edge of every silhouette is covered with interesting and intricate detail, establishing an excellent sense of atmosphere whilst simultaneously clearly communicating everything I needed to know about the state of the game and how to interact with it.

Lesson: Presentation obviously has dual responsibilities – entertaining the sense pleasure part of my brain as well as feeding me hints and updates about the state of the underlying game system.  Traditionally I’ve thought of the latter as being the most important role of presentation, but my tolerance for lazy approaches to the former is… lower than it used to be.

Controls

Nearly every game I played (with the exception of Ace Combat 7′s airplane level, Outland, and of course Beyond Good & Evil) had controls that felt bad: movement that was simultaneously too fast and too slow, unpredictable consequences, and unclear connections between my inputs and actions in the game.  I have always been sensitive to this, and it’s something I obsess over in my own games, and I have apparently lost the ability to cut a game any slack if they haven’t nailed down the most fundamental basics about how I interact with the system.  This is only complicated by lackluster presentation and repetitive gameplay.

Lesson: Keep obsessing about controls.  It’s still more art than science, especially when it inevitably reaches across the game logic and presentation.  But when it feels wrong it massively detracts from the game experience, like finding a chicken head in your chicken nuggets.

Made With Love

This is easily the most subjective (and possibly imagined) of any of these rushed appraisals, but I was finding games that I deemed “made with love” much more enjoyable than the others.  Castlevania and Bloodrayne especially dripped with unnecessary detail and personality, as did From Dust and El Shaddai.  Age of Booty and Echochrome felt like they were built by robots.

Lesson: Personality matters.  I can tell (or at least I think I can tell) when the folks making the game really cared about what they were doing, and spent some of their limited time on this earth trying to make my limited time on this earth more interesting.  This is a beautiful thing.

Outland and the Outsider’s Perspective

Of all the demos I played, Outland was the only game (except Pac-Man and Beyond Good & Evil, but I’ve played those before!) that I wanted to keep playing.  It was also the only game demo that presented an engaging amount of both systemic and presentational variety, coupled with tight controls and a sense that the team making the game really cared about every little detail in it.  If I wasn’t working on FEZ and GDC talks this weekend, I know how I’d be spending most of this afternoon!

Playing all these demos helped me remember a little bit of what it is like to just be a game player, not a game maker.  There are lots and lots of things that are really important to me as a game maker that have little to do with whether a player finds the game enjoyable.  I know for a lot of game creators that “finding the fun” is the ultimate law, and I do think engagement is important.  But as a game maker there are so many other boundaries and concerns for me that that ultimatum is rather moot.

However, I’ve always believed in and practiced trying to view the games I make as an outsider, as a new player, and trying to imagine what they might feel.  Playing these demos help remind me of the things that interest me when I decide to spend my limited leisure time with a video game, instead of a book or movie:

* Variety

* Inspired Presentation

* Perfect Controls

* Made With Love

These are obviously very complex and overlapping concerns from the game maker’s perspective, but as a player these were the things that stood out to me in sharp relief last night.  I hope that the next time you play a game I made that you hold me to the same critical standards to which I hold the games I play, and I hope that sometimes I succeed.

PS: It’s worth noting that Outland was created by Housemarque, the studio most well-known for Super Stardust HD, but also responsible for the vastly superior Dead Nation, an excellent nu-retro top-down co-op shooter available only on PSN.  You can check out theOutland demo on either XBLA and PSN and give it your own critical look!(Source:gamasutra


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