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阐述《质量效应3》存在的2%消极元素

发布时间:2012-06-06 15:07:19 Tags:,,,

作者:Moses Wolfenstein

《质量效应3》的确拥有许多优秀的元素。我认为这款游戏中几乎有98%的内容都是相当出色的。并且我也不认为《质量效应3》的结尾破坏了整个游戏系列。我仍然在玩这款多人游戏,当我拥有足够的时间时我甚至还会想着重新挑战剩下的内容,并挖掘出游戏中真正重要的元素。

关于这款游戏的积极评价已经很多了,所以我并不打算再次重复这些内容——但我将通过本文详细阐述《质量效应3》的消极面。我将侧重于分析这款游戏中糟糕的设计或编写内容,以及那些可能影响玩家游戏体验的丑陋设计界面。

我们已经听过许多关于《质量效应3》的讨论,特别是针对于它的结尾。而我也想从设计和编写角度去传达我对于这一游戏结尾的想法,不过在此之前我想先说说游戏中一些遭遇失败并有待完善的设计和开发元素。如果我们忽视了这些元素,那么再完善的结尾也终究拯救不了这款游戏,并且不得不担忧EA未来的游戏发展前景。

从纯技术角度来看,最糟糕的设计或开发元素当属失败的角色脸部导入。尽管这并不会破坏玩家的游戏体验,但是我们却不得不在游戏开始后的前30分钟一直面对着Shepard的脸部。我一直在努力重塑我的Shepard,但是当她进入了游戏世界,便会出现各种摄像镜头呈现出一个错误定位的Shepard。

质量效应3(from pcworld.com)

质量效应3(from pcworld.com)

很大程度上,我的重新设计与Shepard在游戏世界中的朝向问题都是因为角色构建的屏幕过暗所造成的,这导致我们很难真正看清角色的容貌。同时在游戏设置中还有早期的人物较亮以及强调各种突出特性之说。如此便导致了开发的失败(即角色外貌导入方面)以及夸张化的设计选择(灯光较暗)而大大影响了玩家在一开始的游戏体验。

我认为我们在此最需要做的便是完善角色的灯光照明,即设计师将根据游戏过程中所出现的不同灯光去调整这一设计。尽管设置较暗的屏幕更加符合游戏的背景环境,但是设计师还需要认真考虑到灯光对于之后游戏发展的影响,从而做出最正确的设计决策。理论上来看,这一漏洞已经在4月份时得到了完善——尽管我从未想过重新导入角色的外形。但是不得不承认的是,最终是Jennifer Hale(游戏邦注:加拿大著名的女配音员)动人的声音表演弥补了这款游戏的缺陷,不管怎么说她的声音都比我所创造的角色外表更具有特色,且更加吸引人。

当然了,脸部导入并不是《质量效应3》所存在的唯一漏洞。游戏中还存在一些难以忽视的小毛病,并且让我们假设这些漏洞最终都会得以修改(事实上有些漏洞已经得到了完善)。当说到一般的游戏设计问题时(也就是不会彻底摧毁游戏但是却是游戏中难以忽视的基本问题)我们便不得不提到存在于Cerberus在面对Eden Prime的Resistance Movement任务时而遇到的一个核心设计问题。这里所存在的真正漏洞并不只是关于玩家最初到达Eden Prime而不能收集intel的问题,还包括这一任务将持续停留在任务记录中,并且系统也将始终突出星系地图直至游戏最后——尽管这时候玩家已经无事可做了。

我们还需要注意的是,BioWare还设置了其它任务,让玩家即使未收集齐道具也能够完成这些任务,同时也能够在一个重要的星球上执行一个优先的任务或其它支线任务。在我看来,《质量效应3》之所以会出现这些漏洞是因为设计师并不希望游戏中出现任何失败的单一任务。玩家可以在任务中失败并死亡,也可以战胜或妥协于任何一个支线任务,但是他们却不会因此遭受到真正的失败。当然了玩家在Eden Prime中的支线任务可能有所不同,但这也只能表明游戏并不希望玩家在此真正失败。

Mass-Effect-3(from nag.co.za)

Mass-Effect-3(from nag.co.za)

