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长文探讨:开发者从留存角度谈为什么休闲游戏需要剧情

发布时间:2018-02-11 09:42:49 Tags:,,

开发者从留存角度谈为什么休闲游戏需要剧情

(三位移动产品业内人士讨论了如何利用连载式剧情有效提高玩家留存率)

原作者:James Batchelor 译者:Willow Wu

对任何一个手游来说,玩家留存率是决定它是否能够在市场上生存下来的关键因素,更不用说留存率跟成功的之间的密切联系。

有很多方法都可以提高留存率——比如定期发布新内容、有趣的升级系统等等。而某些休闲游戏工作室找到了一种更加有创意的方法:讲一个好故事。

“一个休闲游戏,如果玩家们能很快上手,并且理解它在讲什么,那这个游戏就能发挥出最好的效果,”Spil Games的CEO Tung Nguyen-Khac说。“然而,如果这个游戏过于简单,那么玩家很快就会觉得没意思了。

big fish casual game(from bigfishgames.com)

big fish casual game(from bigfishgames.com)

“手游剧情变得越来越重要,因为它能提升玩家的沉浸度,让玩家一次又一次地回到游戏中。而这些再次返回游戏的玩家氪金几率也相对比较高,所以好的剧情也是增加游戏收益的一种方法。”

Rebecca Harwick,Wooga解谜找物游戏《琼的旅程(June’s Journey)》剧情的主操刀者也认同这个说法:“游戏机制和游戏角色不一样,你没办法跟它建立情感关系。这种深入内心的联系会让玩家在不玩游戏的时候也有所挂念。另外,人总是会想知道接下来会发生什么,就跟你看最喜欢的电视节目或者是书本差不多,对于下一部分的内容充满了好奇。

“另外,游戏剧情还给机制本身赋予了另一层意义和情感共鸣。当玩家们在玩《琼的旅程》时,他们做的不仅仅是在这个场景中搜寻物品、点击它——他们做的是收集线索,解决对应的难题以及深入了解这个角色。”

在Mediatonic创意总监Jeff Tanton看来,并非所有休闲都需要剧情。

“3消游戏可能就不需要角色关系复杂交错的剧情来告诉你为什么把三个香蕉排成一线对于拯救宇宙来说是不可或缺的,”他说,“如果你觉得某种方法可能行不通,你还有更加简单的方法带领玩家前进,让他们感觉到游戏是有进展的——可以利用地图、定时更换背景,或者是逐渐引入新的升级道具、机制。

“但这并不意味着你可以忽视剧情,不用构建游戏世界,而是你要明白自己做出的游戏是什么样的基调,玩家会因为什么迷上你的游戏。”

在所有休闲类衍生游戏中,受益最明显的大概就是解谜找物游戏了,Tanton describes将它描述成“一个美丽的异类,你和竞争者之间的最大差异通常就在于剧情。”

他接着说道: “剧情包含了所有吸引点,让整体的游戏体验得到提升。就像是在写一部电视连续剧,玩家会不会回来看接下去的剧情要取决于你的剧本写得好不好。”

传统的剧情主导游戏需要好几个小时才能把剧情完整展开,但是休闲手游不能这样,开发者们必须在玩家第一次进入游戏的时候就让玩家明白这游戏讲的是什么,努力吸引玩家,让他们在接下来的几个月沉浸在故事中。这就是为什么很多产品(尤其是解谜找物游戏)是以连载的形式展现剧情,也就是在正式发行之后继续开发工作,加入新的剧情内容。Wooga在《珍珠的冒险(Pearl’s Peril)》和《琼的旅程》上采用的就是这种方法,而Mediatonic借助了J. K. Rowling的创作,利用史上最畅销的架空世界背景制作出《神奇动物:魔法世界探奇》,大获成功。

