作者：Rick Lane

2013年是游戏产业非常出彩的一年，但在某种程度上，这似乎只是为了2014年所做的暖身。2013年见证了两大新主机的发行，但在这两个平台上却并未出现特别突出的游戏。同时，兴起于2012年的Kickstarter在过去12个月里一直活跃发展着，但它主要还是关于游戏创造而不是发行。所以2013年是倾向于全新硬件和全新理念。2014年才是关于游戏。

一开始我们计划呈现2014年10大最激动人心的游戏列表。但却考虑到内容的局限性以及无聊性，我们决定转向将会主导2014年游戏发展的5大主题。

回到太空的一年

如果说有什么能够代表2014年或近几年游戏产业的发展，那么回归太空模拟应该首当其冲吧，回首过去，这一类型早已被遗失在10几年前的时间隧道里了。那时候，只有一款太空游戏能够激发玩家的想象力，它就是《星战前夜》。《X》系列时也是时好时坏，就像虽然《Albiom Prelude》是一款高质量游戏，但最近该系列却仅因为糟糕的《X重生》而遭遇低迷期。

在2014年，所有的这些情况都会发生改变（游戏邦注：当然了，这并不包含《X重生》，除非Egosoft重新去创造这款游戏）。一开始就出现了两个强大的开发项目，并且都是源自太空游戏史上两个显赫名字，它们分别是Frontier Development的《Elite Dangerous》—-由David Braben所领导，以及Chris Robberts的《Star Citizen》。

Elite Dangerous(from sina)

在过去一年里看着这些项目的发展真的很有趣。最初是《Star Citizen》占领了头条位置。而现在它变成了最成功的众筹游戏，通过Kickstarter和其它投资方式赚取了超过3000英镑。Roberts计划将该游戏与名为《Squadron 42》的单人玩家活动一起发行，同时《Star Citizen》本身也是一个被虚拟航天人共享的在线世界。《Elite Dangerous》一开始在Kickstarter上的发展较不稳定，即它最初是利用《Elite》遗留下来的名气等等元素，但最近Frontier发行了一个太空战斗的测试版去突出各自不同难度的8大任务，并且每一个任务都非常有趣，所以似乎《Dangerous》也已经走上发展的正轨了。

除了这两款“星际”巨头外，还有一些较小型的独立项目提供了一些在太空展开的内容—-探索，交易和战斗。就像正处于早期访问测试阶段的《Starbound》便是一款关于探索丰富多彩的2D宇宙，殖民地化星球，发现各种各样古怪道具和丰富多彩的生物的程序游戏。同时，Josh Parnell的《Limit Theory》计划从程序上生成游戏宇宙中的所有内容，而不只局限于像星球，行星之类，即各种可能导致你随着宇宙的进化而生存，死亡，前进的NPC，敌人等等互动元素。

2014年同样也将见证《Kerbal Space Program》，《Space Engineers》以及《Starmade》等游戏的发行，并且每一款游戏都将推动着你基于特殊的方式进行探索。

RPG游戏的一年

2013年我们缺少大型且具有吸引力的RPG游戏。这也许并不是件坏事，它将提供给我们更多机会去完成像《天际》和《质量效应》等过去几年所盛行的大型RPG。但这个时候我们需要做出一些选择。幸运的是2014年在这方面做得很好。

《巫师3》起了头步，即承诺呈现所有源自前两款游戏的世界重塑选择，道德模糊的角色以及包含政治元素的故事内容，并在CD Projekt所声称的大于《天际》的世界中进一步扩展这些内容。这一波兰开发商的计划是确保这一世界的内容是完全手工制作，所以不会存在任何无聊的获取任务。这也将让你能够适当参与Geralt的怪物捕猎过程，你将穿越游戏中的荒地，并为了保护这片土地上的人民不断追逐，打斗并杀死怪兽（游戏邦注：你会在这个过程中为自己赚取大量的货币）。

