作者：Josh Bycer

当我在玩《火炬之光1》时注意到游戏中一些设置不当的机制问题，所以我希望借此好好研究这些问题。

当提到动作RPG类型时，任何玩家应该都很熟悉游戏套路：打败敌人获得战利品并因此升级，然后继续重复。简单而言，这类型游戏就等于：战斗，战利品和升级。只要任何一方面 设置不当，都将严重影响玩家的游戏体验。在本文中我们将先忽略“战斗”元素，因为任何人都清楚它的重要性。

torchlight-loot(from 360degreereviews.blogspot)

战利品是游戏中一个很重要的环节，也是任何动作RPG吸引玩家的关键元素。关于战利品主要有两种设计类型：固定和随机性。固定的战利品意味着设计师明确编出了游戏中的每件 道具，装备和武器。《恶魔之魂》和《黑暗灵魂》便是这种战利品设计的典例。

固定的战利品所具有的优势是，设计师了解游戏中的每个装备，能够更加自由地发挥自己的创造性。就像在《黑暗之魂》中，每种武器类型都具有自己独特的风格和功用。这种类 型的战利品也让设计师能够更加轻松地设定玩家获得装备的速度，并且平衡玩家遭遇敌人的时间。

但是固定的战利品也具有两大弊端。首先是这些战利品中都被冠以一定的头衔，如“游戏中最厉害的剑”或者“最棒的盔甲”。这就意味着玩家不能够追求更厉害或更有帮助的道 具，从而导致许多玩家退出游戏。就像在玩《恶魔之魂》时，我因为找不到更厉害的新装备而不愿意再继续玩这款游戏。

另一大弊端则与PvP模式有关，固定的战利品将让PvP变成是玩家间争夺最佳战利品的竞赛。就像我在《黑暗灵魂》PvP模式中发现，无论我多么巧妙地避开对方的攻击，任何拥有更 高级武器的玩家都能够轻易地打败我，我不得不退出PvP模式直到后来获取更厉害的武器。

很多动作RPG设置了随机战利品以取代固定的道具。设计师为这些战利品的生成设定了相关模式。以《暗黑破坏神2》为例，游戏中的每个道具都拥有特定的属性或奖励，并伴随着 一定的前缀/后缀，如“燃烧的”或“尖锐的”。这些用于定义奖励类型的形容词始终附着游戏道具，如此便可能出现更多不同种类的武器。这就意味着我的“冰火斧”可能与你的 “冰火斧”并不相同。同时这些道具还会按照稀有程度进行划分。如此玩家便可以根据这些形容词更快速地判断哪些设备更强大并且能够带来更多奖励。《暗黑破坏神2》的战利品 列表中拥有各种变量，能够生成更多不同战利品，因此属于最优秀的战利品设计类型。

显然，随机战利品的最大优势是重玩性。玩家永远不知道哪个箱子或者哪些敌人能给自己带来超级道具。新的道具将帮助玩家提升外观（游戏邦注：即更好的道具等于更耀眼的角 色）并提高角色属性。就像在《暗黑破坏神2》中，玩家能够在更困难的关卡中找到更稀有的道具，从而鼓励他们进一步玩游戏。

而随机战利品的弊端，也是《火炬之光》所面临的问题，游戏不只是创造随机道具那么简单。为了让战利品激励玩家，游戏也需要让道具随着时间发展呈现威力上升的趋势。也就 是玩家越深入游戏，他便能够找到越厉害的战利品。

《火炬之光》的战利品列表远没有《暗黑破坏神2》精细。例如当我在玩硬核模式时，我在整个游戏只能一直使用在前5个阶层中所获得的一件胸甲。尽管从理论上看来，让玩家在 游戏中的任何地方都可能找到任何装备是个非常有趣的设置，但是却会引起两个问题：

