作者：Leigh Alexander

《光晕：致远星》的特色在于一场无法获胜的标志性终极战斗。然而，微软的Tom Abernathy表示，实际上该续作并不打算延续自由主题。游戏已设定结局，以悲惨故事为主。

但是许多开发者均发现，自己必须延续备受拥护的游戏前作中独特又意义深远的挑战机制。对于《星际战士》来说，Raphael Von Lierop既需要维护Games Workshop这一IP所有者的利益，又要将更广泛的新用户引进《战锤40k》的游戏场景。

杀出重围:人类革命(from igameradio.com)

而在《杀出重围：人类革命》这款游戏中，Edios的Mary DeMarle不但要让忠实粉丝理解游戏中的某些元素与其设想存在出入，还需要确保整体游戏风格和感觉仍然保持不变。

她指出：“你应听取粉丝的建议，浏览他们的回馈……随后停下，因为你还是得执行自己所做的决定。”

Van Lierop表示：“你得尊重IP，但同时也需要添加自己的创意。”

对此，Obsidian感受颇深：Chiris Avellone曾在Black Isle开发出《辐射2》，后来又开发其续作《New Vegas》，后者延续了《辐射3》中的进展模式。在创造续作时，Bethesda提出两个请求：仅利用美国的西部海岸，沿用相同的游戏引擎。

除此以外，该团队可以在续作上自由增添些许元素，他们通过添加政治派系与同伙元素来充实游戏世界、故事与某些角色。

但所有团队成员均有些许遗憾，在Avellone看来，他们本应更突出那些重要派系，为其制定更多的有趣选项。

他表示：“在《New Vega》中，该游戏机制中大部分涉及政治与名誉派系，虽然这是一个强大的游戏机制，但我们清楚地认识到，如果其中某个派系不够健全，那么该机制将无法运转。”假使团队有幸再次修改游戏，他们可能会制定出类似凯撒军团这种相当极端的派系，并详尽体现出它们的积极特性。

虽然Obsidian尽量确保玩家不会感受到被迫与同伴角色合作，或被迫让同伴角色环绕周围，但Avellone也希望能够增加这些角色在故事中的重要性，同时又能够让玩家有所选择。

Van Lierop打算针对星际战士角色创作出一个第一人称故事，以此扩大《40k》的用户规模，但他却未意识到，该作在时窗与直接对比方面来看可能与《战争机器》颇有相似之处。Lierop希望该作从不同角度入手，根据Relic工作室自身的优势来创造独特的游戏体验。

他表示：“从某种意义上说，开发这类游戏的最好办法是从情感、小说、角色和喜好这些角度入手——你打算为玩家创造出怎样的体验呢？你应秉承这一理念，制作出相应的游戏内容。我仍坚信这是正确的方法。如果可能的话，我认为你应该看得更长远一些，充分认识到自己的前进方向。”

DeMarle指出：“在制作《杀出重围：人类革命》时，我们无从下手。如果我们曾经有过类似经历，那我们定会更有干劲。”

该作品早期为玩家提供了大量选项，但之后提供选择的频率却大幅下降，转向了一对一的对话方式。这是因为该团队并未真正意识到到赋予玩家更多角色扮演机会的重要性。

DeMarle表示：“我们编写了大量拥有不同台词的脚本，比如角色所做出的反应，在boss交战时产生的对话上也花了大量时间。但我们却没有着眼于主要脚本路径并考虑：‘我们应该赋予玩家让Jensen道出其心声的能力。’所以我们不得不进行大幅修改，这导致我们浪费了不少时间。我唯一后悔的是，我无法在结尾之外的其余脚本内容中贯穿这一理念。”

对话是保持游戏连续性的关键因素，DeMarle也表示她并不喜欢Jensen在电影场景和在游戏中的不同表现方式，因为这让他看起不像同一个人。她指出：“我坚信，编写游戏与故事是一个合作过程……团队中的每个成员都应了解所有角色的风格特点。可惜，我们的电影团队与编写团队之间的沟通并不顺利。”

所有团队成员都投入大量时间研究其它游戏系列，以了解自己想要的游戏风格。Van Lierop表示自己并非《40k》这款桌游的铁杆粉丝，但他钟爱该作的故事情节，而他也打算在游戏中延用这一成功元素。

Avellone表示：“为了制作出自己的项目，我们通常研究相似的游戏，找出其中的出色内容。”

Abernathy则指出，“在Bungie制作游戏系列最终版本的感觉很自由，通常我们会研究《光晕》的各个系列，了解自己是否可以做出与之不同的作品，因为我们无需遵循那些制作模版。”

为了获得合作之感，与团队成员并肩作战，该团队正在观看《兄弟连》这部电影，以便找到如何将该片中的出色元素添加到游戏的想法，“我们都认为自己能够为Bugie的《光晕》与众不同的最后一章内容而出力。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Stories from the trickiest sequels: Challenges and successes

by Leigh Alexander

Halo Reach features an iconic final battle that can’t be won. For Microsoft’s Tom Abernathy, however, the fact the series was not going to continue offered incredible freedom. The game was able to tell its poignant story because it had an end.

