作者：Patrick Miler

CCP Online高级游戏设计师Matthew Woodward表示，完全围绕手动内容制作MMO游戏是一大失策。他在GDC Online大会上提到：“试图成为下一款《魔兽世界》并不可行。因为它的游戏内容制作成本十分昂贵。”

Woodward在题为《The Other White Meat: Design Architecture for Sandbox Games》的演讲中解释了CCP制作《EVE Online》这款引人注目的MMO沙盒游戏所依据的三个核心理念——这也是他们能够吸引玩家投入数十年的时间，而且不用担心会失去用户的原因。

Eve Online(from goodread.hubpages.com)

“社交”并不局限于Facebook元素

Woodward指出：“人人都知道社交十分重要，但我用了5年的时间才真正体会它的重要性。社交不单涉及朋友。社交是指你同其他人每次所做的所有事情，它突显出角色是个人物，不是NPC。我们希望尽可能围绕这一元素制作游戏。”

Woodward同时解释了为何制作鼓励人们进行社交互动的游戏存在一定弊端。他表示：“如果你推动用户以团队形式体验游戏，那通常会产生反效果。它通常不会实现你所期望的价值。当你打算把好友引入一款你已经玩了6个月的游戏中，这样可行吗？在《EVE》中，我们的能力曲线十分稳定——比如，它的第一天或第一周能力曲线仍然适用于已经玩了5年的铁杆玩家。而在传统MMO游戏中，如果我已玩了一个周末，而你没有，那我们可能就无法一起玩游戏。”

Woodwrad指出，最主流的MMO游戏的一大社交弊病就是公会模式：“传统公会模式的效果十分糟糕，《EVE Online》同样如此。我认为这源于游戏假设每个玩家只有一个朋友圈。但那并不能反映人们互动与体验游戏的实际方式。”

据其所称，即使游戏鼓励社交行为，如果它可能干扰最佳操作方式，玩家也会自然忽视这些部分。他表示：“大部分情况下，外在的刺激因素可以优化游戏的社交元素。但如果我专注于加快提升数值，我可能就没空跟你说话了。”

低强度的活动也能够以一些额外内容或游戏元素奖励玩家，比如《EVE Online》的采矿模式也能够以其他方式鼓励社交行为：“采矿是项乏味工作；但同好友喝着啤酒进行采矿则充满乐趣，因为你可以坐在那，不做任何事，享受着乐趣。”

给予玩家长期目标

Woodward表示：“我们希望目标具有长期性，因为我们打算提升留存率。同时，这也可以消除玩家的心理疙瘩——如果你因用3个小时完成需要6个月的目标而失败，玩家对此感觉更加合理，因为相对目标而言，他们并未投入大量精力。”

同样，提供玩家一些长久目标能够更久地留住他们，但通向这些目标的途径需精心设计，否则会适得其反。Woodward指出：“我们需避免陷入死胡同。如果玩家发现他们需要搁置工作，那他们会决定休息片刻，而这就可能转变为长期离开游戏。”

自发性玩法成本低廉

开发者无法快速构造出游戏内容来留存玩家，并且如果你制作的是一款基于订阅模式的游戏，这种方法也并不适用。Woodward表示：“自发性玩法的廉价成本是一大优势。许多自发性玩法关注的是‘重要时刻’，比如在《EVE》中发生于6年前的大型抢劫活动，《Ultima Online》中涉及暗杀大不列颠国王的事件。它们的出色之处在于让玩家身临其境，而它的最大优势在于可以轻易地留存玩家。”

当然，《EVE Online》中精心构造的PvP设计是长期吸引玩家的核心之处。Woodward解释道：“这样，玩家的每个动作都会影响游戏世界的状况——最好可对他人产生消极影响。这样，玩家会回归游戏。游戏世界会充斥大量持续回应他人的玩家，游戏世界也会因其他玩家的行动而不断演变。”

“如果你能出色地实施这个元素，人们将会永久地体验你的游戏。他们愿意永远为它付费。”（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）

CCP Online’s three design pillars for sandbox MMOs

By Patrick Miller

For CCP Online senior game designer Matthew Woodward, building MMOs solely around hand-crafted content is a losing strategy. “Trying to be the next World of Warcraft doesn’t work,” Woodward said during at GDC Online, “Content is expensive.”

Woodward’s talk, “The Other White Meat: Design Architecture for Sandbox Games”, explained the three pillars that CCP relied on to make EVE Online into a compelling sandbox MMO — and thereby keep players coming back to play for years without having to worry about them running out of things to do.

“Social” not just Facebook

“Everyone knows the social aspect is important, but it’s taken me five years to actually find out how important it is,” Woodward said. “Social is not just about friends. Social is everything to do with other people, every time it matters that a character is a person, not an NPC. We want to hit this as much as possible, we want our game to be about this.”

Woodward explained how designing a game to encourage socializing had certain pitfalls, as well. “If you push people into playing in groups, that will often backfire. It doesn’t always deliver the value you’re hoping for,” Woodward said. “And what happens when you try and get a friend into your game and you’ve been playing for six months? “In EVE, our power curve is really flat — you can still be useful to a five-year veteran player on day one or week one. In traditional MMOs, if I play over a weekend and you don’t, we can never ever play together again.”

One cardinal social sin Woodward pointed out in most major MMOs was the guild model: “The traditional guild model is done horrendously badly — and EVE Online does this too. In my opinion, because it assumes that each player has only one circle of friends. That does not reflect how people actually socialize and play a game.”

Woodward also made sure to point out that even if your game encourages socializing, players will naturally ignore those aspects if it interferes with the most optimal grinding methods possible. “In a lot of cases, extrinsic motivators optimize social aspects out of the game,” Woodward said, “If I want my numbers to go up as fast as possible, I’m not going to talk to you.”

Low-impact activities that also reward players with buffs or other in-game elements, like EVE Online’s mining aspect, can encourage socializing in other ways: “Mining is boring; mining with friends and beer is fun because you can sit there and do nothing and have fun.”

Goal-driven players good for business

“We want our goals to be long-term for grubby business reasons — we want to drive retention,” Woodward said, “This also smooths over bumps — if you have a setback of three hours’ work in a goal of six months, players are more reasonable about that because it’s less work relative to the goal.”

Giving players something to aim for over the long haul can keep them around longer, but if the paths to those goals need to be carefully designed or they’ll have the opposite effect. “Avoid dead ends,” Woodward said, “If the players find out they have to throw away work, that’s the point at which they decide to take a short break, which turns into a long break.”

Emergent gameplay is cheap

Developers simply can’t build game content fast enough to keep players in their games — and when you make a game based on a subscription model, that just won’t work. “The big win is that emergence is cheap,” Woodward said, “A lot of emergent gameplay discussion is about the One Big Moment. in EVE, the big heist that happened six years ago, in Ultima Online, the assassination of Lord British. They’re great because they make players feel like that could be them, but the big win of emergence is that it lets us keep players cheaply.”

Of course, EVE’s meticulously-tuned PvP design is central to its long-lasting appeal. “Make it so that every action a player takes affects the world state — preferably in a negative way for someone else,” Woodward explained. “That gets them to push back. That gives you a world where everyone is constantly pushing against everyone else, and you get a world that is in constant flux because of other players.”

“If you do this well, people will play your game forever. People will pay for it forever.”(source:gamasutra)