Author: Paranoia first released the "Travel Thinking" public account
Biochemistry 4 has many titles and memes, such as the pioneer of the over-shoulder perspective, Li Sanguang, Hydra and so on. But both the praise and the memes confirm the status of Biochemical 4's god work, and the game design of Biochemical 4 itself is close to perfect. The challenge of the Biochemical 4 remake is obvious - how to add, delete, modify and check the content while retaining the original content as much as possible, and optimize the game experience suitable for 2023.
This article mainly discusses the following points:
1. Restore the correct posture made by God
Second, realism and horror - the dilemma of realism and the advantages of horror themes
Third, the remake of the perfect score - whether the game industry is stagnant
Fourth, the main contradiction of 3A games - the contradiction between the growing game demand of players and the imbalance and insufficient development of manufacturers' development costs and commercialization models
1. Restore the correct posture made by God
Looking back at the biochemical series, the success of the biochemical 4 remake is inseparable from a series of biochemical new works, such as the village; And more remastered development experience - the same god Biochemical 2, but the exquisite design of the two-disc process was lost when remaked, which has been criticized a lot, not to mention the Biochemical 3 remake. The experience of this series of works has brought Biochemistry 4 other things besides design experience, such as attempts at technical implementation, and even resources that can be reused.
This allowed the production team to focus more on the remastered experience itself.
The basic idea of restoring the Biochemical 4 experience is to conform to the habits of modern players and the optimization of gaming equipment:
The original level design of Biochemical 4 has basically become perfect, and what the remake needs to do is to restore these design experiences on the basis of the next era - but this will cause new problems, that is, the change of the player experience after the picture is more realistic, which is discussed in "two".
The remake of the level part completes the task better, on the one hand, it reduces the difficulty of the level, and it is easy to encounter save points and merchants. On the other hand, many level details have been added, deleted, and optimized, such as various exploration content, collected content, and the map is more open and fun to repeat play; For example, the original mine cart has been opened more than once, but the remake seems to take into account the repetition of this experience, and the setting of multiple times has been deleted.
And the multi-week experience of the game also has various designs, such as replaying the sniper bell ringing of skipping class - too thin, too thin. Biochemical 4's multi-week experience content is also pleasantly surprised.
Combat section. The station stakes are removed and can be moved when firing. At the same time, the knife function has been strengthened, and the knife can now bounce back, of course, the durability is still a little annoying. At the same time, resource management has become more user-friendly and ammunition synthesis has become more convenient. The addition of stealth mechanics allows players to basically execute most enemies, including the Minotaur.
Role section. The design of the pear has been greatly optimized, there are no more health bars, and it has gradually grown into a good helper for players. The plot of the other main character, Louis, is increased, making the player more bound to Louis, the plot is more reasonable, and the knife is more uncomfortable.
Plot details, adding more elements of plot fragments, old actors' diaries, and some archives and the like. Make the story more reasonable...
There are many advantages of the biochemical 4 remake, and it seems to be nonsense if you say more, so I won't continue to blow embarrassment... A few more points that I don't think are good enough:
First and foremost, the original "bad taste" (this is a compliment!). The design is gone - xx and xx that get in the way (no, this is of course related to the zzzq in Europe and the United States.
After the picture writing is more realistic, various problems that are not "real" enough are also highlighted, such as attacking various large animals; For example, how to kill a non-humanoid monster is also a drop of money (this is not a bar).
For boss battles are not new enough, or even shrinkage, such as the performance of boss transformation is lazy, boss battles have no new experience. For example, the boss battle attack method with the lake monster is very lacking, and there is no thrilling experience; For example, the final boss experience is still relatively watery, or basically no difficulty, and even less intense than the previous boss battle - there is no modern experience of boss battle, or a little regret.
Dynamic difficulty. In fact, the dynamic difficulty of adjusting the monster is on the line, the sense of existence of this work is too obvious, and it is obviously unnecessary to reduce the experience of dropping.
Aunt Wang's role is too few, which strengthens the obstruction. - Maybe it's about the DLC.
Commercialization issues. Whether it is a commercial purchase option, selling skins, DLC, in fact, the problem revealed is ROI, and it is difficult to make a lot of money by selling copies of 3A games alone. Selling extra content is complementing more play time: the longer you play, the more valuable the content you buy. For example, multi-week and mercenary mode, but I want to ask do we really need to invest so much time in repeated playing? This will be discussed at the end.