计划明年发行的《龙腾世纪：审判》在《龙腾世纪2》被打上只是一款不断重复且充满混乱内容的游戏后，它拥有许多想像世人重新证明些什么的内容。BioWare也向我们保证已经从错误中吸取了教训，并希望《审判》能够呈现出更大，更深入且更具有战术性的体验，并且完全避免大批随机繁衍的蜘蛛。关于《审判》其实还有很多未知性，但考虑到BioWare发行内容的整体质量，这款游戏终将会吸引我们的注意，不管《龙腾世纪2》有多糟糕。

如果你说不存在足够的角色可供你游戏，至少还有《黑暗之魂》的续集，具有非常棒的外观的《神界3：原罪》，Brian Mitsoda的僵尸生存RPG游戏《Dea State》，作为90年代末期的等距RPG游戏《博得之门》和《冰风溪谷》的继任者《永恒之柱》，以及诞生20年的后启示录RPG游戏的续集《Wasteland2》（正处于早期访问测试阶段，据说非常有发展前景）。

总之，2014年下半年是非常值得我们期待的。

属于虚拟现实的一年

在Oculus Rift上玩《半条命》应该是2013年最精彩的一部分，但那时候关于虚拟现实体验机还存在一些问题。其分辨率还太低，我们不能使用它去玩太多游戏。但幸运的是在接下来的一年里所有的这些情况得到了改善，我们将在2014年末迎来具有高分辨率的商业版本Rift。

许多即将问世的游戏业将带有Rift兼容性。其中便包括一些我们之前所提到的游戏。就像《Elite Dangerous》便已经添加了Rift兼容性，同时像《DayZ Standalone》，《Everquest Next》，《The Forest》，《泰坦陨落》以及《Star Citizen》也计划加入虚拟现实体验机。其它着眼于通过某种方式去使用这一硬件的是免费运行的僵尸RPG游戏《Dying Light》—-看名字便知道非常适合Rift，以及《EVE Valkyrie》，即来自CCP的一款太空战斗游戏，同时也是现今少数以Rift为理念进行开发的游戏—-通过使用头部追踪能力让玩家能够使用眼睛去瞄准敌人的船只。

对于我个人来说，Oculus Rift改变了我看待《半条命2》的方式，即使在2014年里它在游戏中做了同样的事，我也不会感到惊讶了。

重视生存的一年

我们经常说游戏产业一直在发生着变化，就像Epic发行于Unreal Engine 4上的第一款游戏并非现实的FPS，这便代表每一个主要的图像引擎都选择去呈现自己的全新屏幕空间环境光屏蔽（SSAO）效果等等。然而，在名为《Fortnite》的生存游戏（与《我的世界》相类似）中，玩家将在白天的时候与自己的好友团结在一起去创造避难处并进行探索，然后在晚上抵挡一波又一波的怪物。

这并不是2014年唯一一款不再围绕收集资源，建造基地的游戏，它们通过不死的公式去证明自己已经成为大势，Mojang的独立大作便证明了这点。2014年将是生存游戏从有趣的新奇事物转变成真正有实力的一种游戏类型的一年。《The Forest》是一款外观让人印象深刻的独立游戏，玩家将在游戏中是空难的生存者并掉落在一片美丽的森林里，不幸的是这里居住着敌对的部落。此外还有《Long Dark》，即最近通过Kickstarter募集资金并致力于成为最吸引人的生存游戏的一款游戏，这里没有菜单也没有HUD，你只需要通过身体的回应去推动游戏的发展便可。

在《Under The Ocean》中玩家是在波浪中生存下来，在《The Stomping Land》中则是在恐龙的追捕中生存下来，而在《Sir, You Are Being Hunted!》中是通过与机器人相抗衡获得生存，当然还有《DayZ》，即最详细且最不可饶恕的生存游戏。但也许在新的一年里最有趣的新游戏要属Tom Clancy的《The Division》，即一款见证了玩家在一个战术小团体中相互协作，在纽约的废墟中搜寻食物，武器和装备，同时与其他幸存下来的玩家群组相抗衡的多人生存游戏。《The Division》的新奇性是呈现于多人游戏元素中，我们也因此被带到了下一个主题中。

