作者：Ernest Adams

本篇文章将讨论低劣游戏设计存在的一些问题。我认为这对游戏行业有益，本文中提到的多是相对较早的游戏，但发现和讨论问题有助于设计新游戏时避开误区。（请点击此处阅读本系列第1、2、3、4、5、6、7、8、9、10、11、13篇）

无法间断的文字内容

我的阅读速度很快，而且不喜欢重新阅读5分钟前已经看过的东西。文字滚动缓慢会让我很不耐烦，如果这些文字是我已经看过的，这更会令我烦躁。

有人表示：“存盘点与BOSS战之间长篇的对话最令人感到厌烦。我简直快要把A键按坏了，我想重新尝试挑战BOSS，然而每次都要看那长达4页的文字。”

道理很简单：非互动文字应当是可间断的，就像电影可快进那样。

不要将存盘点设置在漫长的非互动部分（游戏邦注：包括文字、过程动画或大片空白区域）之前。

快速呈现无法暂停的文字内容

上述问题的另一个极端是，文字的呈现速度过快。有人反映：“我不喜欢呈现速度过快的对话。每个人的阅读速度都是不同的。我跟不上某些游戏的文字呈现速度。”这是个很基本的游戏易用性失败案例。

你需要增加两个按键，用来跳转到“下个页面”的“前进”键和直接跳到需要玩家做出动作或决定的时刻的“跳过”键。

错误或无意义的立场设置

我总是认为，诸如《龙与地下城》之类的清晰立场设置从某种意义上来说是不可取的，它们限制了角色扮演体验，不利于形成带有瑕疵或复杂个性的角色。

某些电脑RPG游戏只是以简单的方法来跟踪玩家在游戏中的举动并做出裁决，这是个很严重的问题。有人认为：

通常情况下，你需要在游戏开始时就决定要成为光明的骑士还是黑暗的恶棍，只有在其中一条路上坚持不懈才能获得奖励。因而，“好”与“坏”之间似乎就产生出明显的界线。在《生化奇兵》中，你可以在终生成为善良的看守者或拥有毁灭世界意图的超级坏蛋两者间做出选择。这两种角色我都不感兴趣！游戏对中立概念的执行往往也不是很好。在某些游戏中，你需要平衡自己善良与邪恶的举止，这让玩家在游戏中感到无所适从。先让你勒索路人然后再帮助另一个人走过街，这不会让玩家觉得自己是中立的，而是让你产生精神分裂的感觉。

如果你想要跟踪玩家的行为并为其设计结果，这当然是可以的，但结果必须与活动相称。如果你有兴趣去奖励玩家的道德或不到的行为，最好通过某些游戏世界内置系统来实现，而不是主观的立场安排。比如，如果玩家选择了邪恶之路，可以让他们加入“犯罪协会”然后不断提升其在协会中的地位，当他们离开时给予奖励。不可因为玩家偶尔表现出来的善良举动就将其从“犯罪协会”中开除，也不可因玩家偶尔的善意恶行而将其从“英雄协会”中逐出。

不必要地强迫玩家改变立场

在《Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast》中，Benoit Girard选择扮演善良的绝地武士，但是他面临如下问题：

你可以获得强大的绝地心灵控制技能，可以将敌人永久性地转变成中立NPC。你可以选择将对手中立化后杀死（游戏邦注：这并不像绝地武士该有的举止），也可以只将他们中立化，然后继续探索当前关卡。

在Bespin关卡中，你最终进入一个类似竞技场的地方，黑暗绝地武士会攻击你，而你只有在击败他们之后方能逃脱。问题就在于，只有屠杀关卡中所有的对手才能触发黑暗绝地武士现身。我花了半个小时努力搜索可能的秘密出口，但发现周围只有被我中立化的敌人四处走动，这时我才明白过来。

Benoit想成为优秀的绝地武士，他将所有对手中立化而没有杀死他们，却因此而无法跳转到下个场景。找到出口的惟一方法是冷血地屠杀所有已经毫无敌意的中立者，从而触发黑暗绝地武士的现身，在杀死所有黑暗绝地武士后，下个关卡的大门才会开启。

