作者：Leigh Harris

从《WRC》到《Motorstorm》再到现在的《DriveClub》，Evolution Studios的设计总监Simon Barlow可以和我们分享许多关于使用具有分享性的内容去管理游戏中的进程和UI等浩大工程的故事。

所以《DriveClub》的单人游戏和多人游戏元素与其它游戏并无不同，是吧？

我们尝试着将《DriveClub》社区中所发生的一切带向单人玩家，只是为了让他们感觉到那里具有更重要的内容。

多人游戏中的轨道和汽车的使用是否影响着你在单人游戏中对于进程的处理？

多少有点。如果你和伙伴身处一个聚会中，你便有可能获得一个锁定内容，即你不能到达游戏所要求的关卡，如此你便不能使用这一轨道，汽车等等。这是最简单的方法，这是我们为多人游戏最终选择的系统，即提供给你可供出租的汽车。如此你便可以与伙伴一起参加各种活动，我们也将把汽车租借给你让你能够参加这些活动。

在虚拟空间，“租借”与“拥有”有什么不同？

唯一的区别在于你不能获得名声。从根本上看，名声是我们游戏中的积分系统。在《DriveClub》中，你可以通过所有任务去赚取名声。这就像是《使命召唤》等游戏中的私人比赛一样。为了避免勾结，它们会在你进行私人比赛时禁止你获取经验值。

名声能够带给你什么好处？

哈哈。这是一个价值64000美元的问题！

名声能够帮助你在游戏中获得所有奖励—-开启所有内容。如果你将名声当成经验一般，这便属于它的核心。当你获得名声时，你便能够升级，并获得名声级别，而每当你升级时，你便能够获得全新的汽车，全新的定制资产以及全新的荣誉。

你可以将荣誉应用于自己的汽车上，并且能够在游戏的内部资料中看到它们。当我着眼于你的资料时，我会看到你所获得的一些突出的道具，也许你是少数拥有这些道具的玩家。所以这也是一种炫耀的方式—-如果你愿意的话，这也算是一种荣誉勋章。

说实话，我们很难设置有效的进程。这花费了我们很多时间并进行了无数次用户测试。

负责主要游戏测试（或进程测试）的设计师事先在一个电子表格中使用了一些视觉元素模拟了许多内容。而现在我们将转向《DriveClub》的模拟器，他添加了一些数字并进行调整，让它能够模拟像关卡曲线等内容，在这里将出现每个开启内容以及汽车类别和其它内容之间的平衡。

设计师能够使用数据去调整游戏。在这一端，你将获得数据，而在另一端你将进行大量用户测试，让真正的玩家去玩游戏。你可以直接与用户对话并了解他们对于游戏体验的感受，同时你也可以从中获得遥测数据。

所有的这些工作需要花费很长的时间，特别是对于《DriveClub》这样规模的游戏来说。但你必须这么做，因为只有这样你才能创造出平衡且有效的进程结构。

当你获得第一组遥测数据时，它们与最初的预测之间具有多大差距？

真的非常接近。

Chris是这些内容的设计师—-他花了很多时间致力于这些内容并对它们非常满意。到现在我们已经制作了3代的晒车游戏，而Chris也与我们共事了很长时间。

尽管如此，这与我们之前所制作的游戏是不同类型的。在最初的测试中，它好像有点过于苛刻。我们不想像不断丢给玩家奖励那样去传达内容—-玩家很快便会厌倦这种方式，我认为今天的玩家变得更加精明。但同时我们也需要确保游戏中存在足够的内容与奖励。

事先提供给玩家关于打开什么内容的指导是否存在优点？

有的。这真的很重要。你总是需要为人们提供一个目标。如果他们需要一直在黑暗中摸索，他们可能就不想前进了。但你也不会想要手把手引导着人们前进吧。

我很怀疑这些机制。我喜欢一些探索元素，但我同样也知道自己何时处于正确的方向中。我认为这应该是关于什么是优秀的游戏设计。这将提供给玩家多个方向，并在他们处于正确方向时进一步推动他们前进。所以你并不是直接告诉他们该朝哪里前进，而是鼓励他们朝着正确的方向前进。这会让玩家觉得更加自然，并且更具有奖励性。

我特别强调了荣誉，因为每个荣誉都有其特定的目标。你可以在一开始浏览每一个荣誉，并且它们都带有多个关卡，所以它将告诉你到达其中一个关卡，你需要做多少事等等。这真的很简单也很直接。

但如果你不想扯那么远（游戏邦注：因为并不是所有人都关心他们的资料，也不是所有人都对此感兴趣），我们便会撤离你将要获得的荣誉，或者你挑选一个特别的轨道或一辆特别的汽车所得到的荣誉。有些荣誉更适合你当前的游戏风格，所以我们将提供给玩家这些内容。