首先，这么做会破坏游戏的进程。厉害的敌人有可能在一般道具周围出现，这就意味着如果该地区最厉害的盔甲只能够抵挡3点破坏力，那么就不该让敌人的每次攻击力超过30个破 坏点。如果战利品列表不能够合理地平衡战利品与敌人的威力，这会将玩家引向或许能够破坏所有内容，或许难以求得生存这两种极端。除此之外，这也让设计师难以判断该在什 么区域引入新敌人或者加强现有敌人的力量。

这也引出了第二个问题，即带有随机元素的游戏对玩家来说并不利。在《火炬之光》中，我的第一个角色并不幸运，只能勉强找到一些新的手枪和盔甲。所以在前面5个阶层我一直 都是使用相同的手枪和盔甲。而当我进入一个新的领域时，我便没有足够的能力去杀死那些更厉害的敌人（甚至它们的每次攻击都几乎致我于死地）。

与《暗黑破坏神2》相比，《火炬之光》所面临的一个问题便在于战利品并不能随着游戏的进程而发展。如果我分别在《火炬之光》的第3个阶层和第5个阶层找到2个稀有道具，我 会发现之前的道具甚至比后来的更强大。相反，在《暗黑破坏神2》中，玩家越往后发现的道具总是比之前的道具更强大。

深入探索《火炬之光》，我还发现了一个关于类别不足的问题。不算一般武器或白色武器，《火炬之光》拥有以下武器类别：绿色代表魔法，蓝色代表稀有，金色代表独特的，紫 色代表组合装置（游戏邦注：即那些汇聚在一起的道具）。而问题就在于，较少的的武器类别将让玩家很难再找到更棒的道具。

如果你有幸能够在游戏早期获得金色装备，那么在较长时间内你便不会再去找其它替代道具（例如在第4阶层或者在第5阶层，甚至更高阶层）。同样的，如果你拥有蓝色或绿色道 具，你将不断寻找更多这类道具，但是你却不知道它们是否比你所拥有的道具强大。因为找到蓝色道具的比例较低（只有找到并打败某些独特的怪物才能获得），如此便大大降低 了绿色道具在游戏其他阶层所呈现出的价值。

《火炬之光》所面临的另一个问题便是——战利品的数量远远高于其质量，也就是在相同级别范围内，任何特殊的敌人或箱子带给玩家的可能是一些相同类型的装备，玩家在找到 新道具时会发现自己已经有了这种东西。有时候玩家会发现一些比自己现有道具更强大的装备，但是有时候也会找到一些相同的道具，或者比之更没用的战利品。例如，我在第11 级打败敌人后获得的战利品却远远不及我在第8级所获得的。如果游戏能够提升战利品的质量，那么这些问题也许就能够一一解决了。

而《暗黑破坏神2》则拥有以下类别（不包括标准或低质量道具）：高质量，魔法，稀有，集合和独特。它比《火炬之光》拥有更多类别，这意味着玩家能够更容易找到道具。在《 火炬之光》中，我几乎不可能找到一个独特道具去取代原来的稀有道具；但是在《暗黑破坏神2》，我却能够轻松地获取更厉害的道具以取代高质量的道具。并且游戏的战利品质量 升级较快，这能够进一步推动玩家去追求更多强大的战利品。

将战利品作为一种激励机制的最大挑战在于，不可让玩家频繁更替道具，但同时又不可以让他们一直使用同个装备。

今天我将侧重于RPG游戏中角色发展的一个重要内容，即升级机制。多年来，提升角色等级一直是游戏发展中所坚持的特定模式。很多设计师都在效仿《暗黑破坏神2》中的模式， 但是实际上这并不总是最佳方式。

升级机制所面临的一大挑战便是它应该如何影响游戏玩法。大多数关于升级的动作类RPG都允许玩家完善自己的角色属性并解琐更多游戏技能。尽管角色属性不影响游戏玩法，但是 却能够影响玩家所选择的装备。而技能非常重要，因为它将影响玩家所拥有的实用道具。

暗黑破坏神2(from pcgamesway.com)

