终极母舰(Lv:11)
Karan S'jet ( Sajuuk～Ga )
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小 发表于 2008-4-23 19:28 只看该作者
嘎！观点：现代RTS进化
[不管商业和评论的成功，THQ的RTS作品，Dawn of War（《战争黎明》）和Company of Heroes（《英雄连》）没有在竞技性上达到《星际争霸》的地位。设计师兼玩家James Lantz研究了现代RTS的革新是否造就了名不符实。]
在Starcraft的巨大成功和Warcraft 3的较大成功中，Blizzard划定了RTS的舞台，而让THQ以Dawn of War 和Company of Heroes渐渐进入视野。
但是，不管商业上和评论上的成功，他们没有任何特权可以让他们像Starcraft那样一直维 持着高水平的竞技性。
现在，Blizzard正在问和我们所研究的一样的问题：什么让Starcraft获得如此巨大的成功而Dawn of War和Company of Heroes却无法建立玩家的竞技圈子？Dawn of War和Company of Heroes这样的类型是不是RTS界的领头羊？
最早也最被低估的就是Starcraft的画面清晰的效果。在Starcraft里，你可以瞥一眼小地图然后立刻知道你的军队部署，或者看一下主屏幕快速了解战斗趋势。然而，在Company of Heroes里，让游戏美丽宏伟的画面效果淹没了原有的清晰度。
首先，这看上去像是不重要的区别；然而，画面的清晰决定了转瞬之间的胜负差别。
很多时候Company of Heroes里都要花费太多的时间来做出快速决定，就像通常的撤退、隐蔽在云雾和树枝间。回看录像，你会发现如果画面清晰的话那么就可以做出正确的决定了。
Starcraft的第二个优势就是精准的操控性。许多随性的RTS玩家把简化微操看作是游戏的长处。然而，愈加复杂的AI系统是以减少精准的高要求操作作为代价的。
随着Starcraft的进步，竞技玩家尝试以战术和暴兵来平衡微操作水平，让他们可以通过改进策略来磨练技术。
可是在Company of Heroes里，单位AI太过于复杂以至于不能好的手控。当你操作一个单位撤退，或用微操使他从侧面突击，你常常发现他移动很慢因为他坚持要笔直走。在建造上，即使一个反装甲单位都会选择错误的攻击方向然后被载具绕着打爆，但是他们其实可以轻而易举消灭对手如果玩家告诉他们在哪里发射火箭。
值得称赞的是Company of Heroe和Dawn of War里去除了关于资源收集上的操作。可是在Starcraft里，最有趣的地方变成了决定扩张与否，而在Company of Heroes和Dawn of War里这个选择被抹掉了。
同样的，Company of Heroes和Dawn of War去除了一个操作层面（工人在Starcraft里很重要），但也去除了一个技术层面。
有些人会说，“那不就纯粹比拼人的技术了吗？”嘎，是的，但是技术和策略是RTS的不同方面-就像FPS中你可以多快瞄准对手头部和战术知识这两方面。如果即时战略没有微操，那么就会变成基本的策略游戏了，而我们早已有了那样一类游戏。
但是Company of Heroes最大的弱项在于随机性。Starcraft很少有随机性，同样的埋伏同样的地方可以用同样的子弹消灭同样的单位。在Company of Heroes里，有时候需要2枚火箭来打死坦克，有时候却是前四个miss然后不受损失。有时候手雷会消灭整个MG小队，而有时候不能杀死任何一个。
对大部分竞技玩家而言，这是不能接受的。如果整个游戏进程可以如此摇摆不定，那么就玩家们没有任何意义研究游戏的微妙来击败对手。
Starcraft里，你的Dragoon是否在某个位置输出最大的火力对于大多数初级玩家来说并没有差别，但是对于专业玩家有着决定意义。
然而，几乎Company of Heroes里的每一个东西都是随机性的！这增添了现实性和张力（你不会知道什么将会发生！），但是限制了高水平的比赛。
 在随机性和令人困扰的视觉效果上，Company of Heroes和Dawn of War这对双胞胎进化出了另一个有趣而又敏锐的现象：AI系统太智能。
最聪明的AI是，玩家最少量的操作：当你的单位会在爆炸冲击波中散开，它们会像不可预知的方向散射，并且有时候会自动替你做出决定。（就像进入坦克）
此外，玩家对于每个单位更少的操作导致了玩家的技术很少可以决定结果。当AI不太过分并且可以预知的时侯，玩家可以准确的知道某个情况下什么会发生，然后可以用所知道的知识来克服困难和阻碍。
但是，当AI变的不可预知并且太聪明时，玩家失去了游戏的控制权，游戏变成了乏味、难以捉摸、乱七八糟的东西，讽刺的事就是智能化的AI可以自己进行防御。
所以THQ应该走向何方呢？Company of Heroes和Dawn of War都是创新的、智能型的RTS。嘎，这两款游戏逐渐进化着，它将变得明了。游戏元素让他们变得电影化——随机性，不清晰的画面，缺少精准的控制——同样这些元素让他们变得不适合高水平对战。
基本的技术的加强和决定性的战术是有趣的，但是最后这些RTS都需要把它们的重心从电影院转向游戏性，如果他们要变得更有竞技性的话。
长远看来，Company of Heroes和Dawn of War不能支持如同Starcraft一样的高水平对战，即使他们是“现代RTS”的标杆与先锋。
Company of Heroes和Dawn of War都有杰出的临场感以及优秀的单人任务，但是需要一个完全不同的方面进行革新来匹敌Starcraft的竞技性。
———— 06.25AM PST, 04/21/08 - James Lantz 嘎～来源：http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18326 引用:[Despite commercial and critical success, THQ's RTSes, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, haven't reached Starcraft's level of competitive play. Designer and game student James Lantz investigates whether modern RTS innovations made the genre unsuitable for high-level play.]