就像管理玩家所追求的东西一样？

是的，这是基于你所作出的任何决定。所以玩家能够意识到自己的决定（我们并不会为玩家做决定），而我们将基于这些决定去推送某些特定的内容。

《DriveClub》中存在许多推送内容—-这对于我们来说很重要。

对于我们来说游戏时间非常宝贵。比起以前，如今我们中的大多数人都没有足够的时间去游戏，并且出现了越来越多游戏在吸引我们的眼球，所以关于《DriveClub》，我们需要做到尊重玩家的时间。我们需要确保他们是只拥有1个小时还是2周的时间去玩游戏。

所以如果你的游戏在最后仍拥有一半的进程，你是否会觉得这更像是一个漫无目标的设置？

是的，我们需要好好想想。每个人都喜欢总结—-不管是比赛的总结，赛车的总结，回合的总结，只要信息在某种程度上具有意义就可以。

虽然我不是很认可统计，但它却真的非常有用。

《Destiny》便是我最近玩过的一个非常典型的例子。它将结尾画面分成3个部分，并在第1页呈现出了大概的总结内容。如果你想的话，你便可以略过这些页面并进一步深入游戏。这并不是什么糟糕的方法，这只是在向玩家说，‘看，这便是所有的信息，但我们只是向你呈现其中的一幕，如果你想要了解剩下的内容，你可以进一步获得更多数据。’

《DriveClub》的设置跟这个有点像。就像我所说的，如果你想要的话你可以获得所有荣誉的信息，但我们却不会将其完全呈现在你面前。我们只会呈现出有意义且相关的内容。

这对于你所创造的游戏类型来说是不是有点不寻常？

通常情况下赛车游戏中并不会带有这些内容—-它们倾向于一些更加传统的内容。它们通常都是基于赛车运动，即玩家将参加比赛并在此获得点数，从而才能前往下一个比赛。

当提到作为游戏中的完美主义者时，我总是会出现一种强迫症，我很喜欢最初的《飞驰竞速》系列呈现游戏事件的方式。它会提供给你游戏世界中的所有事件，而当你完成其中一个任务时你便能够获得一些奖励或点数。这对于像我这样需要视觉上的完成感的玩家来说非常重要。

但我也理解有些玩家会认为看到所有的内容太吓人了。

Sid Meier便说过，当玩家在做出关于新信息的决定时，你能够提供给他们的最佳选择数是3。你是否同意这一看法？

是的，3的确是个很神奇的数字。如果是2的话会让人觉得这不算是选择。

这种情况也出现在了《DriveClub》中。我们并未特意这么做，但实际上如果打开菜单发现那里有3个选择，那么在行程菜单中的列表上便不可能出现3个以上的选择。这一切真的只是凑巧，我们并非有意这么做。

我认为三法则普遍用于所有设计中，不只是电子游戏；你肯定能在其它地方看到同样的三法则。

一不小心的话你便很容易带给玩家过多压力。在《DriveClub》中有很多事可以做，特别是它带有许多社交元素（因为所有挑战都是同时发生的），所以这将成为你在做其它事的背景。

尝试着管理所有这些内容具有很大的挑战，所以我们必须谨慎地处理用户界面（游戏邦注：因为这是玩家于游戏互动的重要元素）以确保我们不会因为呈现过多内容而带给玩家过多压力—-我们只会呈现相关且有意义的内容，再一次地，我们会提供足够的代理让玩家能够适时选择他们想要的内容。

呈现来自大量内容的适当信息对于制作《DriveClub》是否是主要的挑战之一？

当然了。这便是我们为何决定延迟的原因。

并不是因为技术原因吧？

是源于设计原因。

这好像比较不常见。

是的。我的意思是游戏已经完成了。我们拥有的是能够发行的内容—-它能够获得很好的评价并且能够大卖，但是我们却未达到最初的期待，特别是因为我们想要将其作为一种服务发行。

Evolution曾经说过，《DriveClub》发行一年后与刚发行的时候具有很大的差别。

我们不知道这到底是如何发展的。我们对于游戏以及游戏的扩展拥有一个愿景，但因为我们想要与社区一起致力于这一愿景，所以在接下来的一年里我们的时间表上几乎是空白的。我们想要留出足够的空间去回应来自社区的反馈并尝试着删除那些不可行的功能。

我喜欢游戏中的可下载内容。我希望它能够进一步扩展体验，我觉得我只是在获得自己期待获得的东西—-并未出现什么让我惊讶的情况。作为开发者，我们真的非常渴望有所超越。

比起只是提供给玩家游戏，我们尝试着与游戏社区进行交流，尽量保持足够的透明度，让玩家清楚这是一种共享的体验，不管是对于我们还是对于他们来说。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转功，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

INTERVIEW: DriveClub designer Simon Barlow talks progression, UI and meta-gaming

By Leigh Harris

From WRC to Motorstorm and now DriveClub, Evolution Studios’ Design Director Simon Barlow has a lot to say about the mammoth task of managing progression and unlocks in a game with heaps of content which prides itself on shareability and social gaming.

