作者：Leigh Alexander

如今的Zynga正遭遇着史上最大的困境：用户数量急剧下降，股价狂跌，并且对于Facebook的过分依赖也变成不可忽视的大问题。除此之外他们在社交游戏领域的最大竞争对手EA也向其发起了侵权控诉，而媒体也总是对他们的运营和管理方式抱有成见。

FarmVille 2(from gamasutra)

如今的Zynga迫切需要一些全新的理念，但是它却即将推出一款玩家不再感兴趣的游戏的延伸——《FarmVille 2》，这真是一个让人困惑的举动。为了弥补用户所认知的质量问题并进一步扩展用户群体，该公司需要创新，即使用一些新理念去抵制盈利导向型模式对于用户基础发展的不利影响。而这款新的《FarmVille》又能为该公司做些什么呢？

在Wright Bagwell（游戏邦注：他是原EA创意总监）的帮助下，Zynga表现出了自己想要解决游戏组合元素阻挡资深玩家和长期玩家进入游戏这一问题的决心。

遇见《FarmVille 2》设计总监

Zynga经常会聘请那些来自传统领域的设计师们，即那些热衷于挖掘社交游戏潜力并希望挑战各种错误理念的设计师。如今，Zynga的“Ville”建造团队中已经汇聚了许多优秀的人才，而该公司为Bagwell所打的招牌——“《死亡空间2》创意总监的华丽变身！”更是推动着我们进一步关注这些能人。

让我们进一步认识Bagwell。他是在2011年2月加入Zynga，在此之前他已经在Redwood Shores（游戏邦注：也就是后来的Visceral Games）工作室待了11年，并与我们所熟悉的许多人具有相同的经历：作为一个成年人他在白天并没有足够的时间去玩游戏，所以便逐渐沉迷于那些无需花太多时间的游戏，并希望社交游戏能够让他回想起孩童时期所感受到的乐趣。

过去几年，随着Facebook游戏的崛起以及Zynga屹立在这股潮流的最前端，开发者社区掀起了一种强烈的身份认知意识，让我们很难再相信有文化的设计师会说自己被Zynga的小团队或创造性文化所吸引这种话。就像Bagwell便直白地说出自己是因为Zynga的“活跃性”与“高曝光率”才加入这家公司。

但是他却不是在否认文化战争的存在以及那些还待在传统开发领域的同事对自己这种转变的看法：“我当然知道文化战争的存在，我也清楚那些人为何不希望做出改变。但是我自己却真心愿意这么做，只因为我相信自己的选择。我并不关心游戏圈中的朋友们会怎么想，我真正关心的是自己选择的是否是条有趣的道路。”

FV2_Animals(from gamasutra)

我们是否真的需要《FarmVille 2》？

尽管《FarmVille 2》的开发团队不同于《FarmVille》，但Zynga极力宣称仍将向原版游戏投入同样的精力和资源——Bagwell进入Zynga的第一份工作便是熟悉《FarmVille》，了解该款游戏的系统，从而进一步明确该公司想要通过赋予这款最初品牌哪些新元素而达成何种目标。对于主机游戏开发者来说，最大的转变在于从盒装产品向实际操作的心态转变，Bagwell也表示这种逼真的理念也是激励自己不断前进的主要动力。

为什么需要为《FarmVille》再出一个续集？Bagwell说道：“这个问题问得好！我们知道有许多玩家喜欢《FarmVille》，所以我们便想着是否能够提供给这些玩家全新的农场体验。我们拥有许多能够创造出一个全新农场游戏的想法，并且我们也清楚不能只是基于《FarmVille》进行游改造。”

根据Bagwell，我们知道最好的方法便是创造一种全新的农场体验，即让后续游戏能够成为《FarmVille》的替代选择。但同时他们也面临着一大挑战：Zynga是基于不同游戏去发展其用户基础，即通过提供不同产品而确保认知标准——从命名规范到视觉效果再到基本的游戏玩法。而添加一个还叫《FarmVille》，但却完全不同的新产品到原先的游戏组合中则为该公司自己设下了一个复杂的问题：当你不不清楚自己到底能够改变什么时你又该如何重新创造游戏内容？

Bagwell承认：“这是一个巨大的挑战。但是我们从游戏产业中学到的一点是，尝试新内容虽然具有各种风险，但同时也是一种有趣的挑战：我们该如何利用新理念，让玩家快速理解这些理念并从中感受到乐趣？”