多人游戏进一步发展的一年

如今两种停滞不前的游戏类型分别是多人射击游戏和MMORPG。多年来大多数多人FPS都是以《使命召唤》和《战地》为模板，而MMO则跳脱《魔兽世界》的模式，尽管出现了《激战2》这些敢于尝试改变的勇士。但接下来的一年将见证大量致力于改变玩家与朋友一起游戏的方式的游戏。

首先便是《泰坦陨落》，乍一看这是基于《使命召唤》风格的多人FPS，但实际上“你知道怎么做得比那更出色。你可以从天空召唤巨大的机器人，爬上去然后像行走的启示录那样前行。飞行背包将提供给你其它的游戏维度，让你能够跃到屋顶上并像装备了武器的巨大跳蚤那样沿着墙壁行走。呈现为何你要射击最好的朋友并添加一些《虚幻竞技场》的屠杀模式到行进过程中的叙述框架如何？我认为这包含，不，等等，如果每一款游戏是伴随着一个疯狂的时刻结束，即见证着失败的团队尝试着逃离地图，而胜利团队尝试着追捕他们会是怎样的情况。是的，这听起来很有趣。让我做这些事吧。”

就像你说的，如果《泰坦陨落》可以做到像去年9月份所播放的演示版本那样精彩的话我们将会非常高兴。但这不只是因为多人游戏在新一年的发展让我感到激动。同样很棒的还有《Destiny》，这款由Bungie所创造的“绝不像《光晕Online》的”游戏。《Destiny》尝试着结合单人玩家，多人玩家以及少量MMO作为一队玩家，相互协作去对抗其他玩家。

当Respawn和Bungie正忙于尝试完善射击我们在世界上最喜欢的人这一行为时，SOE正致力于《无尽任务Next》这款致力于呈现一些不同于MMO的MMO。它拥有两种形式，第一种是Landmark，它既是SOE用于创造《无尽任务Next》的工具，同时也是游戏，即关于与无数玩家创造并重塑世界的一款游戏。

对于《无尽任务Next》自身来说，它结合了手工制作的Overworld，即对于《无尽任务》的虚幻大陆Norrath的重新定义版本，伴随着程序生成的地下世界，你可以在任何时候闯入，并与同伴探索地下城。此外，最有趣的Landmark玩家创造将会被整合到《无尽任务Next》中。这是关于MMO设计的一次有趣试验。

（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）

The Five Gaming Trends of 2014

by Rick Lane

2013 was a fascinating year in gaming, but in some ways it felt like merely a warm up for 2014. 2013 saw the release of two major new consoles, but no particularly outstanding games for them. Meanwhile, the Kickstarter craze that began in 2012 has been in full swing for the last twelve months, but mostly it was about games being made rather than released. 2013 was about new hardware and new ideas. 2014 is all about games.

Originally we planned to bring you some kind of list of the ten most exciting games of next year. But that was A) severely limiting, and B) extremely boring, so instead we’ve traced together five major themes that will dominate the next twelve months of gaming, and combined them here for your ocular pleasure.

The Year We Return to Space

If anything is going to mark out 2014 over and above other years in gaming, it’s that it sees the return of the space-sim, which has been lost in the inky vastness for over a decade. In that time there has only really been one space game to capture the imaginations of gamers and that is EVE Online. The X Series has proved an occasional distraction, and Albion Prelude is a quality title, but more recently the series has been somewhat soured by the utterly dreadful X-Rebirth.

In 2014 all that will change (well, not X-Rebirth, unless Egosoft rebuild the game from the ground up). To begin with, there are two enormous projects in development courtesy of the biggest names in space-gaming history; Frontier Development’s Elite Dangerous, headed by David Braben, and Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen.

