《马里奥赛车》手游化面临的挑战：照搬主机版不可取

原作者：Ishaan Sahdev 译者：Vivian Xue

几年前，我写过一篇关于《马里奥赛车7》的文章，我在里面写到：“《马里奥赛车7》缺的不是新功能，它新增了许多功能，只不过它没能让这些功能发挥出最佳效果。”

《马里奥赛车》是我非常喜爱的系列游戏，我之所以这么说，很大程度上是因为我对该游戏的某个方面不太满意：它缺乏一个真正的竞赛模式，因此，虽然你花了很多时间打这款游戏，你体会不到进步的感觉。

作为一款赛车游戏(至少在某种程度上是)，《马里奥赛车》存在一个重大问题：解锁所有赛道只需要几个小时，一旦你跑完了所有赛道，就只能挑战更高的难度，或者打多人模式。任天堂试图用有趣的方式让玩家慢慢解锁新内容，但这没什么意义。换句话说，这游戏没有竞技感。

与《马里奥赛车》形成对比的是《反重力赛车：脉搏》（Wipeout Pulse），虽然它是这个系列的第一部作品，但它是我玩过的最棒的赛车游戏之一。游戏设有多种赛事，如单圈赛、锦标赛(2-3圈)、淘汰赛（死亡竞赛）、1v1赛、Zone模式和计时赛。游戏共有12条赛道，每条都有常规版和镜像版。此外和《马里奥赛车》一样，比赛分成四个速度级别：Venom、Flash、Rapier和Phantom。

虽然游戏只有12条赛道和4个速度等级，但开发商SCE Studio Liverpool最大程度地利用了有限的游戏内容。他们设计了一个巧妙的比赛流程，以多种有趣的方式重复利用12条赛道，成功地让玩家沉浸数小时。

《反重力赛车：脉搏》的成功之处不在于赛道之多，而在于每条赛道都能以不同的方式、在不同的赛事和速度级别中被利用。此外，玩家完成了一定数量的赛事之后，将解锁更多新的比赛流程。虽然这款游戏年代久远，但一些较新的赛车游戏，比如《极限竞速7》仍然在使用相似的机制吸引玩家。

让我们再次回到《马里奥赛车》。从主机版游戏的表现来看，它显然不需要担心玩家的留存问题，大多数人都把它当成一种聚会娱乐游戏，不会对它有太高要求。但手游玩家们可不会这么想。

《马里奥赛车》手游和主机游戏的境况将完全不同，如果它想真正吸引手游玩家，它将不得不使用F2P之类的模式，并且也不可避免地需要处理玩家留存、每日活跃用户、付费转化这些手游需要面对的问题。

我们现在对《马里奥赛车》手游知之甚少：任天堂去年公布了这款游戏，它的发行时间可能在今年夏天——由于质量问题原发行日期被推迟了。但是我们可以对这款手游做一些推测。更准确地说，我们可以有把握地认为《马里奥赛车》的“聚会游戏”结构在手游版上效果不会太好，任天堂将会探索其他用户留存方式。赛车手游市场的发展潜力实在太大了，任天堂不会冒着失去这个机会的风险照搬主机游戏。

《极品飞车：无极限》单在Android平台上安装量就达到了5000万到1亿，EA的另一款游戏《真实赛车3》安装量超过1亿。与此同时，Gameloft的《狂野飙车8》也曾大受欢迎，总下载量超过了3亿次。2016年中旬，Gameloft公布《狂野飙车8》的收入大约是4400万欧元(约合5400万美元)。虽然近年来赛车类手游业绩惨淡（《狂野飙车9》发行年下载量仅为3500万次，EA终止了《真实赛车4》开发)，但凭借IP知名度和优秀设计，《马里奥赛车》依然能够在这块市场大放异彩。

mario kart 8(from gamasutra)

庞大的用户数量和潜在的收入是F2P赛车游戏花费大量时间精力钻研设计的原因。下面是我总结出的F2P赛车手游的基本核心循环，我所根据的游戏是《极品赛车：无极限》，它是这个类型中最复杂的元游戏之一。

-游戏早期：比赛→赚取金币→金币购买新车→新车解锁新赛事→比赛→赚取金币→循环重复

-游戏中期：比赛→赚取金币→金币升级现有车辆→升级车辆后跟上难度曲线→参加更多比赛→最终赚取/购买硬通货→硬通货购买昂贵的新车→新车解锁新赛事→比赛→赚取金币→循环重复

显然游戏的核心循环远不止这些。你经常会面临燃料/能源不足无法继续游戏的情况，这时你需要决定是否花费游戏货币（通常是硬通货）补充它。无论你想用硬通货继续游戏，还是存下来购买新车，这个问题会反复出现。此外，gacha机制使获得升级零件具有难度，你可能需要反复参加比赛。一旦获得了新车，你还要考虑是继续升级旧车（你已经投入了一定的资源）还是投资新车。