So the single and multiplayer elements of DriveClub aren’t totally distinct from one another, are they?

We do try and push some of what’s going on in the wider DriveClub community into the single player as well, just to give you the feeling that there’s something bigger out there.

Does the open access to tracks and vehicles in multiplayer affect how you’ve handled progression in single player?

A little bit. One of the worst things that can happen if you’re in a party session with your mates is that you get to a content lock where you’ve not reached the required level so you can’t play on this track, use this vehicle or whatever. The simplest way around it, and this is the system we ended up choosing for multiplayer, was that to offer you loan cars for it. So you’re playing a bunch of events with your mates, you get to one particular event and it’s a car you haven’t yet unlocked, we’re going to loan it to you for the purpose of that event.

And how does ‘loaning’ differ from ‘having’ in a virtual space?

The only caveat is that you don’t earn fame. Fame is basically our points system in the game. You earn fame by doing all kinds of things in DriveClub. It’s a similar approach to the way the Call of Duty games deal with private matches. To avoid collusion they stop you from earning XP whilst you’re playing a private match. This is kind of like that.

And what does fame get you?

Haha. That’s the $64000 question!

Fame gets you all the rewards in the game – all the unlocks. If you treat fame as more like experience, that’s pretty much it is at its core. You earn fame, you level up, you gain fame ranks, and every time you level up, you get new cars, new customisation assets, and new accolades.

The accolades can be applied to your vehicles and you’ll see them on your profile in-game. If I were to look at your profile, you might have some particularly prominent accolades on it that only you’ve achieved, or maybe you’re in a very small percentage of people that have achieved them. So it’s a way to show off – a sort of badge of honour if you like.

It was hard to get the progression right, to be honest. It took us a long time and a lot of user-testing.

The designer that was responsible for the main meta-game (or meta-progression) simulated a lot of it beforehand in a spreadsheet with a bit of visual basic – he just knocked something up. Now, we go to the master DriveClub simulator, he puts numbers in and tweaks it and can follow and simulate things like level curves, where each unlock appears and also the balance of the vehicle classes and everything else in between.

Using that data he was able to tune the game. You kind of take that data, then from the other side you come in with a bunch of user testing, get actual real players playing the game. You can talk to them directly and get anecdotally what they felt about the experience, but then you also get telemetry data from it as well.

The combination of all of those things – it’s a long, time consuming process, particularly for a game the size of DriveClub. But you have to go to those lengths to make a nice balanced, rewarding progression structure.

Was the first set of data from the telemetry came back, how close was it to those initial projections?

Pretty close. Actually, it was really close.

Chris was the designer behind this stuff – he’s been doing it for a long time and he’s got a pretty good feel for it. It wasn’t like he was coming at this cold. We’ve done three generations of racing games now, and Chris has been with us for a long time.

Even so, this is a different type of game than anything that we’ve made before. In the initial tests, it felt like it was a little too punishing. What we didn’t want to do was drip-feed the content to you as though we were just throwing rewards at the player – the player gets bored of it really quickly, and I think players are quite savvy towards it these days. But at the same time you want to make sure there isn’t this barren patch of no content and no reward.

So first time around it wasn’t so generous. Then we actually flipped it the other way, and we’ve kind of being balancing it since then until we got to where we’re at. The last user test we did a few months back now, the feedback was ‘Please do not change this. This is now perfect.’

Is there much merit in signposting ahead of time what a player is about to unlock?

Yes. It’s really important. You always need to give people a goal to achieve. If they’re just in the dark all the time, there’s no desire to progress. But, you don’t want to lead people by the hand either.

I’m quite cynical about those kind of mechanics. I like some element of exploration, but I also like to know when I’m on the right path. And I think that should be what good game design is about. It’s to give the player multiple paths, but re-enforce when they’re on the right path. So you’re not exactly telling them where to go, but you’re encouraging them to move in a certain direction or behave in a certain way. It feels much more natural and is much more rewarding.

We highlight stuff with the accolades in particular, because each accolade has a very specific goal. You can browse through each and every accolade right at the beginning if you want to, and with each accolade there are multiple levels, so it’ll tell you that to reach level one of this or that accolade, you need to do x number of these things. Really simple, really straightforward.

