Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, by Jing Haoyu

Marriage in the game is much closer to reality than we thought.

I don't know when the "marriage" setting appeared in the game-this must have made many players feel that "the game can simulate life", but that must have been a long time ago.

Of course, there are many reasons to interpret marriage in the game. For example, in MMORPG, the marriage system allows players to express a more intimate relationship (which means they can spend more time in the game). Or in RPG, marriage can provide further freedom and fidelity.

No matter which type it belongs to, humans always look forward to developing intimate relationships in the game. And in all the games with marriage system, marriage is one of the most popular functions. Game developers also know that the marriage system means richer play and more stable player dependence. Draw a new story with a playable character, design more feeder tasks with a cyber wedding, and hold the player with a virtual relationship-from the producer's point of view, the marriage system is a good idea to win.

But as in real life, there are a lot of things that people are always in high spirits at the beginning, but end up being a bit of a fool. Or take MMORPG as an example, many games do extraordinary wedding or wedding functions, but what if two people want to break off an intimate relationship? Most MMORPG games only need one or more buttons, press it, and it will be fine. Of course, there is the kind of naked "marriage is more of an economic concept" flavor, but even from the design, if carefully studied, it does give people a sense of a dead end.

Although this topic sounds strange at first-it seems that we always seem to wander about these things-talk about how to end an intimate relationship in the game, to some extent, you can also see how designers view intimacy (or at least in-game intimacy). Sometimes the way you end a relationship is more telling than the way you start it. Specific to the game, specific to this system, do we need to take it seriously? Or is it just enough to use it as a feature that provides a numerical harvest? In other words, it mainly meets the emotional needs of players or utilitarian needs?

Marriage proposals in the Sims series start at the end when players try to end their marriage in the game, the ideal scenario is, of course, to break up peacefully according to the process. Players who want to get out of marriage are lucky to be able to choose divorce freely in the game.

The marriage system of "the Story of the Ranch" is also one of the favorite ways to play in this series. The latest series, "the Story of the Ranch: the Town of Olives and the Land of Hope," released in 2021, continues the previous marriage play of the series. As long as you enter a specific place during a non-bad weather period, you will trigger a love affair with the corresponding character, brush it with objects and propose, and players can get married with their favorite character.

In contrast, the previous works in this series have no divorce function at all. If players want to experience a new marriage, they must replay the game and make a choice in another archive. But in the new work, you only need to make a special wish in the elves of the ancestral temple and choose to dissolve the family relationship, and the goodwill with your partner will return to the pre-marital value. In a sense, this is considered by the system to be divorced. After that, players can confess their marriage to any character including ex-wife and ex-husband at any time.

The Wedding in the Story of the Ranch: the Olive Town and the Land of Hope

Divorce will return to the state it was before confession. This so-called divorce has a typical escape style and feels like the kind of person who disappears without saying hello. As in real life, evasion can also lead to some problems. For example, if both parties have children at the time of divorce, the children will disappear directly and permanently without any relevant plot explanation. This is tantamount to returning the archives directly to the pre-confession state. From the point of view of game design, this is of course a very convenient choice for both players and developers, but it is "extremely scary" if you think about it. The game followed by a series of DLC, adding more than a dozen characters to fall in love, which is obviously related to this design-less moral sense, but more wives and husbands.

Also to end the intimate relationship, the Story of Xinglu Valley designs a more real way to play. In the Story of Xingdeu Valley, players can also choose to divorce their spouse, but the procedures are much more complicated. Players need to go to the mayor's house to find the prop book and choose the divorce option. The player can back out after submitting the application, but the application must be withdrawn before the mayor's house closes that night. If the divorce is confirmed, the partner will move away from the player the next day and return to his former residence. A wooden box appears in the player's own house, which contains what the player had put in the other person's room. At the same time, the popularity of the two is reduced to zero, and the character interface will also be marked with "ex". If the player interacts with him again, the other person will react in an unfriendly way.

As for children born with ex-partners, after divorce, they will stay in the farmhouse where the players are located and continue to be raised by the players. When players no longer want to raise their ex-children for a variety of reasons, the witches in the game can also provide dark magic to turn the child into a pigeon and fly away-scary as it sounds, but at least there is an explanation. At the same time, the witch can also help erase the memory of the ex, and the character who forgets the front can have a romantic relationship with the player again.

The reaction when I saw my ex-wife again.

Of course, like every witch in a fairy tale, there is a price to ask her to do something. In the Story of Xinglu Valley, you need to pay 30,000 gold coins for each time you erase the memory of your ex, and you need to sacrifice a "colorful fragment" every time you turn your front chamber children into pigeons. Divorce itself costs 50, 000 gold dollars at the mayor's office, while marriage costs only 5000 gold dollars-a full 10 times as much as marriage.

From a game design point of view, this design certainly makes this function more complete, and most importantly, in this way, the game reminds players of the price of ending a serious relationship-which, of course, comes at a price. We show how serious we are about something by paying the price.

"you have to pay 50,000 gold for divorce, or do you still make do with it?" Not all games have divorce features. In some games, partners are born to go from one to the end, and there is no option for players to break up peacefully. But the demand always exists, if the normal way can not find a way, the player will use abnormal means to achieve the goal.

The glorious classic game "Chronicles of the three Kingdoms" series has a famous marriage system. In some of these works, if the player and his wife fight together, they will receive a special force bonus. Based on the ancient background of the game, each player in the Chronicles of the three Kingdoms can marry three wives at the same time, and it is important for players to choose a lineup.