Watching these projects come together over the last year has been fascinating. Initially it was Star Citizen that grabbed the headlines. Currently it’s the most successful crowd-funded game ever, earning over ￡30 million in Kickstarter backing and other investments. Roberts plans for the game to ship with both a Wing Commander esque single-player campaign named Squadron 42, while Star Citizen itself is a persistent online world shared by virtual spacefarers. Elite Dangerous had a rockier start with a Kickstarter that initially appeared to trade on Elite’s legacy and little else, but recently Frontier released a space-combat Alpha featuring eight showcase missions of varying difficulty, and by all accounts these are excellent, so it sounds like Dangerous is very much on the right track.

Alongside these two interstellar behemoths are an array of smaller indie projects offering their own twists on space-exploration, trading and combat. There’s Starbound, currently available in Early Access beta, a procedural game that involves exploring a colourful 2D universe, colonising planets, and discovering all manner of weird items and wonderful creatures. Alongside that is Josh Parnell’s Limit Theory, which plans to procedurally generate everything in its universe, not just planets, asteroids and the like, but NPCs, economies and factions that you can interact with who will live and die, come and go as the Universe evolves around you.

2014 will also see the full release of Kerbal Space Program, Space Engineers, and Starmade, each of which enables you to explore a the great black beyond in its own unique way.

The Year of The RPG

One thing 2013 lacked was a big, absorbing RPG to play. This may not have been a bad thing, as it gave many of us the opportunity to finish the massive RPGs from the last couple of years like Skyrim and Mass Effect. But it’s about time we had some more dice to roll, choices to make, and levels to up. Luckily 2014′s got that well and truly covered.

To start with there’s the Witcher 3, which promises to take all the world-shaping choices, morally ambiguous characters and politically involved storylines from the first two games and spread them out in a world CD Projekt’s claims to be bigger than Skyrim. The Polish developer’s plan is to ensure that this world’s content is entirely hand crafted, so that there’ll be no boring fetch quests repackaged in seventeen different ways. It will also finally let you partake in Geralt’s monster hunting profession properly, as you track, fight and slay beasts beyond nature through the game’s open wilderness in order to protect its populace (and earn yourself a fat sack of coins in the process).

Also due for release next year is Dragon Age: Inquisition, which has quite a lot to prove after Dragon Age II turned out to be a rushed and repetitive mess. BioWare assure us they’ve learned from their mistakes, and intend for Inquisition to be a much larger, deeper and more tactical experience entirely devoid of waves of randomly spawning spiders. There’s a lot about Inquisition that’s still shrouded in mystery, but given the general quality of BioWare’s releases, this has got our attention despite the Dragon Age II hiccup.

And if that isn’t enough roles for you to play, there’s also the sequel to Dark Souls, the fabulous looking Divinity: Original Sin, Brian Mitsoda’s Zombie-survival RPG Dead State, Pillars of Eternity, the spiritual successor to the late 90s isometric RPGs Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, and Wasteland 2, the sequel to the 20 year old post-apocalypse RPG, which is currently in Early Access beta and by all accounts is looking very promising indeed.

In short, it’s probably a good idea to book the second half of 2014 off.

The Year of Virtual Reality

Playing Half Life 2 on the Oculus Rift was our highlight of 2013, but there are a few problems with the virtual reality headset at the moment. Its resolution is currently far too low, there aren’t that many games to play it with, and, well, strictly speaking it’s not out yet. Thankfully, all of that is set to change next year, with a high-res, commercial version of the Rift scheduled for release in late 2014.

Many upcoming games are ensuring Rift compatibility will be a feature on release. These include several of the titles we’ve already mentioned. Elite Dangerous already has Rift capabilities built in, while the likes of DayZ Standalone, Everquest Next, The Forest, Titanfall and Star Citizen are also planning to embrace the virtual reality headset in a warm compatibility hug. Other interesting games looking to use the hardware in some fashion are the free-running zombie RPG Dying Light, which sounds like an ideal match for the Rift, and EVE Valkyrie, a space-combat spinoff from CCP and one of the few games currently being developed entirely with the Rift in mind, by using the head-tracking capability to enable players to target enemy ships using their eyes.