Finally, let's talk about a little process design comparison between Atomic Heart and Biochemical 4, and talk about what is good process design:
The design of the Atomic Heart game itself is also very thoughtful, not really "development to kowtow to art", but known that the technology is limited, all functional members (programming, art, music, etc.) work together to achieve the effect:
The main flow of the game can feel the feeling of "human stacking experience", especially for people who have similar game development experience (such as MMO). It's all kinds of performances, events, battles, puzzle solving, and finally stacked together by the developer's hands.
The process design of the game itself, if the basic experience is excellent, may have a smooth experience loop: for example, it is all battles, puzzles, looting, safe house arrangements, if everything is good, each part can have its own rhythm. Instead of the fact that all parts of the experience are not very good, let the player clearly perceive that my main wave consists of a large puzzle and several small puzzles. The small puzzle has to be completed several times, and the monster will be brushed in the middle of each time (in fact, it is to let the player's experience change, but it is very stiff), and then when running, you have to pick up a lot of garbage, there is a safe house and a refrigerator to make some interesting ...
In fact, the implementation of Biochemical 4 is similar, and the main line consists of a large puzzle and several small puzzles. The puzzle has to be completed several times, and each time the monster will be brushed in the middle - but the difference is:
The puzzle form of Biochemistry 4, although similar in core, has completely different mechanics. Small puzzles basically have a certain rhythmic difference.
With dynamic difficulty and well-designed levels & monster rhythms, the battle experience is excellent.
On the whole, it is the diversity of puzzle solving + the diversity of combat, which combines a well-paced process experience.
Finally, a concrete example: the three beast heads as a large puzzle, consisting of small levels with 3 heads. These three mini-level experiences are completely different, one is to find faults and solve puzzles, one is skirmishes, and the other is an arena-like ring match.
Find fault solving puzzles
Encounters
Ring matches
To sum up
Biochemical IV, as a remake of how to do the textbook, handed over a fairly perfect answer sheet at a limited cost. But in fact, the focus of this article is to borrow Biochemistry 4 and talk about some of my thoughts on game production.
Second, realism and horror - the dilemma of realism and the advantages of horror themes
The realism of triple-A games has been a major trend in recent decades, and in the last 10 years of masterpieces, realism seems to have reached its limit:
In fact, the artistic effect presented by the picture has already reached the boundary of reality, and in recent years, it has continued to advance on the road such as light tracing, but the improvement has been limited.
The "uncanny valley effect" brought by realism cannot be ignored: because the picture is more realistic, players are more sensitive to the gap between various games and reality: character expressions, a little stiffness of actions, 3C operation does not conform to reality, the freedom of characters, etc. - this will lead to a significant increase in the investment of developers in character infrastructure.
One example is the surprising technical implementation of the last survivor, such as the wearing and taking off of clothes, which is difficult to achieve and the investment is not small.
Another example is Red Dead Redemption 2, which seems to prove it through top-of-the-line realism production - such a realistic extreme pile seems to be on a dead end, and the Niu Ru Big Cousin 2 team has spent more development time than expected - and there are countless employees working overtime and being squeezed behind it.
If you carefully compare the Biochemical 4 remake and the above 2 masterpieces, in fact, the detailed experience is much worse, but we still feel very comfortable, which is partly due to the horror theme:
Horror has natural limits: for example, players naturally don't wander around, and restrictions on movement are acceptable because of the atmosphere.
At the same time, horror can be used to inspire other experiences – like a salted watermelon. Fear itself can bring physical pleasure and psychological release satisfaction, and fear can also amplify the player's adventure experience, and the character's "suspension bridge effect" - Leon's adventure journey with the blessing of horror games we can get more feedback, such as the improvement of operations, becoming stronger, releasing adrenaline, and the sense of security at the merchant will also be amplified.
And the main characters in the game, such as the bond of the pear that gets in the way, because the existence of horror elements is also "drawbridge effect": the sense of terror amplifies our sense of achievement in saving beauty and protecting the weak; And the growth of the hindering pear and the bond with the protagonist can also make us remember more deeply - this is also one of the reasons why the hindering pear can be more substituted after being more realistic (the production team also deliberately did it).
Biochemical 4 reduces the sense of terror. The horror elements of Biochemical 4 are much lowered, but you can still feel it through full detail stacking - horror movies create horror through atmosphere creation and scary bridges, but the game has interactive jump scare is actually not necessary, so that more players can not be deterred by horror elements - and it is also conducive to expanding more player groups. Therefore, biochemical 4 is also rarely used - the horror of biochemical 4 comes from the powerlessness of insufficient resources and appropriate restrictions.