减少压力和摩擦

在深入分析Zynga游戏所面临的最具挑战的设计元素时，我们指出传统的城镇类Facebook游戏主要依靠于大量受奖励驱动的玩家，即通过提供各种基于奖励的游戏体验而让他们上瘾——甚至要求他们必须发送并接收各种游戏告示才有可能完成游戏。

游戏（更确切地说应该是“社交”游戏）中所存在的另一大问题便是开发者不再关心玩家对于反社交行为的抵触（游戏邦注：如垃圾邮件或收件箱中过多游戏邀请），而只是一味地要求玩家为游戏掏钱。无数未完成的任务清单，无序，噪杂的游戏界面以及大量无意义的垃圾邮件都将带给玩家一种压力满满的体验，但是游戏却让玩家能够通过进行微交易去缓解这种压力。最终玩家将只能沉浸在一些自己并不满意的体验中，并不知不觉地充当起Zynga的广告和盈利工具。

从《FarmVille 2》的演示版本来看，这款游戏将能够缓解这种压力与摩擦——这也是Bagwell及其团队一开始便设定好的主要目标。在一条长长的泥土路上座落着一间小房子，房子四周围绕着尖桩篱栅，随着微风，被洗得干干净净的床单在晒衣绳上轻轻地摇摆着，田野里琥珀色的庄稼也如波浪般徐徐拂动，整个场景让玩家心中不禁飘起淡淡的乡愁感。

Bagwell说道：“……我们一直在思考着如何重新塑造玩家对这些能够帮助他们放松心情的游戏的看法。”

当提到创造取代传统物品收集和对象点击等吸引玩家的方式时，他继续补充道：“一开始我便萌生了一个想法，即必须确保游戏仍能够提供给玩家一天中最美好的10分钟。而不应该通过各种方法去强迫玩家进入这种体验。”

呈现出实际的社交性

Bagwell不只是想创造出一种安详和谐的游戏氛围，即使用愉悦的背景音效而不是Zynga其它游戏中那种刺耳的金属音乐。他同时也希望游戏能够呈现出一种生命力，真正去触动玩家的心灵。他说道：“游戏内容必须足够有趣，能够直击玩家内心深处。”

他同样也希望能够解决其它游戏的访问机制中所存在的“肤浅性”，即玩家与好友间的互动并不能真正影响游戏玩法。也就是不管玩家是否拥有游戏所要求的道具数量都可以与好友交换礼物，这就意味着“帮助”好友只是在用户界面上点击“接受”这样简单。

FV2_Social_Farm-Helpers(from gamasutra)

而在《FarmVille 2》中，玩家作为农场帮手可以采用更实际的方法去影响好友所控制的角色，即他们能够决定好友的工作并为其分配工作量。正是意识到基于收件箱交换礼物的不合理性，Bagwell才希望玩家能够在真正的游戏场景中进行更多社交互动。

Bagwell解释道：“我们希望玩家能够在游戏中获得一种特别的情感反应。我们希望玩家也能和我们一样在游戏中感受到真正的乐趣。即我们通过使用各种颜色和图像而带给他们轻松愉悦的心情，让他们能够在此完完全全得到放松。”

不再有能量系统

也许最受争议的改变要属《FarmVille 2》删掉了Zynga在Facebook平台上所建立的产业标准，即能量系统。基于能量系统，玩家必须为自己所执行的每个行动付出代价，这就大大限制了玩家一天中能够执行的行动，并因此成为了玩家对社交游戏感到厌烦的一大因素。

而在《FarmVille 2》中，玩家在一天内可以尽情执行各种行动，包括种植庄稼，饲养动物，加工制作，收集水资源等。这便能让玩家可以不再纠结于互动受限而能够更认真地规划自己的目标（即如何建设自己的农场）。

使用自己通过销售庄稼和道具而获得的货币（游戏邦注：货币不再是玩家行动的奖励，而是玩家农场收获的报酬），玩家可以为自己的农场添加更多水井，从而提高农场的供给。

Bagwell将删除游戏中一定的惩罚——即强迫玩家必须经常回到游戏中，否则他们的动物和庄稼便会遭遇各种损失。如遭受玩家忽视的牲畜虽然不能再生产作物，但却不会因此一蹶不起。

