|
|
翻译：charliell @ 游侠
转载请注明作者和出处
Eurogamer: You've come fairly recently from outside Blizzard to work on a quintessential Blizzard game. Is that intimidating?
Jay Wilson: Yes, it was very intimidating. It's funny, when I first arrived, they had somebody they were trying to hire and he was really nervous about it, he wasn't sure if he was good enough to be working at Blizzard. And they were like: if we're trying to hire him, of course he's good enough. If you knew their interview process you would know that he must be.
For me, when I first interviewed with Blizzard, I was just trying to get information about how Blizzard worked. I wasn't actually trying to get a job, because I didn't think they would hire me. So yeah, it was intimidating to come in and work there and take over something like Diablo which is so precious to me. On the other hand, I would have hated to see somebody else take it over and not do it right, or I would have hated to see it not get made. So it felt like this weird sense of, almost, responsibility - like I needed to go do it because maybe somebody else wouldn't.
Eurogamer: 你不久前才来到暴雪开发这样一个经典的游戏，你有压力么？
Jay Wilson: 当然，压力非常大。我第一次到暴雪的时候碰到了一件有趣的事，他们正在面试一个应聘者。这个应聘者很紧张，他不确定自己是否足够优秀从而能够在暴雪工作。而面试官给我的感觉是：如果我们雇用了他，那么他当然是非常优秀的。如果你知道面试的过程，你就会明白的确是那样。
当我第一次去暴雪，我只是想了解下暴雪是如何运作的。我并不是去求职的，因为我觉得他们不会雇用我。所以当我加入了暴雪，在那儿工作并且接手了暗黑3的开发后，我感到这个机会对我来说太珍贵了，同时我也感到了巨大的压力。另一方面，我不愿看到别人接手暗黑3并且把它弄砸了，当然，我更不愿看到的是没有开发暗黑3。因此我隐约地感到一种责任感，似乎我应该去开发暗黑3，因为可能别人不会去做这件事情。
Eurogamer: You're a fan of the Diablo games?
Jay Wilson: As my wife likes to joke, Diablo was always said in hushed tones in my house. I remember seeing the first ad for Diablo on the back of the Warcraft II CD and thinking 'what is that?', and wanting to play it so bad. I was at day one for Diablo and Diablo II and [Diablo II expansion] Lord of Destruction, and I took days off of work for each one of them. At this point I think I've taken pretty much every class to Hell difficulty in Diablo II, and a few of them I've capped out. I only did one Hardcore character and I lost her, it was a Sorceress. I was grieving. Couldn't do it again, it was so painful.
Eurogamer: 你是暗黑系列的粉丝么？
Jay Wilson: 我妻子经常开玩笑说，在家里我总是以温柔的语气讨论暗黑。我记得第一次在魔兽2的CD背面看到了暗黑的广告，我就在想：这是什么游戏？当时我迫不及待地想玩一玩。第一天我先把暗黑、暗黑2和毁灭之王粗略地试玩了一遍，后来又花了不少时间仔细地玩了每个游戏。目前我把暗黑2每个职业都玩到了地狱难度，其中几个职业已通关。我唯一花心血的专家级角色是一个女巫，不过她挂了= =。我很伤心，无法重来让我很痛苦。
Eurogamer: Notwithstanding your affection for them, was there stuff about those games that you wanted to fix?
Jay Wilson: Uh-huh, yeah, there are a lot of things, and I think a lot of those are evident in what we showed at WWI. I look at the Diablo series as an interesting mix of an action game and a role-playing game; and I felt that as a role-playing game, it really sold itself short. What it did right was the addiction, the drops.
But as an action game, we really felt that it lacked some things. You have a character class that has endless health, endless resource, they can run faster than almost anything in the world. When you combine speed with endless power and endless health, really, the only way you can challenge that player is to kill them. And you see that with Diablo II - you'll be running through the game having a great time and all of a sudden something will walk up and just step on you. That's the only time the game ever feels challenging. But that's also the time when you're most likely to lose the player, with such harsh penalties. So a lot of our focus has been, can we set the game up so that we can have a higher barometer of challenge for the player without making the early game hard?
