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从玩家角度看社交游戏《Civ World》竞争力

发布时间:2011-07-07 14:10:37 Tags:,,,,,

作者:Dean Takahashi

Sid Meier制作的社交游戏《Civilization World》昨日起在Facebook开始公测。

经过逾22个月的制作,《文明》系列战略游戏社交版本终于面世。现在,我们来看看这款游戏是否值得我们等待如此长的时间。

Sid Meier是Firaxis备受尊崇的游戏开发者,也是《文明》系列游戏的制作者,此次亲自负责该Facebook游戏的编程,支持你在好友的城市边上建立起自己的城市。有传言称,《文明》品牌游戏已售出超过1000万套,似乎是Facebook这个成长最快的游戏平台上最完美的休闲游戏题材。玩《文明》系列游戏需要花上很多时间,而我们刚好也在Facebook上花费很多时间,这似乎很般配。

内测时我玩过一小段时间,那时并未开放所有的功能。作为一个喜欢Kabam的《Glory of Rome》之类游戏的硬核玩家,我个人觉得《Civilization World》稍显简单,但游戏至少能吸引到更多休闲玩家。

civ-world(from venturebeat)

civ-world(from venturebeat)

《Civilization World》与其他Facebook游戏相比是个进步,但仍然没有让《文明》硬核玩家感到兴奋的事物。游戏想同时吸引两个社群的玩家:硬核战略游戏玩家和喜欢Facebook休闲社交游戏玩家。游戏将角色卡通化,这种艺术风格无疑更偏向休闲玩家。但游戏也很有深度,可以满足那些资深玩家的诉求。

《Civilization World》将炙手可热的游戏品牌《文明》(游戏邦注:此品牌属于Firaxis Games和Take-Two Interactive旗下的2K Games)带入Facebook市场。EA也曾将其硬核足球品牌带到Facebook中,但到目前为止仍没有从Zynga处夺取大量市场份额,后者凭借《CityVille》等城市建设类Facebook游戏获得了巨大的成功。Meier花了大量时间来优化游戏,他的目标是开创社交游戏新时代。

2009年10月,Firaxis首次声称公司正在制作一款称为《Civilization Network》的游戏。许多Facebook的开发周期仅6个星期(游戏邦注:比如《FarmVille》),像《Civilization World》这样长达22个月的开发还从未见过。

Meier工作细致认真,其对游戏趣味性的重视程度为外界所熟知。事实上,你曾花数年时间做《Dinosaurs》这款游戏,但最终决定不继续做下去,因为游戏根本不好玩。《Civilization World》花了Meier如此多的时间,但凭这一点就足以让我及其他Meier的粉丝感到兴奋。

合作性战略

在《Civilization World》中,你刚开始需要建造自己的中心城市,你的目标是与朋友和对手竞争创造世界上最辉煌的文明。这是个恒久的世界,但文明间的竞争存在开始和结束。

游戏跨越了所有已知的文明,从古代到太空时代等。从核心机制来看,这是款合作性战略游戏。你得与其他人合作实现某个目标。开始时,你只有个荒芜土地上的残破宫殿。你必须建造房屋供市民居住。然后,你可以给市民指派任务,比如让他们成为农民。你造个农场,市民就会开始耕作土地,然后将收获的东西运回宫殿。

你可以让自己的子民担任商人、科学家、艺术家、工人或农民。当你收集到足够的食物时,你的人口就会增加。然后你又可以安排这些人去工作,让城市变得更大些。同时,你可以收获资源,用这些资源来购买东西。你的发展方向很多,可以不断囤积黄金、产品和食物,发展科学或文化。

这款游戏比通常的Facebook游戏更具战略性。如果你把房屋建造得更靠近宫殿,农民就不用走很长的路,这种安排确实有一定作用。重点在于你做出的决定有对错之分,这并非自由随机的游戏。如果你将果园建造在水源盘,收获时得到的就是25分,而不是仅仅10分。你可以种植大量树木让科学家觉得开心,吸引更多科学家来到城市。游戏会从细节上奖励你的正确决定。

Meier努力让单人游戏体验更具社交化。有些任务你可以同好友合作完成。比如,在文化测试中,你需要整理混乱的图片让其呈现出真实的面貌。你的好友可在定时测试中帮你做这个事情。这款游戏中还有大量小游戏,比如从地图这头到那头修筑道路方便旅行商队,这会让你获得更多的资源。

加入有许多玩家的联盟便可以体验到多人游戏。其他玩家可以为你提供帮助,联盟成员还可以在战斗中组队共同对抗敌人。

每个队伍间相互竞争,胜利一方可以获得更多的奖励点数。每次战斗最多只能有200人参与,所以无需担心遇见大军团。

civ-world (from venturebeat)

civ-world (from venturebeat)

无害的战斗

为迎合Facebook中更多休闲用户的需求,战斗系统相对来说是无害的。你无法彻底摧毁其他人的城市,也无法攻击单个玩家。战斗只能在主要联盟间发生。你在战斗中选择要将哪些单位带进战斗,结果会立即显示出来,并没有展现战斗场面的动画。