这些牲畜虽然不能再供给肉类，但是奶牛却能提供牛奶，羊能够提供羊毛，而马能够供给马蹄。而因为动物的饲料是源自玩家所获得的农产品,这便无形中形成了一个完整的生态圈——而不再只是玩家反复点击道具列表那样简单。

提供更多生态系统，避免过分压制

为了避免玩家被无尽的任务清单压得喘不来气，Bagwell决定提供给玩家一种引导性游戏玩法。每一天，村庄的杂货店都会向农场下订单——主要基于玩家所执行的任务以及他们所生产的产品，从而避免玩家因为自己一开始未能生产客人所需产品而感到沮丧。除此之外，杂货店每一次下订单时也都会提供给玩家一定的选择，让他们能够自己选择每天将要面对的挑战级别。

Bagwell还说道，《FarmVille 2》将通过提供给玩家各种任务而教授他们如何应对游戏中的新内容（Zynga知道用户喜欢实现目标并感受到“胜利”的喜悦），所以游戏每次提供给玩家的任务数量将被限制在一定范围内。

FV2_Farm-Horizon(from gamaustra)

他表示：“我明确了基本理念并说道：‘我们并不会使用无数任务去压制玩家’。我希望玩家在游戏中能够感受到自己拥有明确的方向——让他们真心喜欢任务，并能够感受到游戏乐趣。我们希望玩家能轻松地玩游戏，所以我们便需要提供给他们各种有价值的内容。”

Bagwell陈述道：“我们一直在努力创造出最优秀的城镇类游戏，然后根据玩家的反馈去解决游戏中存在的各种问题。”

得益于Flash 11，《FarmVille 2》能够带给广大Zynga玩家一种全新的控制体验：即能够右击游戏，让整个游戏界面的控制显得更加灵活且直观。

即使意识到早前游戏组合带给玩家的各种压力以及玩家不再喜欢游戏的各种原因，并视图通过《FarmVille 2》去解决这些问题，Zynga仍旧因为侧重参数而忽视玩家体验的质量遭到各种质疑。而Bagwell则表示，玩家体验是他整个职业生涯中最看重的一大元素。

Zynga表示计划在今后几周展开《FarmVille 2》的市场营销活动，尽管这款游戏现在只推出英语版本，但是他们也表示最终将会出现16种语言的《FarmVille 2》。《FarmVille 2》的应用页面也已经设置妥当了。

Bagwell最后说道：“我的言论不足以代表整个Zynga，但是我们的确都在执行一些战略性任务。我热爱游戏设计。我真的非常开心能够加入Zynga并接受这些工作：即创造一款玩家会喜欢的游戏。我希望我所创造的游戏能够始终带给玩家这种奖励感。”

Zynga现在迫切需要实现的目标便是创造出让玩家愿意长期沉浸于其中的游戏。

（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）

Does Zynga really need a FarmVille 2? You bet

By Leigh Alexander

Things couldn’t get much worse for Zynga right now: Its user numbers are contracting and so is its stock, amid concern about its dependency on the Facebook platform. It’s facing an infringement lawsuit from Electronic Arts, its most-muscled rival in the social gaming space it helped pave, and enjoys regular criticism in the press of its business practices and apparent executive philosophies.

Desperately in need of some fresh ideas, that its next big launch is Farmville 2, a sequel to a game it’s hard to conceive of as requiring one, might seem like a baffling move. In order to rectify its perceived quality issues and broaden its audience, the company needs newness, more polish against the brutal monetization-oriented friction that bottlenecks its userbase. What good can another FarmVille do?

Actually, a probable lot, by the looks of things. With the help of Wright Bagwell, yet another EA talent Zynga’s managed to snag in the past couple years, Zynga demonstrates it’s willing to address some of the elements of its game portfolio that would seem to create the most resistance among savvy fans and long-term players alike.

Meet the design director

Zynga has a history of grabbing up designers from the traditional space, most of whom enthuse at some point or another about the potential they see in social games and their hope to challenge misconceptions. To date, though, we’ve seen legions of something-Ville click engines, and especially amid Zynga’s current challenges, the narrative for Bagwell that the company pitched us — “the former Dead Space 2 creative director has made a big transition!” — seemed a bit hard for us to let them get away with.