这样我们就明白了为何人们会为电子游戏中的暴力问题感到担忧。即便你想成为好人，游戏仍强迫你通过杀戮解决问题。

游戏强迫玩家违背自己的立场，要求他做出某些游戏之前告诉他不能做的事情。

多数情况下，这种反复无常的设计并非好想法。更糟糕的是，设计师居然没有从另一个侧面来考虑这种情况。Benoit将所有的对手中立化，不靠武力解决所有问题。这种行为应当得到奖励而不是被忽视。

这一行确实存在将玩家置于道德抉择境地来产生戏剧化效果的设计方法。但是上述方法与前者并不相同，只是种低劣的关卡设计方法而已。

RTS游戏难于进行防御控制

历史教训：1066年诺曼底公爵William率军入侵英格兰，他在Hastings战役中遇见了Harold国王的军队。Harold的军队摆出严密的盾墙，William的步兵和骑兵均无法突破。经过数个小时的努力和失败后，William假装撤退。Harold的军队误认为自己已经获得胜利，于是撤去盾墙上前追击。在盾墙解体之后，William的部队回头将Harold击败。

《星际争霸》中也出现了同样的情境。有人指出：

你可以控制单位保持当前状态或停止移动。在单位停止后，如果它们受到攻击，就会前去追逐攻击者并杀死它们。于是，它们会继续受到攻击，继续追逐并如此循环下去，直到它们进入敌军基地，于是这些单位便会全部死亡。如果让他们保持当前状态后受到攻击，只有1或2个单位会对此做出反应，其他单位无动于衷，最终的结果还是全部牺牲。游戏中没有停火模式。如果你企图去侦查对手，侦察者在没得到指令时会自动射击，这样你的对手就知道了附近有侦察者，就可以用探测者来消灭你的侦察者。

上述范例中存在两个独立的问题：攻击和追逐。侦查单位不应当主动攻击，除非得到明确的指令。

并命令停在原地的单位不应当追逐敌人，直到得到明确指令。如果游戏中有两种攻击命令（攻击视野内的所有对手和受到攻击后反击）和两种追逐命令（追逐和不追逐），那么结合起来就可以产生出4种类型的防御命令：

受到攻击后反击能够是单位保护自身，同时不让它参与到你不想卷入的战斗中。以侦察者为例，最简单的处理方式就是不给侦查单位配备武器，或者将侦查单位设置成不主动攻击。

当然，如果你愿意的话，还可以制作得更为复杂。如果单位的视野范围比武器攻击范围要广，那么它会向对手靠近吗？你可以设计出第3种追逐选项。反之，如果你想要将游戏制作得更为简单些，可以将防御命令限制为“Engage on Contact”和“Deny Passage”两种。

玩家抱怨的另一个点是，当同伴受到攻击时，其他单位无动于衷，这表示《星际争霸》中各单位没有很好地联系起来。可以将机制修改如下：当某个处在防御姿态的单位受到攻击时，包括它在内的所有接到同样命令的单位（游戏邦注：就是接到防御姿态命令的所有单位）将做出同样的反应。

看到同伴单位被杀死，而附近的单位却毫无举动，这确实会让人感到愤怒。我们都知道，这不该是士兵在战场中的表现。

仓库无法堆叠小物品

有人对某些游戏颇有微词：

部分MMO和CRPG中存在设计瑕疵，包括免费网络游戏《Regnum Online》和《神泣》、《巫师》、《无冬之夜》、《魔石》和《公会战争》等。

你接到屠杀200个Silvercrest Soldier Chickens的任务，最先会选择在周围寻找任务怪，在此过程中你会遇到超级怪物Ranhar和Average Joe Chickens，但是没看到任务所要求的鸡。当你在周围转上两个小时甚至两天后，会提出疑问，“任务鸡究竟在哪里？”，直至最终在教堂背后找到通向另一个区域的传送门，你才真正看到任务所需的鸡。

最后，你到达了任务鸡所在的地点并开始杀鸡，2个小时后，你发现自己只杀了1只Silvercrest Soldier Chicken，其余都是Silvercrest Warrior Chickens，这并非任务所需的怪物。分配任务的NPC显得很挑剔，要求玩家必须凑足这些Silvercrest Soldier Chicken。经过不懈的努力，你终于杀够了任务所需的数量。

