作者：Ernest Adams

这个系列我已经写了一年了，我邀请读者们告诉他们对于游戏的抱怨和吐槽，我确实收到来信了！所以有了这篇文章，正是由许多读者的反馈组成的。我想感谢所有为本文做出贡献的读者，但有些人没有在邮件中留下真名，所以我也没有办法啦。（请点击此处阅读本系列第1、2、3、5、6、7、8、9、10、11、12、13篇）

坏蛋和消失的武器

许多人抱怨这一点，这是对我在上一篇文章中提到的“带武器的鸟类”的延伸。你千辛万苦放倒了一只大BOSS，却发现他的武器没了。Evan McClanahan提到，“当大BOSS正在用他的无敌机关枪对付其他角色时，我溜到敌人背后偷袭他，我想要那把枪，而不是一具尸体和一根破棍。”

现在，在网络游戏中，这一点多少是可以理解的。怪物总是会重刷出来，如果他们每次挂掉都掉落大武器，那么游戏世界很快就会被那些武器淹没。但在单机游戏中，游戏设计师完全可以平衡这一点。如果掉落武器使游戏太不平衡，你可以限制玩家使用武器的能力——好吧，你消灭了那个巨魔，拿了它的武器，但事实上你不可能那么轻松地挥动那根30斤公重的树干。或者，也许你得到了坏蛋的好枪，但坏蛋所带的子弹只够你用几次。用完了就没有了，如果你坚持要满世界寻找那把枪能用的子弹，那么你随意吧。

这个问题的另一个推论是由Chris Oates提出的：一个穿着皮革比基尼的妖女死掉后掉落一套铠甲。什么？她既然带着装备为什么战斗时不穿上？难道她是打算拿去洗衣店的吗？

我玩过在这方面没犯错的游戏。杀了一只小地精，得到一把小刀。杀了五十只小地精，得到五十把小刀。这就非常合理了，你也不会贪走这些小刀，就像在现实生活中一样。

没有变化的技能水平

这个问题有点棘手，因为我知道执行起来是要成本的。平衡多种技能水平比平衡一种技能水平要费时间，而在游戏开发中，时间就是金钱。另外，并非所有玩家都有相同水平的技能，也不是所有人都希望接受同样难度的挑战（如果你把游戏设计得太困难，只能说明你是一个自娱自乐的游戏设计师）。通过给玩家不同的技能水平，你其实是延长了游戏的寿命，因为玩家的水平会提高，这样就能重复通关了。更重要的是，你扩大了你的游戏的受众范围。如果游戏太简单，那么硬核玩家就会对它不屑；如果游戏太难，休闲玩家就不会对它有兴趣。如果你的游戏的难度水平是变化的，那么这两类玩家它都能吸引了。

过度使用黑暗

Trent Lucier抱怨道，有些游戏让玩家在黑暗的环境前进，只能借助显示器的微弱光线看东西。前五分钟还挺刺激挺有氛围的，但五分钟以后就只是觉得无聊厌烦了。同样是在黑暗的环境中，敌人怎么可能比我看得还清楚？我完全同意这个抱怨——我不反对“光线微弱”，但我在“黑暗”中不会得到太多乐趣。在黑暗中摸索嗑碰可不会让我觉得自己像间谍/盗贼/刺客/忍者。所谓的潜行刺杀的要点是，能在黑暗中看得清楚。

Charlie Byers也指出，许多Windows移植到Mac平台的游戏都存在这个问题。苹果显示器有不同的伽玛值，而虚幻引擎的伽玛值修正功能似乎在苹果机上不太管用。移植程序员请注意了！

Spyro the Dragon(from giantbomb.com)

草率的壳菜单

不少人抱怨游戏壳的粗糙的界面。所谓的游戏壳就是指在进入主游戏模式以前必经的设置面板。这些东西设计起来从来就没什么乐趣可言，它们只是设置、保存、加载等。结果是，它们往往存在两个问题中的一个：要么做得太匆忙，导致布局不合理、组织混乱；要么太花哨，搞笑大过必要。为了掩饰它们是电脑加工的功能这个事实，以及让它们更贴合游戏的主题，所有的菜单都使用旋转怕燃烧文字，并在当前强调的项目上加发光特效。