要说成功的诀窍是什么?当然是节奏。玩家们需要的是细水长流的剧情节奏,这样可以避免在你发行新内容之前玩家就匆匆过完了所有内容,但是剧情进程也不能太慢,否则他们会对游戏失去兴趣。

Nguyen-Khac谈到了《麻将犯罪:东方快车谋杀案(Mahjong Crimes: Murder on the Orient Express)》,一款混合了中国传统游戏和阿加莎·克里斯蒂代表作的手游。如何确定这个游戏的节奏?很重要的一个方法就是进行大量测试。

“最初,我们的设计是在每个关卡后加上剧情,”他说,“但是通过测试我们发现这对玩家来说信息量过大了,所以我们将关卡数量增加一倍,现在玩家要完成两关才会看到剧情。玩家们对这种模式比较能够接受。”

“人们玩休闲游戏就是想获得一种轻松愉快的体验,文字太多的话可能会打消他们继续玩下去的欲望。因此我们尽量用图片的形式来表达剧情。举个例子,在其中一个关卡,我们用一张报纸的图片揭露了一条关键线索。玩家需要在一个棘手的谜题中完成所有配对才能看见这张报纸,这样一来玩家就不需要耗费更多精力阅读大篇幅的文字。”

Tanton也同意他的说法,还附上了对话设计规则:“我们采取的做法一直都是保持精简,不留废话——除非这些句子真的能帮助这个角色赢得玩家好感,但即使是这样我们还是尽量减少文字量,通过语气语调传达案件的关键信息。”

《琼的旅程》的产品主管Georg Baumgarte还说:“为了保证游戏节奏流畅,每一章节的对话长度我们都有严格的限制。但是游戏的其它部分我们就没有掐得那么紧,玩家可以体验到额外的游戏内容,自己掌控游戏节奏。”

(像《神奇动物:魔法世界探奇》这样的游戏需要定期加入新的剧情亮点才能吸引玩家继续玩下去)

虽说我们的目的是利用剧情吸引玩家回到游戏中,但是过于频繁的剧情更新和大量对话也会影响产品的核心——也就是游戏玩法本身。Harwick再次阐明了她的观点:在解谜找物游戏中,剧情和玩法之间应该是不分你我的。

“玩法是什么?剧情是什么?”她说,“整个游戏都是琼的世界中发生的。所以游戏就是故事。如果你想制作出一款成功的叙事游戏,你就不能将这二者区分对待。

“不要把游戏机制做的太抽象,不然你还要补充很多东西让玩家明白他们该做什么。这样一来你就少了很多空间去添加有趣的东西,比如角色特征、戏剧性、幽默、浪漫事件等等。”

Tanton拿《神奇动物》举例,每一个关卡玩家需要进入哪些场景、跟什么人交流,Mediatonic都有十分严格的规定,他们是根据一般玩家的流程速度决定的。

“就如上面提到的,的确是像在写电视连续剧,定期发布新章节对我们来说是非常重要的,”他说,“要维持这种‘公平感’,让玩家觉得投入时间是有回报的。”

Baumgarte详细说明了Wooga是怎么处理这个问题的。游戏会根据玩家的分数奖励星星,每个场景最多可以拿到五颗星,每章有五个场景。总共有25颗星,但是玩家只需要15颗星,也就是每个场景你只要拿3颗星就可以继续游戏了。

“意思就是说尽管这游戏是线性叙事,但是玩家还是可以自己掌控游戏进程,”Baumgarte说。“他们可以决定哪些场景要拿五星,哪些场景只要拿三或四星就好了。在剧情主导的游戏中,玩家的游戏节奏、方式在很大程度上决定了他们会获得怎样的游戏体验。”

Harwick还强调了游戏需要为付出时间达到目标的玩家提供对应的奖励:“如果故事中的某个建筑需要玩家等待很长时间才能完成,我们一定要给玩家一个大奖励。我们还需要提醒玩家那些容易被遗忘的细节线索,这样他们就不会因为遗漏某些线索而觉得情节发展过快、不合理。”