For me personally, the Oculus Rift changed how I view Half Life 2 forever, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it did the same for gaming as whole at some point in the next twelve months.

The Year We Survive

It says quite a lot about how the games industry is changing that Epic’s first game to be released on Unreal Engine 4 is not a realistic-looking-as-possible FPS, which is how almost every major graphics engine ever has chosen to show off its new Screen Space Ambient Occlusion effects or whatever. Rather, it’s a Minecraft-esque survival game called Fortnite, where players team up with a bunch of friends to build shelters and explore the world during the day, and fend off waves of cartoony monsters at night.

And it’s not the only game of 2014 to put its own spin on the resource-gathering, base-building, and hopefully not-dying formula which has proved itself so popular in the wake of Mojang’s indie sensation. 2014 will be the year survival games switch from being an intriguing novelty to becoming a genre in their own right. Joining Fortnite in the Bear Grylls fan club is The Forest, a remarkable looking indie game that casts you as a survivor of a plane crash lost in a beautiful woodland, which unfortunately happens to be populated by an extremely hostile indigenous tribe. In addition to that is the Long Dark, the recently Kickstarted survive-em-up aiming to be the most immersive survival game of them all, with no menus or HUD, and only your body’s own physical responses to go on.

There’s survival beneath the waves with Under The Ocean, survival with dinosaurs in The Stomping Land, survival against aristocratic tea-drinking robots in Sir, You Are Being Hunted!, and of course the full release of DayZ, the most detailed and unforgiving survival game of them all. But perhaps the most interesting new entry for next year is Tom Clancy’s The Division, a multiplayer survival game that sees players teaming up in small groups of tactical squads, scouring the ruins of New York for food, weapons and equipment, while battling against other groups of player survivors. The Division’s novel take on multiplayer also, handily, brings us onto our next overarching theme of 2014.

The Year Multiplayer Evolves

Two genres which have been stagnant for a while now are the multiplayer shooter and the MMORPG. The multiplayer FPS has been based around the Call of Duty/Battlefield template for years, while the MMO has summarily failed to move on from the World of Warcraft model despite a few valiant attempts at change such as Guild Wars 2. But next year will see a slew of games designed to shake up how you play with your friends.

The first is Titanfall, which has taken a look at the Call of Duty-style multiplayer FPS and gone “You know what would make that better? Giant robots that you can call down from the sky, climb inside and then storm around like a walking apocalypse. Oh, and jetpacks that give you a whole other dimension to play with, hopping onto rooftops and along walls like a giant weaponised flea. And how about a narrative framework that contextualises why you’re shooting your best friend in the chops and adds a little bit of Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode to the proceedings? I think that covers ev…oh no wait, what if every game ended with a frantic extraction period that saw the losing team trying to escape the map in a dropship, and the winning team trying to hunt them down. Yes, that all sounds like fun. Let’s do all of those things.”

As you can probably tell, we’re pretty excited to see if Titanfall can live up to the impressive looking demo we played back in September. But it’s not the only multiplayer game landing next year that has got us intrigued. Also looking nifty is Destiny, the “definitely not Halo Online honest” game being created by Bungie. Destiny attempts to meld single-player, multiplayer and a sprinkling of MMO as teams of players join together to compete against other players in a persistent online game with its own factions, races and classes.

While Respawn and Bungie are busy trying to revitalise how we happily shoot at the people we love most dearly in the world, SOE are working on Everquest Next, the MMO that finally looks to bring something genuinely different to MMOs. It comes in two forms, the first of which is Landmark, which is both the tool SOE are using to build Everquest Next, and also a game in its own right, a game about crafting and re-shaping the world with thousands of other players.

As for Everquest Next itself, it combines a hand-crafted Overworld which is a reimagined version of Everquest’s fictional continent Norrath, with a procedurally generated underworld which you can break into at any time, and explore dungeons with your party on the fly. What’s more, the most interesting player creations of Landmark will be incorporated into Everquest Next. It’s a fascinating experiment in MMO design.(source:bit-tech)