《The Witness》是一款开放世界的解谜游戏,游戏将在PS4和PC平台上推出,视频中Jonathan Blow将讲述游戏开发过程中的故事。微软确认次世代新主机XBOX ONE不向独立游戏开发,开发者仍然需要出版商才可以放出内容,而PS4在这点上则相对开放,任何独立游戏开发者都可以自由在PS4上推出他们的作品,《The Witness》就是一款很好的作品,在次世代家用机上,它将为PS4独占
The Witness on PS4: Tiny Details in a Very Big World
It has been a while since we made a post on PlayStation.Blog, so I thought I would give an update about what we are working on.
The Witness takes place on an island full of puzzles. The island is an open world; you can go anywhere you want, and the game does not try to force you into a linear path. For the past couple of years, we have had the island mostly built in a gameplay sense, and we were trying it out, moving things around, developing location concepts, tweaking puzzles. At this point, most of that stuff is figured out, so we are now going through all the areas of the island and detailing them.
What we learned in this process is that the island is in fact very big, for a place where you carefully visit every location during gameplay! Correspondingly, for a small independent team like ours, detailing this huge space is a lot of work!
Just the other week, we played through the game from start to finish, to get a fresh perspective and to see everything that is here (because when you are working on a small piece of a game for a long time, it becomes very easy to get tunnel vision and to see only that small piece). Originally I had meant to design an 8-hour game, but The Witness is more like 25-40 hours depending on how much you play (some of the game is optional!)
I suspect this is the biggest and most-intricate world ever built for a puzzle game (someone get a consultant from the Guinness Book to verify that!)
On the tech side, we are working on making The Witness run with a smooth and solid frame rate, making the graphics look as nice as possible, and ensuring that the streaming system loads things quickly. We wrote our own engine for this game, so on the one hand, it means we get to do a lot of work; but on the other hand, it means we have precise control and can tweak it carefully until it is the highest-quality experience we can deliver.
作者: kirassss 时间: 2014-5-8 07:47 AM PS4限时独占游戏作品《见证者》将提供621个谜题
Jonathan Blow制作的PS4限时独占独立游戏《见证者》(The Witness)将是一款规模非常巨大的游戏作品。我们曾经报道过,《见证者》的谜题数量将达到500个左右,现在,制作者Jonathan Blow在推特上透露,目前游戏中的谜题数量已经达到了621个。
@Jonathan Blow:“目前的谜题数量:621”
虽然这是一款小游戏,但却很可能给我们带来大惊喜。开发博客上透露,游戏将提供地下洞穴场景,看上去非常壮观。虽然厂商并未在博客上直接公布地下洞穴场景,不过截图已经放出来了,应该不是手绘的概念画。目前Blow依然拒绝确认游戏发售日期,只说“当制作完成,就会发售”。作者: kirassss 时间: 2014-5-15 07:08 AM Jonathan Blow provides The Witness development update
The Witness on PS4: New Development Details
The Witness is a game where you explore an abandoned island and solve puzzles. We’ve been working on this game for a long time (It’s been more than five years since I began working on it, myself! The rest of the team joined at various times after that.). We don’t know the release date yet; it’s still officially “when it’s done,” but these days “when it’s done” is getting closer and closer. The Witness is an ambitious game with a lot of things for us to get right, and getting it right takes time; I don’t want to rush the game out at the cost of quality.
Here are some of the things we’ve been working on lately:
• Design. All the gameplay along the “main line” of the game — the stuff you would expect to do from the beginning to the end of a standard playthrough — is done. But, this is a game that has a lot of extra things for players who are really into the game and want more; we’re still designing some of those extras.
• Modeling and texturing. The Witness has a lot of different locations, and it’s very important that they all receive the same degree of care. Most of the island where The Witness takes place is fully modeled at this point, but there are a few important locations that are still in a draft stage, and several others that could use another pass of detail.
• Frame rate optimizations. At launch on PS4, we’re planning to render at 1080p and 60 frames per second. Right now we meet this target in many areas of the game, but not everywhere. But with more old-fashioned hard work, we should be.
• Level-of-detail management and streaming. For example, making sure that it doesn’t take too long to stream in new parts of the world as you move. When we do stream in higher-detail versions of far-away geometry, we don’t want the graphics to pop, so we’ve recently implemented a smooth blend between LOD levels. The Witness is an open-world game with no loading screens; the feeling of just walking around and looking at things is very important. We work hard to make this happen as smoothly as possible.
• Audio. Since The Witness is so much about a sense of place, the audio design is crucial. Right now there are 1.2 gigabytes of sound (Much of it compressed!) in the game, which represents over 40% the game’s data.
This last statement about the audio made me curious about what our data looks like, so here are some numbers on how much data is in The Witness. (These are all the size of files in the game as it would be shipped, not the source files!)