(解谜找物中的剧情为游戏玩法填充了背景,显得不那么单调)

另外,还有一种平衡也是很重要,而且很不好把握,但是这会对一个公司的名气以及收入产生巨大的影响。很多休闲游戏都是F2P模式,所以后续的内容需要通过微交易创建。虽然那些喜欢这个游戏的玩家会为它投资一笔可观的费用,但是如果强迫玩家们反复搜寻场景,这会变成一种折磨,使他们对剧情失去兴趣,甚至是对整个游戏失望。

“我们尝试着将剧情进度和盈利达到某种平衡状态——不需要玩家多次重玩,但是重玩价值非常高,能带来不错的收益,” Baumgarte说。

Nguyen-Khac补充道:“我们不是直接平衡这二者。从我们的经验来看,玩家不喜欢让他们花钱的游戏。我们的重点是游戏要怎么设计才好玩——这本身就是一个大难题了。如果玩家享受一个游戏,他们会经常回到游戏中来,留存率上去了,收入自然就有了。”

休闲游戏的剧情跟主机游戏的剧情可以说是两个完全不同的类别。玩家数量多意味着他们对游戏的期待也有所不同,这三位业内人士欣然给出了他们在游戏制作方面的建议:

“休闲游戏跟小说是不一样的,所以玩家对游戏会抱有不一样的期望,但并不一定是更低的,”Nguyen-Khac说,“故事需要被分成好几个小节,而且能用图片表达的就尽量用图片表达,避免大量文字。剧情应该是优化游戏体验的东西,而不是成为人们玩游戏的阻碍。

“的确,一位好的编剧对游戏剧情来说是十分重要的,但是他们也需要了解游戏画面和机制的相关知识。《麻将犯罪:东方快车谋杀案》的编剧就有设计游戏的经验。这就意味着写故事和其他开发事项是可以同步进行的,而不是等游戏开发都完成以后再把剧情插进去。”

Baumgarte说大家都在争取玩家的时间,想尽各种办法留住玩家,休闲游戏开发者们要做的就是把重点放在剧情上:“玩家们对剧情的期待值很高。我们收到了各种反馈,他们发邮件、写评论、寄明信片,甚至是找我们面谈——这真的发生过,就在我们办公室。我们从谈话中得知玩家对我们创作的故事以及架空世界期望颇高。游戏中有些不符合时代背景的物品,比如说有辆车看起来就不怎么像是1920年代的产物。这就是情节漏洞,还有比如海岛装饰物的名字不太准确等等,玩家能发现所有的细节。”

然而Tanton则持相反的看法,他认为现在玩家对休闲游戏的期待实际上是很低的——但如果开发者们愿意在剧情下功夫,这有可能会转为一种优势。

“如果你能利用巧妙的对话、精彩的剧情将游戏中那些眼花缭乱的东西串联起来,那这就是产品出头的大好机会。

“这笔投资我们永远都不会后悔,而且我们一直都很重视剧情。去找个优秀的编剧吧,找个懂得人与人之间的对话方式、心理活动,懂得玩转句子结构、懂得剧情节奏的人。

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Mobile studios discuss how they use serialised storylines to drive player retention far beyond launch

Retention is the key to any mobile game’s survival, let alone its success.

While there are many ways to bolster retention – regular release of new content, a compelling progression system, and so on – some casual games studios have found a much more creative route to keeping players engaged: telling a good story.

“Casual mobile games work best if they are speedy to understand and simple to get going with,” explains Spil Games CEO Tung Nguyen-Khac. “However, if a game is too simple then it stops being satisfying quite quickly.

“Narrative has become important in mobile gaming because it improves engagement and keeps people coming back to a game. Returning players are more likely to spend money, so narrative is a way to increase the revenue value of a game.”

