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列举游戏设计需回避的错误做法(11)

发布时间:2013-12-20 14:23:35 Tags:,,,,

作者:Ernest Adams

又到年底了,这意味着又一篇由愤怒的忠实读者们的意见组成的文章出炉了。这次我罗列了8条糟糕的游戏设计师的罪证,虽然不多,但我看得比以前的更仔细了。(请点击此处阅读本系列第12、3、4、5、6、7、891012、13篇)

提供无关的帮助

当游戏提供帮助或建议时,玩家通常会信任地接受了,因为他们认为游戏比自己更了解应该怎么做才能赢。然而,还有什么比无用的帮助——来得不是时候或与当前情况无关的帮助更令人困惑的吗?

Ben Ashley写道:“建议必须切题!《战地2》就有这个问题。抓钩是只有突击队职业才能携带的装备道具。所以,当玩另一个职业时,游戏为什么假装热情地告诉我可以使用抓钩爬上面前的山壁?我根本没有抓钩啊。这对于新玩家来说,是非常让人摸不着头脑的。”

AI给的建议很调整好的,在复杂的经济模拟游戏中,给建议的角色通常会把事情措错。但当游戏建议你做一种根本不可能做到的事时,那就不是一个调整不调整的问题了,那是设计师的失误!

纯益智游戏的时间限制

许多游戏具有奖励和惩罚机制。在《太空侵略者》中,你射击外星人可以获得点数,被外星人击中会损失命数。简单。难的是如何平衡二者。鉴于一条普遍原则,你应该总是奖励多于惩罚。

说到时间限制,奖励速度快是好的,但惩罚速度慢就不太好了。赛马时,最先到达终点的骑师获得奖金,但最后到达的不必罚款。这条原则最适用于益智游戏了。人们的脑力是不同的,解决谜题所需的时间和耐心也是不同的。有个自称“Aguydude”的人写道:

“当我叫一款游戏‘纯益智游戏’时,我是指这款游戏不要求任何反应能力,也不考验时机把握能力。我偶尔会玩带时限的纯益智游戏,结果很糟。同样糟糕的是使用命数或其他限制玩家尝试解决谜题次数的东西的益智游戏。一旦玩家在当前关卡中犯错就强迫玩家重玩之前的所有关卡,只会消磨玩家继续玩下去的耐心,因为他们不想进行无意义的重复。”

具有命数限制的益智游戏?把让你重复解决谜题作为惩罚的益智游戏?都是错误的设定。如果你想因为玩家解决谜题快而奖励他,那就请便吧。但不要因为玩家多花了自己的时间而惩罚他。记住一句关于游戏易用性的话:“不存在‘太慢’这种东西。”

糟糕的、无聊的BOSS战

在之前的某篇《糟糕的游戏设计师》中,我谴责了BOSS战时的规则变化。但与之相反的也同样恶劣:BOSS只是玩家已经见过的敌人的增强版。我的朋友Gabrielle Kent最近开始在Facebook上讨论BOSS战的问题。

Gabrielle认为,导致BOSS战无聊的东西是“愚蠢的重复,荒唐的敌人血量恢复(即BOSS的命值),无趣的玩法以及旧BOSS的增强版。”

她还讨厌BOSS分批来进攻——重复击退你之前已经打败的BOSS。我同意。这是游戏设计师缺乏想像力(或时间不够用)的表现。

Sarah Ford补充道:“我经历过的最糟糕的BOSS战是在《最终幻想10》。我在整个游戏中都在追击最终BOSS,居然是个长了腿的垃圾桶。太让人扫兴了。更糟的是,你甚至不会死。这是闹哪样?这种战斗一点意义也没有,BOSS还会自己修命。真垃圾。”