你开始拾取战利品，捡到了100个鸡毛，每个鸡毛都需要占用仓库的1个格子。这些鸡毛无实用价值且无法堆叠，但仍可以以1金币的价格出售给NPC。因为所拾取鸡毛过量导致仓库已满，使你无法拾取真正有价值的+3 Rainbow Armor，你只能舍弃部分鸡毛。

当你在处理这些事情的时候，或许不会注意到周围怪物的刷新情况，当它们再次出现时，你就进入了战斗状态。这会导致仓库的关闭，而且你无法再次打开，直到你杀死所有已刷新的怪。你看着那件极品装备慢慢消失却无法采取措施，而仓库中却装着满满的无用鸡毛。

随后，你传出该区域，向NPC出售所拾取的鸡毛。你到了离自己所在地最近城镇的市场，而NPC却说：“这里是猪皮市场，我们不收购鸡毛。鸡毛市场在地图的另一端。”于是，你决定将鸡毛出售给玩家，在拍卖行中花了1个小时将鸡毛挂上。

鸡毛当然应当设计成可堆叠的物品！游戏中的任何小物品都应当可以堆叠，比如地精短剑和狼爪等。但装备应当设置为不可堆叠物品。

无加载过程条/无意义的加载过程条

有名游戏记者抱怨道：

你进入某个未知地区，游戏暂停并显示“加载中”。没有加载条，甚至没有任何动画告诉你游戏正在进行某些操作。尽管我很喜欢《半条命》系列作品，但它们自始自终都存在这个问题。这种问题的另一个变种是显示无意义的加载条。游戏进入加载页面并呈现加载条，加载条在很短时间内便已填充满。你可能会跟我一样，想到：“真棒，游戏的加载时间很短！”随后，加载条又从起点开始填充，如此不断重复。

IE浏览器便是无意义加载条的绝妙例证。浏览页面上的小圈圈不断旋转，并没有告诉用户任何信息（而适用于Android手机的免费浏览器xScope却可呈现已加载页面数量的过程条，这才是真正有价值的）。

这两种做法都不当，但是无加载条更甚，因为你根本不知道是否已经卡机。应当添加加载条，且该加载条只在加载过程完成时填满。加载条的设置即便不完美也没关系，如果你需要加载2个文件，一个10KB，另一个10MB，而你设置的是加载完前一个文件时加载条会走完一半，另一半加载条显示第二个文件的加载过程，这都是可以接受的。只要我们能看到加载过程正在进行中就可以了。

难以辨识的字幕

有人表示：“我无法忍受那些字幕无法阅读的游戏。我曾经见过某些游戏的字幕字体偏小或者颜色与游戏背景相近。有时，在屏幕底部设置字幕显示区就可以解决这种问题。”

有些游戏在字幕或者界面设计上存在欠缺，比如字幕无法识别和阅读或者在玩家使用绿色夜视镜时绿色十字准星会消失。

字幕应当与背景间有足够的对比度，在任何时刻都可以轻松阅读。例如电影就采用白色字幕，同时屏幕底部区域的颜色比画面中心区域更暗。

我曾经提过使用多种颜色的字幕来区分不同说话者的建议，我们需要这种方法，因为游戏与电视电影毕竟不同，在许多游戏中我们看不到角色嘴唇在动。为了确保在使用这种方法时字幕不会与背景冲突，我们可以在每个字的周围加上黑色边框，并使用黄色或品红等较为吸引眼球的颜色。《猴岛》系列游戏是这方面的优秀典型。

从易用性方面来说，我们应当全力避免字幕字体过小的问题。除非字幕被嵌入构图中（游戏邦注：这样做不利于游戏的本土化处理），否则应当足够清晰地显示，让玩家可以轻松阅读。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

The Designer’s Notebook: Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! XII

Ernest Adams

Welcome to the 12th installment of Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! I think we’re having a positive impact, folks — many of the games mentioned in this edition are fairly old, so it’s just possible that newer games are starting to avoid the worst design mistakes. I’d like to hope that this gripe-fest is helping. However, old or new, we can always learn from the errors of the past, so I’m going to go right on documenting them. As always, thanks to my many contributors, and you’re welcome to send more complaints to notwinkie@designersnotebook.com.

