作者：Alex Wawro

Remedy Entertainment的Sam Lake相信，我们正在经历电视的黄金时代，这也值得开发者们投入时间去研究电视内容并从中学习如何在有限的电子游戏中创造出真正有意义的角色和故事。

Remedy曾跟我说过：“电视是我们在设计游戏故事和节奏的灵感来源。就像《心灵杀手》便有其自身的情节片段，我们也认为这是最适合游戏设计的。”

Remedy并不是独自站在这一前沿的工作室。当他们在2010年发行《心灵杀手》后，像《行尸走肉》，《奇异人生》和《幻痛》等备受瞩目的游戏都在现代电视内容的影响下通过创造吸引人的叙述结构而大获成功。

很快地Remedy便希望在他们即将发行的科幻行动游戏《量子裂痕》中做出更大的尝试，即整合22分钟真人实景内容去传达游戏叙述并对玩家的选择做出回应。

作为《量子裂痕》的创意总监兼作家的Lake说道：“玩家将做出选择，而在我们心里这也是玩家创造属于自己的与众不同时刻的一种机遇。”在复杂性和保真度方面游戏设计已经走了很长的一段路，但如果想和优秀电视节目的戏剧张力相比较的话还真的差很远。

Lake说道：“在看电视的时候我们总会觉得这些优秀的电视剧和故事缺少互动性。HBO和Netflix Originals一直都是我们游戏设计的灵感来源。我真的非常希望你们能去观看他们的电视节目。”

Lake同样也指出电视并非Remedy的创意团队全新或唯一的灵感来源。Lake和其他同事们都是生活在一个大熔炉一般的流行文化中，这里既有来自90年代的漫画也有2010年问世的扭曲真实的电影《盗梦空间》。除此之外，Remedy既在努力朝着未来的科幻内容发展也在努力远离田园诗歌般的游戏内容，就像他们上个大型项目《心灵杀手》还是基于永恒的90年代美学。

Lake表示：“《心灵杀手》之后我们想创造一款真正的游戏续集。”但当Remedy开始讨论游戏发行商微软时，很明显微软对《心灵杀手2》并不感兴趣。他们想看到一些不同的内容，一些全新的内容，即在设计中整合互动叙述内容的全新IP。

Lake回想道：“让作为设计师的我们产生共鸣的是时间旅行故事。如果你想要做出一个选择，你便需要改变某些内容，而将时间旅行作为一种游戏机制能让玩家看到一些新内容并改变结果。所以便诞生了《量子裂痕》。”

这并不是一个全新的理念，不过它还是比五年前的内容新鲜许多，并且是先于Dontnod的《奇异人生》和Telltale基于选择的授权游戏诞生。

maxresdefault(from gamasutra)

我认为去衡量Remedy如何采取与对手不同的方式将明确的玩家选择整合到叙述内容中是很有趣的。如果说Telltale是在已建立的电视节目的叙述框架中创造他们的选择游戏，Remedy便是从他们自身的故事内容中吸取经验教训并尝试着将其应用于第三人称行动游戏设计中。

Lake笑着说道：“当你着眼于今天许多优秀电视节目时你会发现许多角色其实都是非常坏的人。现在的电视节目真的很黑暗，而这点也带给了我们很大的灵感。”

但是如今的电视编剧都在创造一些可靠，甚至是值得同情的坏人角色，所以Remedy也希望在《量子裂痕》中做出同样的尝试。

Lake说道：“对于我们来说，游戏是关于英雄与英雄的旅程；所以玩家将控制Jack并体验他的旅程。但是在游戏的‘演出’面，它将让玩家看到截然不同的一些内容。”如果处理得当的话它将能够引导玩家去同情游戏中的反派角色。

让我们从游戏开发角度看看这是如何发挥作用的：Lake表示《量子裂痕》的前期制作远比大多数Remedy项目长且紧张，一部分是因为团队需要明确一些故事理念并具体化《量子裂痕》的背景，如此在洛杉矶的外部制作团队才能开始拍摄现实真人版的《量子裂痕》，与此同时芬兰的Remedy才能开发真正的游戏。

Lake承认因为制作问题游戏发行已经遭到多次延迟，他表示：“我们已经从中学到了许多。我们的游戏前期制作过程太过漫长，它需要投入许多工作并且也带给了我们许多压力。”

Lake说道，我们从这一过程中学到的最重要的一点便是，为工作室选出真正专业的作家。即使并不是与世界其它地方的制作团队合作，你们也最好拥有一个内部游戏叙述和角色制作者，并且确保他们能够与游戏共同发展。

Lake说道：“在我们的产业中，作家往往是不包含于开发团队中。他们通常都是暂时出现定个草稿然后离开。我不认为这种方法是可行的。为了创造出真正与游戏玩法维系在一起且足够吸引人的故事，我们需要进行大量的迭代，即不只是游戏方法（如关卡之类），同时也需要在故事方面进行迭代。”

所以Lake认为拥有专门的作家成员是非常必要。而如果开发者继续将作家当成是高预算游戏开发的配角，他们便不可能在这种特殊时刻创造出真正优秀的游戏。

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

Want to write a better game? Try watching some TV

By Alex Wawro

Watch any good TV lately?