在技能设计中应该考虑到等比例提升的问题——玩家何时会遇到更强大的敌人，以致他们必须多次挑战游戏？如果角色的破坏性技能一成不变，如“20-30火力伤害”的技能，那么 当他们反复玩游戏时，这些技能的威力就会显得越来越弱。在《暗黑破坏神2》中，敌人难度的提升也会让玩家这种固定的破坏技能逐渐变得毫无用处。

克服这一问题的最佳方法便是逐渐引入技能。很多动作类RPG都有“X%的武器DPS（DPS代表每秒伤害值）”之类的技能设置。逐渐提升的设置可保持技能的可行性，并让玩家获得更 好的回报（如果玩家获得了更好的装备，那就等于他拥有更强大的技能）。

《恶魔之魂》和《黑暗灵魂》都使用了等比例提升的机制，但执行方式并不相同。在这两款游戏中，各种不同的武器都拥有可逐渐提升的属性（游戏邦注：例如，魔法棒代表智慧 ，弓代表敏捷）。而各自的属性也将根据F至S不同规模等级进行划分。等级越高，该武器所具有的破坏性就越大，并且能够为玩家争取到更棒的奖励。同时我们还必须注意，在这 两款游戏中，到达50个点数左右，等比例提升机制就会失去效力。这可能是游戏想以此阻止玩家想通过升级而增强威力的欲望吧。

现在我们来关注一下某些动作RPG中使用的升级模式。从最受欢迎的《暗黑破坏神2》说起。在这款游戏中，每一种职业的角色都拥有3个完全不同的线性技能树，而每棵树上根据从 上至下或者从下至上的排列方式罗列不同技能。最后的技能将出现在第30级别，而玩家在完成了这个级别后仍然能够继续挑战接下来的级别。每次升级能够让玩家获得5个属性点以 及1个技能点。并且玩家可以通过各种方式多次完善自己的技能。

《暗黑破坏神2》的游戏进程中需要解决的一大问题便是如何解琐各种技能。除了要求玩家达到一定级别之外，每个技能都要求玩家必须获得之前游戏中的某种特殊技能。如此设置 就导致游戏中很多技能都只是玩家为获得更好技能的踏板。例如，巫师拥有两个能够迷惑敌人的技能。第一个技能是诱导敌人攻打其他敌人，而另一个则是陷害一个敌人成为附近 所有敌人的攻击目标。如果从可用性来看，后者的优势明显大于前者，但是为了获得这一技能，玩家就必须先获得第一种技能。

而可产生破坏性的技能在这一点上的问题更为严重。为什么当玩家进入骨精灵（第30级）时仍然还要使用骨牙技能（即死灵法师在第1级别中的攻击法术）？暴雪尝试在游戏后来的 更新内容中添加协同奖励去解决这一问题。一般来说，如果玩家能够使用一些技能去争取更多奖励并获得更强大的技能，他们就会更愿意使用厉害的技能吧。尽管这么做具有一定 的功效，但是这一问题却仍然是《暗黑破坏神2》所面临的少数问题之一。

我曾经谈到的《火炬之光》在游戏进程这一方面做得很好。与《暗黑破坏神2》一样，这款游戏中的每个角色也拥有3个技能树，并在升级时能够给获得属性点和技能点。然而与《 暗黑破坏神2》不同的是，玩家在此并不需要任何必备技能，玩家等级才是最关键的要素。这就意味着玩家不需要为了不断前进而去争取一些自己不想要的技能。

《火炬之光》中还有一些比低级别技能更棒的技能，并且比起《暗黑破坏神2》，它反而为玩家提供了更多可用性的内容。除此之外，游戏中大多数技能都可以逐渐提升。唯一让我 不满的是，《火炬之光》中有一些三种职业共享的技能，这削弱了游戏内容的多样性。

