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开发者谈创作者需要对游戏玩家社区保持坦诚和透明

发布时间:2017-09-11 15:21:47 Tags:,

Bluehole创意总监Brendan Greene谈论如何对早期测试版《绝地求生》的玩家社区保持坦诚和透明。

原文作者:Matthew Handrahan 译者:Megan Shieh

在游戏的早期测试中,与在线玩家社区合作是一项艰巨的任务。

对于该游戏的创意总监Brendan Greene来说,成功的秘密就是坚持早期开发阶段所制定的原则,即使游戏迅速发展成为了业界最热门的游戏之一之后也是如此。

Greene昨日在Devcom上谈论了与玩家保持联系的重要性。即使游戏在4个月内达到了800万销量;即使它的Steam同步玩家数量已经平稳地超过了70万;最重要的是,即使玩家可能不相信你有在关注他们的给出的反馈;与玩家保持联系的重要性从来不曾改变过。

Greene说:“我们有一个非常强大的玩家社区。游戏的论坛和Discord上都有来自玩家的大量反馈,甚至当我们进行直播的时候也会通过Twitter之类的渠道收到反馈。”

“不管是hack报告还是bug报告,它们都会被传递到团队手中。跟玩家社区沟通的过程中有时会遇到困难,因为你明明就听到了所有的反馈,可他们还是不相信你。因此我会在周日的时候登录我们的Discord,然后花上2个小时和人们聊天,维持和玩家社区的关系,他们很喜欢这种做法。”

“我是一名游戏玩家。直到大概一年前,我都一直在玩游戏,所以我并非从一开始就是行业中人,现在我是Bluehole的创意总监。

我感觉自己是玩家中的一员,而且能够与玩家社区交流真地让他们觉得自己在游戏的开发中有发言权。”

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds(from gamesindustry.biz)

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds(from gamesindustry.biz)

与众不同的道路成就了Greene今天的地位。如今作为Devcom最有声望的演讲者之一,他可以轻轻松松地在Devcom坐上90分钟,享受人群的拥戴。

通过Arma系列和H1Z1的游戏模组,他开发了Battle Royale的概念并改进了与玩家直接接触的核心功能和机制。

Greene说:“如果没有著名游戏主播Lirik的支持,我今天‘不会坐在这里’。他玩我的游戏玩了3年,衍生出了H1Z1,然后H1Z1衍生了《绝地求生》。”

韩国工作室Bluehole聘请了Greene来担任创意总监,目前他在Bluehole拥有一个超过100人的团队,但规模的扩大并没有削弱直播在《绝地求生》的持续发展和改变中所扮演的角色。

根据Greene的说法,办公室里的每个人每天都会看游戏直播。他说,游戏主播制造的内容是“业内最好的调试工具之一”,也是对玩家喜好的关键性洞悉。

Bluehole的一名程序员Marek Krasowski将这种密切监控视频内容的行为归因于《绝地求生》的“标志性”武器之一:平底锅。

之前Greene说想要看看子弹改变方向会是什么样子,所以为了满足他的好奇心,他们将平底锅的物理效果进行了改变;之后Krasowski忘记将这一变化恢复原状。

目前成为标志性武器之一的防弹平底锅将会与下一个补丁一起推出。

Krasowski说:“我们看到人们拿着平底锅在和子弹在对打的视频时才发现这个事情……我的老板走到我跟前说:‘Marek,你做了什么?’但是我们不忍心移除这个功能,因为人们太喜欢它了。”

Greene补充道:“我们最初把这个锅加进游戏是为了将它作为对(Kinji Fukasaku’s 2002年电影)Battle Royale的致敬……真是歪打正着,太好了哈哈哈。我们甚至在内部讨论过允许手榴弹击中平底锅,然后让玩家可以用平底锅把手榴弹打回去。”

这些方案显然都非常实用,但因为游戏计划于今年发行,所以他们现在必须对数据进行很多必要的“平衡”。

他说:“平衡诸如loot之类的东西时,我们会试图远离社区的反馈。有时候数据才是平衡的最好方法。我之前通过玩家社区来平衡《Arma III》的时候获得了很多经验,但是现在必须得完全依靠数据来完成平衡……额…这种情况下你必须得信任你的数据科学团队,不过我们的团队很棒,他们真地在帮助我们。”

“有时候你可能会承诺一些事情,然后两个月后发现自己没办法实现这些承诺,那是因为游戏开发是炒鸡困难的。”

这正好证明了《绝地求生》自3月发行早期测试版本以来的成长。Greene说,他们长期存在的玩家社区有时候没办法理解Bluehole所面临的困难——《绝地求生》的发展速度几乎前所未有,要保持这么个速度并不容易。

“我们在过去的四个月里看到了巨大的增长,不过游戏也就才刚出来四个月而已。

有时很难说服社区,让他们理解:我们正在扩张,试图找到适合团队的工程师,以及团队的其他成员是一个艰难的过程。这个过程不是砸钱就能解决的。”

“我们试图向玩家传递的信息是:我们需要时间。

但这同时也是我们选择信任这种开放型开发意识的原因,在开放型的开发意识里,我们不会将我们的玩家当作小白来对待。

他们了解游戏开发,或者想要了解它,你交流得越多、展示得越多,对你来说就越有好处。”