So we rein that [health] system in, and having basically a little bit more challenge to recover health means that we don't need to make the monsters as grueling - which is a good thing, but also means that a monster that can pin you down or slow you down or trap you in some way is suddenly way more threatening, even if he doesn't do as much damage. We've tried to get away from damage as the big scary thing; we've tried to get towards restricted movement, and having a health system that actually plays into placement, where you're standing makes a difference. That really opens things up.
Eurogamer: 抛开你对游戏的感情，暗黑系列有哪些地方是你觉得需要改进的？
Jay Wilson: 有很多，其中有些地方在我们WWI的演示中体现得很明显。我认为暗黑系列是动作游戏和角色扮演游戏的一个有趣的结合；一个角色扮演游戏的生命力是短暂的，这类游戏的亮点是容易让人痴迷以及丰富的物品掉落。
而作为动作游戏，我们真切地感受到它缺少些什么。游戏里的角色拥有无限的生命值，无限的能力，他们比世界上几乎所有的东西都跑得快。当把游戏角色的速度与他们的能力以及生命值相结合，能挑战玩家的方式就只剩下杀死这些角色了。在暗黑2里，你可能在游戏里一直一帆风顺，突然一个怪物出现了，并且把你的角色‘踩扁’了。这是游戏中唯一有挑战性的瞬间，同时面对如此严峻的形势，这也是你的角色最容易挂的时候。所以我们比较关注的是，我们是否能够在避免让游戏初期很困难的前提下提高游戏难度，让其更有挑战性呢？
因此，我们引入了生命回复系统，并且提高了一些生命回复的难度，这样我们就不用把怪物设计得过于强大。这是件好事，同时这也意味着即使一个怪物的攻击力不高，它却能用更突然、更具威胁的方式来困住你，或是让你减速。我们不刻意强调怪物的伤害；我们尝试限制玩家的行动，并且加入生命回复系统，使得战斗有所不同。这一系列的设计使得游戏的自由度更高。
Eurogamer: I guess this is where the influences you've mentioned from enemy design in Zelda and World of Warcraft come into play...
Jay Wilson: Or God of War. Games like that are some of my favorite games. It would be far more interesting if we could have a boss monster that wasn't just a giant sack of health that deals out ridiculous damage. We've got monsters that drop health at percentages of their damage, we also sometimes spawn monsters that are just there basically to drop health. Even there: if you have a boss that just walks around and hits you, and a bunch of smaller monsters that continually spawn and generate health, that's already a far more interesting fight than you ever got in Diablo. And that's just the bear minimum of what we can do.
And then on the role-playing side, we've been focusing on more story. We want people to be able to ignore the story if they want, but we still want there to be a denser story, we want there to be a lot of scripted events that support the story, we want the story to be better formed and more interesting. Plus we want there to be some elements that allow players to feel like they're in a role-playing game. I think that one of the differences between Blizzard North and what we sometimes call Blizzard South is that Blizzard South, led by our creative director Chris Metzen, is just a little bit more story-focused. That's not a knock, but it can't help but be something that gets into the game now, because it's also a value that I have.
Eurogamer: 我猜这些设计就是你所提到的从塞尔达传说和魔兽世界敌人设计中得到的灵感吧。
Jay Wilson: 呵呵，还有战神。这些游戏都是我的最爱。如果我们设计出的Boss不只是一个拥有大量生命和超高攻击力的庞然大物，那游戏会更加的有趣。游戏中会出现一些怪物，它们掉落血球的概率与攻击力有关，而另外有些怪物则是固定掉落的。比如有个Boss在攻击你，周围不断地刷新小怪，它们会掉落血球，这样的战斗比以往暗黑里的任何战斗都有趣的多。这样的设计恰恰是我们所擅长的。
从角色扮演来讲，我们把精力集中在更多的剧情故事上。玩家可以忽视剧情，但我们仍然希望游戏的剧情更为紧凑，有更多的预置事件来充实剧情，从而使其更有条理，并且更加有趣。另外，我们希望加入些元素让玩家感到自己是在玩角色扮演游戏。我认为北方暴雪和南方暴雪的一个不同点在于由我们的创意主管Chris Metzen领导的南方暴雪相对而言更注重剧情。那并不让人惊讶，目前剧情已经融入了游戏，因为我觉得这也是有必要的。
Eurogamer: I have to ask about the art style - I know you're not going to change it, but have you been surprised at the strength of reaction? 50,000-odd is an awful lot of petitioners...