远在马来西亚的Harryizman Bin Harun也写邮件向我抱怨无限自愈的BOSS。我想可以说,全世界的玩家都讨厌这种BOSS吧。

有个叫作Jessica的人提到有些BOSS除了对正确时机的攻击有感,其他一切攻击都不能对它造成伤害,比如在动作游戏《指环王》中:“当然,七足高的Uruk-Hai会很难对付,但干掉了它的80只小兵后,我想用剑猛砍它的头应该会跟剑打小兵的效果相当,即使我没有在它最脆弱的时候猛砍它的头。

“如果在这个特殊的时刻猛击会造成更多伤害,而其他时候的攻击造成的伤害更少,那我也就满足了,但实际情况让我非常不满,几乎没有动力继续玩完游戏。”

Jessica还指出,在《Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth》中,打败某BOSS的唯一方法就在按某个键——但你必须等BOSS先攻击你,不能在此之前按键。这是一个严重蝗不合理推论。这个键和BOSS进攻是无关的,所以避免被BOSS打到,尽可能攻击BOSS才合理。Jessica做了符合逻辑的事,但游戏却因此惩罚她。

以下是BOSS战的一些原则:

BOSS必须不同于其他敌人

BOSS虽然不同,但玩家仍然可以靠之前学到的东西来对付它

BOSS不应该只对一种东西有感而其他一切都不能伤它(否则BOSS战就变成解谜题了)

BOSS战的打法应该多样化,不应该无尽的重复

BOSS不应该自我治愈(或者不能自愈得太快太多)

BOSS战的弱点应该符合常理

BOSS死了就是死了。如果BOSS还会回来,那么每次回来都应该发生有意义的变化

我肯定你们还会想到更多原则。

根据Gabrielle的讨论,好的BOSS战包括《传送门》中的GlaDOS、《战神2》中的Colosssus、《Yoshi’s Island》中的若干BOSS战、《Arkham Asylum》中的Scarecrow、《Interstate ’76》中的Malocchio和《Shadow of the Colossus》中的所有BOSS战。这些都是值得学习的榜样。

保存点在冗长的非交互环节之后

如果你看我写的文章已经有一段时间了,你应该知道我并不喜欢保存点;我偏好请求式保存,也就是比如听到老爸(妈)喊“马上给我关游戏。=”时我就能马上保存游戏。但有些玩家非常喜欢那种不知道下个保存点在哪里的紧张感,所以我必须承认保存点是可以保留的。然而,如果执行得不好,确实会带来麻烦。

我从第5篇《糟糕的游戏设计师》起就一直提到这个问题。如果你保存点放在一段影像前面,每一次玩家死亡,他就得再次看这段影像。如果你可以跳过这段影像,那也不是什么大问题,但有些游戏把只保存点放在非常非常长的非交互环节前面,玩家第一次加载都要经历一次。

Kaftan Barlast举了《质量效应》的例子:“在Artemis Tau之前的BOSS战,每一次你死亡,你都要再次经历一段对话,和一段不可跳过的乘电梯情节。这款游戏确实有保存系统,但当你接近BOSS战时,你是不可以保存的。”

Steven McDonald还提到《Deadly Creatures》(Wii),在游戏中,玩家在遇到保存点前走了一分钟无事可做。一般来说,不应该出现无所事事地走了很长一段路的情况;但走相同的地区15次却无事可做真的太乏味了。

底线:把保存点放在非交互内容(过场动画、对话、走长路)之后及大战斗之前。如果玩家重刷后只有一点儿命值,那就要在刷出点附近放一些治疗药水(或有治愈效果的其他东西),因为刷出后只剩一点儿命值,而马上投入一场必然的战斗,是另一个经常被吐槽的设计。

不可暂停或重看的影像

我已经讨论过不可中断的影像和缺少暂停键的游戏的问题——都是游戏设计师的罪行。二者相结合的情况更恶劣,正如Bas Wells所指出的。假设你辛苦地一路打怪,保存点没有等到却跳出一段重要的过场动画……这时你家门铃响了。你不能暂停,不重玩整个关卡又不能重看,怎么办?