But many developers find themselves inheriting beloved, iconic franchises that offer unique and often significant challenges. With Space Marine, Raphael Von Lierop (now of HELM Studios) needed to balance a very protective IP owner in Games Workshop with the goal of bringing the Warhammer 40k universe to a new and wide audience.

While with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Eidos’ Mary DeMarle had to deal with helping passionate Deus Ex fans understand that while some elements of the game would not be like what they remembered, the sense and feel were intended to stay intact.

“You listen to the fans and you read the feedback… and then you stop reading it, because you have to do what you have to do,” she says.

“You want to respect the IP,” says Van Lierop, “but you also have to [add] your own creative vision.”

Obsidian knows from experience: Chris Avellone worked on Fallout 2 at Black Isle, and returned to the series with New Vegas, which inherited the evolutions on Fallout that Bethesda implemented with the third game. Bethesda had two major requirements: Use only the West Coast of the country, and use the same engine.

Other than that, the team had some freedom in what it wanted to add to the sequel, and chose to add a stronger focus on fleshing out the world, story and characters some, with the addition of faction politics and companions.

But all the panelists have some lingering regrets, and for Avellone it’s that those important factions could have been more nuanced and made for more interesting choices.

“A big part of the game mechanics in New Vegas was faction politics and faction reputation, and while I thought that was a strong game mechanic, I think internally we realized it’s not possible to make those mechanics work if one of those factions isn’t as well-developed,” he says. If the team could have another pass at the game, they might have taken fairly extreme factions, like Caesar’s Legion, and given them more nuanced positive qualities.

Although Obsidian wanted to ensure the player didn’t feel forced to work with or keep the game’s companion characters around, Avellone also would have liked to have implemented making those characters more important to the story while still being optional.

Van Lierop wanted to create a first-person story for the space marine character as a way of broadening the 40k audience — but hadn’t fully realized the extent to which that would place it up against Gears of War, both in terms of timing window and direct comparison, even superficially. He wishes the game would have focused more on differentiation, creating an experience that played more to the strengths of Relic as a studio.

“In a sense I do believe the right way to develop something like this is to come at it from the point of emotion, fiction, character and passion — what is it you want to create for your players? … You’re developing the content in that game to support that promise,” he says. “I still believe that’s the right approach. I just think you have to, if you can, look further into the future and realize where that’s going to bring you.”

“To do Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we had to be naive,” says DeMarle. “If we ever do another one, we have to have courage.”

The game offers a lot of choices for the player early on, but further on the frequency of those choices significantly recedes, favoring more one on one dialogue. That’s because the team hadn’t really grasped how important it was to give the player the ability to roleplay with more choice until well into develoment.

“We wrote all these scripts that had different lines, from the characters’ reaction to you, and we spent an awful lot of time focusing on the conversation boss fights,” DeMarle says. “But we didnt actually look at the critical path script and say, ‘let’s really give players the ability to let Jensen say what he wants to say. So we had to do this major rewrite, and we just ran out of time,” she says. “My one regret was that I couldnt get all the way through the rest of the script to get those in until the very end.”

Communication internally becomes important for consistency, and DeMarle also says she’s not fond of the way Jensen seems like a different person in the cinematics versus in the game. “I strongly believe when you’re writing games and stories it’s a collaboration… eveeryone on the team needs to understand the sense of the characters,” she says. “Unfortunately we had a breakdown in communication between the cinematics team and the rest of the writing team.”

All the panelists spent a good deal of time visiting other games in the series to understand how they wanted to build their own. Van Lierop says he isn’t a huge fan of the 40k board game but is passionate about the fiction, and it was that successful element he wanted to bring with him.

“We always go through a game research phase for all of our projects, in terms of what similar titles are out there and what are the things they do well,” says Avellone.

Says Abernathy: “The opportunity to do a final game in the series, for [Bungie], was very liberating, and there was a general feeling in the room that we all wanted to look at what the Halo games had been and had to be and see what we could now do differently from that, because we no longer had to follow that formula in many ways.”

To get the feeling of company, fighting with brothers and sisters, the team watched films like Band of Brothers closely to find how to get the sense they wanted to add to the games. “All of us felt there was an opportunity to do something a bit different as the final chapter for Bungie in that process.”(source:gamasutra)