Rebecca Harwick, lead writer on Wooga’s hidden object title June’s Journey, agrees: “You can’t form a relationship with a mechanic the same way you can a character. And it’s those relationships that stick in the player’s mind even when they’re not playing. In addition, there’s the ever present need to know what happens next, which isn’t so different from what you experience with your favorite TV show or book.

“But the other thing that game narrative does is provide additional meaning and emotional resonance to the mechanics themselves. When players play June’s Journey, they’re not just searching scenes and tapping on objects–they’re finding clues to solve a mystery, improvising solutions to challenging problems, exploring a character’s space.”

Of course not all casual games need a narrative, as Mediatonic’s creative director Jeff Tanton observes.

“A match-3 can probably survive without giving the players a complex, multiple-character-arc story-line to help them understand why getting those three bananas in a line is critical to saving the universe,” he says. “If anything that’s likely to get in the way, and there are far simpler ways of driving players forward and giving a sense of progression; maps, regular changing of background scenery, gradual introduction of new power-ups and mechanics.

“That doesn’t imply you ignore story or world building, it just means you need to understand the tone of your game and how players are likely to engage with it.”

Spil Games aims to tell the story visually in Mahjong Crimes to avoid bombarding players with too much text

Perhaps the most obvious casual sub-genre that benefits is hidden object games, which Tanton describes as “a beautiful little outlier, where the story is often the critical difference between you and your direct competitors.”

He continues: “It’s the glue that holds everything you’re asking of the players together and the aspect that absolutely elevates the experience. It’s a lot like writing a serial drama, where its up to you to ensure players will want to come back later to see what happens next.”

With traditional narrative-driven games, stories are told over a matter of hours but with casual mobile games, studios must spread them out and keep them engaging for months at a time. This is why many titles – particularly hidden object games – tell a more serialised story, adding new episodes as development continues long after launch. Wooga demonstrates this with Pearl’s Peril and June’s Journey, while Mediatonic has enjoyed success with Fantastic Beasts: Cases From The Wizarding World, set in the best-selling universe of J. K. Rowling.

The trick, of course, is pacing. Players need a steady flow of story beats so that they don’t rattle through your content before you have the chance to release more, but equally the progession can’t be so slow that they lost interest in the story.

Nguyen-Khac says that extensive testing was crucial when finding the right pace for Mahjong Crimes: Murder on the Orient Express, which mixes the ancient Chinese game with Agatha Christie’s iconic murder mystery.

“We originally had a story element after each level,” he explains. “Through testing we saw this overwhelmed players, so we doubled the number of levels so there was only a story element after every two. Players were much more receptive to this.

“With a casual game, people want to be entertained in a relaxed way. Too much text may turn them off. Therefore, we try to tell as much as possible of the story visually. For instance, in one level we reveal a huge clue to the mystery via an image of a newspaper. Players only see it once they’ve matched all the tiles in a particularly challenging puzzle so we don’t ask them to exert more energy by reading lots of text.”

Tanton concurs, offering this simple rule for dialogue: “Our rule was always to leave no excess fat in these interactions – unless they really helped sell a character and even then we’d always go back and try to get the same effect, through implied tone or dialect, in the lines that delivered critical information to the case.”

June’s Journey product lead Georg Baumgarte adds: “For the chapters we have a strict limit on how long dialogue can be in-between gameplay sessions in order to keep the flow going. In other parts of the game we are more loose and can provide additional content that the player can engage with when they want to and at their own pace.”

Games like Fantastic Beasts need to deliver new story beats at a regular cadence or players will lose interest

While the goal is to use story to keep players coming back to your game, frequent story beats and extensive conversations mustn’t get in the way of the title’s core: the gameplay itself. Then again, Harwick argues that in the case of hidden object titles, there should be little to distinguish the two.

“What’s gameplay and what’s story?” she says. “Our whole game is set in June’s world. It’s all story. If you want to make a great narrative game you have to dismiss this idea that you can separate the two.

