游戏邦在:
杂志专栏:
gamerboom.com订阅到鲜果订阅到抓虾google reader订阅到有道订阅到QQ邮箱订阅到帮看

开发者谈对电子游戏将走向何处的看法

发布时间:2012-11-17 14:30:30 Tags:,,,

作者:Mathew Kumar

电子游戏将拥有怎样的未来?游戏开发者应采取怎样的步骤才能实现目标?

随着新公司与创新机会的不断涌现,在蒙特利尔国际游戏峰会上,各个开发者纷纷陈述了自己的观点。

美学复兴

Eidos Montreal兼《杀出重围:人类革命》美术总监Jonathan Jacques-Belletete辩称,为了能够在未来幸存,电子游戏“必须实现美学复兴”。

杀出重围(from gamasutra)

杀出重围(from gamasutra)

他指出:“我们所生活的环境十分封闭;我们的视觉文化已完全过时。我们必须寻找全新的灵感来源。”

他继续提到:“我们应该与电子游戏行业之外的人们合作:比如服装设计师与建筑师,因为我们的观念已逐渐落后。毕加索曾经说过‘你是无法从效仿中获取原创元素’。我认为这是个真理。”

Jonathan表示,脱离《星球大战》与《指环王》这些经典佳作寻找创作灵感,不仅有助于制定优秀的设计方案,而且可以成就一个完美项目。

“独特的设计风格能够催生玩家的游戏欲望……如果你的设计方案与众不同,那么你就能够针对目标用户自然而然地创造游戏。”

跨平台游戏

Epic的Tim Sweeney再次引用他在峰会开幕式上提到的观点。

他表示:“7年来,自从PC市场逐步走向衰落,电子游戏行业已被卷入平台战争中,PC平台不再是玩家心目中的理念平台。而微软与索尼的出现,及其兼具稳定平台和出色性能的系统确实给行业带来震惊。”

然而,这种全新模式并未持续多久。

Sweeney指出:“接下来几年,电子游戏行业发生了翻天覆地的变化。”他解释道这是由于应用商店、智能手机、平板电脑与网页游戏的出现。他表示,自己的下一代目标设备选择很可能是“所有平台”。

他提到:“所有应运而生的不同游戏平台将会融合成一种共同特性。借此,我们可能会制作出瞄准所有平台的游戏;而这是行业在历经7年的分割变化后,迎来的一种真正的积极变革。”

他继续表示:“我可以设想,未来,围绕云计算设计的游戏将有助于你实现在多台设备上体验同款游戏。届时,画面与控制方式也会发生变化,但玩家已十分满足于能够随处体验游戏。”

Sweeney补充道:“从运营角度上看,这同样十分有趣。我们可以通过多个不同平台解决制作成本问题,我们能够吸引大量用户,同时无需提高开发成本。”

然而,他警告道:“这也意味着,我们需要改变设计游戏的方式——我们不能单单着眼于某台设备、某种输入方式,以及某种画面质感。”

互动性

THQ的Stephanie Bouchard认为,“未来,充满现实感与环绕音效的电子游戏将不会有多大效果,”她争辩道,由于当前游戏无法提供相似的社交技术改进,从而给人以“空洞”之感。

她指出:“每款游戏都存在一个弊端。”她感叹道大多数游戏并未提供能与玩家互动的不同方式。她特别提到自己对EA《教父》系列的失望。

她指出:“我们为何属于人类,因为我们可以与他人互动。但我们却无法在游戏中有效体现这个元素。我体验了《刺客信条3》的所有关卡,其中居然只有一只小狗NPC能够真正能让我产生存在感。”

“我们必须制作出能让玩家与其它角色进行互动的游戏体验。”

elemental(from gamasutra)

elemental(from gamasutra)

开发者的创意

育碧蒙特利尔工作室兼《Watch Dogs》创意总监Jonathan Morin进一步阐明了Bouchard的观点。

他指出:“我确信,电子游戏将拥有精彩的未来,技术能够推动我们不断创新,而且技术问题也会十分有趣。但这些事项并不重要。技术不会改变我们的未来;只有我们开发者能够改变游戏。”

他继续指出:“我们创造的游戏应能够激发玩家的好奇心。”

“我想,未来将会出现向我们展示周围环境,提供更多有关我们场景建议的NPC。我们应停止创造枯燥的对话形式以及二选一模式,要用真实的对话形式取代它。它可以是简单形式,但应充满真实感。这样可以赋予我们行动的力量;我认为,复杂的事物不一定就是复杂的解决方案。”

“总之,电子游戏的未来将会如何?我认为这取决于在座各位开发者的想法。”(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

Top developers ponder the future of video games

by Mathew Kumar

What does the future hold for video games, and what steps do game makers need to take to get there?