After the huge success of Starcraft and the large success of Warcraft 3, Blizzard stepped off the RTS stage and let THQ nudge their way into the spotlight with Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.
But, despite their commercial and critical successes, neither franchise could hold a flame to Starcraft’s ability to produce and maintain competitive play at a high level.
Right now, Blizzard is probably asking the same question we’re about to investigate: what made Starcraft a huge competitive success while Dawn of War and Company of Heroes have a comparatively piddling competitive fan base? And are Dawn of War and Company of Heroes really an example of where the RTS genre is headed?
The first, and largely underestimated, strength of Starcraft is its visual clarity. In Starcraft, you can glance at the minimap and understand almost immediately where your forces are concentrated, or look at the screen and quickly understand the flow of the battle. In Company of Heroes, however, the visual clarity gets lost amongst all the majestic effects that make the game so beautiful.
At first, this seems like a trivial difference. However, visual clarity is crucial when making the split second decisions that can steal victory from looming defeat.
There are easily half a dozen times in any given Company of Heroes game where you must make a quick decision, usually about retreating, amidst huge clouds of smoke and severed limbs. Looking back on the replay, you’ll often have made the wrong decision when, if the circumstances were clear, the decision would have been much easier.
Starcraft’s second strength is the precise level of control it gives the player. Many casual RTS players see the gradual curtailment of micromanagement as a boon to the genre. However, the more complex AI comes at the cost of precise control at a higher level of play.
As Starcraft evolved, competitive players tried to balance micromanagement with overall strategy and unit production, allowing them to hone a skill as well as push strategic innovations.
In Company of Heroes, however, the unit AI is complex and difficult to control manually. When you try to run a unit back, or micromanage it around to flank, you’ll often find it moving slowly because it insists on running from cover to cover. In buildings, even anti-armor units will often choose the wrong windows to fire from and get slaughtered by circling vehicles, which they could easily have killed if the player could simply tell them where to fire their rockets.
It’s also rather popular to praise Company of Heroes and Dawn of War for removing the micromanagement involved in resource gathering. In Starcraft, however, one of the most interesting choices that defines the course of a game is when to expand and when not to expand, a choice that Company of Heroes and Dawn of War simply remove.
With the same stroke, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War also remove another layer of micromanagement (worker micromanagement plays a large role in Starcraft) and, consequently, another layer of skill.
Some might say, “Isn’t that just purely physical skill?” Well, yes, but the balance between physical skill and strategic skill is part of any RTS – just as the balance between how quickly you can target someone’s head and tactical knowledge is part of any FPS. If there were no micromanagement in real time strategy games then they’d just be turn based strategy games, and we already have a genre for those.
But Company of Heroes’ largest weakness is its randomness. Starcraft has very little randomness, and so the same ambush in the same place will almost always kill the same amount of units with the same amount of shots. In Company of Heroes, sometimes it takes two rockets to take out a tank, sometimes the first four miss and it gets off unscathed. Sometimes a grenade takes out an entire MG squad, sometimes it doesn’t kill anyone.
To most competitive players, this is unacceptable. If the entire course of the game can be changed by a bad roll of the dice, there is no point in learning the subtleties of the game that competitive players use to get slight edges over each other.
In Starcraft, whether or not your dragoons are positioned in such a way that they get the optimal number of shots off is largely inconsequential in a game between low level players, but it’s crucial at the pro level.
However, almost everything in Company of Heroes has a random number generator attached to it. This lends it a sense of realism and tension (you never know what’s going to happen!) but severely limits high level play.
Among random number generators and confusing visual effects, the twin evolutions Company of Heroes and Dawn of War have proved another interesting, subtle point: there is such thing as AI that is too intelligent.
The more intelligent AI is, the less control the player has: when your units scatter and take cover at the sight of an artillery blast, they’ll scatter in unpredictable directions, and sometimes in ways you didn’t mean for them to go at all (like into a tank).
Moreover, the less control the player has over individual units, the less player skill factors into a result. When an AI is dumb and predictable, the player knows exactly what will happen in any given situation and can use this knowledge to pull off difficult and impressive stunts.
However, when the AI becomes unpredictable and intelligent, the player loses that level of precise control over the game, making it a frustrating, slippery and often unintuitive mess, ironically the very thing that intelligent AI was supposed to safeguard against.
So where does THQ go from here? Both Company of Heroes and Dawn of War are innovative, intelligent RTSes. Yet, as both games have evolved, it’s become clear that the elements that make them so cinematic – randomness, visual confusion, lack of precise control – are the same elements that make them unsuitable for high-level play.
The basic mechanics of reinforcement and capturing strategic points are interesting, but ultimately these RTSes need to turn their focus from cinema to gameplay if they want to become competitively successful.
In the long run, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War don’t support high level play in the same way that Starcraft does, even though they are often hailed as the pioneers in the RTS genre and true examples of a “modern RTS.”
Both Company of Heroes and Dawn of War are brilliant cinematic experiences and excellent single player games, but it’s going to take innovation in a completely different direction to compete with Starcraft’s competitive multiplayer juggernaut.
POSTED: 06.25AM PST, 04/21/08 - James Lantz 作者： 雪夜血@SC2c.com , 转载请注明星际争霸2中文论坛.
[ 本帖最后由 雪夜血 于 2008-4-24 23:28 编辑 ]
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