《文明4》设计师Soren Johnson聊4X游戏范式设计

原作者：Adam Smith 译者：Vivian Xue

“席德·梅尔（Sid Meier）并不知道自己在1991年创立了一种游戏类型——如果他知道的话，可能会谨慎得多。他当时只是按照自己的想法设计。“

类型就是这样诞生的。出于偶然，某个人为特定的游戏创建了一套规则和系统，然后人们沿用或是调整这些规则。《外星贸易公司》（Offworld Trading Company）创作人、《文明4》首席设计师索伦·约翰逊（Soren Johnson）正在开发一款新游戏《Ten Crowns》。在GDC大会上和他交谈了将近一个小时之后，我觉得他会非常谨慎。这种谨慎不是畏手畏脚，因为他将对4X游戏公式做一些大胆的改造，只是对于这个我们都认为亟待改变的类型，他的态度非常谨慎。

谈到4X游戏，我们当然要从《文明》聊起。作为4X游戏鼻祖，《文明》带领人们历经4000年的历史，高调地开启了4X战略游戏时代。4X体系很快被套用在以太空、魔幻世界以及其它特定时期和空间为背景的游戏中。

自始至终，4X公式几乎没有改变，玩家的目标是探索（explore）、扩张（expand）、开发（exploit）和征服（exterminate），通常按照这个顺序。

Game of War（from pocketgamer.biz）

不同的游戏风格决定了每个部分所占的比例，如果你追求某种特定的胜利方式，甚至完全不需要征服。在初代《文明》中，游戏只有两种结局，你要么淘汰所有其它文明，要么赢得太空竞赛并向半人马座阿尔法星球发射第一艘飞船。大体上看，拥有军事头脑的侵略型领导者会倾向于选择前者，而后者更适合注重自身发展而不是征服的人。

自那时起，《文明》系列加入了多种多样的胜利方式，鼓励和奖励不同的游戏风格，有时游戏会为此加入一些特色系统。例如《文明5：美丽新世界》中的世界议会（World Congress）为外交胜利增加了一个政治途径。其它的胜利方式更注重累积资源，达到一定程度自然能成功，它们类似于通过Rush战术建造奇迹，不过花的时间更长。

《Ten Crowns》将和《文明》系列很不一样，大概吧。虽然现在很难确定它究竟哪方面不一样，因为约翰逊他们还在研究游戏的雏形，但胜利条件绝对会是他们反复斟酌和改进的一个方面。

“现在谈论《Ten Crowns》的胜利条件对我来说没啥压力，因为我们还没决定要做成什么样子，所以我没什么可泄露的（笑）。但是胜利条件的存在确实让我感到非常矛盾，一方面我觉得它扭曲了游戏本身，可我又暂时想不到什么替代它的方案。在《文明》这类游戏中，胜利条件是玩家不断参与游戏的重要动机，并且它影响了玩家的游戏方式，”约翰逊说。

“从某种程度上看，胜利条件的存在更像是让玩家做选择，而不是让他们书写自己的故事。这让我很纠结，因为我想尝试改变这一点，但我不确定最后会变成什么样。”

约翰逊的这一观点以及他对《Ten Crowns》的构想我觉得很有意思，不过我想先谈谈我对《文明5》和4X游戏的总体感受。《文明5》是我十分喜爱的游戏，虽然Rise And Fall扩展包不尽人意。每个月我都会花好几个小时玩4X游戏，尽管大战略游戏（Grand Strategy Games）中涌现的故事和复杂性令我着迷，但我的硬盘里至少会装一个《文明》游戏，兴致来时可以随时打开，发现另一个新世界。

可是，我越来越希望看到4X游戏发生一些根本性的变化，不仅是增加新功能和层次，而是彻底地改变自己。这就是为什么我很喜欢《遥远的世界》（Distant Worlds）中的托管功能，它使我既能参与世界管理，又无需操心每个领域，还有《群星》（Stellaris），它试图将大战略与《文明》类游戏的特色结合起来。此外我十分欣赏Elemental Games的游戏，它们引入了英雄和战利品，使我怀念起《魔法大帝》（Master of Magic）中的迷人道具。