Remedy Entertainment’s Sam Lake believes we’re experiencing a golden age of television, one that affords developers who take the time to study it some useful lessons on how to craft meaningful characters and narratives within the constraints of a video game.

“TV is a constant source of inspiration as we design our stories and the pacing of our games,” the longtime Remedy writer told me at Gamescom earlier this year. “Alan Wake had its episodic pacing, and we just feel that’s perfect for game design.”

Remedy isn’t alone on that front. Following the studio’s release of Alan Wake in 2010, high-profile games like The Walking Dead, Life Is Strange and The Phantom Pain found success with narrative structures clearly influenced by modern television.

Soon Remedy intends to try and take the format one step further with Quantum Break, its upcoming sci-fi action game designed to incorporate four 22-minute episodes of a live-action drama that fleshes out the game’s narrative and shifts in response to choices made by the player.

Practically speaking, the “choice” mechanic sounds pretty heavy-handed: Lake describes a system whereby players temporarily play Quantum Break antagonist and super-powered prognosticator Paul Serene ahead of every 22-minute cutscene and foresee two potential futures, then pick one to become reality.

“The player makes that choice, and in our minds we see it as an opportunity for players to dynamically generate their own cliffhanger moments,” says Lake, who’s currently serving as creative director and writer on Quantum Break. Game design has come a long way in terms of complexity and fidelity, he opines, but it still has a long way to go to match the dramatic tension of a good television show.

“Watching TV, I’ve always felt that there is so much awesome drama and story that hasn’t been explored in interactive form,” says Lake. “HBO and Netflix Originals have been a great inspiration in our game design. I can’t recommend them enough.”

Lake is quick to point out that TV is neither a new nor a sole source of inspiration for Remedy’s creative team. Lake and his cohorts pull from a pop culture potpourri that spans everything from ’90s comics to the 2010 reality-bending heist film Inception. Beyond that, Remedy has been striving to move towards near-future sci-fi and away from the idyllic, almost timeless ’90s aesthetic of its last big project, Alan Wake.

By now it’s common knowledge that, as Lake says, “coming out of Alan Wake, we were really looking to do a sequel.” But when Remedy began talking with the game’s publisher, Microsoft Studios, it became clear that the company wasn’t interested in an Alan Wake 2. It wanted something different, something new — a fresh IP that incorporated an element of interactive narrative in its design.

“The thing that resonated with us, as designers, was the idea of a time travel story,” recalls Lake. “If you need to make a choice, if you need to change something, time travel as a gameplay mechanic allows the player to see something and change the results. That’s where Quantum Break was born.”

This is not a new idea, though it was perhaps a bit fresher five years ago, before Dontnod’s Life Is Strange and Telltale’s bevy of choice-based licensed games hit the market.

Still, I think it’s intriguing to measure Remedy’s approach to incorporating explicit player choices into its narrative differs from its contemporaries. If Telltale builds choice-based games inside the narrative framework of established television dramas, for example, Remedy is taking narrative lessons from the dramas themselves and trying to apply them to third-person action game design.

“If you look at a lot of great TV these days, a lot of the characters are actually really bad guys!” Lake says, with a laugh. “TV is really dark right now, and that definitely insires us.”

But today’s television writers are creating bad guys that are relatable, even sympathetic, and Remedy wants to do the same with Quantum Break.

“Games, for us, are about heroes and the hero’s journey; so players play Jack and experience his journey,” says Lake. “But the ‘show’ side of it lets players see the other side of things,” and — ideally — drive players to empathize a bit with the game’s antagonists.

Here’s how this plays out, from a development perspective: Lake says pre-production on Quantum Break was significantly longer and more intense than most Remedy projects, in part because the team had to nail down a bunch of story ideas and flesh out the background of the Quantum Break universe so that an external production team in L.A. could begin shooting a live-action Quantum Break while, back in Finland, Remedy developed the actual game.

“We have learned…a lot,” says Lake, acknowledging that the game has been delayed multiple times due to production issues. “Our pre-production process on this game was a long one…it was a lot of work, and gave us a lot of grey hair.”

The biggest takeaway from this process, says Lake, is that having dedicated writers on your studio’s staff is critical. Even if you aren’t working with a production team on the other side of the world, having an in-house advocate for your game’s narrative and characters ensures they’ll dynamically evolve alongside the game itself.

“In our industry, there’s this tendency to have the writers outside the team. To have them just come in, do a draft and get gone,” says Lake. “I don’t think that works. To get a really engaging story that’s tied to actual gameplay requires a lot of iteration, both on the game side — level work, that sort of thing — and the story side.”

Having a dedicated writer or writers on staff is “an absolute must” in Lake’s eyes. To do otherwise — to continue to view writers as incidental to big-budget game development — would be the “bad” choice for the industry to make at this particular juncture.(source:gamasutra)