The best example of this sense of powerlessness is the bridge section of "Save Leon" in the way, which has no ability and can only escape - so that even if there is an expectation, the experience of horror + puzzle solving + running is full - the ingenuity of this paragraph is that the horror experience is full, but it amplifies the player's emotion and the full experience of the growth of the hindering pear.
However, the lack of realism in the biochemical 4 remake will still be perceived, such as the lack of interaction with various creatures, and hitting animals is also losing gold coins; And the AI that gets in the way of the pear is still not smart enough, there are various small problems, the most funny of which is that because the hindrance pear has no blood bar and is attacked and picked up - this leads to me being able to deliberately hit her with a gun, and then "are you okay" to lift up and get another shot.
This paragraph is both a strong horror experience and more moving
Third, the remake of the perfect score - whether the game industry is stagnant
In the past 10 years, there has always been a view: that is, compared with the game design of decades ago, it seems that the current level of various game design has not made much progress, or even regressed, but I think the reasons for this are quite compound:
In fact, technology has been developing rapidly over the years, and Moore's Law has only expired in recent years - after the previous game outbreak, major manufacturers have been in the rhythm of catching up with technology, dealing with the rapid technological iteration.
The realism of the game screen has almost entered the bottleneck in recent years, and as the picture becomes more realistic, players have higher and higher requirements for game details - which leads to a 1-point increase in details, and manufacturers may have to pay 100 points of effort, which is also a major competitive threshold for 3A manufacturers.
Therefore, many triple-A game manufacturers will roll up this technology moat to maintain their dominant position. This is a bit similar to how large companies spend a lot of energy on keeping their business and maintaining their advantageous position.
In this case, another problem is bug hell - the game still seems to take so long to play, but the number of bugs to be debugged is multiplied, which also leads to an increase in the game development cycle.
The bugs that went live in 2077 do not even guarantee the platform experience
But technical reasons aside, I don't think it's fair to say that the design level of the game industry has not improved:
Games have existed for thousands of years of human history, and the modern game industry is inseparable from other art forms: literature, architecture, music, film, etc. - it can be said that for game design itself, humans have accumulated thousands of years. For example, the level design and architecture in the game are closely related, not to mention the art, copywriting and other parts.
In recent decades, what human beings have done is actually summarized and summarized from excellent works obtained from "imagination" in an attempt to better create - such as the "heroic journey" model, which is summarized from well-known stories and myths around the world, and many excellent film scripts are also unconsciously adapted from many classic works.
The advantage of the game is the interaction, which is also the advantage of technology. As for the montage brought about by film technology, the game is based on a variety of ever-changing technologies for the exploration of "idea libraries" * "technology applications" - technology is always evolving, and there will be breakthroughs in the foreseeable decades.
Changes based on "interaction" and technological development have also had a profound impact on game design: for example, the invention of touch screens has brought about the outbreak of angry birds, fruit ninjas, and match-3 games (match-3 games are naturally the most suitable for touch screens); Nintendo, which "fully develops outdated technology", brings unique experiences based on the device itself, such as NDS and Wii, and unique experiences of NIS's Labo and Fitness Ring Adventure; And the recent PS5, the game "Cosmic Robot: Wireless Controller User Guide" tailored for its controller allows people to enjoy the possibilities of game interaction, which is also Sony, which has not advocated the meta-universe, has done one thing closest to the meta-universe - all of which actually shows that behind the development of technology, the design level of the game industry is always synchronized with the latest technology.
After the multi-dimensional impact of visual, tactile and other dimensions brought by technology has passed, many developers have calmed down and thought about the game design itself - how to do a good job of game design under a restricted platform condition to bring players the best experience - well, or Nintendo, Cookout, Mario Odyssey, and the upcoming Kingdom Tears (this is another example of a limited-based platform to make a design breakthrough); and independent games with space-time fantasy as an important node...
Fourth, the main contradiction of 3A games - the contradiction between the growing game demand of players and the imbalance and insufficient development of manufacturers' development costs and commercialization models
The triple-A game has been in a price dilemma for a long time:
The increasingly high technical costs brought by chasing technology, as well as the higher and higher basic requirements of players, have overwhelmed many manufacturers - but the game industry has maintained 59.9 knives for masterpieces for many years, and even if it rises by 10 knives or 20 knives, it is difficult to cover this inflated development cost.