为了让游戏壳更对玩家的胃口，不是用大量无意义的特效来装点它，而是把它设计得容易使用，以便玩家能尽快进入游戏。尽量根据你的游戏主题设计字体，但也必须保证玩家读得懂。不要使用超过两个层级的菜单。保证所有项目的默认设置是合理的，以便第一次玩的玩家可以直接跳过，不必做任何修改。（考虑到PC硬件的不同，我知道这个很困难）老版Borland Turbo Pascal编译程序手册的第一页——甚至在标题页以前，就提到“如何立即开始”，因为他们知道所有人都想最先进入。玩家也是这样的。

永远不要忘记：虽然壳是游戏最无聊的部分，但它也是玩家真正开始体验游戏以前第一见到的东西。正如一些求职手册上所说的，你只有一次机会给人留下好的第一印象。

浪费时间的随机遭遇战

你终于把整个小镇上上作恶多端的鼠怪都收拾掉了，因此得了一些经验点。现在你又出发去其他地方做更伟大的事了。但当然，你还是会经常回来这个小镇的，回来卖卖打怪得来的垃圾、补充武器等。问题是，每一次你回来，你还是会遭遇鼠怪的攻击。现在你的已经变强大了，有了更强的武器和装备，所以打鼠怪绝对是浪费时间。所以，你不会为了那少得可怜的经验值停下来打鼠怪，你会为了避免麻烦而对鼠怪避而远之！

这个问题的变体是，你回到小镇上却发现这个地方又被更多鼠怪占领了，只是现在它们比之前更强了，你又得再展开一次“灭鼠行动”了。它们看起来和动起来跟之前那一批鼠怪一模一样，所以并没有带来新玩法，这又是一个无意义的挑战。

这显然也是糟糕的游戏设计师的失误。稍微想一想就能找到解决办法。1）无论是什么地方，你刚清理掉那里的怪物，那里就应该保持无怪的样子一段时间（这是好游戏设计的基本生态学）。2）随机遭遇战的小怪如果太弱不足以构成威胁，应该让小怪们见到玩家立即恐乱逃跑（这是基本的动物行为）。这样，玩家就不会因为你设计的无意义的战斗而浪费时间了。

能够保存调整后的设置

本系列的忠实读者应该已经知道在“保存游戏”的论战中我的立场是什么了：我认为玩家想保存时就应该能够保存；如果他们为了通过一个艰难的挑战而重新载入所有时间，那是他们的特权。然而，这次我打算承认我对这个问题还有另一个观点。

但确实令人生气，正如Brendan Sechter所说的，当游戏要求你在关卡开始以前调整你的单位/武器/或无论什么东西以便战胜挑战，然后却不允许你保存调整后的结果。调整设置可能是玩法中有趣的一部分，但当你不得不一次又一次地在关卡开始以前调整，那就变成一件无聊的机械运动了。

糟糕的（或不存在的）摄像机控制

Dave Wilson告诉我，有些第三人称3D游戏完全不允许玩家控制摄像机。又是糟糕的游戏设计师在搞鬼！什么是3D环境？允许你不付任何代价就能自由地观察游戏世界。看：普通人的视域约有120度宽。不同的游戏的视域则相当不同，随着高清电视的普及，那个值应该还会变大，但无论如何不会超过120度。玩家戴着头戴设备玩游戏已经够辛苦的了，作为补偿，他们应该能够控制摄像机。而且这个问题很容易解决。看一下原版Playstation游戏《Spyro the Dragon》或《Toy Story 2》，你就知道直观顺利的玩家控制型摄像机应该是怎么样的了。

可以用敌人的尸体重生的角色

我在许多游戏中都看到过这种角色，似乎已经成为幻想游戏的有趣而自然的玩法之一。比如说，死灵法师可以复生死亡的敌人，使复活后的敌人成为自己一方的僵尸战士之类的。似乎是挺好的设定。不幸的是，如果执行得不好，会导致游戏严重不平衡，因为它造成了不可控制的正向反馈：你失去的单位越多，敌人得到的就越多。正如我在其他文章中说过的，想象一下如果在下棋时，你可以把对方的棋子捉过来为己所用，那么游戏时间就会大大缩短。允许一方占用另一方单位的游戏机制必须非常谨慎地处理平衡性。

dungeon keeper 2(from gamasutra)