As usual, I’ve tried to mix and match between small things that are incredibly annoying (but easy to fix) and larger, harder problems. This year we have eight.

Uninterruptible Text

I read fast, and I don’t like to re-read something that I’ve just read five minutes ago. Waiting for text to… scroll… slowly… by… drives me nuts, especially if it’s text I’ve already seen.

Joshua Gault wrote, “This is most annoying when you save, then there is a long conversation between you and some guy, and he turns out to be the boss.

“This is particularly bad at the end of all of the Mega Man Battle Network games. I don’t like breaking my A button from anger because I must retry the boss, which requires me to go through four pages of text.”

It’s very simple: non-interactive text should be interruptible, just as movies should be.

Oh, and don’t put save points before long non-interactive sections, either — text, cinematics, or empty regions the player has to walk through. But you knew that one, right? I mentioned it last year in Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! XI.

Rapid Non-Stop Text

The flip side of the foregoing is text that goes by too fast. Shairi Turner wrote, “I have a problem with dialogue moving too quickly. We don’t all read at the same speed. While I may have found pressing X or clicking to be tedious in the past, I miss it when it’s gone.” This is a basic accessibility failure. (Most games have terrible accessibility.)

You need two buttons: Advance to Next Page (which should happen instantly, not in a slow scroll or worse yet, a letter-by-letter display — TeleTypes were old news by 1985, okay?) and Jump to End, which should take the player to the next point at which she has to take action or make a decision.

False or Pointless Alignment Systems

I’ve always thought that explicit alignment systems, a la Dungeons & Dragons, were kind of pointless anyway; they constrain role-playing and discourage enacting characters with flaws or complex personalities. Is Hamlet good or evil? Well, he killed Polonius, so I guess that makes him evil. Whew. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted out.

It’s even more of a problem in computer RPGs that keep track of what you do, but only in a simplistic way. Luke Bainton wrote,

Generally, you have to decide from the outset whether you’re going to be the white knight or the black knave; you will only get benefits from relentlessly pursuing one or the other. On top of this, the contrast between being “good” and “bad” is usually so far divided it’s impossible to relate. In BioShock your choices are between being a loving caretaker for the rest of your life or turning into a comic-book supervillain with destroy-the-world intentions. I have no desire to do either!

The concept of neutrality is usually poorly implemented as well. In some games it means you need to balance good acts with evil ones, which gets hard to swallow. Roughing up one pedestrian for a few coins and then helping another across the street doesn’t make you neutral, it makes you schizophrenic.

If you want to track the player’s behavior and generate consequences for it, by all means do, but the consequences have to be proportionate to the activity. And if you’re interested in rewarding moral, or immoral, behavior, it’s better to do it via some in-world system than an arbitrary alignment. For example, if players want to be evil, let them join the Crime Guild and work their way up, gaining benefits as they go. They shouldn’t be thrown out for the occasional act of virtue, nor should they be thrown out of the Heroes Guild for a little burglary in a good cause.

While we’re on the subject of alignments…

Forcing the Player to Violate His or Her Alignment Unnecessarily

The example for this goes back a way, but it’s a good one. Benoit Girard chose to play a good Jedi in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, but…

You could get a powerful Jedi mind control trick allowing you to change an enemy into a neutral NPC permanently. You could use it to neutralize your opponents before killing them (not very Jedi-like), or just neutralize them and continue exploring the current level.

In a Bespin level, you ended up in an arena-like place where dark Jedis would attack you, and from which you could escape only after defeating them. The problem is that the appearance of the dark Jedis was triggered by the slaughter of all the other opponents in the level… something I figured out after more than half an hour trying to find the secret exit I might have missed somewhere in the level, while a bunch of formerly-hostile NPCs were walking around randomly.

So Benoit, being a good Jedi, courteously neutralized all his opponents without killing them, then couldn’t find the exit because it didn’t exist yet. The only way to get out was to massacre all the harmless neutrals in cold blood, thus triggering the appearance of the dark Jedi, and then kill all of them before the door would open.