Jay Wilson: Yeah, it's an anonymous petition, so I'm not trusting of that actual number... I think it's a very small minority of people who don't like the art style. And I actually think when they see the game later, they'll feel differently. I think there's a lot of selective memory of Diablo II - when Diablo II came out, it was panned for its art style. Way too bright and sunshiny and colorful, compared to the original Diablo.
We tried a more subdued look and the game was just boring to play, it was kind of difficult, it was hard to identify different types of creatures, it just didn't feel very fun. We weren't surprised that there was a strong reaction like that because we struggled with the art style so long. We had fights on the team about how we wanted the art style to go. We don't any more, everyone's really happy with where we're at. It's because we've walked through that process. If we could walk all of those fans through the process, we think they'd go, 'I see why you guys did this'.
Eurogamer: 我还是要提到画面风格，尽管我知道你们不会改变它。不过如此大的反响你们是否感到惊讶呢？5万多的请愿者是个不小的数目……
Jay Wilson: 这是一个匿名的请愿活动，因此我不相信那个数目……我觉得不喜欢目前画风的玩家是少数，并且当这些玩家看到游戏成品后，他们会改变看法的。暗黑2的设计当场也面临选择。当暗黑2发行的时候，很多人都批评它的画风，觉得同暗黑1相比过于鲜亮了。
我们尝试过柔和的、不怎么明亮的画风，但结果是游戏让人感到乏味，我们很难辨认不同类型的生物，这很无趣。对于目前的画风受到强烈的质疑，我们并不感到惊讶，因为我们为这个画风努力了很久。我们团队内部对于画风也有过争议，不过这已经是过去时了，每个人都很满意现在的状况。我们经历了整个开发过程，如果我们能让玩家也经历相同的过程，相信他们一定会理解我们为什么会采用这样一个画风。
Eurogamer: Have there been times where you've felt that you've overstepped the innovation line and gone to something that wasn't Diablo, and had to pull it back?
Jay Wilson: Not really. I'd say we're actually over-cautious to not go over that line and I feel we should push it a lot more. Some people don't like it when I use this series as an example, because it's Zelda, and Zelda is sometimes cartoony as well, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's very realistic. It really depends upon each version of the game, what's the art style that they want to follow, what's the game they want to make.
The other example I like to give is the new Battlestar Galactica series, which is vastly different from the original series, but I don't think anyone would argue that it is inferior in some way because of that. They pull enough from the original series to make it Battlestar Galactica, but they do a lot of things that make it something that is its own. That's really something that we wanted to do.
Eurogamer: 你是否感到有时过度的创新使得游戏不像暗黑了，以至于必须推倒重来？
Jay Wilson: 还不至于。我们一直保持着十分谨慎的态度，不逾越创新的边界，但我觉得我们可以更深入。一些人不喜欢我拿塞尔达传说作例子，认为塞尔达就是塞尔达。塞尔达有时很卡通，有时却很写实，每一作都不相同，这要看制作者想采用怎样的画风，他们想制作怎样的游戏。
另一个例子是新太空堡垒卡拉狄加系列，它与前作风格迥异，但是我不认为有人会因此觉得它不如前作。制作者借鉴了前作很多内容，但也设计了很多新元素使得新剧有自己的特点。这也是我们希望做到的。
[ 本帖最后由 charliell 于 2008-8-26 22:21 编辑 ] |
-
总评分: 金钱 + 15
+ 2
查看全部评分
|
发表于 2008-8-26 21:07:20
分享
收藏
