作者：Josh Bycer

我在周末百无聊赖之时，打算回头去玩完一款游戏打发时间，我选择的是PS3平台的《Dante’s Inferno》。它获得差评的原因有很多，但我想讨论的主要一点就是，它所犯的一个典型错误就是其游戏设计没有平衡玩家的选择。

错误选择谬论

自早期CRPG游戏问世以来，设计师就允许玩家制定可以多种方式影响游戏玩家的选择：例如决定购买哪种武器，探索哪个区域，甚至是加入哪个派系。

虽然这些选择很棒，并且可以让玩家获得个性化体验，但如果执行不当却可能造成弊大于利的结果。

错误选择的定义如下：

玩家所能做出的选择完全逊于游戏设计中的其他选择。

换句话说：这就好比是游戏中没有错误选择，但只有两条让你完成游戏的路可走。

其中一个最简单的例子可以追溯到旧式的CRPG派系组成。在这些游戏中，玩家可选的职业正是那种《龙与地下城》式的职业范例，与其角色牢牢锁定不可更改。例如，武士永远不可以学习魔法，而法师也永远不能穿上盔甲。

问题是，你的派系中必须有一个后勤或精通医术的职业，这样才能提高大家生存下来的实力。而游戏显然不会告诉你这些情况，却让你误以为自己拥有完全自由的派系个性化选择。

CRPG设计在过去数十年有所放松，其他游戏题材的兴起开始给予玩家更多玩法选择。不幸的是，你向这个等式抛入越多变量，就可能产生越多适得其反的结果。

没有选择的选择

你给玩家越多选择，游戏就需要越谨慎地处理平衡性问题。如果设计师做不到，那就可能创造出更糟糕或者没有输赢的体验。

在《Dante’s Inferno》这款游戏中，玩家有两个可以随时间发展而提升的技能树：魔法和非魔法。你可以用特定方式打败敌人而分别为技能树赢得积分。第一个技能树要求使用远距离魔法攻击，而后者则要求近身作战。

Dantes Inferno(from gamasutra)

随着你每个技能树的升级，你就可以分别解琐更多攻击行为及攻击力量也会相应提升。鉴于这些技能树的属性，你必须尽早确定要让哪一个技能树实现最高级技能。

虽然魔法技能树听起来像是一个更安全稳妥的选择，但如果你完成其最高升级后，就会发现设计师并没有据此平衡游戏。之后拥有魔法盾的敌人就会为其周围的同党作掩护从而导致所有的魔法攻击失效。

甚至是终极boss也会惩罚玩家使用魔法攻击的行为——它会以更大的力度将玩法投射的魔法反弹回来。

这两种情况迫使玩家使用近身攻击，导致魔法树攻击彻底沦为无用之物。

有趣的是，找到被囚禁的灵魂并施展魔法赦免或了结他们，却能够比惩罚他们产生更多经验。这种小伎俩进一步让玩家相信，优先升级技能树是一个更好的选择。

现在，如果你在玩这款游戏并遇到终极boss，意识到你所做的一切选择都是错误的，你还会想再重玩整款游戏吗？

另一个错误选择元素就在于迫使玩家无法预知未来的情况下做出永久选择。《杀出重围：人类革命》的boss设计备受诟病。当你给予玩家潜行选择，之后却锁上这一功能，迫使玩家进入枪战，这并不是一个很好的选择。

允许玩家重新分配技能点是快速修复这种错误选择的一个方法。如果玩家制定了一个错误的选择，他们就不会只是为了重新选择而再次重玩整款游戏。

这里我们有一个必须讨论的重点：即次优选择和错误选择的区别。

当设计师给予玩家一系列选择，武器和战术时，我们可以理解并非每一个选择在任何情况下都是最佳的，只要这些选择并不会因为游戏设计而被彻底排除在外就行。

在《Demon’s Souls》中，有一个终极boss是个超强的骑士Gark Vinland。他身着魔法不可穿透的盔甲，手持巨大的武器，在狭窄的通道中与人战斗。在这场战役中，直接的破坏性魔法咒语毫无用处，而普通的战士将面临艰险的恶战。

远距离攻击或施咒角色却可以避免这场战斗，轻松地跟在他所保护的角色后面，就可以无需与之过招而赢得这场战役。

在这种情况下，有些选择并不易于玩家使用。但是，没有一个选择是毫无用处的，优秀的玩家也能够适应这一点。

现在，如果一个boss只害怕火术魔法，其他攻击却无法伤他分毫，那么情况就不同了。

错误的选择并非含有RPG系统的游戏的专利。在《生化奇兵：无限》中有一些武器因其操作不顺手和外形普通，而被视为玩家保留和升级的糟糕选择。对玩家来说，进入这种拥有大量武器类型，但却围绕一两种特定武器进行平衡的游戏，真不是一个很好的选择。

显然，避免错误选择的最简单方法就是，不要给予玩家改变游戏的选项。但除非你创造的是完全线性的体验，不然这种做法只会让游戏变得乏味无趣。

而更复杂的解决方案还不只是解决一个问题。与多数游戏设计元素一样，你必须检查游戏中的每个选择，确保游戏中不存在总是无甚作用的选择。

有时候少即是多：拥有三个相互结合的选择要优于拥有一揽子选择。因为那些没有平衡的选择可能就是玩家倾向的选择，而它所造成的结果就是破坏了整个游戏体验。（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）

Examining False Choice in Game Design

by Josh Bycer

Over the weekend, I was bored and decided to go back into my backlog to finish a game, and the one I choose was Dante’s Inferno for the PS3. Dante’s Inferno was poorly rated for a number of reasons, but there is one major point that I want to talk about, as it made a classic mistake of not balancing game design with player choice.