但这些游戏没能改变4X游戏战役的总体流程和形态。《群星》引入了可触发的“危机事件”（crisis events），为传统战役增加了一些新的冲突、敌人和同盟，但你仍然会觉得这种改变不够大。相比之下，P社的招牌游戏拥有更加开放的结构，鼓励玩家进行尝试、角色扮演和追求完美。《群星》的历史观更复杂、吸引人，在文化呈现方面也突破了局限性，更加包容多样。

胜利条件的存在是4X游戏形式僵化的一个主要原因。历史和文化发展可以被视为一种优胜劣汰的过程，但这种观点具有局限性。游戏在鼓励玩家淘汰弱者，夺取胜利的同时，也剥夺了玩家创意表达的权力。我很想建立一个极度浪费而不便利的城市，但它展现了人民的某种性格。

这也是为什么约翰逊对胜利条件的看法引起了我的共鸣。最新的《文明》系列游戏提高了对民族特征的重视，领导者具有自己的性格倾向，各个文明有自己的规则。我很想知道约翰逊是如何看待这些改变，它对游戏形态的影响，以及以一个种族称霸作为结局的设计。

“游戏的胜利进程过于平稳是个很大的问题，它也是我们在新游戏《Ten Crowns》中最想改进的地方。“

“《文明》系列很难改变，因为它已经形成了某种固定进程。席德在1991年完全不知道自己创造了一种游戏类型，他只是按照自己的想法设计。由于他选择制作了一个关于人类历史的游戏，再加上游戏跨越的历史是如此之广，因此只能让它平稳地发展过渡。”

“我参与过《文明3》和《文明4》的开发。每当涉及到惩罚玩家时，我们总是格外犹豫。举个例子，在《文明4》中我们加入了黄金时代（Golden Ages），但我们最初的想法是黑暗时代（Dark Ages），它是历史上真实存在的重要时期，因此我们希望在游戏中呈现它。但是玩家们不会喜欢。

“此外，它改变了游戏原有的节奏，玩家要消耗更长的时间，力量也被削弱了。因此我们决定反其道而行之，把黑暗时代变成黄金时代。”

“很多游戏都这么做过。你可能知道《魔兽世界》有个休息机制。最初，他们选择惩罚那些过度游戏的玩家，但是玩家不乐意了，因此他们设立了可以涨经验的“休息区”，通过这样来干预玩家的游戏方式。重点在于，他们一开始采取消极的方式，随后采取完全相反的做法。

“不惩罚玩家是《文明》根深蒂固的设计理念。但时代变了，如今玩家的容忍力、以及他们对游戏的期待与以往不同。使我意识到这一点的是P社游戏的成功。他们的作品几乎与典型游戏背道而驰。

我玩的第一款P社游戏是《欧陆风云3》（Europa Universalis II），它改变了我对策略设计的看法。《十字军之王》（Crusader Kings）系列更是冲击了我的观念。我突然发现自己不需要在游戏里成为最强者，不需要费力地往上爬。有时候，顺着游戏而不是尝试支配它可能更加有趣。如果说《文明》的结局总是可想而知的，那《十字军之王》的乐趣大概在于它让玩家乘着历史的浪潮去往他们意想不到的地方。

“没错。在这个游戏里你可以晒太阳，你可能暂时屈居人后，你可能战胜归来也可能惨败。你接受了人生中存在波折，历史进程亦是如此。”

“他们采取了各种方式，以发动战争为例，在《文明》中，你可以在任何时候宣战，如果你占领了一座城，它就是你的了。而在《十字军之王》里，发动战争必须有理由，占领城市之后还要进行和谈。”

“我觉得这些很有意思，尽管可能有违历史。此外，从玩法上看，如果游戏一直平稳推进，它会变得很无趣。你需要一些挑战和压力。在《文明》中，这些挑战和压力一般来自外部，也就是其它文明。这种设计在1991年完全没问题，但如今有很大的改进空间。”