《Dungeon Keeper》其实有不下四种把敌人变成“朋友”的机制，它闪都通过不同的方式实现平衡：

1、你可以捕捉敌方角色，把他们关进监狱，饿死他们。（在某种程度上，《Dungeon Keeper》使《侠盗猎车手》变成人道主义的榜样，但我们现在不打算说这个）敌人饿死后会变成低级的骷髅战士，这种战士在大部分时候是非常脆弱的。而且饿死还要花一段时间。因为需要时间和力量上的下降，这不算特别不平衡的设定。

2、你可以捕捉敌方角色，在酷刑室里折磨他们，直到把他们转化成自己一方的。在这种情况下，你得到的“小伙伴”将与他们作为敌人时一样强大。这种设定的缺点在于，非常费时间，你要不断地施放昂贵的治疗咒语，否则敌人就会被折磨至死。另外，越强大的敌人，需要的转化时间就越长，所以优势和劣势实现平衡了。

3、你可以把敌人的尸体拖进墓地，当埋在那里的尸体足够多时，墓地就会生出一只吸血鬼。这个设定的平衡条件是，产生一只吸血鬼所需要的尸体比较多（如果我没记错的话，应该是8个），并且建造一个墓地是比较贵的。另一方面，一旦训练完成，吸血鬼就是游戏中最强大的物种之一，所以这是一个非常有效的设定。

4、原版《Dungeon Keeper》有一种叫作“清道夫室”的特殊房间，你可以让你的“小伙伴”把敌方的单位招降——有点像叛徒招募工具。这种东西的缺点是，造价极高，且与墓地一样，当你的跟班在里面工作时，就不能训练和战斗了。另外，敌方也有他们自己的“清道夫室”。然而，这个设定确实太不平衡了——当双人模式时，哪一边先建造了“清道夫室”，哪一边往往就能获胜。所以《Dungeon Keeper2》把这个设定删除了。

总之，《Dungeon Keeper》是解决重生敌人问题的经典案例，我们应该向它学习。

重生敌人单位的另一个问题是，重生的单位通常是非常强的：强力术士之类的。结果是，复活了这种角色的一方变成无敌了。如果你打算让某种角色具有这么逆天的复活能力，那么就要让这种角色非常脆弱和易受伤作为抵消。

总结

我还收到了许多“糟糕的游戏设计师”的罪证，但这次我没有办法再写下去了……我打算建立一个数据库！我仍然希望听到更多新的“槽点”。如果你知道了什么让你手抓狂的游戏设计缺陷，就请告诉我吧。（你最好回头去看之前的系列文章，以免重复举证）。（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）

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! IV

By Ernest Adams

I’m not going to write this month’s column. You are. Or rather, you already did. After last year’s “Bad Game Designer” column, I asked readers to submit their own peeves about games, and hooo-eeee, did I get letters! So herewith, a compendium of design flaws and irritations sent in by various readers. I’ll try to give appropriate credit where I can, but some E-mailers don’t use their real names, and in that case there’s nothing I can do.

Bad Guys With Vanishing Weapons

Many people wrote to complain about this one. It’s the corollary to the “birds that carry swords” complaint I mentioned in the previous “No Twinkie” column. You spend forever trying to take down some major bad guy, and when you finally do, his weapon has disappeared. Evan McClanahan said, “If I sneak up behind someone and knife them in the back with one of my characters, as he’s keeping my other characters pinned down with The Inexhaustible Machine Gun of Perforation (+2), I expect to get that gun, not an empty corpse with three Futuristic Monetary Units and a stick of gum.”

Now, in online games this is understandable in some respects. Monsters respawn all the time, and if they dropped a big weapon every time they died, the world would soon be awash in such weapons. But in single-player games, you have the freedom to balance the game properly, and can compensate accordingly for these issues. If it unbalances the game too much, you can limit the player’s ability to use the weapon — OK, you killed the troll and got his club, but actually you can’t wield a 30-kilo tree trunk all that conveniently. Or maybe you get the big bad guy’s amazing gun, but the only ammo available for it is what he’s got on him at the time. If you insist on lugging that gun all over the place hoping to find more ammo, well, that’s your choice.

Another corollary to this, sent in by Chris Oates, is the demon woman in a leather thong bikini who drops a full suit of plate armor when she dies. What, she had it with her but didn’t feel like putting it on for battle? Did it need to go to the cleaners or something?

I have played games that got this right. You kill a little kobold, you get a little knife. You kill fifty little kobolds, you get fifty little knives, none of which is really worth your while to fool with, so you just leave them behind-which is what you would do in real life.