And we wonder why some people are concerned about violence in video games. Note that this is what you’re supposed to do when you’re the good guy!

I already covered Illogical Victory Checks back in Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! VIII, and this is certainly an example. (Normally, you don’t have to kill people to unlock a door.) But apart from that, it compels the player to violate his alignment, requiring him to do something that the game has told him not to do.

Lying to the player about how he’s supposed to play the game is almost never a good idea. (Yes, I know about Shadow of the Colossus, and I’m not convinced.) Worse yet, it fails to recognize lateral thinking. Benoit neutralized his opponents without shedding a drop of blood. That should be rewarded, not ignored.

It’s one thing to put the player in a moral dilemma for dramatic effect. But this was no dilemma, it was just bad level design… and a Twinkie Denial Condition.

Poor Defensive Controls in RTS Games

History lesson: When Duke William of Normandy invaded England in 1066, he met King Harold’s armies at the Battle of Hastings. Harold’s men formed a tightly packed wall of shields that neither William’s infantry nor his cavalry could breach. After a few hours of trying and failing, William ordered a feigned retreat. Harold’s armies, thinking they had won the day, broke ranks and chased them. With the shield wall down, William’s men turned around and destroyed them. This is why, nearly a thousand years later, the motto of the British monarch is still in French.

The same thing happens in StarCraft. Someone named Ilya tells it:

You can either tell your units to hold position or stop. If they stop, and they get attacked, they’re going to run after whoever did it, kill them, get attacked again, run after it, etc., until they’re in the enemy base. Then they all die.

If they hold position and they get attacked, only one or two of them is going to do anything about it and the rest stand around. And they die.

And there’s no hold fire mode. If you’re trying to spy on your enemy, you leave your spy alone for a second, and he shoots something automatically, then your enemy will know what happened and will send a detector over and your spy dies.

There are actually two separate issues here: engagement and pursuit. A reconnaissance unit should never initiate engagement until explicitly ordered to.

A unit that has been ordered to stay in one place should never pursue until explicitly ordered to. If you have two engagement policies (fire on sight and fire when fired upon) and two pursuit policies (pursue and don’t pursue), the combination yields four types of defensive orders:

Firing only when fired upon enables a unit to defend itself but doesn’t let it start fights that you don’t want to get into unless you have to. As for spies, the simplest way to handle this is not to give spy units any weapons, or instruct them not to initiate engagement.

Obviously you can complicate things further if you want to. If a unit’s range of vision is greater than the range of its weapons, should it move to get in range, or not? Do you want to make that yet another pursuit option? On the other hand, if you’re making a fairly simple game, I would restrict the defensive orders to Engage on Contact and Deny Passage.

One other item — Ilya’s complaint about units that just stand around when their fellows are under attack shows that Starcraft fighters haven’t bonded well. Implement a three musketeers policy: all for one and one for all. When a given unit in a defensive posture is attacked, it and every unit that received the same orders at the same time (in other words, the whole group that received the order) should respond together.

I realize this isn’t trivial to do; you have to keep track of more information. Still, watching one unit twiddle its thumbs while his buddy ten feet away gets massacred is infuriating. We know that’s not how soldiers should behave.

Small Objects That Don’t Stack

Mats Ohlsson sent a hilarious rant that speaks for itself:

These are some design flaws from MMOs and CRPGs. They are collected from the Regnum Online and Shaiyia free online games, The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights, Dimensity, Guild Wars, and many more.

You are going to do a quest to kill 200 Silvercrest Soldier Chickens, so first you run around, roaming a huge landscape to visit several chicken lairs, where you will find Ranhar The Super Strong Chicken and Average Joe Chickens but no quest chickens. When you have been running for two hours or two days you ask yet another time “Where are the chickens?” and you get an answer that you can teleport into that area if you find the portal behind the church.

So at last you are at the correct place and start to slay chickens, and when you have been killing chickens for 2 hours you find out that only one of them is a Silvercrest Soldier Chicken. The rest of them are Silvercrest Warrior Chickens that you don’t want for your quest. The NPC who gave you the quest was really picky about the ingredients for his soup. You finally get 200 chickens.