Bagwell was prepared for the scrutiny, though. It’s true his rationale for joining Zynga in February 2011 after 11 years at the Redwood Shores studio that became Visceral Games is one we hear a lot from folks who’ve taken a similar path: As an adult with less hours in the day he’s increasingly interested in less time-consuming games, and hopes social play will reunite him with what he enjoyed about the pastime as a child himself.

Over the past few years, the rising groundswell of Facebook gaming, with massive Zynga at the head, has created enormous identity conflict in the developer community, and it becomes increasingly hard to believe culturally-aware designers who say they were attracted to Zynga’s small-teams feel or its creative culture. Bagwell himself says he was attracted to the company because he saw it as “feisty” and “with a lot of focus.”

But he isn’t in denial about the culture war and how his move may be regarded by his former colleagues in traditional dev: “I’m certainly aware that it exists, and I do know people who wouldn’t consider making that change,” he says. “I made it gladly and willingly, because I believe in it… I worry a lot less about what my gaming friends think, and I care more about what I really believe is a fun direction.”

Do we really need a FarmVille 2?

Although the FarmVille team exists separately from the FarmVille 2 team and will continue to going forward — Zynga is taking pains to assert it maintains the same level of committment to the original title — Bagwell’s first work at the company involved becoming entrenched with FarmVille, learning its systems with a lens toward the company’s goal of doing something refreshing with the largest of its inaugural brands. The most obvious transition for a console developer is the psychological shift from boxed product to live operation, and Bagwell said that idea of a living, breathing, always on “place” inspired him.

Why does FarmVille need a sequel, again? “It’s a great question,” says Bagwell. “We knew people loved FarmVille… we wanted to see if we could give people a new kind of farming experience. We had a lot of ideas for ways to make a different, next-generation farming game, and we realized that you couldn’t just take FarmVille and change it up overnight.”

According to Bagwell, the better idea was to develop an entirely new farming experience that acts as something of an alternative to FarmVille. Already, though, there’s a challenge: Zynga cultivates its userbase across its different games by keeping recognizable touchstones across different products, from naming conventions to visual style and gameplay basics. Adding a product to the portfolio that is called FarmVille, and is kind of like FarmVille only not, seems like a complex proposition: How do you reinvent something when you must be extremely careful about what you can change?

“It’s a huge challenge,” Bagwell admits. “But if there’s one thing you learn in the games industry, it’s that trying to do something new is incredibly intimidating and risky and scary, but it’s also one of the most fun challenges: How do we take a new concept and try to make players understand it and have fun with it quickly?”

Reducing stress and friction, finally

In our in-depth analysis of some of the design elements most challenging to the appeal of a Zynga game, we pointed out that traditional ville-style Facebook games tend to work by overwhelming and overstimulating players with early plenitude and getting them addicted to the reward-driven experience of quests that pile up from all directions — even as those quests require an increasingly-meaningless inbox exchange of sending and receiving notifications to complete.

Another problem was that the games, supposedly “social”, instead tend to play on players’ fears of anti-social behavior — like silly wall spam or too many inbox requests — to get them to spend money. The long lists of unfinished quests, the sprawling, noisy, pop-up littered playfields and the meaningless friend-spam often combine to create an incredibly stressful experience, the stress of which can only be alleviated through spending on microtransactions. Ultimately players are addicted to a fundamentally unsatisfying experience in which they unwittingly act as Zynga’s advertising and monetization engines.

From our demo of FarmVille 2, though, it looks like alleviating that stress and friction was one of Bagwell and his team’s key objectives from the get-go. A little house with a picket fence sits gently by a long dirt road, clean linens sway on a clothesline while amber grain waves nod in the breeze in a nostalgic, soothing vision of Americana.

“I can tell you from my perspective what I did with this game was say, hey, I want to build a game that doesn’t fall into those traps,” he says. “We set out to the start to think about ways that we can shake up what people know about these games…These games are about a relaxing break,” Bagwell asserts.

“One of the visions I had from the beginning is that this should always remain something that feels like the best 10 minutes of your day,” he adds, pointing to alternatives to the traditionally-frenetic object collection and item-clicking that makes preceding games obsessively-engaging. “This is not supposed to be something where you lean forward and have to get pumped up.”