Getting a wife also needs to increase feelings by completing a task. if you want to end an intimate relationship, the player who chooses to be the monarch can solve it by confiscating the wife's treasure and breaking the "trip" between the two. But for players who choose other identities, they may have to do so through the "population iteration" of their existing partners. If you don't want to wait until the end of your life, the most common way is to send the wife to fight with very few troops and make a glorious death without suspense-and if you can't die in one battle, you need to go out many times in a state of injury. At this point, if there are no underage children, players can marry new lovers-because there is no corresponding function, NPC will have to be sent out to die, which does not make sense.

The same can be done in Chronicles of the three Kingdoms 14. Similar settings appeared in Venus and Bryce, a RPG game that landed on PS2 in 2003. There is a very special setting in this game, the protagonist of the player has an unlimited life span, and the companions in the game need to experience the birth, aging, sickness and death of a normal person. The main way to play the game is to form a strong and stable knighthood in the process of continuous iteration.

As the core of the iteration, the marriage subsystem is of great significance in the game. The roles of Venus and Bryce are divided into 17 professions with different genders and grades. Players can promote marriage between characters and then have children. If done properly and of childbearing age, the child will inherit the parents' ability to become a more powerful role and join the order of knights.

That's why it's important for players to get married and have children, and whether their characters marry the right people at the right time. At the same time, there are similar same-sex relationships in the game, where characters of the same sex who have a deep relationship will develop into close friends and will no longer marry and have children with other heterosexual couples. Faced with this situation, the only solution is to arrange for the party whose conditions are not good enough to be discharged from the army or die in battle. If you want to form a strong enough team, every player has to experience the operation of beating mandarin ducks with their own hands.

This is a very ruthless operation, but some of the game world is even more cruel than this, can not be solved in the game world, need to go outside the game world to find a way. In Ancient Scroll 5: the Skyline, players are unable to divorce under normal rules. The common way is to throw the love token necklace out of the backpack, then find a way to kill the current partner, and finally enter the code through the console to reset the marriage task, then you can fly with your new lover.

Key props: Mara necklace, but what's the price? We talked earlier about how many games deal with ending a relationship-either relatively simple or very simple. That doesn't sound like "the game is second Life". But the question is, if the game seriously simulates reality, will it certainly give us a good feeling?

NPC are all avatars, and divorce is sometimes more troublesome in MMORPG, which involves social interaction among live players. You can enter code in the world of "ancient scrolls", but if everything involves another living person, divorce is not as simple as entering a code at all. If the opposing player does not agree to end the relationship, he or she usually has to pay a high price.

In May 2020, a player told about his painful experience in the online game "two under the Heaven" on Weibo. Because the couple's quests are rewarded and allow players to upgrade quickly, she married another player of the same gang in the game after agreeing in advance that she would "only do tasks but not talk about feelings." The problem is that things didn't go the way they wanted. The other party began to pester her in real life, and after being rejected, she no longer manipulated the character online, and the task she wanted to do could not be accomplished. Under such circumstances, she naturally needs to get divorced in the game.

However, in "Heaven II", role agreement divorce requires both parties to work together to find their own NPC and apply for it many times. During this period, either party can cancel the "separation" status at any time and refuse to divorce. According to her, the other party not only repeatedly interrupted the divorce process, but also quite into the play, saying that "the deletion of the account will not divorce." In desperation, the player had to adopt the method of "forced divorce". Although this process only needs her to operate alone, but the divorce expenses also need to be borne by her. The exact amount of fees to be paid is determined by the other party of the marriage by judging the "bad grade of divorce". At the end of the story, she was forced to pay a forced divorce fee of 1000 gold coins.

She summed up the experience as a "divorce cooling-off period" in the game, and in retrospect, it's hard to say whether the design was rough or "even Zen." On the one hand, as we said before, we sometimes need to pay a price to determine how much we value this matter, and on the other hand, when you know that divorce is so troublesome, you may be more cautious about getting married-even in the game.

Such settings exist in many games. In "Dream Journey to the West", a fee of 1 million silver dollars is required to be paid to Yuelao for a unilateral forced divorce, which is non-refundable even if it fails. If you unilaterally terminate the relationship in "against the current and cold", you need to pay 200000 copper money. In Dungeon & Fighter, the number is 500000.

But if you look at it another way, divorce is so troublesome, but marriage is quite simple. Can I make some changes to this design? To some extent, we can understand why game designers set a threshold for unilaterally ending an intimate relationship, but to be honest, is it more appropriate to remind them "before marriage"? For example, come up with an answer with 20 questions, with a correct rate of more than 80% before you can continue. One of the famous sayings of modern netizens is, "it's a pity that parents don't need exams." Children can't tuck it back, but should the development of intimate relationships, even in games, set a threshold?

The divorce procedure in "against the Cold" Marriage in the game is much closer to reality than we thought. The real marriage is influenced by factors such as love and economic ability, and marriage in the game is often driven by both game income and emotional factors. Driven by interests, players choose to enter the love and marriage system in the game in order to get props, participate in activities or train teams. Whether it is getting married together or beating lovebirds, there are always very realistic considerations. Husband and wife, who were originally the same forest birds, were rewarded to fly separately.

But at the same time, there are quite a lot of intimate relationships in the game that are also based on deep emotional factors. In many MMORPG games, it is nothing new to go from love on the Internet to couples in real life. Even in stand-alone games, sincere feelings still exist-no matter how attractive the expected benefits of divorce and remarriage, there are always players who are reluctant to give up the characters they have been with for a long time, which may partly explain the nature of intimacy.

There are always unforgettable moments when we can interpret intimate relationships to some extent by games, such as "double trip". In the final analysis, the complexities of real life are always projected in the game world. even indifferent people, when they come into contact with similar scenes in the game, may think about what marriage and intimacy really mean. From this point of view, it actually makes sense to interpret intimacy in the game.

A "double trip" based on divorce stories

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