尽管从理论上来说,出现这些漏洞主要是因为Eden Prime任务属于可下载内容,但同时这也牵扯到了游戏中的一个主要的技术败笔:任务记录簿。如果没记错的话,任务物记录簿问题应该存在于所有《质量效应》系列游戏中。任务记录簿所存在的问题主要是它将负载着所有的任务列表。这就意味着当玩家走到游戏最后时,如果他们想了解自己所完成的任务就必须向上滚动一长列未完成的任务内容。这对于那些需要频繁引用任务的玩家来说便是非常不合理的设置。虽然这并不是一种蓄意的设计选择,但是它却成为了游戏开发的败笔——因为它始终贯穿于这一系列游戏的始终。

关于任务记录簿的另外一个主要问题便是在星系地图上通过导航而获得任务信息。如此设计也是非常荒唐,因为这将强迫玩家为了获得任何信息而必须来回地在地图上进行导航。

在这个理智的游戏世界中,玩家将通过导航才能在屏幕上看到相关的任务信息。而这与滚动问题其实是一个道理,即这也是我们需要马上调整的早期游戏设计问题,否则将会影响玩家的游戏体验。我们可以通过两种方法去完善这一问题:1)让玩家能够在星系地图上进行点击而导航至自己所需要的内容中;2)在星系地图上填充更多关于活跃任务的信息。

我想方法1更加难以实现吧,而尽管方法2要求我们必须设计出一个优秀的UI以保持界面的整洁,但是它却能够有效提供大量信息而帮助玩家做出合适的导航决策。从用户体验立场来看,任务记录簿问题便在于它将会浪费玩家的时间,促使他们毫无必要地点击屏幕。而这不仅会破坏玩家的游戏体验,同时还会强迫他们必须投入至少20个小时才能彻底完成游戏。

尽管星系地图和任务记录簿问题真的很让人头疼,但是比起作战室终端来说,这还只是小巫见大巫(后者甚至将严重影响用户体验)。不可否认的是,当我第一次看到作战室终端时我真的非常兴奋。这真的是一个非常棒的界面,我甚至认为“在游戏中的某一时刻下这些不同的系统状态将发生改变,而我将根据自己所完成的任务而接触各种出色的功能(也许是一些特别的任务或内容)”。这便是我第一次看到这一界面时的感受。

但实际上作战室终端却存在着三个问题,其中有两个问题牵扯到了用户体验,而第三个问题更是涉及到我所认为的“不道德”设计。首先,事实证明不论我们如何完善银河系备战状态,我们都不可能改变地图上的分块。最终这种不可用的状态信息将不能传达给我们任何内容,因为信息所揭露的的内容只是关于系统的一般描述,而未涉及任何战略性元素。

这与我尝试着去推动多人玩家竞赛的行动其实是一致的。总的来说这也意味着游戏界面在向我们承诺着一些游戏根本不可能办到的事:1)独特的行动将影响着界面所呈现的不同分块,2)而对于这些区块的划分也将影响着游戏的实际进展。虽然第2点较为模糊,但是这却明确预示着,当准备状态到达50%时呈现于我们面前的信息将非常少。除此之外,考虑到玩家对该游戏结局选择问题的抱怨,第2点同样并非可行的解决方案。

因为涉及到终端问题(是游戏不透明度的表现)的设计败笔,这两个问题将变得更加复杂。在单人游戏中这便不是问题的所在,因为游戏将明确地告诉你如何在银河系备战状态下移动转盘。也许我错过了一些辅助文件,但是只要游戏中的信息是呈现在地图上或者抄本上,游戏中的内容便具有不透明性。

当我第一次向我的好友和兄弟提起这一问题时,他们都建议我去玩玩多人游戏从而更好地优化我自己的游戏结果,最终我发现玩多人游戏或者iOS应用是帮助我完善银河系备战状态的唯一方法。通过使用这一方法我便能够在一分钟内找到问题所在,但是从用户体验角度来说,我仍然需要给予玩家一个选择,并且不应该强迫他们离开游戏系统,帮助他们更好地理解系统的运作。撇开道德问题来说,这只是一个糟糕的设计。当然我们也不能完全忽视道德问题,这也是我为何在文章最后再次提起这一点的原因。

尽管我还不是很满意《质量效应3》中的某些其它游戏玩法(游戏邦注:如按压A按钮执行所有行动!)以及关卡设计(如Tuchanka中该死的reaper),但是事实上这些问题并不算致命。这些问题可能只是我这种玩家的喜好不同,或者说是我所犯错误的结果,而其它人可能根本就不会有同种疑问。(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