Bas写道:“更糟糕的是,有些游戏会在过场动画结束后保存,但过场动画是不存档的,这样除非你重玩整个关卡,否则你就永远看不到错过的那部分情节。我记得这在《GTA 4》中也有发生,从安全区重新开始,再次穿越整个小镇,只为再看一遍过场动画。我想我在《GTA 4》里做了好几次这样的事,许多其他游戏也有类似的问题。”

GTA IV(from designernotebook)

GTA IV(from designernotebook)

我认为过场动画倒不需要全套的DVD控制,但我认为它们确实需要:

可以中断和跳到结尾

可以暂停

可以调出来再看

《The Longest Journey》和许多其他游戏都有一个壳页面,允许玩家回顾他们已经看过一次的影像,以免玩家错过任何第一次没有发现的重要线索。重播应该成为强制功能。

情节与游戏机制的不一致

有些剧情游戏并没有把故事和玩法融合起来。尽管这是可能的,但我们总是看到游戏设计师在这方面犯错。理想情况下,游戏世界和故事故事应该是统一的,一致的,背景和内部规则应该是一样的。当游戏世界的机制因为情节突然变化,玩家的沉浸感就被破坏了。

Sean Hagans和Joshua Able都指出这个问题。Joshua还举了一个著名的例子:

“《最终幻想7》中的Aeris在故事中死掉后,Phoenix Down(游戏邦注:这是角色复活物品)对她就不管用了。如果不管用,为什么游戏中要有这种东西?为什么她这次一死就是永远死了(即使之前她在游戏中已经死过100回了)?

“复活药水应该对故事中死掉的角色管用,否则就说不通了;要么角色不应该死掉,要么不应该有复活药水。”

Phoenix Down的作用似乎在不同版《最终幻想》游戏中有所不同,但在同一款游戏中,它不应该没有任何解释就突然失效。

必须给我们一个解释。告诉我们“Aeris伤势太严重,无法拯救”不就行了。或者“Sephiroth的剑有毒”。这样,玩家在这个情节高潮时感到的悲痛就不会夹杂着一丝沮丧了。

糟糕的输入设备转换

电子游戏机的输入设备是硬件的最重要部分。玩家可以忍受低分辨率的图像和小小的8比特声音,但糟糕的操作会毁掉整个游戏。如果你把游戏从一个机子移植到另一个机子,我建议重写输入设备的代码,因为要转换的东西实在太多了。Sam Hardy指出两个特别惊人的例子:

“BioWare的《质量效应2》的菜单有严重的问题。我可以使用方向键移动和选择菜单项,但没有办法按键确认。我必须用鼠标点击。另外,没有支持滚动文本的鼠标油轮。另一个问题是,没有说清楚应该按什么键。如果我重置按钮,提示语并不会发生变化。

“2008版的《波斯王子》也有这个问题。操作杆和按钮组合移植得太好了,以致于我必须用鼠标选择选项然后按‘ENTER’才行。鼠标点击不管用。”

“另一个常见的移植问题是,与游戏机相比,用鼠标和键盘操作更慢。在《波斯王子》中,玩家要按鼠标左键施放连续技,这让人非常不舒服。当你必须使用不常用的按键如鼠标中键,那就更难受了。你的手并不习惯这样,鼠标也不是那么设计的,所以会让玩家非常不舒服。

prince of persia(from designernotebook)

prince of persia(from designernotebook)

控制器不是键盘和鼠标。我意识到可移植性是一大美德,但当说到操作设备,与其写出能够移植但执行效果非常糟糕的代码,不如写能优化硬件的代码。不要拼凑代码;该重写就重写。你的玩家会感谢你的。

不能关闭的背景音乐

我把这个简单而明显的问题放在最后。Scott Jenkins写道:“我想吐槽的是不允许关闭背景音乐的游戏。与欧美游戏相比,日本游戏中的这个问题似乎更普遍。我能想到的最近的例子是《塞尔达传说:黎明公主》。”

由于易用性,所有游戏都应该有两套声音方案,一套是音乐,一套是声音特效。有听力障碍的玩家必须能够关闭音乐或降低音量;但这不是唯一的原因。再好听的音乐听多了也会腻。

总结

以上。上述值得思考的地方有很多,特别是BOSS战和故事/游戏交互性。如果你知道其他我还没指出的糟糕的游戏设计师的“罪证”,就请给我写邮件吧。

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

Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie! XI

By Ernest Adams

It’s the end of the year, and that means it’s time for another roundup of game design errors sent in by loyal, yet outraged, readers. This year I have eight, which isn’t very many, but I look at them in a little more detail than I did in earlier columns.