As a result, major manufacturers began to think about how to get more revenue, from the complete experience at the beginning to splitting into the main body + DLC, the main body + season pass, to the later paid skins, and even the digital sales similar to online games - it has become very difficult for players to get a complete experience at a basic price.
This brings us to the content of this part of the title: the contradiction between the growing demand of players for games and the imbalance and insufficient development of manufacturers' development costs and commercialization models.
And these problems are also reflected in the Biochemical 4 remake:
Under the premise of the original biochemical 4 base + biochemical new work resources/technology accumulation, the raw 4 remake is actually facing funding problems, with various additional krypton gold options, and the deletion of Ida King scenes - it is likely to appear in DLC.
And one of the requirements for traditional 3A masterpieces is the duration of the game, which leads to a lot of great time and some repetition of experience with little meaning. Of course, the multi-week experience of Biochemical 4 Remake is still very good.
The topic I want to introduce here is that the high experience concentration time provided is more important from the perspective of experience concentration: a good example is a double trip. This requires changing the requirements for game duration, and I think that as a 59.9 knife game, it is completely enough to provide a first-pass experience of about 15 hours (about 5-10 movies), and more game design for the duration is not necessary (such as the three goddess chests of the new God of War).
And finally, some thoughts on the solution of these problems:
As players, we need to clarify our own game needs: for example, the experience of long-term operation of mobile games is probably in a cycle of high experience concentration and repetitive meaningless experience (short experience period of content update + long grass period of repeated work; Some 3A masterpieces provide a tangled cycle filled with high experience concentration + repetitive meaningless experience content, such as the ubisoft can that has been criticized by various criticisms; As a player, I prefer to experience works with high experience concentrations such as two-player travel, Breath of the Wild, and Biochemical 4 remakes, and the lower design difficulty here is linear games - in addition, there were many open world works many years ago, but due to technical limitations, they have re-emerged in recent years, but many of the detailed experiences of "open world" are repetitive and meaningless.
As a manufacturer, you have to consider both development cost and commercialization model.
In terms of commercialization model, more consideration can be given to models similar to GTA+OL, and some OL content can be done using game resources; Or expand a series of products from the IP chain of the game, such as various peripherals, adaptations, mobile game versions, etc.; Another direction is that the development cost is obtained from platform and hardware manufacturers, such as the technical support of the biggest winner NVIDIA, Sony, Microsoft Nintendo's platform policy preferences, etc. - but do not rush to medical treatment in commercialization, this aspect has the opportunity to expand later.
The solution to development costs can be based on technological developments, especially the recent AIGC:
On the one hand, the accumulation of technology and the accumulation of reusable assets: this is more like the approach of FS Society, and the infrastructure part is highly reused.
The biggest beneficiary of volume technology is Lao Huang: when Huang founded Nvidia, he did not intend to make it a gaming giant. In fact, he founded the company with the belief that people would eventually need graph-based computing to solve problems and problems that general-purpose computing would never be able to solve. For Jensen Wong, the best way to develop the necessary performance and technology is to focus on video games.
For developers and players, it seems to be a lose-lose situation: this requires game platforms + hardware providers to provide more universal solutions and reduce the difficulty of game development - this is what Unity, Epic, and NVIDIA are doing, but not enough now.
On the other hand, AIGC will bring solutions to the dilemma of 3A games: AI can reduce the cost of repeated development in the production of 3A games, especially in the reuse of resources that are difficult to achieve in technical iteration: for example, the resources of old works are difficult to reuse in new platforms and new requirements, which can allow AI to optimize; For problems such as multi-platform, localization, and QA, it can be handed over to AI; Finally, the introduction of AI such as ChatGPT allows tens of thousands of words of complete settings for a single character, and a lot of interaction is handed over to AI, making the game world more realistic...
Finally, the optimization hell caused by the differences between different platforms is that this requires better common solutions between platforms, or to complete the standardization of the underlying technology earlier. And the reason why cloud gaming is enjoyable is also because cloud gaming can erase this developer's optimization hell to a certain extent - well, it's a bit too much, but all of this is both to reduce the cost of developers and to realize the seemingly "ethereal" meta-universe.
But in fact, it is very important that developers should not roll too much technology, should give priority to focus on the design itself, technology is a tool rather than a purpose, do not put the cart before the horse - GF technology, picture pull, do not hinder their excellent design to make the game sell.