我个人最喜欢的进程系统来自《丁神的诅咒》。这款游戏的开始与其它ARPG在角色发展方面有所不同。一开始，玩家可以选择一个预先设定好的角色类型或者自己创造一个混合式 角色。而不同之处就在于，预先设定好的角色拥有3棵技能树，而混合式角色却只能选择任何2种技能。如果你想要成为一名弓箭手巫师，这款游戏便是你的最佳选择。

每个技能树都带有2个不同类型的技能。第一种是精通，即决定你的角色能够套上何种装备并获得何种特殊奖励。另外一种是你能够在游戏进程中掌握的真实技能。与之前的ARPG游 戏一样，这款游戏中的技能也是从上至下按照便宜到昂贵而排列。并且它与其它游戏的最大不同点在于，技能对于玩家等级没有特定要求，玩家可通过升级获得金钱和技能点。

取消了等级要求的游戏赋予玩家绝对的自由来定义自己的角色。让玩家能够从选择廉价技能开始玩游戏，或者为了获得更昂贵的技能节省开支。这种不强迫玩家获取技能的设置让 设计师能够创造出更多可用性的技能，从而赋予游戏角色更多个性。有些玩家甚至不会选择技能树上那些最昂贵的技能，反而更喜欢不断完善每棵树上的技能。

任何一款优秀ARPG都必须能够在升级过程中为玩家提供一些有意义的选择。

相关拓展阅读：篇目1，篇目2（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao）

The Devil Is in the Details of Action RPGs – Part One: The Logistics of Loot

Josh Bycer

While the title may suggest otherwise, I am not in the Diablo 3 beta. As I’ve been counting the minutes for either Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 to be released, I ran through Torchlight 1. Playing it, I noticed several things that didn’t seem right with the mechanics that I wanted to take a closer look at.

When it comes to the action RPG genre, any fan knows about the cycle: you fight enemies to get loot to help you level up and repeat. In other words, the magic phrase is: Fight, Loot, and Level. If any of those three are not represented correctly, it can bring the experience down. We’re going to ignore “Fight” for this post, as everyone should know what is good or bad about it.

Loot is the big one, and is one of the main draws of any action RPG. With loot, there are two schools of design: set or random. Set loot, means that the designers hard coded every item, piece of equipment and weapon in the entire game. Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls are currently the best examples of this practice.

The advantage of set design is that by knowing every piece of gear in the game, it gives the designers freedom to get creative. In Dark Souls, each weapon type is unique in its feel and utility. This also alowed the designers to easily set up a general pace of getting equipment and balancing it out with enemy encounters.

There are two disadvantages to set loot design. First is that it has a cap, there is such a thing as the “best sword in the game” or “best piece of armor ”. Meaning, that eventually the drive for better loot disappears, which is one third of the pull of playing action RPGs. Playing Demon’s Souls; I lose a lot of the motivation to continue playing new game +s as there is no new equipment to find.

The other has to do with PvP; set loot largely turns PvP into a race to get the best loot before anyone else. When I played PvP in Dark Souls, no matter how great I was at avoiding damage, all it took was one hit from someone’s high level weapon to kill me instantly. This forced me out of PvP until I could grab better weapons which would take awhile.

Randomized loot design which is used in most action RPGs, is that instead of defining set pieces of gear in the game. The designers set up algorithms for loot generations. If you look at Diablo 2, every item hat has unique stats or bonuses comes with a prefix/suffix or prefixes, such as “burning” or “spiked”. These adjectives defined what kinds of bonuses are attached to the gear and from there the weapon is given the amount of that type. That means that my “freezing, burning axe” could be different from your “freezing burning axe”. Items are also graded in terms of rarity. This allowed the player to quickly see what equipment is more powerful and affects the bonuses from the adjectives. Diablo 2′s loot table is still one of the best of the genre with all the variables that go into generating loot.

Obviously the big advantage of randomized loot is replay ability. You never know if that chest or enemy will drop some super piece of gear. New gear provides both a visual boost (better gear = shiner avatar) and of course the stat boost. With Diablo 2, the harder the difficulty level, the chance of finding rarer gear is increased further encouraging play.

