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如何在游戏中创造更合理的敌人

发布时间:2013-12-14 15:32:15 Tags:,,,,

作者:Dylan Woodbury

在许多游戏类型中,实体敌人是玩家必须面对的最常见的挑战,他们总是很容易概念化。我整合了一些你在设计游戏中的敌人时需要牢记的内容,有些可能是你经常做到的,而有些也可能常被你忽视掉。

敌人应该体现出世界。《半条命》宇宙中的敌人便完美地呈现出世界,当你与他们相抗衡时,你便能够意识到那个领域所面临的糟糕情境以及政府的残酷镇压。所以在概念化你想要的敌人形象前,你应该先明确想要呈现怎样的世界。你的游戏中的敌人可以比其它内容更有效地传达这一内容。他们的外观,行动,策略都将改变你的世界所带给用户的感受。如果你的游戏是发生在一个低预算且运行糟糕的监狱,那么当你闯进去时,缺乏经验的门卫将手忙脚乱,甚至有人还会落荒而逃。如果玩家偷偷从侧面进行攻击,便会看到这些愚蠢的门卫在那忙着祈祷。另一方面,如果你是FBI所追查的逃犯,那么敌人将通力合作捕捉你,他们将勇敢地将你拿下。

Half Life(from steamcommunity)

Half Life(from steamcommunity)

敌人应该能够带给玩家满足感。这可以通过几种方法做到。首先便是外观:如果你希望玩家在打败敌人时感觉良好,你就需要让敌人足够强大。让敌人具有健硕的肌肉与坚决的态度,并且很难打败,但并非每一个敌人都能成为Bowser。所以确保你的敌人看起来足够强大,且充满信心(他可以贬低玩家或挑衅地挥舞着剑)。这将让玩家觉得很难打败对方,所以当玩家真正做到这点时,他的成就感便会翻倍。但却并不是只有你的敌人足够强大,玩家对手才能获得满足感。就像在《蝙蝠侠:阿卡姆疯人院》中,当你从上方悄悄地杀死一个敌人时,其他敌人将聚集在一起讨论该怎么做。你可以看到他们变得更加紧张。他们会绝望地朝你咆哮,然后请求你放过他们。这种投降的态度以及害怕也会让玩家产生骄傲感,而不管他们的技能是否遭遇了挑战。

我想一个在这一类别中未创造出合适敌人的例子是《塞尔达传说:黄昏公主》中的地面怪物。它们都是一些虚弱,且没有多大区别的敌人,你只需要猛砍几刀便能够将其打败。我从未在那里输过,也没看过别人输过。这看起来真的太过简单。玩家被迫杀死无数这样的敌人,这种玩法很快就会变得无趣。这也将我们引向了下一个指导方针。

敌人应该是多种多样的。你肯定不希望玩家厌倦了敌人。你可以通过确保在游戏中设置许多敌人基于各种不同的方式去挑战并磨练玩家的技能而做到这点。通常情况下,当我在玩游戏时,我总是会收到某种工具去解决谜题或通过各种组块,这时候我就会想“这真的是件很棒的武器!”在这点上《黄昏公主》倒是做得不错,即玩家在游戏中收到的许多工具都可以用来对付敌人。毕竟,游戏中的实体敌人应该配有学习工具,以帮助玩家了解他们。伴随着基于各种不同机制的更多武器(剑,枪,盾,飞镖等等),不同类型的敌人都是可行的。包括那些要求你使用新工具才能被打败的敌人,这也将帮助你更好地解决精神上的挑战。

但是改变敌人的很大一部分内容是平衡挑战。如果你在一个更加困难的挑战中扔给玩家一些简单的敌人,那么挑战也就会变得简单。当玩家快速战胜一些简单的挑战时,他便会想要遇到一些复杂的挑战去测试自己的技能。当玩家最终战胜一个复杂的挑战,他会想要摆脱自己一直忍受着的困难。这一步调在游戏中非常重要,有可能会成就一款游戏,也有可能会彻底摧毁它(游戏邦注:《神秘海域2》便是一种有关步调的典型例子)。