你选择战斗单位后他们会排列出来对抗敌军,很像你在玩老式的《War》卡牌游戏。排出最好卡牌或最好单位的一方便可以获得胜利。作为硬核玩家,我希望游戏能够更强调战斗,配上更好的动画。但值得欣慰的是,在你下线的时间里不会遭到攻击。我觉得Facebook游戏在满足硬核玩家的战斗需求方面还有很长的路要走。

艺术风格并不像去年秋天面世的PC游戏《文明5》中的高分辨率图像那样好看。现已证实,这款单机游戏在硬核玩家中非常流行。然而,《Civilization World》的受众完全不同,平台上更多的是女性和休闲玩家。游戏必须要提高其可接入性。

游戏的艺术方面类似于《Civilization Revolution》,这是2008年发布于游戏主机和掌机的《文明》系列游戏。在这款游戏中,艺术显得更卡通化,不像《文明5》中那样现实和庄重。作为一个硬核玩家,我更偏好《文明5》的艺术风格。但我也能理解为何《Civilization World》会采用这种艺术形式。然而,这也意味着Kabam的《Glory of Rome》之类的硬核游戏无需担心这款游戏的竞争。

游戏中也有个炫耀的系统,这是个任何你与朋友一起玩的游戏中必须要有的功能。《Civilization World》让你可以在王座大厅中展示成就和在游戏中获得的其他很棒的手工艺品。你可以在商店中购买某些东西。有趣的是,商店中虚拟商品的价格会随供求关系而发生改变。你可以在商店中购买某个道具,随后在他人有需求时以更高的价格出售这个道具。

游戏中有完整的科技树,直观显示你某些科技数千年的发展线路,包括运输、印刷术等。科技树是《文明》系列游戏中最精彩的内容。你也可以咨询Civilopedia,这个百科资源描述游戏中所有的建筑、单位、奇迹、科技和城市单位。

游戏配乐由Christopher Tin制作而成,他曾凭借《文明4》中的《Baba Yetu》获得格莱美奖。

刚开始,你一次只能玩一个城市。随着时间推移,你可以控制多个城市。与《文明》系列游戏一样,你可以以多种方法来赢得游戏。你可以选择建造最多的奇迹,来获得文化上的胜利。你也可以选择富国强兵之路。

缓慢的开局

总之,游戏的玩法多种多样,为你参与和实施全球化战略提供奖励。现在我刚开始玩这款游戏,事态进展缓慢。当然,你可以付费使游戏速度加快。游戏盈利正来自于此。如果你想同好友比拼建造最大的文明,那会花掉你很多钱。但是,游戏也会限制你每天花费的金钱数。游戏开发商仍在测试这个限额,目前的数量是每天10个CivBuck(游戏邦注:游戏中可用金钱购买的虚拟货币)。这个数据可能根据用户的反馈发生改变。

对此游戏的好坏,我尚无定论。刚开始确实很有吸引力。我想看看过1周或1个月后是否还会有如此激情。但到现在为止,我还没看到游戏有什么很大的优势能够对Kabam或Zynga构成威胁。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Long-awaited Civilization World launches public beta on Facebook

Dean Takahashi

Sid Meier’s Civilization World is available today to all Facebook users as the social game enters its public beta test.

After more than 22 months in the making, the social version of the Civilization strategy game series is ready for general consumption. Now we’ll find out soon if it was worth the wait.

Sid Meier, the acclaimed game developer at Firaxis and creator of the Civilization series, personally coded the Facebook game, which lets you build your own city alongside the cities of your friends. It has been hotly anticipated because the Civilization brand has sold more than 10 million units over time and it seems like a perfect title for casual gamers on Facebook, one of the fastest-growing game platforms. It seems like a good match because Civ games take a long time to play and Facebook commands a lot of our time.

I’ve played it for a short time in a closed beta test, where not all of the features were available. As a hardcore gamer who likes titles such Kabam’s Glory of Rome, I feel a little “meh” about Civilization World myself, but it has a chance to appeal to the broader casual crowd.

Civilization World is a step up for Facebook games, but it’s also nothing that hardcore Civilization fans will get that excited about. The game tries to straddle two communities: hardcore strategy gamers and the casual players who like to socialize on Facebook. The art style is definitely skewed toward casual gamers, with cartoon-like characters. But the game has a lot of depth to it, and that will appeal to gaming veterans.

Civilization World marks the entry of the authentic gaming brands — Civilization is a property of Firaxis Games and Take-Two Interactive’s 2K Games label — into the Facebook market. Electronic Arts has also launched its hardcore football and soccer brands on Facebook, but so far it hasn’t taken much market share from Zynga, which has seen tremendous success with home-grown Facebook games such as CityVille. Meier took a long time to perfect the game because his goal is to take social gaming to its next generation.

As I noted in our preview, Firaxis first announced that it was working on a game called Civilization Network in October, 2009. Since many Facebook games are developed in as little as six weeks (FarmVille fits in this category in some respects), a 22-month development cycle for Civilization World (as it has been renamed) is unheard of.