No Variable Skill Levels

This one’s a bit tricky because I know what it costs to implement. Balancing a game for multiple skill levels takes more time than balancing it for just one, and time is money in game development. Still, not all gamers have the same degree of skill, and not all of them want equally hard challenges. (Making games that are nightmarishly hard just because you can is a sign of designer self-indulgence, as I discussed in an earlier column, “What Kind of Designer Are You?”) By giving players different skill levels, you actually increase the longevity of your game, because players can crank it up and play through again. More importantly, you increase the size of the market. If a game is too easy, it’ll get a bad reputation among the hardcore gamers; if it’s too hard, it’ll get a bad reputation among the casual players. If you offer variable skill levels, you can appeal to both groups.

Overuse of Darkness

Trent Lucier wrote in to complain about games that you have to play with the blinds drawn and the monitor brightness cranked up in order to see anything. OK, for the first five minutes it’s all creepy and atmospheric, and after that it’s just annoying. And how come all the bad guys can see in the dark a whole lot better than I can? I agree completely on this — I don’t object to “dim ,” but I don’t get much enjoyment out of “dark.” Peering around like a mole and bumping into things all the time isn’t my idea of being a cool, stealthy thief/assassin/ninja. The whole point about stealthy assassins is that they can see well in the dark.

Charlie Byers also pointed out that this is a problem with a lot of Mac ports of Windows games: Macintosh monitors have different gamma values, and he says the gamma correction feature in the Unreal engine doesn’t seem to work properly on Macs. Port programmers take note!

Sloppy Shell Menus

Various people complained about crummy user interfaces in the game’s “shell” — the set-up screens that you have to go through before you get into the main gameplay mode. These are never very interesting to design; they’re just configuration screens, save and load slots, and so on. As a result, they tend to suffer from one of two problems: either they’re done hurriedly, with poor layout and awkward organization, or they’re much fancier than necessary. In an effort to disguise the fact that they are computer-oriented bookkeeping functions, and make them fit in better with the theme of the game, all the menus are done in rotating letters of fire, with sparkle effects on the currently highlighted item.

The best way to make the game’s shell work for the player is not to gussy it up with a lot of meaningless effects, but to make it well-designed and easy to use so that he can get into the game as quickly as possible. Create a font that fits with the theme of your game by all means, but make sure it’s easily readable, too. Try not to have menus any more than two layers deep. Be sure you have reasonable defaults for everything so the player can jump right in, without having to make any changes the first time he plays. (Given the variability of PC hardware, I know this can be tricky.) The first page of the manual of the old Borland Turbo Pascal compilers — even before the title page — was called, “How to Get Started Immediately,” because they knew everybody was going to want to dive in headfirst. That’s even more true of players.

Never forget: while the shell is the least interesting part of the game, it’s also the first thing the player is going to see, before he gets into the real experience. As they say in the job-hunting manuals, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.

Time-Wasting Random Encounters

So you’ve cleared the entire town of Squelching-in-the-Marsh of the nasty rats that were making life miserable there, gained a few experience points, and now you’re off to greater deeds of derring-do elsewhere. But of course, you have to return to Squelching every now and then to sell your loot and replenish your stock of Crossbow Bolts of Extra Pointiness +3. Problem is, every time you come back, you get attacked by rats again in random encounters. By this point you’ve got the strength to take on ferrets or even juvenile badgers, so it’s a complete waste of time. Rather than stand around fighting rats for the measly few experience points they get you, you actually find yourself running away from them just to avoid the problem!

A variant on this nuisance is that you get back to Squelching only to discover that it has mysteriously repopulated with a whole lot more rats, only now they’re five times as mean, and you have to do it all again. They look and act exactly like the last lot of rats, so there’s no new gameplay, just another meaningless challenge.

This is clearly a Twinkie Denial Condition. A moment’s thought will give the correct approach. 1) Any region that you have denuded of a given species of creature should remain denuded of them for a while (that’s basic ecology as well as good game design). 2) Random encounters with creatures too small to represent much of a threat should result in those creatures fleeing in terror (that’s basic animal behavior). That way you don’t waste the player’s time with pointless combat.