Texture Maps: 1,196 files, 446MB
Meshes: 4,588 files, 507MB
Sounds: 2,435 files, 1.2GB
Animations: 197 files, 0.6MB
Entities: 1 file, 4.3MB
Lightmaps (these are auto-generated): 17,916 files, 453MB
Total (including other files not listed here): 39,387 files, 2.7GB
It’s a lot of work, but we are now in the downhill stretch of the race and looking forward to tying the game up completely. We’ll have more updates for you before too long!
作者: kirassss 时间: 2015-9-18 07:09 AM 本帖最后由 kirassss 于 2015-9-20 07:40 AM 编辑
The Witness Launches for PS4 & PC on January 26
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The Witness Launches on PS4 January 26, 2016
Hi everyone!
We finally know the release date for The Witness: it’s January 26, 2016. That’s about four months from now, and it will be a very busy four months as we work hard to make the game the absolute best we can.
We’ll be very happy to get the game out into the world, because we’ve been working on it a long time! We originally thought The Witness would be coming out toward the end of the PS4 launch window, but... there’s just been a lot to do. I think when the game is in your hands, you’ll find it to be intricate and deep, and also unlike anything else you have played.
There’s a lot here. When we started making this game, I figured it would have between 8 and 12 hours of playtime. As it happens, the game we’ve finally built is around 10 times as big as that: if you are a completionist who wants to wring every last drop out of the game, you might expect to play for 80 hours, or possibly 100. For people who don’t want to go quite that far, the game’s still got plenty for you.
Last time I posted to this blog was in May 2014. In that post, just for fun, I gave some stats about how many assets were in the game (3D meshes, animations, sounds, etc). Today I went back and took new measurements of all these things; here’s what we have:
As you can see, we have not been idle!
But those numbers will only increase a tiny bit between now and release. For the most part we are fixing bugs, refining the feel of play, and making sure everything is just right for January.
That’s all from me for now — back to working on the game! — but your fine PS.Blog host Justin has been playing the preview version of The Witness and will be sharing his impressions soon.
《The Witness》的舞台是一个充满谜团的小岛,玩家可以在岛上自由地做很多事情。开发者为玩家准备了25-40小时左右的游戏体验。作者: kirassss 时间: 2016-1-15 07:29 AM The Witness voice cast announced
Meet the Voice Actors of The Witness
We’re a couple of weeks away from our release date, and we’ve just finished recording the last of the voice acting, which means it’s a good time to tell you about the actors!
The Witness deliberately riffs on several traditional elements of game design, and one of those elements is the classic audio log, where you are wandering along and you find a recording that was placed there by someone before.
The Witness has recordings like this, but let’s just say they are done in a highly non-traditional way. When you first encounter them you won’t find much in the way of answers, but, if you keep looking, you will eventually be able to piece together what’s going on.
These are the folks whose fine voicework you will hear in these recordings:
Ashley Johnson, who you may know as Ellie from The Last of Us, or from her roles in Tales from the Borderlands and Infamous: First Light. She also plays the smartest person on the hit TV show Blindspot. You can find Ashley on Twitter here.
Phil LaMarr, who I best know as Marvin from Pulp Fiction, but who you may know as Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4, or as Ratbag from Shadow of Mordor. He also played Hermes in Futurama and Ollie Williams in Family Guy! You can follow his random musings here.
Matthew Waterson, who played very English person Sir Lucan in The Order: 1886, and has recently acted in Fallout 4 and Halo 5. Check out Matthew’s amazing Sean-Connery-themed profile picture here.
Terra Deva, an oft-performing musician, including recent hit single “At Night” with the Swiss group Shakedown (though she doesn’t play music in The Witness because we don’t have music in The Witness! She is acting!) and veteran of… The Mickey Mouse Club (among many other places)!! Terra’s Twitter is here.
I will warn you, though, that the story in The Witness, such as it is, is fairly subtle and happens mostly implicitly. You really have to explore and read between the lines to know what’s going on. So do not expect a traditional game story like The Last of Us or The Order! All that said, we are very happy to have these actors lending their talents to our game, and I look forward to release when you’ll see what we’ve been up to.
Jonathan Blow on Jan 14, 2016 // President, Thekla
A lot of people have been asking about the price, so: The price of the game on both Steam and PSN will be $39.99.
A lot of people have been asking about preorders too. Preorders will go live on Steam and the Humble Store (and on this web site) today at noon PST. Unfortunately we won’t have preorders on PSN, because apparently developers have to set those up months in advance and we didn’t know that!
The preorders are regular price! They contain an amazing bonus pack-in: the warm fuzzy feeling that you have pre-ordered the game. (And that’s all). So it’s exactly the same as buying the game at launch, except earlier.