与在现实世界一样，你需要考虑的东西有很多，这也正是游戏的魅力所在。但这种核心循环和典型主机赛车游戏的核心循环并非完全不同。尽管存在复杂的meta元素、过度使用的gacha机制、刺激氪金的广告，成功的F2P赛车手游通常有一个优秀的核心循环和内容推进结构——这些正是《马里奥赛车》手游成功的必备品质。

任天堂应该不希望《马里奥赛车》手游像《极品飞车：无极限》和《狂野飙车8》一样需要玩家反复刷金币和抽奖，但对于手游来说，一个核心循环是必要的——如果没有它，游戏将无从盈利。因此，任天堂需要重新设计《马里奥赛车》的赛道和赛事内容，从而让人们持续地进行游戏。换句话说就是，《马里奥赛车》手游需要一个真正的竞赛结构。

说起来容易做起来难，我们现在不清楚任天堂和DeNA将如何解决这个问题。解锁更高级、更豪华的赛车是F2P赛车游戏留住玩家的手段之一，但这种方式要想达到最佳效果，首先你得把赛车设计得足够时髦带感，或者和汽车厂商合作推出现实世界的车型。毕竟，谁不想要一辆新的兰博基尼，或者迈凯伦呢？

然而，马里奥赛车既不时髦也不带感，正因如此，解锁它们对玩家来说没有那么大的吸引力。这意味着任天堂要么得重新设计赛车（虽然再怎么设计它们都不太可能和时髦沾边），要么得重新设计游戏的内容推进结构。《反重力赛车》几乎完全依赖于解锁更多的赛道和赛事来保持玩家的参与度，这也是《马里奥赛车》手游的一种可行方式，特别是如果游戏真的像它的名称《马里奥赛车巡回赛》（Mario Kart Tour）一样可以让玩家在世界各地进行比赛。

无论任天堂将采取何种方式，见证《马里奥赛车》的手游化依然是一件令人期待的事。它会是一款像《极品飞车：无极限》或者《狂野飙车》一样的典型赛车游戏吗？完全有可能，鉴于这类赛车手游的表现一直不错。

除此之外，《马里奥赛车》手游可能预示着未来主机系列的设计。若果真如此，《马里奥赛车》手游的重要性将是无可比拟的，它不只是任天堂手游计划的一部分，还为主机游戏设计提供了反馈来源。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Years ago, I wrote an article giving my impressions of Mario Kart 7. In it, I stated: “It isn’t that Mario Kart 7 doesn’t have new features. It has a lot of them. The problem is that it doesn’t necessarily use them in the smartest way possible.”

That statement largely refers to a facet of Mario Kart’s design that has prevented my enjoyment of the series for as long as I can remember: the lack of a curated race campaign; and, as a result, the lack of a sense of progression as you spend more time with the game.

As a racing game (which it is, at least in part), Mario Kart’s main issue is this: when a new Mario Kart is released, it may contain anywhere between 16 to 32 tracks, but it only takes a couple of hours to unlock every track and see everything there is to see. Once you’ve done that, all that’s left is to play these tracks on higher difficulties over and over again, or in multiplayer. There’s no real sense of Nintendo making an effort to curate its content in interesting ways and spread it out for the player to gradually discover and unlock over time. In other words, there’s no campaign.

In contrast to Mario Kart, let’s look at another game from a series it helped inspire: Wipeout Pulse from 2007. Despite being Wipeout’s first attempt, Pulse has one of the best race campaigns I’ve ever encountered. It’s broken up into various events such as Single Races, Tournaments (which consist of two to three races), Eliminator (deathmatch races), Head-to-Heads (one-on-one races), Zones, and Time Trials. The game spreads these events out over just 12 tracks, each with a regular and mirrored version. Pulse also has speed classes similar to Mario Kart: Venom, Flash, Rapier, and Phantom.

A dozen tracks and four speed classes isn’t a whole lot, but developer SCE Studio Liverpool did a great job of making the most of its limited content. Using a smartly designed race campaign grid (pictured in the screenshot below), it manages to re-use its 12 tracks in exciting and varied ways, ensuring that it provides the player with enough engaging content to last several hours.

The trick to Pulse’s campaign isn’t that there are a lot of tracks, but that each track can be used in several different ways, across different events, across different speed classes. Additionally, the grid pictured above is just one of many, with new grids unlocked after enough events have been cleared. While Pulse is fairly old by this point, newer racing games such as Forza Motorsport 7 use similar ideas to keep their players engaged, too.

This brings us back to Mario Kart. Judging by how well the console games already do, Mario Kart obviously doesn’t need to worry about player-retention. Most accept the idea of Mario Kart being a party game and enjoy it on its own terms. The problem is, Mario Kart is now headed to smartphones, where it won’t have that same luxury.

On smartphones, where it can’t be a party game and will inevitably have to be more of a free-to-play racer to gain any real traction, it absolutely will have to deal with the concepts of player-retention, daily active users, paid conversions, and all that other business stuff that make smartphone games tick.