Not Being Able to Save After Fine-Tuning Things

Regular readers of this column will already know where I stand on the “save game” debate: I think players should be able to do it when they want to, and if they reload all the time to get through a tough patch, that’s their privilege. However, I’m prepared to acknowledge that there are other points of view on this.

But it’s really annoying, as Brendan Sechter pointed out, when the game requires you to fine-tune your units/weapons/whatever at the beginning of a level in order to face its challenges, then gives you no way of saving that work. Tuning the disposition of your forces can be a fun part of gameplay, but not when you have to do it repeatedly every time you restart a level — after a while it’s just boring bookkeeping.

Bad (or Nonexistent) Camera Controls

Dave Wilson brought it to my attention that there are some third-person 3D games that give the player no control over the camera at all. Bad game designer! That’s what 3D environments are for: it costs you nothing, zip, nada, to provide freedom of perspective. Look: the ordinary human field of view is about 120 degrees wide. The width of the field of view varies considerably in games, and will get larger as HDTV becomes commonplace, but it’s nowhere near 120 degrees in any case. In order to compensate for the fact that the player is effectively trying to play while wearing a box over her head, she needs decent camera controls. It can be done well. Look at Spyro the Dragon or Toy Story 2 for the original Playstation, and you’ll see excellent examples of smooth, intuitive, player-controlled cameras.

Creatures That Can Resurrect The Corpses of the Fallen

Dungeon Keeper 2.

I’ve seen this in a couple of places, and it feels like a fun and natural addition to a fantasy game’s gameplay. The Dark Necromancer has the power to resurrect the bodies of his fallen enemies and make them fight on his side as zombies or some such. Great touch… or so it seems. Unfortunately, if it’s not properly handled, it unbalances a game something fierce, because it creates uncontrolled positive feedback: the more units you lose, the more the enemy gains. As I’ve said elsewhere, imagine what would happen to chess if you got to keep the pieces you captured to use as your own: the game would be a whole lot shorter. Any game mechanism that enables one side to take over the other side’s units is going to require great care in balancing.

Dungeon Keeper actually had no less than four mechanisms for turning enemy creatures into “friendlies,” and they were all balanced in different ways:

1. You could capture enemy creatures, put them in the prison, and let them starve to death. (In certain respects Dungeon Keeper made Grand Theft Auto look like a model of human decency, but we won’t go into that now.) In that case they turned into low-level skeletons, and skeletons were pretty flimsy warriors at the best of times. It also took a while. Between the time required and the reduction in strength, it wasn’t a severely unbalancing technique.

2. You could capture enemy creatures and torture them in the torture chamber (yes, yes, I know), which would eventually cause most of them to switch sides. In this case you got a creature who was just as strong for you as he had been for the enemy’s side. The disadvantage here was that it took a very long time and you had to constantly cast expensive healing spells, or the creature would die under torture. Also, the tougher the creature was, the longer it took, so that naturally tended to balance out the benefit.

3. You could drag the bodies of dead enemies to a graveyard, and when enough bodies had been buried there, the graveyard would yield up a vampire. The balancing factors here were that it took several dead creatures (eight, if I remember correctly) to produce one vampire, and the graveyard was extremely expensive to build. On the other hand, vampires were among the most powerful creatures in the game once they were trained up, so this was a highly efficacious technique.

4. The original Dungeon Keeper had a special room called the Scavenger Room, in which your creatures worked to persuade those on the other side to come over — a sort of traitor recruitment facility. The tradeoff here was that the Scavenger Room was extremely expensive, like the graveyard, and while your creatures were working in it they were not available to train or fight. Besides, the other side could have its own Scavenger Room as well. However, this feature was really too unbalancing — in two-player mode, whichever side built a Scavenger Room first tended to win — and so it was eliminated in Dungeon Keeper 2.

In short, Dungeon Keeper is an example of a game that managed to get this right, and one to learn from.

The other problem with resurrecting the corpses of the fallen is that often the resurrecting unit is something very strong: a mighty warlock or something similar. As a result, any group with him in it is well-nigh invincible. If you’re going to give a particular unit the power to perform such resurrections, consider making him weak and vulnerable by way of compensation.

Conclusion

I’ve still got lots more Twinkie Denial Conditions that I didn’t have room to use this time around… I’m thinking of setting up a database! But I’m always interested to learn about new ones. Drop me a line and tell me about the game design flaws that really hack you off. (You might check the previous columns first to see if I’ve already mentioned them)(source:designersnotebook)