“就《Ten Crowns》而言，最初的几个月我们一直在制作多人版本。因为和朋友对战总是令人兴奋，所以我倾向于一开始就做多人版本，以更好地体验游戏在多人模式下的感觉。”

“但在过去的6到9个月里，我基本上都在测试单人模式。我会打开游戏，尽可能一直玩下去，并不断增加游戏的层次。并且我一直在拖延着加入AI对手。”

“目前，我在测试游戏的某块内容，其中没有其他玩家，你只需要处理内部问题，类似于《文明》里的野蛮人问题。这些外族部落虽然不是其他玩家，但也是一大威胁，我们尚未确定它们在这个游戏里的确切名称。”

“我觉得游戏现在挺有趣的。《文明》这种单机游戏可能会使玩家觉得无聊。因此我设定了一个目标：哪怕《Ten Crowns》里没有其它对手，它也必须是有趣的。当然很快我就会加入其它文明，但重点是我必须使游戏本身在无对手的情况下仍然有趣。”

“比如玩家的科技实力、军事实力会随着不同时期增强或衰减，这将怎样影响游戏进程呢？ 再或者玩家失去了一批城市，但能通过某种途径夺回它们。”

这使我们再次回到了游戏惩罚这个话题上。我认为游戏可以在惩罚玩家之后，通过其他方式弥补他们，以减轻玩家的抵触。失败为玩家开拓可能性，而不应该把他们逼上绝路。根据我自己的游戏体验，如果我在丧失某物后能获得挽回损失的有趣选择，那么失败对我来说完全可以接受。

“4X游戏的早期阶段，也就是玩家只有几座城市或生产单位的阶段是最好的。在这种状态下，玩家能够进行一些有趣的选择，并且这些选择的数量会随着游戏时长的增加而缩减。我希望找到一种方式让玩家多次回到这种状态。”

“此外我在思考如何展示一个民族的变化，这样玩家就能回顾历史的变迁，以及他们一路走来所克服的困难。“

如果游戏一开始就设定好一个民族的精神特征，它就很难产生什么变数。当然，民族会进步，但前进的道路缺乏有意义的挫折。我希望看到一个民族随着时间的推移逐渐形成自己的品格，这种品格是可塑造的，但我不太确定怎样可以实现这一点。

从某种程度上看，我所关心的是策略游戏赋予玩家主动权的问题。很多时候玩家都在被动地进行游戏，《文明》中也存在这样的问题，特别是在探索阶段，当你发现一个新世界并试图充分利用它时。随着时间推移，你不知不觉又陷入了探索、开发、扩张和征服里。

我问约翰逊，他是否考虑过提高4X游戏的挑战性，将初始设定为空白，让玩家在游戏过程中塑造人民的性格。

“正是考虑到这一点，我和乔恩（Jon Shafer）在《文明5》里加入了外交系统。我认为当今各类游戏中都存在一个强大的文明势力——不同游戏的叫法可能不同，无论是格斗游戏里某个强势角色，还是经典的《星际争霸》中的强势族群。它已经成为了策略游戏的标准设计。

“事实上，《文明》系列采纳这种设计经历了较长的过程。在《文明3》中，我们设立了6个文明优势，每个文明拥有两个优势，这些优势并没有特别大的差别，但在后来的版本中这种差异被不断扩大。我们这么做主要是为了提高可玩性，但也导致玩家不甘于书写历史，而更愿意利用某些文明的优势（文化优势或宗教优势）快速征服世界。

“玩家们确实喜欢差异化的文明，从这方面看这是一个合理的设计，但它也导致一个后果，它使人们感觉自己的道路从一开始就设定好了。”

“这是一种矛盾的现象，我经常听到玩家说他们很喜欢这种特征差异，但他们又不喜欢道路被设定好的感觉。事实上，二者是紧密相关的。这是一个设计困境。”

但我们不能认为《Ten Crowns》就是为了解决这些设计难题而生的。尽管游戏处于开发早期，约翰逊在交流过程中还是不得不三缄其口。游戏很多方面还没确定，因此现在谈这些具体问题为时尚早，但无论是对于地图、胜利条件、AI、政治冲突或战争，他认为传统的标准化设计已经成为了一大障碍。或许他的这种质疑态度将改变策略游戏的设计走向，我觉得差不多是时候了。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

“Sid [Meier] didn’t know he was inventing a genre back in ’91 – if he had he might have been a lot more careful. He was just making it up as he went along.”

