水晶动力主管达雷尔·加拉赫谈远离古墓丽影的从前
Tomb Raider Studio Head Darrell Gallagher Talks To GameInformer About Moving Away From Previous TR Titles
GameInformer杂志的问题:与前期作品注重谜题相比,新游戏更加注重射击和格斗。为什么设计团队会走向那个方向呢?
GameInformer asks: The new game has more focus on shooting and action than previous entries, compared to their bigger focus on puzzles. Why did the team go that direction?
达雷尔·加拉赫:首先,我觉得我们并不打算去回顾古墓丽影,我们觉得我们必须要做出一些改变。在这个过程中,我们逐渐被她的旅途和为生存冒险的精神所折服。这也就使得我们更加注重生存格斗和解决问题。仅仅依靠谜题来做游戏是一件很困难的事情,因为每个人对谜题的理解是不一样的。过去的古墓丽影中,谜题是故事的核心,很难达到平衡,因为我们必须照顾到对谜题的不同口味。有的人愿意在同一个地点花一个小时,就是为了解开谜题,但是有的人却讨厌花一个小时在同一个地点,因为他们可能只有2个小时玩游戏。其实,我们在《光之守卫者》中已经运用了这样的结构,原因和我们在这部作品中多处应用该结构的一样,因为这样的结构奏效了。虽然在故事主线中也有谜题,但是这些谜题并不是必须要花一个小时去解决的。我们想要确保想要花更多时间在解决谜题上的玩家能够得到满足,这样有助于扩大游戏世界,使游戏更加多样化,有助于市场开拓。这也是我们在尝试着平衡各方需求和个人步调,提供更多的选择。
Darrell Gallagher: First, I don’t think we were intending to retrace Tomb Raider 1; we felt like we had to do something different and in doing that we felt more compelled by the journey she was on and being this survival adventure. That led us down the path of it being more exterior and focused on survival action and problem solving It’s very tough to do a game that is sorely based on puzzles because one person’s difficult puzzle is another person’s easy puzzle. The way Tomb Raider games were structured in the past, all of the puzzles were all on that core path and therefore balancing was very difficult to do because of catering to many different tastes in puzzles. Some people love spending an hour in one spot figuring out how to get past the puzzle. Other people hate spending an hour in one spot because they have two hours to play the game before they have to go do something else. So, we actually changed the structure in Guardian of Light, for the same reasons and that was actually the template used in many ways for this game, because we felt like it worked. Even thought there are puzzles along the core story path, they’re not necessarily the spend-an-hour-solving-them type. We wanted to make sure that the player who wants to spend longer playing through puzzles, that they were there through more optional secondary tombs, which helped to expand the game world and make it more non-linear, which we felt helped exploration. It was really trying to balance different needs and pace of individuals and give choice
GameInformer杂志的问题:水晶动力在哪些地方放弃了原有的设定元素,比如说劳拉和她父亲的关系?
GI: Where does Crystal Dynamics fall on holding true to old element of the lore, like Lara’s relationship to her father?
达雷尔·加拉赫:我们讨论过这个话题,很多次。我们真的觉得我们需要明确划分过去和未来。我们本来应该继续前行,但是我们也并不想被过去发生的事情所牵绊,所以这是一个很理智的决定。游戏结束的时候,并不是说像1996年古墓丽影1一样,她又回到了游戏的起点。这是一个独立的开始,有着独立的开始和不一样的结局。我们并不觉得过去和现在这两条平行线需要交织在一起。虽然也会有一些相似的地方——同样的角色,同样的超能力——但是我们并不需要坚持这些。
Gallagher: We had that conversation and it was debated a lot. We really felt that we wanted to actually make a clean cut between the past and the future. There should be enough DNA that we carry across, but we didn’t want to be bound by what happened in the past so that was a conscious decision. When she ends up finishing this game, it’s not like she ends up at the beginning of Tomb Raider 1, back from 1996. It really is a separate start, a separate branch with its own beginning and we will see where it goes from here, but we don’t feel like the two parallels of the past and present have to join up. Obviously there will have to be dotted lines to them in some way-the same character, the same franchise- but it’s not something we felt that we had to hold on to.
GameInformer杂志的问题:在游戏结束的时候你对这个角色有哪些期待?在以后的续集中,你想看到她处于哪种状态?
GI: What is your take on the character regarding where she is at the end of this game? Where do you want to see her evolve in future installments?
达雷尔·加拉赫:我想对我来说重要的是劳拉并没有完全定型。在游戏开始的时候我们就感觉到她处于一种变化的状态中。当然最开始的时候她很天真,毫无戒备的开始了这段旅程,但是随着时间的推移,她也被她的经历所改变。我想以后我愿意看到旅程的波澜继续在她的心理和角色塑造方面起到推波助澜的作用。这些东西对人会产生何种影响?我想这是一个很好的问题,她经历的哪些恐怖和困难的场景不会被人们轻易忘记,所以我还想继续看到旅程的波澜对她的影响。我想那种我们尝试着让她不同于以往的能力是很重要的,完全就是一个Teflon的超级英雄。这也是这段时间以来我们一直尝试着想要打破的桎梏。我想这不可触碰的不同于以往我们所知道的古墓丽影,而是继续进化的灰色地带,和她所经历的苦难在她的角色上得以体现——这真是有趣的开端。
Gallagher: I think the most important this for me is she’s a character that isn’t fully formed. That was something that we set out to do from the beginning with this game, that she was sort of in the in-between state. Certainly she stars out very naive and ill equipped to go on this adventure, but she ends up in a place where she’s changed by the experience. I think moving forward I’d like to see the ripples from this adventure continue through her inner psyche and her character. What would that do to a person? I think that’s a good question I don’t think they’d be easily forgotten, what she’s just been through, which was a horrific and difficult circumstance, so I’d expect to see the ripples from this adventure continue through her character moving forward. I think the ability to keep her from becoming what we tried to move away from is important, which is a completely Teflon superhero. That was one of the things we tried to break the mold on this time around. I think this sort of grey area of not quite being the Tomb Raider that we knew from back in the day, but continuing to evolve, and the scars of what she’s been through being represented in her character-that’s an interesting place to start.
节选自《GameInformer》杂志2013年5月第241期第25页
Excerpt from May 2013 GameInformer, issue 241, page 25