我发现大多数游戏(特别是行动游戏)所忽略的一点便是带有故事的敌人。当然,你可能拥有1,2个这样的敌人(如游戏中的主要反派),但大多数情况下,你所对抗的是没有过去,只有动机(即杀死你)的无灵魂傀。在电子游戏的历史中,我们已经创造了一些了不起的主人公(尽管我们可以做得更好),一些出色的盟友/非玩家角色,以及一些不错的反派角色,但是我认为我们可以做出最大改善的还是敌人(他们也是角色!)。这是一个让人困惑的主题,我也还未想出一个有效的方法。我们是否真的想要让玩家遭遇的敌人拥有过去,拥有灵魂?我认为这还需要取决于玩家的角色,以及设计师希望玩家获得怎样的感受。

举个例子来说吧,如果你必须杀死一些门卫,一个个除掉他们,那么事先听到他们谈论有关自己的小孩以及配偶的故事便不会让你感到有趣。你将会让玩家去同情这些自己将要残忍杀死的人。这真的是个禁忌(99%的情况下)。如果你在之后发现自己杀死的所有人都有让人同情的家庭,你便会觉得设计师这么做是想让你后悔(如果这种后悔在游戏情节中是重要的),而不是愉快(如果他们只是单纯的敌人你便仍能在打败他们的时候感到乐趣),而下次当你再做这些事时你所获得的乐趣便会大大减少,除非你知道所有的敌人都是卑鄙,独身且对社会无益的杀手。

但是你不能让敌人的故事听起来像是废话。实际上,如果玩家能够亲眼目睹敌人杀害一个无辜的人或做其它残忍的事的过程,这便能够加深他们消灭敌人的决心。《Rambo》(2008)便是一定典型的例子。在这部电影的一开始,Rambo和一些士兵在一个缅甸营地里目睹了一个无辜的小城镇被抢劫的场景。在电影中间,Rambo还看到了同样的一批人强迫妇女和孩子穿越布满地雷的田地。在营地的另一端,他们还强迫妇女在前边跳舞。因为看到这些人的所作所为,所以当Rambo最后回去杀死他们时,这一行动也变得更加有说服力,作为观众的我们也会更加支持Rambo的做法。而在《黄昏公主》中,如果你憎恨愚蠢的蜥蜴,你便会更加想要去击败它们。敌人的背景故事能够增加或改变你的动机;你可能会因此更想去杀死这些人,或者恰恰相反(就像在越南战争中,当你杀死许多无辜的人后,你便会想要去帮助他们)。

归根结底,关于敌人还有许多未被传达的故事,但是设计师必须谨慎地决定是否公开这些故事。年轻的战士总是想要证明些什么。盲目的爱国者会太过坚持自己的目标。那些总是想着与别人战争的人可能是因为害怕自己的那一方。而这些都是我想在今后十年的游戏中所传达的内容。

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

Making Better Enemies

by Dylan Woodbury

In many genres, physical enemies are the most common challenge a gamer must face, and they are easy to conceptualize. I’ve put together some things you should keep in mind for designing enemies in your game, some always done right, and some rarely.

Enemies should embody the world. The enemies in the Half Life universe embody the world perfectly, and when you fight them, you realize just how bad off the place is and how suppressive the government is. So before you conceptualize what you want your enemies to be like, you should first figure out what you want your world to be like. The enemies in your game can actually drive that home more than anything else. Their look, actions, and strategy change the way your world feels. If your game takes place in a poorly-run, budget, low-trained prison, when you break out, the inexperienced guards will fight for themselves, one or two even running away from the action. If the player sneaks around to flank them, maybe he will see them shaking or praying. On the other hand, if you are a fugitive of the FBI, the enemies will probably work well together, one agent covering another by firing at you, and they will probably be braver, taking risks (like their life) to take you down.

Enemies should give the player satisfaction. This can be done several ways. The first is the look: you want your enemies to be tough if you want the player to feel really good about defeating them. Adding muscles, a determined attitude, and actually making the enemy hard to beat is good (think of your average level-boss), but not every one of your enemies can be a Bowser. So make sure your enemy looks tough and has confidence (it can trash-talk your player or swing his sword around skillfully). This will make it look hard to defeat, so when the player does, he/she will feel more accomplishment and power. Your enemies don’t have to be tough to give the player satisfaction, though, and the opposite can work just as well. This was done in Batman: Arkham Asylum. When you take out an enemy in stealth from above, the others will gather around, discussing what they should do. You can tell they are getting more and more nervous. They yell at you desperately, later begging for you to leave them alone. This surrendering attitude and fear gives the player a sense of power and skill, whether their skill is being challenged or not.