But if you don’t want to go that far (because not everybody’s going to care that much about their profile – not everybody’s interested in it), we do pull out accolades that you’re close to achieving, or accolades which work if you’ve picked a particular track or a particular car. Some are more suited to your current play style, so we surface those for the player and give you those to latch on to.

Like curating a feed of what the player could or should be going for?

Yeah, based on the decisions you make. So the player is conscious in their decision (we’re not making decisions for the player – they’re going to make their own decisions), but based on those decisions we’re going to push certain content.

There’s a lot of push content in DriveClub – that was a big, big thing for us.

It feels to us that gaming time is pretty precious. Most of us don’t have as much time to game as we maybe used to, and there are so many games out there competing for your attention right now, that we felt that with DriveClub we needed to be respectful of the player’s time. We needed to make sure that if they only had an hour or two a week to play the game, that that hour or two was great and was really rewarding.

So when you play games where there are half a dozen progress metres at the end of a session, do you look at it as being more of a scattershot approach?

Sure, but you need both I think. Everybody likes a summary – the match summary, the race summary, the round summary – as long as that information is meaningful in some way.

Stats for stats’ sake is something I just don’t necessarily agree with. But stats that are meaningful are useful.

Destiny is a great example of something I’ve been playing recently which isn’t DriveClub. It makes your end of round (or end of mission) summary screen split into three sections, and they just give you that very broad summary on the first page. If you want to, you can skip through the pages and drill down even further. That’s not a bad approach, it’s saying to the player ‘Look, there’s all this information, but we’re just going to give you this window into it, and if you want the rest of it, you can go there and get more data.’

DriveClub is a bit like that. Like I said, you can see all the accolades if you want that information, but we never surface that to you. We only surface the things that are meaningful and relevant.

Is this unusual for the sorts of games you make?

Driving games usually don’t have these rather elaborate design mechanics to them – they tend to be a lot more traditional. They tend to mostly be based in motorsports, actually, where you have a championship and you get points in that to progress to the next one and so on.

I have a kind of OCD when it comes to being a completionist in games, and I love the way the original Forza series just gave you the event grid. It’s gave you all the events in the world and a little tick or a little point when you’ve achieved one of them. That’s great for players like me who need that visual sense of completion.

But I understand that that’s quite daunting for other types of players – being able to see absolutely everything.

I think it was Sid Meier who said that the perfect number of options you can give a player when they’re making a decision about new information is three. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, three really is a magic number isn’t it? A choice of two just feels like it isn’t even a choice.

You know, now that you mention it, magically it has happened that way in DriveClub. We didn’t consciously set out to do that, but actually if you go to the drive menu there are three options, and there are never more than three options on the list in the tour menu either. It just magically happened, that was absolutely subconscious.

But I suppose the rule of threes is prevalent in all design, not just videogames; you’ll see the rule of threes used all over the place.

I think if you’re not careful, you can easily overwhelm players. There’s so much to do in DriveClub, especially considering all the social aspects of it (because all the challenges happen asynchronously), so these can be going on in the background while you’re doing other things.

Trying to manage all of that logistically is challenging, so we had to be really careful with the user interface (because that’s the point at which the player interfaces with the game) to make sure that we’re not overwhelming the player with too much content – we’re only really surfacing the stuff that’s relevant and meaningful, but again there is enough agency for the player to kind of pick the things that they want to do at that point in time.

Was presenting the right information from a myriad of content one of the main challenges of making DriveClub then?

Absolutely, yeah. And that’s why we delayed it.

It wasn’t delayed for technical reasons then?

It was design reasons, yeah.

That’s fairly uncommon.

Very much so, yeah. I mean the game was finished. What we had was perfectly shippable – it would’ve reviewed reasonably well and it would’ve sold well, but the ambition of the vision initially wasn’t being done justice, particularly because we wanted to release this as a service – as a racing platform.

Evolution has said before that DriveClub a year after release was planned from the outset to look very different to DriveClub at launch…

And we don’t know what that’s going to be yet either. We had a vision for the game and we have a vision for how we want to extend that, but we’ve left gaps in the schedule next year because we want to work with the community on this. We want to leave enough space to respond to feedback from the community and to try and deliver features or even remove features that aren’t quite working.

I like DLC in games. I like that it extends the experience for me, but I feel like I’m just getting what I’m expected to be getting – there’s nothing that surprises me. We were quite keen to move beyond that as a developer.

Instead of just giving players more of the game, it was to try and open a dialogue with the community, be much more transparent and much more open and let the players know that it’s a shared experience, just as much for us as it is them. We’re all shaping what it’ll be a year from now together.

Thank you for your time!(source:develop-online)