2% failure in user experience

by Moses Wolfenstein

There’s a lot of good in Mass Effect 3. In fact, as others have argued I’d say the game is really roughly 98% good. In addition, unlike some folks out there I don’t think that the ending of ME3 ruined the whole Mass Effect series. I do believe that it casts an indelible shadow across it that slightly diminishes it as a whole, but there’s a big difference between that and saying that it’s ruined as I honestly I don’t think it even ruined the rest of the game let alone the series. I mean heck, I’m still playing the multiplayer and plan on replaying the rest when I have the time so that surely counts for something.

That said, I’m not going to write much about the good in Mass Effect 3 in this post, because honestly I don’t have too much to say about it that hasn’t been covered in the more glowing reviews. Instead I’m going to focus primarily on the parts of Mass Effect 3 that I consider to be badly designed or badly written, as well as those elements that I consider to be ugly game design in that they may be effectively designed but they still do a disservice to Mass Effect players.

Many words have already been spilled on the topic of Mass Effect 3, most of them focusing on its ending. I have a few thoughts on the ending as well from both a design and writing perspective, but before we even get to that there are a handful of design and development elements in the game that fail in one way or another and are worth addressing. These are mostly things that would have marred the game moderately even if the ending had been different/better in some way (bad design), and the part that makes me fundamentally worried about any games coming out of any EA development houses in the future (ugly design).

Undoubtedly the most egregious of the bad design or development failures from a sheerly technical standpoint is the character face import failure. While it didn’t ultimately diminish my experience with Mass Effect 3 that much over the course of the game, it was absolutely jarring for the first 30 minutes or so of gameplay in which we see Shepard’s face quite a bit. I did my best to reconstruct my Shepard, but once she was out in the world there were a number of camera angles where she just looked wrong.

In large part the disjunct between my redesign attempt and how my Shepard looked out in the world owed to the fact that the lighting on the character construction screen was pretty dark making it hard to see just what some of the character’s features really looked like. Meanwhile, there are many settings in the game including the early ones that are brightly lit, and any protruding feature becomes magnified. The combined result was a development failure (import) and a design choice (dark lighting) that magnified each other in diminishing the quality of my experience as a player the moment I started the game.

I think the key design take away here is that improving the lighting in the character designer would have been a good design move in general based on the variations in lighting that occur over the course of the game. While it may have been nice artistically to have that screen be a little darker to stick with the mood of the game, it has serious usability consequences that have aesthetic consequences over the rest of the game, hence those concerns should’ve lead that design decision. In theory the bug was fixed in April, although I haven’t tried a re-import as there’s no real point in doing so currently. Ultimately, I’ll say that fortunately this issue was greatly offset for me by Jennifer Hale’s excellent voice acting, as her voice is in many ways a more defining feature for Shepard than my character’s appearance.

Of course, the face import wasn’t the only problematic bug in Mass Effect 3. Most of the other ones are small things and I assume all of them will be fixed eventually (some of them probably have been already). Still, I do have to mention one other bug since it touches on a general game design problem that certainly didn’t kill the game by any measure but is fundamentally problematic in some ways. Specifically the bug on the Cerberus intel for the Eden Prime: Resistance Movement mission highlights a core design dillema in the series. The actual bug involves the mission not only being incompletable if the player fails to gather the intel when they’re initially on Eden Prime, but the mission continuing to stay highlighted in the mission log and the system remaining highlighted on the galaxy map up to the end of the game even though there’s nothing the player can do there.

Note that with other side missions BioWare made it possible to complete these missions even if you failed to collect items while on the relevant planet for a priority mission or other side mission. From my perspective, the problem this bug bug highlights seems to represent Mass Effect 3′s designers reluctance to allow for the appearance of individual mission failures in the game. Players can fail a mission and die, but side missions are either completed or not, but never actually failed. It’s possible the Eden Prime side mission was supposed to be different, but if so this just highlights the manner in which the norm for the game involves not allowing the player to fail.