During the Montreal International Game Summit’s closing session (the annual “Brain Dump”), a variety of developers tried to answer that question, as new business and creative opportunities continue to emerge.

Aesthetic rehab

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, art director at Eidos Montreal for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, argued that to survive in the future, video games “must go to aesthetic rehab.”

“We live in a kind of sealed environment; our visual culture is completely outdated,” he said. “We need to start looking for new sources of inspiration.”

“We need to start working with people outside of the video game industry: fashion designers and architects, because we are going to be left behind,” he continued. “It’s Picasso who said, ‘you get nothing original from an echo.’ It’s very true.”

He said finding inspiration aside from typical sources like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings is not merely a good design decision, but a good business decision.

“Design distinction creates desire… if your design is different enough, you will automatically create design in your audience.”

Tim Sweeney’s future of “everything”

Taking the stage, Epic’s Tim Sweeney re-approached some of the thoughts he had presented to the audience at the start of the summit.

“For seven years the industry has been embroiled in a platform war that began when the PC market began to decline, and the PC really lost the central place in gamer’s hearts,” he said. “Microsoft and Sony came along and created systems with much more stable platforms and greater performance and really shook things up.”

However, this new stability didn’t last.

“Over subsequent years things have really changed even more dramatically,” Sweeney said, noting the rise of the App store, smartphones, tablets and web games. He revealed his pick for the new winner of the next generation: “everything.”

“All the different gaming platforms that have emerged are coming together into a common specification,” he said. “We can build one game that potentially targets all the different platforms; this is a really positive change after seven years of divisive change.

“I imagine a future,” he continued, “where cloud-centric gaming means you can have one game and play it across all your devices. Graphics and controls will scale, but to be capable of playing a game anywhere is a very friendly way to work with players.”

“This is also interesting from a business point of view,” Sweeney added. “We can amortize the cost across different platforms, reaching a much larger audience without dramatically increasing the development cost.”

However, he warned, “this also means we need to change the way we think about game design — we can’t just think about aiming for one device, one type of input, one graphical level.”

What makes us human

THQ’s Stephanie Bouchard approached the future from the position that “photorealism and surround sound is not going to help us any more,” arguing that current games feel “hollow” because of their failure to offer similar improvements in social technologies.

“Every game has a button for kill,” she said, lamenting that more games didn’t offer different interactions with players. She particularly noted her disappointment in EA’s licensed “The Godfather” series.

“EA, fuck you,” she said. “You messed up my fantasy. I wanted to put cotton balls in my mouth and make an offer that couldn’t refuse. Instead I was just another hood beating people up.”

“What makes us human,” she said, “is the ways we can interact with each other. But in games we do it very poorly. I played all of Assassin’s Creed III and the only NPC that I feel that truly acknowledged my existence was a dog!”

“We must customize the game experience to enable social manipulation on other characters.”

The mind of the developer

Ubisoft Montreal’s Jonathan Morin — creative director on the upcoming Watch Dogs –closed out the session with a talk that furthered some of the thoughts in Bouchard’s commentary.

“I was convinced that our future was fascinating, that technology would bring us forward and the questions about technology were interesting. But they are beside the point,” he said. “Technology isn’t what’s going to shape our future; it’s up to us to push our medium beyond that.”

“When we create games,” he continued, “it should excite your sense of wonder.”

“I think the future is in the rise of NPCs to show us what really surrounds us, to suggest more about our universe. We need to stop creating trees of dialogue and binary choices, replace that with a real way of communicating. It could be simple but it should be felt. Doing stuff like that would be empowering to us; suggest complex stuff — and complex stuff doesn’t have to be a complex solution.

“What’s the future? I think it’s the mind of everyone here, in the mind of every developer.” (source:gamasutra)


上一篇:

下一篇: