《骑马与砍杀2：霸主》开发日志（123）——回顾2019年科隆展

贤狼赫萝

Greetings warriors of Calradia!
卡拉迪亚的战士们，大家好！

As the dust from Gamescom begins to settle, we thought we would use this week’s blog to give you a summary of the events from last week’s show before inviting you to present some questions for us to answer in next week’s blog.
随着科隆游戏展的尘埃落定，我们想用这期日志给大家带来上周展会的活动摘要，在这之后我们会邀请大家来问几个问题让我们在下周的日志里回答。

So, let’s get to it, shall we? As we explained a couple of weeks back, this year’s Gamescom was a rather special one for us. For the first time ever, we presented the game in the public area of the show with a hands-on demo of Captain mode, a 6 vs 6 team-based game mode that puts players in command of a detachment of their own AI troops. Meanwhile, over in the business area, we presented guests with a hands-on demo of the mid-game of Bannerlord’s vast sandbox campaign, putting a heavy focus on large-scale battles and sieges.
那就让我们开始吧？正如我们几个星期前所说，今年的科隆展对我们很特殊。这是我们有史以来第一次在公共展区展示了我们的游戏，其中包括上手测试中的领军模式，通过6V6组团让玩家带领自己的一队AI部队进行战斗。同时，我们还在商业区让来客们上手了《霸主》游戏中期的沙盒模式，重点关注大规模的战斗和攻城。

This was actually quite a challenging task for us. Before this year, we had only shown the game in the business section to a restricted audience. This time, we would not only have a public booth for the first time, but we would also offer the single-player demo separately in the business area. This really put a lot of stress on our team. Although programmers working on single-player and multiplayer could generally work independently, our QA team, level designers etc. had to put a lot of work to ensure that both demos were ready. We also had to design and plan for two separate booths, which was quite a task in itself!
这其实对我们来说是一项具有挑战性的任务。在今年以前，我们只是在商业区给很少的来客展示游戏。这次，我们不仅第一次有公共展位，我还在另一个商业区提供单人联机内容。这给我们的团队带来了很大压力。虽然程序员们可以分别独立为单机和联机游戏进行工作。但我们的QA团队，关卡设计师等工作人员就要做很多工作来确保两个模式都准备好了。我们还必须设计和规划两个独立的展位，这本身就是很艰巨的任务！



The TaleWorlds team making the final preparations at our business area booth
TaleWorlds团队在我们的商业区展位做最后准备

Thankfully, in the end, our confidence paid off and we were able to show the game in somewhat its entirety, with thousands of guests visiting our booths, and in some instances, multiple times! We won’t lie though, for as well as we feel things went (amazingly if we do say so ourselves!), there were a few small issues here and there, but that is to be expected of a game that is still in development. Barring the odd obscure crash and some minor optimisation issues, overall the demos were stable, had a sufficient amount of content to keep people entertained, but more importantly, they were fun!
值得庆幸的是，最终我们的信心得到了回报，我们基本上给玩家展示了完整的游戏，数千玩家来到了我们的展位，有的甚至来了好几次！我们不撒谎，事情都已经过去了（有点惊讶这是我们自己对自己说的！），有不少地方都有一些小问题，但这依然是一个正在开发中的游戏。除了一些奇怪的模糊崩溃和小部分优化问题，整体的测试都很稳定，已经有足够的内容能让人觉得好玩了，但最重要的是，大家都很开心！


Community member, Killbotter, after a game or two of Captain mode
玩家Killbotter在一两场游戏之后（T恤留言：我来这就是为了骑砍2的！以及“这个头颅很漂亮”）

We were blown away by the response from the players at both booths. It was amazing to see people completely fresh to the series standing alongside Mount & Blade veterans, enjoying the game we have worked so hard on for so long. We can’t express how much it meant to us to see the look on people’s faces as they rode head-on into battle with a huge smile on their face.
我们被两个展位的玩家的反馈给震惊了。能看到新玩家和骑马与砍杀老玩家同台竞技并肩作战，他们享受着我们一直以来努力开发的游戏，这是非常令人吃惊的事情。当我们看到大家在一股脑钻入战场满脸笑容的表情，让我们无法用言语来表达这对我们有多大意义。



Visitors at our public booth playing Captain mode
游客们在公共展区玩领军模式

At the beginning of the week, we made the announcement that the game will be launched on Steam Early Access in March 2020. It wasn’t our intention for Bannerlord to launch exactly 10 years after our previous game, Mount & Blade: Warband, was released, however, we do find it to be a rather amusing coincidence nevertheless! Alongside this announcement, we opened up a web form for people to apply to take part in Bannerlord’s ongoing closed-beta, which, by the way, is still open: beta.taleworlds.com

在上星期二，我们就宣布游戏将在2020年3月，在STEAM上发布抢先体验版。我们并不是故意让《霸主》在前作《骑马与砍杀：战团》发布的10周年之际发布游戏，但这对我们来说还是相当有趣的巧合。出了这个公告后，我们还给玩家们开放了一个表格，让每个玩家都有机会申请加入《霸主》正在进行的内测，也就是进入官网：beta.taleworlds.com

So, why the decision to launch in early access? Well, for a game as huge as Bannerlord, we knew that at some point we would need to get a large pool of players in to play the game and find all of the strange and hidden bugs that are simply impossible for a team of our size to locate. The game has completely expanded in scope compared to anything we have released before, and not just in terms of map size and settlement counts. We are talking about the many new game features and mechanics, most of which are interconnected, meaning that any slight change in one can have an unexpected knock-on effect in another. We are keen to hear feedback from our players on these new features, as well as, the changes we have made to existing features. We want to work alongside our community to deliver a game that achieves our goals and vision while providing them with a unique and enjoyable experience that they can keep coming back to well into the future.

那么，我们为什么要启动抢先体验版呢？其实，对于像《霸主》这样的大型游戏，我们知道我们需要在某些时候让大量玩家进入游戏并找到奇怪和隐藏的BUG，因为这对我们这规模的小团队来说几乎是不可能的。游戏范围比我们之前发布的任何游戏都要答，不只是地图大小和聚落数量。我们说的是很多游戏的新功能和机制，其中大多数都是相互关联的，也就是说任何微小的变化都会产生意想不到的连锁效果。我们迫切期望能得到我们玩家对新功能的反馈，还有对我们现有的功能做出的更改。我们希望能与玩家共同合作，让游戏实现我们的目标和愿景，同时还能为大家在未来给大家提供更独特而又愉快的体验。

We will be talking a lot more about what you can expect from early access over the coming weeks so that you can make an informed decision on if you would like to access the game in an unfinished state or not, but for now, we just want to make it clear that there will be a lot of content there to keep you entertained for many, many hours.

我们将在未来几周讨论大家能在抢先体验版中期待什么，以便你能在游戏还没完工的情况下做出明智的选择。但现在，我们只想明确表示游戏会有很多内容可以让你好好玩上很久很久。

As for the multiplayer closed-beta, we will start to invite players in from next week onwards. We have made the decision to invite people in waves, so if you don’t get a key next week, please do not be disheartened. We will be targeting different groups at different stages so we can gather feedback from a wide range of players. We have decided to take this approach because we feel it would be the most effective way for us to make use of the limited amount of time we have to gather feedback and data to refine multiplayer in time for the early access launch. This allows us to target and tackle specific problems individually rather than allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed from the get-go.
至于联机测试，我们将在下周开始邀请更多玩家。我们会分好几批玩家进行邀请，如果你下周没有拿到激活码，请不要灰心。我们会针对不同的群体进行不同阶段的测试，以便让我们广泛玩家的反馈。我们这样做是因为我们认为这能让我们在有限的时间内收集反馈和数据，在抢先体验版发布之前完善联机游戏。这能让我们定位和解决某个具体的问题而不是让我们被问题的海洋淹没。



We would like to invite you to ask any questions you may have about this year’s Gamescom, as well as, any questions you may have about the closed-beta and early access, by leaving them in the comment section below. We will select a few to answer in next week’s blog, which we will present to you alongside a gameplay video from the single-player demo.

我们想邀请大家来问任何关于今年科隆展，以及你对内测或者抢先体验的任何问题，就在评论区讨论吧。我们会选择几个问题并在下周的日志中回答，同时我们还会把单人游戏的演示视频一起展现给大家。

独孤传道者

如果再磨叽10年，我可能拿不动鼠标了。。