That’s how genres begin. By mistake. Somebody creates a set of rules and systems for the needs of a particular game, and then either people adopt and adapt those rules. Soren Johnson, creator of Offworld Trading Company and lead designer of Civilization IV, is working on a new game called Ten Crowns and after spending almost an hour talking with him at GDC, I get the impression he’s going to be very careful indeed. Not cautious, because I expect some bold reinvention of 4X strategy fundamentals, but careful in his treatment of a genre that we both agree needs to escape its own past.

As might be expected, we began with Civilization. It’s the single settler at the beginning of the 4X genre, planting its flag in fertile soil and watching as empires grow around it. From the not-so-humble beginnings of a game about 4,000 years of history, the 4X genre soon went to space, to fantastical worlds with multiple planes of being, and to specific times and places.

Through it all, the four Xs have endured. Whether you’re visiting a Tolkienesque land or a distant galaxy, the aim is to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate, usually in that order.

Depending on your playstyle, there might be a little more exploitation and a little less expansion, or hardly any extermination at all if you’re chasing specific victory conditions. In its earliest incarnation, Civilization only had two end-games; either you eliminated every other nation or you won the space race and launched the first ship to Alpha Centauri. Broadly speaking, that’s one aggressive option for the martially minded and one more suited to leaders who prefer to concentrate on internal growth and improvement rather than conquest.

Since then, the series has incorporated a variety of victory conditions, each encouraging and rewarding a different style of play. Sometimes they involve systems that make them feel unique, as with Civ V: Brave New World’s World Congress that makes a political game out of the diplomatic route to victory. Other victory conditions feel like gathering raw materials until a tipping point is reached and success is assured; they’re like a longer-term version of the rush toward constructing a wonder.

Ten Crowns is going to be very different. Probably. It’s hard to know for sure in precisely what ways it will be different because Johnson is still figuring out the shape of the game. Victory conditions, however, are definitely on the rethinking and rebuilding agenda.

“It’s easy for me to talk about victory conditions for Ten Crowns because we haven’t made up our minds about what we’re going to do, so I can’t really spill the beans (laughs). But I’m very conflicted about the existence of victory conditions in a game like Civ. I feel like it distorts the game in a lot of ways and that doesn’t mean I necessarily have a solution or substitute for that. If you’re going to make it through a whole game of Civ, the victory conditions are a huge part of your motivation and affect the whole way you play.

“At some point, you’re no longer writing your story, you’re trying to fill up whichever bar you choose instead. This is going to be a struggle for me because I’m going to try and do it a different way, but I’m not sure yet how I’m going to get there.”

I’m going to reiterate my feelings about Civ VI and 4X games in general before I follow up on what I find so exciting about Johnson’s thoughts about the genre, and his ambitions for Ten Crowns. I like Civ VI a lot, even though I found the Rise and Fall expansion disappointing. Every month I sink hours and hours into one 4X game or another, and even though grand strategy games provide more of the emergent stories and complexity that I crave, I can’t imagine a time when I won’t have at least one Civ game on my hard drive, ready to load up when I’m in the mood to discover another new world.

Increasingly, however, I want to see 4X games making some fundamental changes. Not bolting on new features and layers, but reinventing themselves from the ground up. It’s why I love the automation of Distant Worlds, which makes me an actor in a world that doesn’t rely entirely on my input, or Stellaris’ attempts to combine grand strategy with recognisably Civ-like traits. I have a great deal of affection for the Elemental games, which bring in heroes and loot, reminding me how much I still miss enchanting items in Master of Magic.