An enemy example that I believe did not succeed at all in this category are the overworld monsters of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. They were all the same, weak enemy that you had to slash a couple of times to beat. I never lost, or witnessed anyone losing, to this thing. It looked like a scrawny lizard, and it fell down just as easy. The player is forced to kill hundreds and hundreds of these things, and it got very boring very fast. I soon began to just run around them as I was beginning to realize I was just wasting my time with them. This leads us to our next guideline.

Enemies should be varied. You don’t want your player to grow tired of any of your enemies (of boredom, not of difficulty). You can do this by making sure you have a good number of enemies for your game that all challenge and build the player’s skills in different ways. Often, when I play a game and receive a tool to solve puzzles and navigate over blocks and such, I think, “This would be a great weapon!” Twilight Princess pulled this off very well, as most of the tools you received could also be used against foes (some even required it). After all, the physical enemies in your game should have a learning tool to them too, right? With more weapons of a different mechanic (sword, gun, shield, boomerang…), different types of enemies become available. Including enemies which require your new tool to defeat can even train you for when you use it to solve a mental challenge.

But a big part of varying your enemies is the balancing of challenge. If you threw some easy enemies at the player, throw in a harder challenge, and then go back to easier (over time). When the player quickly defeats an easier challenge, he/se wants a more difficult one that will test his skills. When the player finally defeats a difficult challenge, he/she wants a break from the difficulty he/she just endured. This pacing is very important in games, and often makes/breaks them (if you want a great example of pacing, of balancing the different extreme sides of a game, you should play Uncharted 2, which I thought had perfect pacing).

One thing I see very little in most games (especially action) is enemies with a story. Sure, you might have one or two (the main villains of the game), but for the most part, the things you are fighting are soulless puppets with no past and only one motivation – to kill you. In the history of video games, we have made some great protagonists (although we can do better), some great allies/NPC’s (although we can do better), and some great antagonists (although we can do better), but the characters I believe we can improve the most are the enemies (yes, they are characters too). This is a very confusing topic, though, that I haven’t even come up with a solid opinion on yet. Do we want the enemies the player to encounter to have a past, a soul? I think it depends on the enemy’s role and what feelings the designers want the player to feel.

For example, if you have to kill a bunch of guards, picking them off one by one, you will probably get less enjoyment from it if you hear them talking beforehand about their little children and spouses back home. You are making the player feel empathy for all these people you are just about to ruthlessly kill. This is a major no-no (99 percent of the time). If you found out later that all the people you killed had grieving families or something, and the designer did this to make you feel regret (if this regret was important in the plot of the game), than it might be good (you still had fun defeating those enemies when they were just enemies), but you will probably get less enjoyment out of it the next time unless you know that all the enemies are backstabbing, alone, good-for-nothing killers.

But enemies’ stories don’t have to make you feel like crap. In fact, it can enhance the determination you feel if you witnessed your enemy hurting an innocent person or something down that line. A great example of this is actually Rambo (2008). In the movie, Rambo and some soldiers are in a Burmese camp full of people Rambo witnessed pillaging a innocent little town in the beginning of the movie. In the middle, Rambo had to watch some of the same people forcing women and children to run through a field filled with landmines. On the other end of the camp, they are forcing some women (one of which, a Christian missionary, Rambo knows) to dance in front of them. Rambo has seen what these people do throughout the movie, and when he finally gets back to killing them, the action is all the more better, as you are full-heartedly rooting for Rambo. If, in Twilight Princess, you developed a hatred for the stupid lizards, you might be more immersed in the fighting against them. Backstory of enemies adds or changes motivation; either you want to kill these people even more, or the opposite (maybe after fighting and killing many innocent people in the Vietnam war, you decide to help them).

The bottom-line is that there are a lot of stories that aren’t being told through the enemies, but to tell them, designers have to be very careful (it is a near unexplored frontier full of hidden landmines). The young warrior who has something to prove. The blinded patriot who believes too much in his/her cause. The person who is fighting out of fear of his own side. This is something I would like to be tackled in this next decade of gaming. What do you thing? Do you have any ideas regarding the stories we could tell, how we could tell them, and how we could use them to influence the character?(source:dtwgames)


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