Offering Irrelevant Help

When a game offers help or advice, players normally trust it because they assume that the game knows better than they do how to win. Consequently, few things are more confusing than help that isn’t helpful — help that comes at the wrong time, or is irrelevant in the current circumstances.

Ben Ashley writes, “Tips need to be pertinent! Battlefield 2: Special Forces suffers from this. The grappling hook is an item of equipment that is only carried by the assault class.

“So, when playing another class, why on earth does the game come and helpfully tell me I can use my hook to get on the ledge above me? I don’t have a hook. This causes quite a bit of confusion for the new player.”

AI-generated advice is tricky to tune well, and advisor characters in complex economic simulations often get things wrong. But when a game advises you to do something that is currently impossible to do, that’s more than a tuning problem, it’s a Twinkie Denial Condition. Bad game designer! No Twinkie!

Time Limits in Pure Puzzle Games

Many games include both rewards and punishments. In Space Invaders, you get points for shooting aliens, and you lose lives when they shoot you. Simple. The trick is balancing them appropriately. As a general principle, you should always reward more than you punish.

When it comes to time limits, it’s good to reward speed, but not good to punish slowness. The jockey who comes in first wins the prize money, but the one who comes in last doesn’t have to pay a penalty. And nowhere is this principle more appropriate than in puzzle games. People have differing amounts of brain power, and puzzle-solving requires time and patience. Someone calling himself “Aguydude” wrote in to say,

“When I call a game a ‘pure’ puzzle game, I mean that the game does not require any sort of reflexes or timing. I’ll occasionally play a pure puzzle game with a time limit, which is bad. Equally bad are puzzle games that use lives or something similar to limit the number of attempts the player can make at solving the puzzle. Forcing a player to redo all of the previous puzzles because they made errors in the current one only serves to discourage them from playing, if they want to avoid meaningless repetition.”

A puzzle game with lives? A puzzle game that punishes you by making you repeat solved puzzles? That is serious wrongthink. If you want to reward the player for solving a puzzle quickly, be my guest. But don’t punish him for taking his time. As we say in the world of game accessibility, “there’s no such thing as too slow.”

Bad, Boring Boss Battles

In Bad Game Designer VII, I condemned extreme rule changes when fighting boss characters. The opposite is just as bad: bosses that are nothing but more powerful versions of enemies the player has already seen. My friend Gabrielle Kent recently started a Facebook discussion about boss battles, and several people chimed in with their own pet gripes.

Gabby said that to her, the things that make a boss battle boring are, “stupid amounts of repetition, ridiculously high/replenishing energy [i.e. boss health] combined with unimaginative gameplay (yawn), and powered up versions of previous bosses.”

She also hates boss rushes — having to defeat the same batch of bosses that you’ve already defeated once before. I agree. This shows a lack of imagination (or time) on the part of the game designer.

Sarah Ford added, “One of the worst I’ve sat through is at the end of Final Fantasy X. Spend the whole game chasing this epic whale thing and the last boss is a bin lid with legs. Total anticlimax. What’s worse, you can’t even die. What’s the point in that? It’s not even a short symbolic battle, it stretches out forever and the thing keeps healing itself. Rubbish.”

Harryizman Bin Harun also wrote to me from Malaysia to complain about endlessly self-healing bosses. I think it’s fair to say that gamers hate them on a global scale.

