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阐述游戏设计的5大现实谬论之敌人

发布时间:2013-06-08 09:28:58 Tags:,,,,

作者:Josh Bycer

当我们在谈论现实游戏时,敌人作为游戏设计的一个现实谬论深深影响着游戏设计的发展,除了那些独自与整个军队相抗衡的人,没有人能够真正处于“现实情境”中。

很长一段时间以来,电子游戏都让玩家能够单独与士兵,僵尸等等军队相抗衡。大多数情况下没人知道这些军队的规模,敌人只会不断涌现出屏幕上。

而在当代,许多游戏都尝试着通过讲故事去描述一个人如何面对敌军,即除了赢取胜利外他们还具备更好的训练。

在三款《神秘海域》中,Nathan Drake作为考古学家已经杀死了许多人,这也是在战斗中真正的士兵所做的。即使是属于家庭友好型的马里奥,他又在拯救Peach的过程中染上了多少鲜血呢?

另一方面,还有一些游戏的隐藏社团和秘密群组带有足够能与一个小国家相抗击的军队和武器,但最终却只起到阻挡玩家的作用。

如果你想要呈现出更现实的背景,那么让玩家扫杀一波波敌人并让他们可以在任何地方重生的设置只会破坏游戏体验。你应该会想着,当一个人杀死了你的100个好友时,你便不会那么迫切地想要射死他了。

在过去几年里,敌人设计并未出现太多根本的改变。一个原因便是我们很难去创造出与人类玩家具有同等水平的复杂AI(游戏邦注:不管是在策略游戏,FPS还是平台游戏)。

另外一个原因是我们在AAA开发游戏中所看到的力量幻想。玩家被当成最大的坏人,而如果敌人作为目标围绕着玩家,他们便会很快将其杀死。

ColossusEscapist(from game-wisdom)

Colossus(from game-wisdom)

《旺达与巨像》的独特敌人设计便推动着游戏更强调质量打斗而不是数量。

这在某种程度上影响着《特殊行动:一线生机》,即设计师使用了书本上所描述的军事射击技巧。

数量超过质量似乎是敌人设计中问题的实质。但这却与玩家在现实背景中的战争是相矛盾的。以我个人来讲,我希望看到更多游戏能够围绕着越少且越危险的敌人间的战斗,就像《旺达与巨像》中的那样。

想象你在玩一款去掉了一个危险的恶棍群组的游戏,即只包含10个敌人,并且不是每个关卡10个,而是总共就10个。但是每个敌人都要求你使用完全不同的应对战术。

尽管这听起来是个不错的想法,但仍存在另外一个问题,也就是游戏长度。不管你将如何分割,带有10个敌人的游戏都拥有有限的游戏时间。而在突出上百个低级敌人的游戏中,你便很容易继续创造关卡并延长游戏。

在大部分情况下,设置低级敌人总是会让玩家感到厌烦。但是让玩家对抗相同水平的敌人将会导致战斗变得一般化。真心希望在下一代的游戏中能够看到拥有自己绝招的AI,或者他们也能够直接冲向玩家。

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

5 Realistic Fallacies in Game Design: Enemies

By Josh Bycer

Enemy design goes hand in hand with health as a realistic fallacy of game design when we talk about realistic or realistic-looking games, as nothing says “realistic situation” as one person fighting an entire army by themselves.

Kind Psychopaths:

For as long as video games have been around the player has had to single-handily fight their way through armies of soldiers, zombies and what have you. No one knows for sure just how big these armies were as most of the time, enemies would just spawn in from off-screen.

With this generation, we’ve seen games try to tell the story of how one person could take on an enemy army and not only win, but were apparently also better trained. We’ll talk more about being “better trained” later on in the series.

Nathan Drake as an archeologist has probably killed more men in all three Uncharted games, then what actual soldiers have done during a war. Even with the family-friendly Mario, how much blood has he spilled on his one man mission to save Peach from Bowser?

On the flip side, we have games where hidden societies and secret groups apparently have enough troops and firepower to rival a small country, and yet do nothing but try and fail to stop the player.

For trying to take place in a realistic setting, the act of having the player mow down waves of enemies and have them spawn out of nowhere distracts from the experience. You would think that after one person just killed 100 of your friends that you wouldn’t be so eager to rush straight at them firing a gun.

Enemy design has not made too many radical reinventions over the years. One reason is that it is simply hard to develop complex AIs on par with a human player, whether that is in a strategy game, FPS or even just a platformer.

The other reason plays into the power fantasy that we see in AAA developed games. The player is supposed to be the #1 bad-ass and it’s easy to be that if the enemies stand around like targets to get mowed down.

Shadow of the Colossus’s unique enemy design led to a game that was more about quality fights, over quantity.

This by the way was used to great effect in Spec Ops: The Line, where the designers used almost every military shooter trick in the book to make a point. Discussing it further would take us into spoiler territory so I’ll leave it at that.

Quantity over quality seems to be the name of the game when it comes to enemy design. But that clashes with the idea that the player is fighting in a realistic setting. Personally I would like to see more games that are built around fighting fewer, more dangerous enemies, think of something like Shadow of the Colossus style.

Imagine playing a game where you have take out a dangerous group of villains and that there are only ten enemies, not ten per level but ten total. Each enemy would be 100% unique requiring completely different tactics to take out.

While that sounds like a great idea one other issue that has to be mention is game length. A game with only ten enemies to fight has a limited amount of play time no matter how you slice it. With games featuring hundreds of non-descript enemies, it’s easy to just keep creating levels and pad out the game.

Arguably, having non-descript enemies can be seen as a necessary evil in most cases. However, the decision to make the player fight the same basic enemy just leads to combat being generic. Hopefully with the next generation of games, we can start seeing games where the AI has a few more tricks up their sleeve outside of hiding behind cover, or running straight at the player.(source:game-wisdom)


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