The problems with random loot and where Torchlight fits into this post, is that there is more to it than just creating random gear. In order for loot to motivate people, there must be an ascending trend of power over time. Meaning the further the player gets, the better the loot they find.

In Torchlight the loot table is not as refined as Diablo 2 was. For example while playing on hardcore mode; I used a chest armor I found within the first 5 floors of the game, as my only piece of chest armor for the entire game. While the idea of being able to find any equipment anywhere in the game sounds good on paper, it does cause two problems.

First is that it breaks the flow of the game. Enemies are designed around the generalized loot in the area. Meaning, if the best armor in the area can only block 3 points of damage, then enemies shouldn’t be set at dealing 30 damage per hit. If the loot table isn’t balanced with the enemies it can lead to the player either demolishing everything, or barely able to survive. Not properly balancing loot and enemies also makes it difficult to determine where to introduce new enemies or strengthen existing ones.

That leads to problem two, having the randomized element of the game work against the player. In Torchlight, my first character on very hard difficulty did not get lucky finding new pistols and armor to use. I went 5 floors using the same gun and armor. When I arrived in a new area, I could barely kill anything and enemies were nearly killing me with each hit.

The problem with Torchlight is that the loot table is not ascending as much as Diablo 2. If I find a rare item on floor 3 in Torchlight and another on floor 5, there is a good chance the former is as powerful or stronger then the later. However in Diablo 2, finding a rare sword at the beginning of an act and at the end, you are practically guaranteed that the latter is stronger than the former.

Looking deeper at Torchlight one of the problem areas I saw has to do with the types of rarity. Ignoring normal or white weapons Torchlight has the following categories: green for magical, blue for rare, gold for unique, and purple for set items (items that go together.) The problem with this is that with only a few categories, it makes it harder to find better gear.

If you get lucky and get gold equipment early on, chances are you won’t find anything to replace it for a long time (such as 4 or 5 floors or more). Likewise if you are stuck with a blue or green item, you’re going to find plenty of them which may or may not be better then what you have. Due to the rate of finding blue items which most unique monsters drop, it lowers the value of green items outside of the very beginning of the game.

Another issue with Torchlight is that there is more quantity then quality with loot, some unique enemies and chests drop multiple pieces of the same equipment type all within the same level range. This makes it a crap shoot when it comes to getting new gear. Sometimes you’ll find something that is miles above what you have, and other times you’ll find 2 or more pieces of equipment equal to or worse then what you have. As an example while fighting level 11 enemies, I saw loot as low as level 8 dropping. If the quality of loot increased at a faster rate, that would elevate some of the issues.

Going back to Diablo 2 it had the following categories (not counting normal or low quality): high quality, magical, rare, set and unique. That’s 5 to Torchlight’s 4, meaning there is a greater spread of items to find. In Torchlight my chance of getting a unique item to replace a rare is low. However in Diablo 2, I have a much greater chance of replacing my high quality item with something better. Combine that with the quality of loot rising at a fast pace, makes the hunt for loot an enjoyable one and not an act of necessity.

The challenge of using loot as a motivator is that the player shouldn’t be surviving from one piece to another, and at the same time, going hours using the same gear also doesn’t work. That does it for part one, in part two we’ll take a look at leveling and see if Diablo 2 still stands as the best in this area.

In the last part, I talked about the importance of loot as a motivator and game mechanic in action rpgs. The other half of the equation when it comes to character progression is leveling up. Improving characters through leveling has not changed all that much over the years. Probably because many designers copied Diablo 2′s style, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the de facto best way.

The challenge with the leveling up mechanic is how much should it affect the gameplay? Most action rpgs on level up, allow the player to improve their character’s attributes and unlock/improve a skill. The attributes won’t affect the gameplay but have an effect on what equipment is available. Skills are a big deal, as they affect the utility the player has.