Someone named Jessica mentioned bosses that are utterly invulnerable to all but exactly the right attack, as in the Lord of the Rings action games: “Sure, a seven foot tall Uruk-Hai is going to be tough, but after fighting eighty of his minions, I would think that whacking him in the head with a sword would do something similar to what it did to them, even if I wasn’t whacking him in the head at the time when he was most vulnerable.

“I would have been satisfied if the special moments did more damage, and the conventional attacks did less, but the way it was left me totally unsatisfied, and uninspired to continue and finish the game.”

Jessica also pointed out that in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, at one point all it takes to defeat a certain boss is to press a button — but you must wait until the boss attacks you, and not press it early. This is a severe conceptual non sequitur. The button and the boss attack are not related, so to avoid getting whacked, it makes sense to push it as soon as you can. She was doing the right thing in a sensible way, and the game punished her for it.

So, a few rules for boss battles:

Bosses must be different from other enemies.

Bosses must not be so different that nothing the player has already learned is of any use.

Bosses should not be invincible to all but exactly one thing (that makes it a puzzle, not a battle).

Fighting bosses should include variety, not endless repetition.

Bosses should not heal themselves (or not very much, anyway).

The key to a boss’s vulnerability should not be a conceptual non sequitur; it has to make sense.

Dead bosses should stay dead. (See Bad Game Designer V.) If they come back, they should be interestingly different each time (think of Dr. Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehog).

I’m sure you can probably think of some more.

Good boss battles cited in Gabby’s discussion thread included GlaDOS from Portal, the Colosssus in God of War 2, various bosses in Yoshi’s Island, Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum, Malocchio in Interstate ’76, and Shadow of the Colossus, which was a game consisting entirely of bosses! All worthy of study.

Save Points Before Long Non-Interactive Sections

If you’ve been reading the Designer’s Notebook for a while, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of save points; I prefer on-demand saving just in case Dad (or Mom) says “Switch that game off right this minute.” But some players really enjoy the tension of not knowing whether they’re going to make it to the next save point, so I have to acknowledge that save points are here to stay. However, they do create problems if implemented badly.

I mentioned this Twinkie Denial Condition briefly all the way back in Bad Game Designer V, when I introduced another one, the uninterruptible movie. If you put a save point right before a movie, every time the player dies, he’ll have to see the movie again. If you can skip the movie, it’s not that big a deal, but some games put their save points right before other kinds of long, non -interactive sections of the game, and the player has to go through it all every time he reloads.

Kaftan Barlast describes one in Mass Effect: “Right before the boss fight on Artemis Tau you have to go through a conversation and an unskippable elevator ride every single time you die. And this is with a game that has an actual save system, but they disable the ability to save the game before and during the fight.”

Steven McDonald also mentioned Deadly Creatures on the Wii, in which you have to walk for a minute with nothing to do following a save point. Generally speaking, there shouldn’t be any long walks with nothing to do in a game anyway; but walking through the same territory doing nothing fifteen times is particularly dull.

Bottom line: put your save points after any non-interactive content (cut scenes, dialog, long walks), and shortly before any big fights. If the player respawns with very little health, be sure to put some healing potions (or equivalent) around too, because respawning with low health straight into an unavoidable fight is another common complaint.

Movies You Can’t Pause or See Again

I’ve already addressed the question of uninterruptible movies and games that lack a pause button — both are Twinkie Denial Conditions. The combination is even worse, as Bas Wells wrote to point out. Suppose you’ve fought your way through hordes of undead kangaroos, haven’t reached a save checkpoint, and a critically important cut-scene begins… when your doorbell rings. You can’t pause and you can’t see the movie again without starting the level over.

Bas wrote, “To add insult to injury, some games will save after the cut-scene, and it will be gone, a slice of the story missed and gone forever unless you restart the entire level. I remember this happening in Grand Theft Auto IV, then dying on purpose, restarting from the safe house and driving all across town a second time just to be able to watch the scene a second time. I think I must have done this a dozen times in total in just GTA4, and many other games similarly.”