While there are certainly development reasons for the bug that could in theory be tied to the fact that the main Eden Prime mission is DLC, it still touches on the second fairly major technical failure in the game: the mission log. As far as I can remember the mission log has been an issue in all of the Mass Effect games. The problem (which you’re well familiar with if you’ve played the game) is that the mission log loads to the center of the list of all missions. This means that especially late in the game you have to scroll up a long list of completed missions in order to get to your active missions. Given that it’s not unreasonable for players to reference missions with some frequency (why have a log if that isn’t the case?) I’m going to assume that this wasn’t an intentional design choice. This just makes it a really unfortunate failure of development (or perhaps design through neglect?) since it’s been a persistent issue across titles.

The other major problem with the mission log involves access to mission information while charting navigation on the galaxy map. It’s frankly ridiculous that a player has to navigate all the way back out of the map in order to get access to any kind of information about the missions beyond their general location.

In a sane and sensible world, the player would be able to see mission information displayed on the same screen where they perform navigation. As with the scrolling issue, this was a user experience design problem in the previous game as well that really should have been rectified. It could have been fixed one of two ways: 1) Make it possible to navigate to the codex with one click from the galaxy map or 2) Populate the galaxy map with a little bit more information about active missions.

I’m guessing that 1 would’ve been harder to do, while 2 would have required some good UI design to keep it clean but carry the right amount of information to help players make navigational decisions. The bottom line with all of the mission log issues from a UX standpoint is that you’re wasting the user’s time and making them needlessly click through screens. This detracts from the gameplay experience, and it’s particularly unpalatable in a game that takes at least 20 hours to get through and upwards of 40 for a completionist like myself.

While the galaxy map/mission log issue is annoying, it’s not quite as severe a user experience failure as the war room terminal is. The first time I saw the war room terminal I was tremendously excited by it. It’s just such a cool looking interface and I figured, “Okay, the reapers have just attacked, but at some point in the game these various system statuses will change and I’ll have access to some kind of cool features (maybe special missions and things) based on which systems are available after I do things in the game.” I mean, that seemed like a totally reasonable interpretation of the interface as it’s first presented.

The problem with the war room terminal is actually three fold. Two of the issues involve user experience, and the third involves the part that I think is fundamentally unethical design. First there’s the fact that no matter how much you improve galactic readiness absolutely nothing changes in terms of what you can do on the map in the different sectors. The status unavailable message ultimately conveys nothing since the information revealed when a system is available is simply a general description of that system with no strategic relevance.

This is closely coupled with the fact that most of the activities I’ve done to push that meter up (multiplayer matches) act globally with very few of them affecting specific sectors. Taken as a whole this means that the interface promises something that the game never actually delivers: 1) That unique actions will have a meaningful effect on what that interface tells you about the different sectors and 2) That there’s some way in which preparing those sectors impacts actual progression of the game in a meaningful way. Point 2 is a little hazier, but it’s strongly implied by the message telling you that more information is not available when readiness is at 50%. Furthermore, given the very real complaints about meaningful choices that have plagued Mass Effect in light of the ending/s, point 2 actually carries the horrible burden of undesigned potential as well (more on that in a bit).

These two issues are further complicated by the single greatest design failure in relation to the terminal which is its fundamental opacity. There is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, in the single player game that tells you anything at all about how to move the dial on galactic readiness. There may have been some piece of supporting documentation that I missed somewhere, but as far as information in the game either on the map itself or in the codex, the thing is fundamentally opaque.

It was only after I spoke first to a friend and then to my brother and they mentioned that you had to play the multiplayer in order to optimize your outcome on the game that I went online to discover that playing the multiplayer or the iOS app were the only ways to improve galactic readiness. I’ll get to my issues with that in a minute, but the key thing from a user experience standpoint is that given the choice, you should never force the user outside of your system in order for them to understand how some aspect of the system works. Ethical issues aside, that’s simply bad design. Of course, we can’t put the ethical issues aside entirely which is why I’ll be returning to this topic at the end of this post.

While I have a variety of complaints with other various elements of game play (Press A for All Action!) and level design (that damn reaper on Tuchanka) in Mass Effect 3, they’re all ultimately pretty insubstantial issues. Some of them are likely tied to my preferences as a player or the results of idiosyncratic errors I made that most people never encountered. Others are more common subjects of complaint. All of them are the types of critiques I generally write off in games, and the proportion of them was remarkably low in Mass Effect 3 anyway.(source:GAMASUTRA)


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