As of this article, we know very little about Mario Kart Tour, the Mario Kart mobile game announced by Nintendo last year. We know that it’s coming sometime this summer — pushed back from its original intended launch due to quality concerns — and beyond that we can engage in some educated speculation. To be more precise, we can safely assume that the “party game” structure that works for Mario Kart on consoles isn’t going to be as effective on mobile, and that Nintendo will explore other ways to encourage player retention instead. The potential is simply too large in the mobile racer market for it to risk missing the target.

Need for Speed: No Limits, for example, has somewhere between 50 and 100 million installs on Android devices alone. Another Electronic Arts game, Real Racing 3, has well over 100 million installs. Meanwhile, Gameloft’s Asphalt 8 was equally popular in its heyday, having reached over 300 million downloads overall. In mid-2016, Gameloft reported it had made approximately €44 million (around $54 million) from Asphalt 8 alone. Despite the fact that smartphone racers have seen a notable decline since those prosperous days (Asphalt 9 has only seen 35 million downloads in its first year and EA has reportedly cancelled work on Real Racing 4), imagine what a brand as well known as Mario Kart could do in that space with the right kind of engagement model.

These humongous userbases and the potential for revenue are the reason free-to-play racing games see so much time and effort invested in the planning of their meta-games and gameplay loops. Below is a quick summary of how the basic gameplay loop of a free-to-play smartphone racer usually works. I’m basing this largely on Need for Speed: No Limits, which has one of the more complex metagames I’ve seen in the genre:

Early game: You race → You earn soft currency → Soft currency is used to buy new cars → New cars unlock new events → You race → You earn soft currency → The loop repeats

Mid game: You race → You earn soft currency → Soft currency is used to upgrade existing cars → Upgraded cars allow you to keep up with the difficulty curve → You race a lot more → You eventually earn/buy hard currency → Hard currency is used to buy expensive new cars → New cars unlock new events → You race → You earn soft currency → The loop repeats

There’s a lot more to the loop than that, obviously. You often have to contend with fuel/energy timers that limit how much you can play for free without having to shell out some form of currency (usually the hard variety). You have to contend with constantly juggling whether you want to spend your hard currency on playing more or conserving it to unlock new cars. You have to contend with gacha mechanics that make obtaining car upgrade parts difficult and excessive grinding necessary. Once you have a fancy new car, you have to decide whether to keep upgrading your older cars (which you’ve already invested hours of effort into), or start bulking up your newer, fancier rides instead.

To sum it up, it can get really meta. And that’s part of the charm, so to speak. But this gameplay loop isn’t all that different from a regular racing game on consoles. Despite the complex meta-game, the excessive use of gacha mechanics, the ads and reminders that you can pay real money to save yourself hours of grinding, successful free-to-play racing games do tend to have a fairly well designed gameplay loop, and a great sense of curation and progression — essentially, exactly what Mario Kart will need if it is to succeed on smartphones.

Nintendo won’t necessarily want Mario Kart Tour to be as grindy or as gacha-driven as Need for Speed: No Limits or late-game Asphalt 8, but a smartphone version of Mario Kart would need to involve a gameplay loop purely out of necessity — because without one, there’s no room for monetisation. In order to maintain a loop, it would also need to curate its tracks and events in a way that keeps people playing. In other words, Mario Kart Tour would require a proper race campaign of some sort.

This is easier said than done, and it’s not obvious how Nintendo and developer DeNA will deal with (or work around) the issue. One of the things free-to-play racing games use to keep players engaged is the idea of constantly unlocking better and fancier cars, and gating progress behind these cars. This works best when your rides are sleek and stylish, and even better if they’re licensed real-life cars like in in Need for Speed. After all, who doesn’t want the new Lamborghini, or a McLaren?

Mario Kart’s karts, however, are neither sleek nor stylish. Because of this, they aren’t really going to serve as an effective means of keeping players engaged through the allure of unlocking them. This means that either Nintendo will need to redesign them so that they can serve this purpose (which is unlikely), or find another solution to create a structure of progression and player-retention. Wipeout Pulse relies almost solely on the idea of unlocking more tracks and events to keep the player engaged, without ever relying on car unlocks. That’s one potential avenue for Mario Kart Tour (especially if the “Tour” in the title ends up being a hint at tracks based on real-world locales).

Either way, it will be fascinating to see just how far down the free-to-play meta-game rabbit-hole Nintendo is willing to go with Mario Kart Tour. Will it be a traditional racer like Need for Speed and Asphalt? That would be the logical choice, since those are the types of smartphone racers that tend to do well.

Beyond that, the possibility that Mario Kart Tour could inform the design of the console series in the future is also fascinating. If that ends up being the case, Mario Kart Tour will be incredibly important beyond Nintendo’s smartphone initiative as something that actually feeds back into their console business.（source：Gamesindusty.biz）