Going for actual socialization, at last

Bagwell didn’t just want to make the game board feel peaceful and soothing, with pleasant ambient sound effects rather than the bright, jangly music of other Zynga games (“a lot of people do” mute the music, metrics reveal). He also wanted it to look vital, tactile and alive. “Things should be fun to touch,” he says.

He’s also hoped to address the frustrating superficiality of other games’ visiting mechanic, where the actions you perform on your friends’ properties don’t necessarily come to bear on gameplay in a realistic way. You can exchange gifts whether you possess the requested number of items or not, meaning “helping” your friends means little more than clicking “accept” in a user interface.

In FarmVille 2, players can implement their friends’ avatars as farm helpers in a much more realistic way, allowing players to direct their friend’s labor and distribute the workload. Conscious of the mindless rote of the inbox-based gift exchange, Bagwell wanted as many of the social interactions to take place on the actual game board as possible.

“We wanted to elicit a very specific kind of emotional feeling in this game,” Bagwell explains passionately. “We wanted players to look at it as this living thing that feels happy to see me, and reacts to my touch… we went for a palette and style of art direction that really makes you want to smile, that feels relaxing and happy and colorful… a more innocent time.”

No more energy system

Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising change is that FarmVille 2 dispenses with the energy system that Zynga helped make industry-standard on Facebook. The energy system, which gives a cost to every action, is a way of limiting the number of actions that players can perform in a day, thereby creating the sort of friction that is central to making social games just unpleasant enough to hook their audiences.

Everything in FarmVille 2, from growing crops to tending animals and crafting, requires water, of which players can only gather so much in a day. That takes the focus off constraining interaction at random and instead encourages players to set goals and plan more conscientiously about what they want to build and achieve on their farm.

With the coins they earn from selling crops and items — no longer are coins bouncing about in response to every action, but are instead logical returns for farm-grown goods — players can add more water wells to their farm, increasing the supply at their disposal.

Bagwell also removed some of the sense of penalty that compels players to check in to their game every so often lest animals or crops suffer and wither. Untended livestock simply won’t produce goods, but they won’t become unhappy, either.

None of them produce meat, either — cows offer milk and sheep wool, while horses produce horseshoes. Animal feed is made from the player’s own produce in another direct correlation aimed at making the FarmVille universe seem like a believable ecosystem, rather than just a clickable item list.

More ecosystem, less overwhelm

And to address the issue of players getting overwhelmed by neverending lists of multi-part quests, Bagwell’s come up with a new way to offer guided gameplay. Each day, a village grocer places an order at the farm — intuitively based on the tasks players are already performing and the items they are already working to grow, to avoid giving players the sense of hopelessness inherent in getting quests based on items they can’t even begin to gather. Furthermore, the player has a few choices at a time of what grocer order to try and fulfill, so they can select their own level of challenge on a daily basis.

And while characters in the FarmVille 2 world will still provide quests geared at teaching players how to do new things in the game — Zynga knows its users love getting objectives and ‘win’ conditions — the number of quests a player can receive at once will be limited, Bagwell says.

“I put a stake in the ground and said, ‘we will not overwhelm you with tasks,’” he says. “I want people to feel like they have enough direction — they love quests… and we want to make sure they remain happy. But we want to feel flexible, so it’s always giving players valuable things to do.”

“We tried to take the best of the -ville games, and then fix the issues we saw were things we heard from our players,” Bagwell states.

Oh, yeah — and thanks to Flash 11, FarmVille 2 will offer a big first for Zynga’s Facebook gamers: The ability to right-click, which makes the controls on the board much more flexible and intuitive.

Realizing what makes its previous portfolio of games stressful and hard to love and actually aiming to fix them on a deep level through FarmVille 2 marks a promising attention to detail for a company often criticized for appearing to care more about metrics than the quality of its players’ experiences. Bagwell says experience is all he’s ever cared about in his career.

The company says it plans to ramp up marketing over the next few weeks. Although its games are usually only available in English, FarmVille 2 will release in 16 languages, Zynga says. An app page for FarmVille 2 is already in place.

“I can’t speak for Zynga as a whole and what we’re doing strategically. I love game design,” he says. “I’m grateful I had the opportunity to come in and do this: Build the game that I really feel like players will fall in love with… I wanted to build a game that continues to feel rewarding over time.”

A game that keeps people engaged over the long term is exactly what Zynga needs right now. (source:GAMASUTRA)