You start to collect loot, and you get 100 chicken feathers that fill every slot in the inventory. They are useless, and you can’t stack them, but still worth 1 gold each. So you can’t get the really nice +3 Rainbow Armor that one of the chickens was carrying because you get a “inventory full” message box all over the screen before you can get rid of a few feathers.

While you’re fiddling with this, you don’t notice that chickens spawn all around you and when they do, you go from idle to battle mode. This closes the inventory and you can’t open it again until all the new chickens are dead. You see your new armor slowly disappear while you get all sweaty fighting a bunch of chickens.

So you teleport out to sell all your new feathers. You go to the market in the nearest town, and the NPC says: “No, this is the pig skin market, we don’t deal with chicken feathers here. The chicken market is on the other side of the map.” So you go to the player market, a huge auction database where you spend the next hour filling in forms for each and every one of your feathers because they don’t stack.

Of course chicken feathers should stack! Anything small should stack. Kobold daggers. Wolf claws. Athelas cough drops. Locks of naiad hair. But not Rainbow Armor or Greater Voulges of Impressive Whooshy Noises.

No Loading Progress Bar/Meaningless Loading Progress Bar

This is another one of those Twinkie Denial Conditions that’s perfectly trivial to do right, so why do so many games do it wrong? From a correspondent named Will:

You get to an area that, unbeknownst to you, is a level boundary, and the game pauses with the legend: “LOADING.” No progress bar, not even an animation to tell you that the game is still doing something, and therefore, hasn’t frozen. The Half-Life series, as much as I love it otherwise, has this problem throughout and it irritates me no end — especially since one of the other hallmarks of the series is strange bugginess and intermittent lockups.

Another variant that messes up in the opposite direction is the meaningless progress bar. A game goes to a loading screen, and shows you a progress bar that fills fairly rapidly. If you’re like me, you’re thinking “Yay, short loading screen!” Then, the progress bar resets and starts filling again… and again… and again… and again.

Internet Explorer serves as another good example of the meaningless progress bar. Giant Internet Explorer’s little circle goes ’round and ’round, telling me nothing. Yet the tiny, free xScope browser for my Android phone includes a progress bar that shows me how much of the page has loaded. It’s invaluable.

Both of these errors are bad, but the lack of any loading bar is the worse of the two because you can’t tell if the machine is frozen or not. Put in a progress bar that fills up, once, until the load process is complete. It doesn’t have to be perfect; if you load 2 files and one of them is 10KB and one is 10MB, but you allocate half the bar to the first one and half the bar to the second, that’s tolerable. We don’t really care as long as we can see movement.

Unreadable Subtitles

Back on the subject of text again, Shairi Turner writes, “I can’t stand when the subtitles are unreadable. I’ve run into games where the subtitles are too small or the colors fade into the background. Sometimes it’s just a good idea to have a text box at the bottom of the screen.”

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! VII already talked about games that lack subtitles and unworkable interface elements such as green crosshairs that disappear into the background when using green night-vision goggles.

This is a variant of the same problem. Subtitles need to have high enough contrast with the background — whatever it may be — to be readable at all times. Television does this with white subtitles, counting on the bottom area of a shot to be darker than the center (as it usually is).

In the past I’ve suggested using multicolored subtitles to identify individual speakers, which we need because unlike TV, in many of our games you can’t see the characters’ lips move. To make sure these don’t ever blend in to the background, surround each letter with a black line and use dramatic colors like yellow or magenta. The Monkey Island games did this perfectly.

As for subtitles that are too small, this is a total violation of the rules about accessibility. Bad game designer! No twinkie! Unless the text is built into the artwork (bad for localization), it should be user-scalable — especially subtitles, which float on top of the image and don’t have to fit into a menu.

Conclusion

I’m not hearing many complaints about social media and casual games. Being simple, multiplayer, and often storyless, social media games may not have the problems with AI or conceptual non sequiturs that we so often see in role-playing and strategy games. Or it may be that my readership just doesn’t play them enough to get mad about them. Anyway, if you’ve got a gripe — about any kind of video game — let me know at notwinkie@designersnotebook.com. See you next year! (Source: Gamasutra)