Meier is meticulous and is known to focus ruthlessly on making his games fun. In fact, he worked for years on a game called Dinosaurs — and decided not to do it because it wasn’t fun. That suggests that the game is commanding a huge amount of Meier’s time. That fact alone has made me anticipate the game, and should excite anyone who has followed Meier’s career.

Collaborative strategy

In Civilization World, you start by creating your own capital city, and your goal is to compete against both friends and rivals to create the greatest civilization in the world. It is a persistent world, but it can have a start and an end time for the competition between civilizations.

The game spans the age of known civilization, from ancient times to the space age and beyond. At its core, it is a collaborative strategy game. You work with other people toward a goal. You start with a meager palace on a tract of land. You have to build a house for a citizen. Then you assign the citizen a task, such as being a farmer. You build a garden and then the citizen will start farming the land and taking harvests back to the palace.

You can assign trades to your people, making them scientists, artists, workers, or farmers. When you collect enough food, your population expands. Then you can put the people to work and grow your city bigger. Meanwhile, you harvest resources and buy things with them. You can develop on a variety of fronts, adding to your stockpiles of gold, production, science, food or culture.

The game has more strategy that a typical Facebook game. It actually matters that you place your house close to the palace so that your farmer doesn’t have to walk so far. The point is that you can make a series of smart or bad decisions — it isn’t just random game play. If you place an orchard near water, you get 25 points for your harvest rather than 10. You can grow lots of trees to make scientists happy and attract more of them to your city. The game rewards you for paying attention to the details.

Meier has tried to make the single-player experience of Civilization more social. Some tasks you can do together with friends. For instance, in a test of culture, you can unscramble a mixed-up image to see what the real image looks like. Your friends can help you do this in a timed test. There are a bunch of mini games — like connecting a road for a caravan from one end of the map to the other — that allow you to win more resources.

The multiplayer aspect comes in when you join an alliance with lots of other players. Your players can help you or team up in battles against rival empires.

Each team races to complete an era first. The team that wins a round will get more reward points. As many as 200 people can participate in a game at a time, so you won’t see gigantic empires.

Harmless combat

In a nod to Facebook’s more casual audience, the combat system is fairly harmless. You can’t raze someone else’s city and you can’t attack an individual. Rather, the combat takes place only between major alliances. In the battles, you pick which units you want to take into battle, and the outcome is resolved instantly, with no animations that show what happens in the battle.

You pick your combat units and they line up against the enemy, as if you were both playing a card game like the old-fashioned War card game. Whoever lines up the best cards, or best units, winds up victorious. As a hardcore gamer, I would prefer a greater emphasis on combat, with better animations. But it’s nice to know you can’t be attacked while you are sleeping. I haven’t tested this much. But from my first look at it, I think that Facebook games have a long, long way to go before they will satisfy the combat thirst of hardcore gamers.

The art style is not nearly as pretty as the high-resolution imagery in the PC game, Civilization V, which came out last fall. That game proved to be very popular among hardcore gamers. But the Civilization World game is made for a very different audience: more female, more casual, and more mainstream. The game has to be more accessible.

The art work resembles that of Civilization Revolution, the 2008 game that took the Civ series to the game consoles and handhelds. In that game, the art veered more toward the cute and amusing rather than the realistic and serious, as in Civilization V. As a hardcore player, I greatly prefer the Civilization V art style. But I understand why Civilization World went down this path. But it pretty much means that hardcore games such as Glory of Rome from Kabam don’t have much to worry about.

The game has a system for bragging, a feature essential for any game you play with friends. Civilization World lets you show off your collection of achievements and the other cool artifacts you win in the game in your throne room, pictured right. You can buy things in a market. One of the cool aspects is that the market prices for virtual goods fluctuate with supply and demand. You can buy an item in the market and sell it later for a higher price if the item is in demand.

There is a full-blown technology tree, which graphically shows the path you have to follow to develop certain technologies over thousands of years, from the wheel to the printing press. The tech tree is a staple of Civ games. You can also consult the Civilopedia, an encyclopedic resource that describes all of the buildings, units, wonders, technologies and civic items in the game.

The music from the game is from Christopher Tin, who won a Grammy award for his Baba Yetu song in Civ 4.

At the outset, you can only play one city at a time. But over time, you can control multiple cities. As with the other Civ games, you can win a game in multiple ways. You can get a cultural victory by building the most wonders. Or you can get a military or economic victory.

Slow start

Overall, the game allows for different play styles. But it rewards you for engagement and pursuing a global strategy. For now, I’ve just gotten started with Civilization World and things happen slowly. If you want to speed them up, you can pay real money. That is where the monetization for the game comes in. If you want to get in a race with your friends to build the biggest civilization, it may prove to be expensive. But the game also has a limit on the amount of spending you can do in a day that will affect the game play. The company is still testing exactly what that limit will be; currently, the amount is capped at 10 CivBucks (virtual currency, purchased with real money) per day. That may change based on user feedback.

I won’t pass final judgment on the game just yet. It’s mildly engaging at the start. I’ll check back in a week or a month to see if it holds my attention. But for now, I don’t see any great advances that will make this a threat to Kabam or Zynga. (Source: Games Beat)


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