“The more abstract your mechanics, the more work you have to do simply to make your player’s actions clear. That leaves you with less space for the fun stuff: character, drama, humour, romance.”

Tanton says that for Fantastic Beasts, Mediatonic laid down some “pretty rigid rules” around how many scenes players would visit or characters they would interact with per case, all based on how fast the average player might move through the game.

“The serial-drama comparison is accurate again here, delivering a story at a regular cadence was very important to us,” he says, “Maintaining a sense of fairness in what players are getting out of the time they put in.”

Baumgarte details how Wooga’s titles handle this. Players receive stars for reaching a certain number of points with up to five stars per scene and five scenes per chapter. That’s up to 25 stars, but players only need 15 – just over three per scene – to continue the story.

“It means players feel agency over the chapter progress, even though it’s a linear story experience,” says Baumgarte. “They can decide in which scene to go to five stars and which scene to leave at three or four. Player agency in a story-driven is key to having an interesting game economy.”

Harwick stresses that rewards need to match the time spent reaching them: “If the player’s been grinding or waiting for a building to complete, we want to be sure to give them a big payoff, narratively. We also want to be sure to remind them of any necessary plot details that they may have forgotten so that they don’t feel as if the story has raced off without them.”

The narrative in hidden object games gives context to otherwise simple gameplay – ‘You’re not tapping objects, you’re searching for clues,’ says Wooga

There’s another important balance to be maintained, one that’s far trickier but can have a huge impact on a company’s reputation and revenue. Most casual games remain free-to-play, so future content and additional chapters need to be funded through microtransactions. While engaged and satisfied players may well invest in their progress, forcing them to grind through hidden object scenes over and over again will frustrate them and endanger their interest in your story.

“We try to balance the progression and monetisation in a way that there is a low replay demand for the story, and high replay value for the game economy,” says Baumgarte.

Nguyen-Khac adds: “We don’t balance progression with monetisation directly. Our experience is that players don’t like games that are all about getting them to spend money. Instead, we concentrate on making the game great to play – that’s a tough enough objective on its own. If players enjoy a game, they keep coming back and if you have good retention, then monetisation tends to flow from that.”

Writing for a casual audience means developers almost certainly won’t be telling the same type of narrative you’ll find in console games. Instead a much broader audience means different expectations, but this trio of studios is happy to offer advice to fellow game makers.

“A casual game is a different thing to a novel and so gamers have different expectations, although not necessarily any lower,” says Nguyen-Khac. “The story needs to be told in little nuggets, and as much as possible should be visual rather than textual. It should add to the experience, it shouldn’t get in the way of playing the game.

“Yes, a good writer is vital to putting the narrative across, but actually they need to understand the visual aspects and the game mechanic too. For Mahjong Crimes, we used a writer who also had experience of game design. That meant we could develop the narrative in parallel with the rest of the game, rather than bolting it on as an afterthought.”

Baumgarte says that given the competition for mobile user’s time and engagement, casual developers need to go “all in” on story: “The expectations are high. Players send us emails, comments, postcards and even show up – it happened in our office – to give us feedback on our story. We know from interviews that players have high expectations towards our story and our universe. Anachronisms in the hidden objects – like does this car really look like a 1920s model? – plot holes, inaccurate naming of the Island decorations… players notice everything.”

Tanton actually disagrees, positing that expectations for casual game narrative is actually very low – but this can work to a developer’s advantage if they’re willing to put the work in.

“It’s an incredible opportunity to make your product stand out if you can deliver some decent, crafted dialogue to complement all of the other sweat, toil – and frankly dark and insane alchemy – that goes into making a game.

“It’s an investment we have never ever regretted, and something we take seriously. Get yourself a good writer. Get someone who understands how people talk, and how much they’re saying when they’re not talking, who understands how the structure of a preceding sentence, or the number of taps between set-up and delivery makes critical difference to a joke landing or leaving everyone feeling kind of sad and awkward.”(source:gamesindustry.biz


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