What these games don’t address is the overall flow and shape of a 4X campaign. Stellaris introduces wrinkles in the shape of its crisis events, which interrupt the march of history with fresh conflicts, enemies and alliances, but you still smart small and hope to end big. Compare that to the kind of games Paradox have made their speciality, which have a more open structure and reward experimentation and roleplaying as well as the pursuit of perfection. Not only is the view of history more intriguing and complex, it’s also less restrictive in ways that are worth considering as strategy games become more inclusive in their representation of cultures.

The existence of victory conditions is a significant part of the problem. History and the development of a culture can be thought of in terms of winning and being better than the rest, but it is a limiting view, and the pursuit of power leaves little room for creative expression. I’d love to build a city that is wildly wasteful and inconvenient but captures some of the character of my people.

And that’s why Johnson’s conflicted feelings about victory conditions excite me. Recent Civ games have focused on the individual qualities of nations, giving their leaders personality traits, and giving the civs themselves their own rulesets. I’m interested to know how Johnson feels about those changes and how they affect the shape of the game, and it’s structure as a race toward the end of history.

“I think the steady trajectory toward victory is definitely a problem. It’s absolutely one of the top three or four things we’re trying to do with Ten Crowns, to approach those ideas in a different way.”

“Civ is difficult because they’re stuck with a certain trajectory. Sid didn’t know he was inventing a genre back in ’91, he was just making this up a he went along. And because he chose to make a game that was about all of human history, and beyond that because it’s such a broad view of history, it’s hard to make that about something other than just accumulation and things getting better and better.

“I was a part of this too, with Civ 3 and 4. We were always hesitant to take something away from the player. There’s a typical story we try to tell. In Civ IV we introduced Golden Ages, but originally they were Dark Ages. That was something that we wanted to incorporate because it’s something that’s in history and it’s important to talk about. But players really didn’t like it.

“The game has a certain pace and suddenly that was changed. Everything was taking longer and players weren’t as strong as they used to be. So we thought, let’s flip it on its head and instead of Dark Ages they’ll be Golden Ages.

“This is an approach that you’ll see all over the place. Maybe you’re familiar with the story of World of Warcraft and their rest mechanic. Originally, they penalized you for playing the game too much, but players didn’t like that, so instead they gave you a Rest Bonus. Basically, for the first hour of each day you got double experience. It was encouraging you to follow a certain playstyle – but the point is that they started with a negative and then flipped it on its head.

“And that’s something that’s built into the Civ designer mentality. You can’t take things away from players. But things have changed. What people are OK with and their expectations of what games do have changed. The thing that made me realise this was the success of the Paradox games. It was almost like these games existed in a bizarro universe where the rules are different.”

The first Paradox game I played, Europa Universalis II, changed the way I thought about strategy design. Crusader Kings and its sequel even more so. Suddenly here was this game where you didn’t have to be a major power and there was no pressure to try and rise to the top. Sometimes it can be more fun to be subservient to the simulation rather than attempting to dominate it. If the end-point of Civ is always known, perhaps some of the joy of Crusader Kings is in allowing the tides of alternate history to carry you to places that you didn’t expect to exist or intend to visit.

“Right. And you might have your moment in the sun and you take a backseat for a while, and maybe you’ll come back or maybe you won’t. You accept that there are twists and turns to life, and that’s also true in history.

“They did all sorts of things, like the way war is handled. In Civ you can basically declare at any time and if you take a bunch of cities they’re yours. In Crusader Kings, that’s no longer true. You have to have a reason to declare war and even if you take a bunch of cities, you need to negotiate what happens to those cities at the end of the way.

“I find all of that really interesting. Ultimately, though, it’s not about whether we’re being true to history. It’s also a gameplay problem. If the game is just on this continual upward trajectory, it just gets boring. You need some sort of challenge and pushback.
“Traditionally, in Civ, that comes from external forces. Other civilizations. I think that was totally fine in 1991. But nowadays there is a lot more you can do.

“Right now with Ten Crowns, we spent the first x number of months building a multiplayer version. That’s how I like to start. It’s good to get all of that in place right off the bat and you can get a good sense of the feel of the game in multiplayer because it’s always good to try and beat your friends.