False Choice Fallacies:

Since the days of early CRPG titles, designers have allowed the player to make choices that can affect the gameplay in a number of ways: From deciding what equipment to buy, areas to explore or even their party composition.

However while choices are great and can lead to the player personalizing their experience, if not properly balanced they can do more harm than good.

A false choice can be defined as the following:

A choice the player can make that is across-the-board weaker than all others due to the game’s design.

To put it another way: It is like saying that there are no wrong choices, but only two will allow you to finish a game.

One of the simplest examples goes back to old-school CRPG party composition. In these titles, the available player classes fit the Dungeons and Dragons paradigm of classes that were locked into their supposed roles. A warrior would never learn magic and a wizard won’t wear plate mail for example.

The problem was that you must have a cleric or some healing class in your party to have any chance of surviving. The game obviously doesn’t tell you this and lets you assume that you have complete freedom in party personalization.

While CRPG design has loosen up over the decades, other genres have grown and began to give the player more options in how they play. Unfortunately the more variables you throw into the equation, the more trouble can come back to bite you.

No Choice, Choices:

The more choices that you give the player, the more carefully the game has to be balanced to accommodate. If the designer fails then they can make the experience far worse or even unwinnable.

In Dante’s Inferno, the player had two skill trees they could improve over the game: Holy and Unholy. You earn points for the respective trees by finishing off enemies in a specific manner. The former was about using ranged holy magic attacks, while the latter was about close ranged attacks.

As you went up in level in either tree, you would unlock more moves for the respective attacks and their general attack strength would improve.  Now given the nature of the trees, you realistically had to make a choice early on over which one to go up to reach the top level skills.

While the holy tree sounds like a safer option, if you go completely up the tree, you would find that the designers did not balance the game around it. Later enemies have a magic shield they would put up for all nearby enemies that negate all holy attacks.

game design

The bosses in Demon’s Souls were designed to be handled in a number of ways, with some easier than others.

Even the final boss would punish the player for using holy attacks: by countering them and throwing them back at the player at greater strength.

Those two cases force the player to use melee attacks and render the holy tree attacks completely useless.

Interestingly, finding condemned souls and absolving or finishing them the holy way would yield more experience than punishing them. This little trick would further convince the player that going up the holy tree was better when it would come back to bite them for the final fight.

Now, if you were playing the game and reached the final boss and realized that all the choices you made were wrong, would you feel like replaying the entire game?

Another element of false choices is forcing the player to make permanent choices without future insight. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution (before the director’s cut version,) everyone had talked ad-nauseum about the poor boss designs. When you give the player stealth and movement options that were locked to the player afterwards, to force the player into gun-fights was not good design.

Being able to respec — or redistribute skill points is a quick fix for getting around false choices. If the player makes a choice that doesn’t work, they won’t have to restart the entire game to make new ones.

Now, there is an important distinction we have to talk about: the difference between sub-optimal choices and false choices.

When a designer gives the player a variety of options, weapons and tactics it’s understandable that not every option is the absolute best at every situation, as long as the options are not completely shut out due to the design of the game.

In Demon’s Souls, one of the final bosses was the super-strong knight: Garl Vinland. He wore magic proof armor; wielded a massive weapon and fought in a narrow corridor. For this battle, direct damage magic spells were useless and normal fighters would have had a hard time.

game design

However, the bosses of Human Revolution could only be beaten by using force.

Ranged or spellcaster characters however could ignore the fight and go after the person he was protecting easily and win the fight without fighting him.

In this case, several choices were harder for the player to use than others. However, none of the choices were made outright useless and a good player could adapt.

Now if there was a required boss that could only be defeated with fire magic and ignored everything else, that would be different.

Games with RPG systems are not the only ones that can have false choices. In Bioshock Infinite, there were several weapons that due to their handling and general appearances in the game were poor choices to keep and upgrade. This is the danger you run into in titles with multiple weapon types when the situations themselves were balanced around one or two specific weapons.

Obviously the simplest solution to avoiding false choices is just not giving the player game-changing options. But unless you are creating a completely linear experience, this could make the game boring.

The more complicated solution is that there isn’t one. As with most elements of game design, you have to examine every choice that is in the game to make sure that there isn’t a penultimate one or choice that is always useless.

Sometimes less is more: it’s better to have three integrated choices over a grab bag of choices. As chances are, the ones that weren’t balanced would be the ones that players gravitate towards. And all it takes is one poor experience to ruin the whole game for them.（source：gamasutra）