One of the issues with designing skills is with the issue of scaling: where players will run through the game multiple times with stronger enemies. If a character has skills that do flat damage such as: “20-30 fire damage,” those skills become noticeably weaker on repeat plays. In Diablo 2, each higher difficulty boosts the stats of all enemies which made set damage skills a waste.

To combat this, the most popular way is to implement skills that scale. Many action RPGs have skills that do: “X % of weapon DPS,” where DPS stands for damage per second. Scaling allows skills to keep their viability and feeds back into loot as a motivator as now better equipment also equals more powerful skills.

Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls also had scaling but it was done differently. In both titles, various weapons had an attribute that it would scale to. For example: magic wands with intelligence, or bows with dexterity. The respective attribute would also be graded on a scale of F to S if I remember right. The better the grade the more of a bonus that attribute would apply to damage. It’s important to note that in both titles, there is a dropping off point of around 50 where the scaling will stop being as useful. This was probably done to prevent players from just power leveling through the game.

With that said, we can turn our attention to a few of the leveling formats used in action RPGs. Starting off with the most well known which is Diablo 2. Here, each character class has 3 completely unique linear skill trees. Each tree has the skills in order from top to bottom, or from lowest level to highest. While the final skill unlocks at level 30, players can continue leveling much further than that. Leveling up gives players 5 attribute points to distribute and one skill point. Skills can be improved multiple times with different boosts based on the skill.

The problem with Diablo 2′s progression comes at how the skills are unlocked. Besides having a level requirement, each skill requires a point in a previous skill on the specific tree to use. Because of that, it led to a lot of skills that are more or less a stepping stone for a better skill. For example, the Necromancer class has two skills relating to confusing enemies. The first one will cause one enemy to attack other enemies. The second one makes one enemy the target of all nearby enemies. Now in terms of utility, the latter is miles above the former, but you still need to waste a point in the former to get it.

This issue is even worse for the damage causing skills. Why would anyone use the bone teeth skill (level one necro attack spell) once they get access to bone spirit (level 30)? Interesting enough, Blizzard tried to fix this issue with a later patch that added synergy bonuses. Basically, some skills would provide bonuses to more powerful skills giving the player a reason to pump them up. While it helps, this issue is still one of the few problems with Diablo 2.

Torchlight, which was talked about in part one, fared better in terms of progression. Like Diablo 2, each character had 3 skill trees and received attribute and skill points on level up. However unlike Diablo 2, there were no prerequisite skills, instead only the player’s level was the factor. This meant that as a player, you would not need to take any skills that you didn’t want to in order to progress through the game.

There were still some skills that were better than lower level skills, but there was more utility offered compared to Diablo 2. What also helped was that many skills were built around scaling with fewer exceptions. The only real knock I have with Torchlight’s progression is that several skills are shared between the three classes, which do cut into some of the iversity.

Our last example for this post and my personal favorite progression system comes from Din’s Curse. The game begins differently in terms of character development compared to other ARPGs. At the start you can choose from either a predefined class or create a hybrid one. The difference is that a pre-made class comes with 3 skill trees, while the hybrid lets you choose any two that you want. So if you ever wanted to be an archer necromancer, this was your chance.

Each skill tree had two different types of skills. The first are proficiencies, which determine what equipment your character can wear, along with any special bonuses. Second are the actual skills you can learn over the course of your game. Like previous ARPGs the skills are arranged in order from top to bottom going from least expensive to most. The big difference is that there are no level requirements for skills, only money and skill points which are earned at level up.

Without any level requirements, it gave the player complete freedom in defining their character. Allowing them to either get several cheap skills starting out, or save up for an expensive skill. By not having to set strict limits on acquiring skills, gave the designers the option of creating more utility skills to make characters personalized. Some players may not even get the most expensive skill on their tree and instead favor improving skills from each skill tree.

Providing meaningful choices in leveling up is an important part of any good ARPG. For the next part I’ll be examining downtime in ARPGs and money sinks.