这种对透明度的承诺展现了Bluehole发言人对待其玩家的态度。

Greene承认他在这方面犯过错误,但他和公司都发现——保持沟通渠道的开放、诚实和良好的监测,以及出错时避免“公关调调”,是在开放型开发中取得成功不可或缺的因素。

他说:“我一加入Bluehole就和执行制作人坐下来讨论了开放型开发的重要性。玩家们想要了解游戏的制作过程,通过消息传递的方式满足他们这一要求的效果是:当你宣布一些事情的时候,开发者和玩家之间的误解会减少。”

本文由游戏邦编译,转载请注明来源,或咨询微信zhengjintiao

Working with a live community on an Early Access game can be a difficult task; working with a live community as large as the one coalescing around PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds is a different thing altogether. For Brendan Greene, the game’s creative director, the secret has been to stick to the principles laid out in the earliest stages of its development, even after its rapid ascent to become one of the most talked about games in the industry.

Speaking at Devcom yesterday, Greene discussed the importance of staying in touch with your players; even when your game has sold 8 million units in 4 months, even when its concurrent player count is poised to breach 700,000 userson Steam, and, crucially, even when they may not believe that you’re even paying attention.

“We have a really strong community,” Greene said. “We have huge amounts of feedback on Discord, on our forums, and even when we stream we get feedback via Twitter and stuff.

“I go into our Discord on a Sunday and just spend two hours in there chatting with people – and people love that”

“Whether it’s hack reports or bug reports, they’re all passed onto the team. It’s sometimes hard to communicate to the community that you do hear everything, even though they don’t believe you. What I do is go into our Discord on a Sunday and just spend two hours in there chatting with people – and people love that, having that connection with your community.

“I am a player. I didn’t come from the industry. I was playing games up until about a year ago, and now I’m a creative director. I feel like I’m one of them, and being able to connect with the community really makes them feel like they have a say in the game.”

Greene has certainly taken a less than typical road to his current position, where he could sit and regale the Devcom crowd for 90 minutes as one of its most prestigious speakers. He developed the “Battle Royale” concept through mods for games like the Arma series and H1Z1, refining its core features and mechanics in direct contact with players. Indeed, Green admitted that “I wouldn’t be sitting here” if it wasn’t for the support of the popular streamer Lirik. “Him playing my game for three years led to H1Z1, and that led to Battlegrounds,” he said.

Greene now has a team of more than 100 people at Bluehole – the Korean studio that hired him as creative director – but that increase in scale hasn’t diminished the role that livestreaming plays in the way Battlegrounds continues to evolve and change. According to Greene, everybody in the office watches streamers every day. The content they produce, he said, is “one of the best debugging tools out there,” and a crucial insight into what the community enjoys.

Marek Krasowski, a programmer at Bluehole, attributes this close monitoring of video content to the creation of one of Battlegrounds’ “iconic” weapons: a frying pan, the physics of which were altered so it could deflect bullets to satisfy Greene’s curiosity. Krasowski neglected to revert the change, and the now bullet-proof frying pan shipped with the next patch.

“We only found out after we saw videos of people swatting bullet shots with the frying pan,” Krasowski said. “My boss came up to me and said, ‘Marek, what did you do?’ But we couldn’t take it down. People loved it.”

Greene added: “We originally put the pan in as a homage to [Kinji Fukasaku's 2002 film] Battle Royale…and now it’s just glorious. We’ve even talked internally about allowing grenades to be hit with the pan, so you can hit a grenade back.”

These methods have clearly served Battlegrounds well, but with the game’s launch still scheduled for this year Greene admitted that much of the necessary “balancing” must now be done with data. “We’re now moving away from community feedback when it comes to balancing stuff like loot,” he said. “You really have to learn that data is the best way to balance sometimes. I had a lot of experience with Arma III balancing via community, and now having to switch over to doing it purely on data… Yeah, you’ve got to trust your data science team, but we have a great one. They’re really helping us.”

“You promise something and two months later you can’t deliver it – because, y’know, game development is fucking hard”

This speaks to just how much Battlegrounds has grown since it launched in Early Access in March. However, Greene said that its longstanding community sometimes fails to appreciate the difficulty Bluehole has faced in keeping pace with the virtually unprecedented pace of the game’s rise.

“We have seen massive growth over the last four months, but we’ve only been out for four months. Sometimes it’s hard to convince the community that, ‘Guys, calm down. We are expanding, but trying to find engineers that fit the team well, and other members of the team, is a tough process.’ It’s not a process that you can just throw money at and it’s fixed.

“It will take us time, and it’s communicating that to the community. But that’s why we believe in this really open sense of development, where you don’t treat your players like they’re stupid. They understand game development, or they want to understand it, and the more you communicate and the more that you show them about it, the better it is for you.”

This commitment to transparency informs the way Bluehole speakers to its players. Greene admitted that he has made mistakes in that regard, but that both he and the company has come to see that keeping channels of communication as open, honest and well monitored as possible, and avoiding “PR speak” when things go wrong, are integral to succeeding in open development.

“When I first joined the team at Bluehole, myself and the executive producer sat down and discussed open development,” he said. “Again, it goes back to the players wanting to know how games are made, and by informing them of that it leads to less misunderstandings when you announce things.(Source: gamesindustry.biz  )


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