I don’t think cut-scenes need a full set of DVD controls, but I do think they need:

a way to interrupt them and skip to the end;

a way to pause them;

a way to see them again, once you’ve seen them once.

The Longest Journey and many other games provide a shell screen where you can revisit the movies that you have already seen once, both for enjoyment and in case you missed any vital clues the first time around. This should be a mandatory feature.

Plot Inconsistency with Game Mechanics

Some storytelling games don’t weave their stories neatly in with their gameplay. It can be done, despite what the naysayers may claim, but we often see games in which it isn’t. Ideally, the game world and the story world are one and the same, identical in setting and internal laws. When the game world mechanic suddenly changes for the sake of a plot feature, it frustrates the player and destroys immersion.

Sean Hagans and Joshua Able pointed this one out to me, and it’s a particularly famous example. Joshua wrote:

“Phoenix Down [a character-resurrection device] didn’t work on Aeris in Final Fantasy VII after Aeris died for plot reasons. If it doesn’t work, why is that? No explanation? Why does this one time that she dies (even though she died like 100 times before) have to be permanent?

“Either a resurrection vial should work on a story-dead character unless there is an explanation for it, or the character shouldn’t die, or you shouldn’t have resurrection vials.”

The behavior of Phoenix Down (the down feathers of a phoenix bird) seems to vary somewhat from one edition of Final Fantasy to the next, but within a single game it shouldn’t suddenly stop working, without explanation, for plot reasons.

All they had to do was give us a reason. “Aeris was too badly injured to save,” would have done it. Or “Sephiroth’s sword was poisoned.” That way, the pure pathos of this highly-charged moment wouldn’t have been adulterated with frustration.

Bad Input Device Conversions

The input devices on a video game machine (of any sort) are the most important part of the hardware. Gamers can tolerate low-resolution graphics and tinny 8-bit sound, but badly implemented controls ruin the game for keeps. If you port a game from one machine to another, I suggest rewriting the input device code from scratch, because there are an awful lot of poorly-implemented conversions out there. Sam Hardy wrote to point out two particularly egregious examples:

“BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 suffers from half-implemented menus. I am able to use my keys to move and select a menu item, but there is no way to press a button and confirm it. I have to mouse over and click. Also, there’s no mouse wheel support for scrolling text. The other offense it commits is giving poor information regarding what buttons to press. If I rebind a key, it isn’t changed in the prompts that pop up.

“Another offender in a similar manner was 2008′s Prince of Persia, in which the joystick and button scheme had been imported so well that in order for me to select START GAME I had to mouse over the option then press [ENTER] for it to accept. It wouldn’t take a mouse click.

“Another common console porting issue is the slower speed at which a mouse and keyboard operate in comparison to a console. Prince of Persia earns its ire from the fact that doing a combo with the left mouse button isn’t very comfortable. It’s worse when you have to use an uncommon mouse button, such as middle mouse click. Your hand and the mouse isn’t designed very well for this and it becomes a source of discomfort.”

A controller is not a keyboard and mouse. I realize that portability is a virtue, but when it comes to control devices, it’s better to write code optimized for the hardware than it is to create something awkward but supposedly portable. Don’t kludge the code; rewrite it. Your players will appreciate it.

Background Music You Can’t Turn Off

I’ll end on a simple and obvious one. Scott Jenkins wrote to say, “My No Twinkie pet peeve is games that do not allow background music to be turned off. This seems to be more common in Japanese made games than western made games. The most recent example I can think of is the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for the Wii.”

For accessibility reasons, all games should have two volume controls, one for the music and one for the sound effects. Players with hearing impairments need to be able to turn down/off the music; and they’re not the only ones. The best music in the world gets monotonous if repeated endlessly.

Conclusion

That’s it for this year; there’s plenty to think about here, especially when it comes to boss battles and story/game interaction. If you know of another Twinkie Denial Condition that I haven’t yet covered (check the No Twinkie Database to see), by all means send me some e-mail and tell me about it.(source:designersnotebook)


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