“But in the last six to nine months I’ve mostly been playing singleplayer. I’ll start a game, play as long as I can, and I’m adding layers over time. And I’ve actually been holding off, longer than I thought I would, putting in any AI opponents.

“Currently, I’m playing with a subset of the game where there are no other players so you’re only dealing with internal issues and what you would normally call barbarians in a game of Civ. External tribes, which aren’t another player in the game but are a problem. I don’t have the exact term for what we’ll call them yet.

“What I’ve found is that I’ve been able to make the game good enough that it’s enjoyable at that level. If you think of a game of Civ where you’re the only player on the board, that would be pretty boring. So I set the bar for myself that Ten Crowns should be interesting even if there aren’t any other civs involved. Pretty soon I need to add that layer, but it was important for me to have enough stuff going on internally that the game is still fun without opponents.

“So there might be a period of time where I was really good at science, then one where I was really bad at it, and what does that mean for how the game plays? Or maybe there was a time when I could build powerful military units easily and I was really strong, but now I’m not. Or I’ve lost a bunch of cities but I can see a path to reclaim them.”

This brings us back to players not liking it when a game takes things away from them. One possible solution, I suggest, is to ensure that when a thing is taken away, the game offers something else in return. You might lose a city or a resource, but in exchange for that loss you receive interesting choices. Failure, or loss, open up new avenues and possibilities rather than closing them down. It’s certainly true of my own experience that I don’t mind losing something as long as I’m given interesting choices in order to negotiate a solution to that loss.

“In 4X, the early stages where you have just a few cities or units work really well. What I want is a way for the game to put you back into that situation a few times. At that point, you know you have a few interesting options and the longer you play, the more they get pared back.

“I am thinking about all of these issues. How you can show the ways a nation changes over time, so you can look back over two or three hundred years of history and see actual changes and obstacles you overcame.”

When a nation’s character is partially set in stone by the unique qualities that the game gives it from the very beginning, it’s hard to see change happening. Progress, yes, but not swerves and meaningful setbacks along the route. The idea of building a nation or an empire that accrues an identity over time, and for that identity to be malleable, is attractive to me but I’m not clear on how it might work.

In some ways, what I’m interested in is a strategy game that asks me to be reactive. There’s some of that in Civ, particularly during the exploration phase when you’re discovering a new world and trying to make the most of it. As time passes, it becomes a game about stamping your authority on your surroundings though – the exploitation, expansion and extermination phases of play.

I asked Johnson if he’d considered the challenge of a 4X game where your nation begins as a blank slate, where you spend the game in a process of becoming a type of people.

“I think that’s what Jon (Shafer) was trying to do with the social policies in Civ V. I think the trend toward very strong civ powers is seen through all sorts of games – whatever the appropriate term might be in any genre. Whether it’s a fighting game with very specific character powers, or something like StarCraft as a classic example. For a lot of strategy games that’s become standard.

“Civ was actually fairly slow to embrace that. In Civ III we had this weird matrix thing with six civ bonuses and each civ had two different ones. They weren’t very strongly differentiated. But then each version since has gone further down that path. I think that was mainly done for gameplay reasons, but once you go down that path, you do lose that sense of writing history as opposed to doing a culture run and then a religion run, or whatever.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily even intentional. People do like the variety of the different civs and giving them those choices is a perfectly valid design decision, but one ramification of that is that you may feel that your path is set from the very beginning.

“It’s weird because I’ve heard people say both things about Civ: that they like playing with the different civ traits, but they don’t like feeling like they’re being railroaded into a certain playstyle. In truth, the two things are closely interconnected. It’s a dilemma.”

It’d be unfair to view Ten Crowns as nothing more than a reaction to existing dilemmas. Even in these early stages of development, however, there are points when Johnson almost has to bite his tongue during our conversation. It’s too early for him to discuss specifics because so few things are decided, but whether its maps, victory conditions, AI, political strife or battles, he sees the standards of the genre as a challenge rather than a given. That attitude might just lead us somewhere altogether different than the familiar routes through history, and I reckon it’s about time.（source：Rockpapershotgun.com）