Quote:Original post by Ranger Meldon
I appreciate this advice. I will take it to heart when wanting to be completely in the spirit of saving my time and increasing my chances of completing my game. I know I talk a lot on here about how I think people are lazy if they don't push themselves to do their best etc etc but that's not all of who I am. I agree with the saying that works of art are never finished, only abandoned. I could probably keep adding features, content, and refinements to my game until sometime around the end of the universe. There will always be so much to do, and the more I do, the more I will see that I could do. So no, please don't think me a complete fool (only partially One). :) I will eventually have to "face the music" as far as deciding how much game is enough.

Heck, I don't conisder it a fool to be ambitious in your game design (otherwise I'd be the biggest fool of all!) It's just you've got some really great ideas that would push the boundaries of RPGs that I'd like to see; however given a choice I'd prefer to see you implement just one of those ideas implemented well in a game, rather than you attempt to implement two dozen and never getting the thing finished.

Actually, from what I've read in game post-mortems, and from my own (brief) experience in the commercial game industry, I'd say the number one reason for failed or broken games is from the team being unwilling to compromise and sacrifice game design ideas in order to get the game finished. It's just human nature to not want to abandon your ideas. Most of us independent and hobbyist developers have a slight advantage over the commercial guys and gals as we don't have a time limit, and make our living through other means.

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p.s.--For those who will understand this: Being the Fool is not so bad, for it leads to being the Magician. And yet we are latently both already. 0=1=oo

Heh, I think I made an account here years ago under the old nickname 'The Hierophant', but I lost both my password and the email account that it was linked to.

I haven't read through all of the replies. So just ignore any questions / concerns that have already been addressed.

Quote:Original post by Ranger Meldon
I'll start this question off with some answers of my own. I don't like:

Maybe it would have been easier to write a list of things you do like [wink]

Quote:5) How games that use weight-based carrying limits don't offer any recourse to physically wimpy mages. There needs to be some kind of "magic bag of holding" or something, that only mages (or characters beyond a certain level of magic skill) can make and equip that allows them to carry somewhere near the same amount of stuff a warrior can. I also think a packmule and/or wagon are good ideas too.

Later on (#19), you argue that different classes should offer much different gameplay experiences. But here you're saying the opposite; that we should try to make this one skill equal for vastly different character types. I believe it already suits the character types, as is. For example, warriors have to carry swords or guns, where mages carry a staff or some paper. I also doubt most players are going to accept 'magic bag' as the reason. What other choices are there to present, if a designer actually wanted to make his character classes less unique?

Quote:8) How uncustomizable the weapons are in practically every game I've ever played, especially if it's an FPS RPG. I want to be able to forge my own custom sword that has a large chance of looking unique even in an MMORPG setting. This would just be an issue of mixing and matching different weapon subparts, i.e. hafts, handles, blades, blade tips, edges, guards, pommels, runes, effects like glowing or flaming, etc. This would be so extremely cool, and if you coded it right, it wouldn't have to be that much more complex.

Customizable weapons sounds great. But it sounds like you're talking about having the player build the model of the weapon. Isn't that taking it a bit far? Even if you offered a thousand combination possibilities, most players are going to regard the same look as 'cool', and so most players will be weilding the same identical weapon anyways. I like the idea of building / designing the weapons, but I don't think it should be based on looks or model parts. The whole purpose of a weapon is to kill. Only kings and emperors care about how pretty their weapon is.

Perhaps if it was based on metal types and forging ability. It would also be possible to draw the shape of a blade and handle (this would be mostly unreasonable in any MMO type game). The color and look of the weapon, other than it's shape, should be from the metal types. As well as it's weight, damage, and other little details.

Quote:13) Game engines that handle reputation stupidly. Say you kill some monster that's harassing some village, completely by yourself out in the middle of nowhere, and by the time you can make it to the nearest town, everybody somehow magically knows that you killed the monster, as if they were watching it on TV or something. Right.

I think all games of any decent length must handle reputation stupidly. What is your suggestion in handling this situation?

Quote:15) Games (such as Diablo 2) when they give numbers (especially percentages) for an item that don't really tell you any more than you knew to begin with. Example: What does 10% faster hit recovery even mean? 10% faster than what? .. Annoyingly vague.

10% faster means you recover in 90% of the time. Makes sense? Whether it's stackable or not isn't really an issue with displaying percentages, as any type of representation would be just as vague. Perhaps a suggestion on how to improve this as well?

Quote:16) How in games like Diablo 2, your skills give you less and less additional benefit each time you put a new level into them. After a while, it's almost like, what's the point? Especially since the monsters don't seem to gain skills in such a diminishing fashion.

That's just life. If you start practicing with a gun right now, next week, you'll most likely double or tripple your ability. A week after, you will not make the same progress. Eventually you will not learn anything new at all. Mastering anything requires devotion and obsession. Monsters are supposed to be tough. Otherwise, everyone would be a hero [wink]

Quote:22) When potions get used up in one drink when the player needed far less health etc than what the potion could optimally provide. Each potion bottle should "remember" how much liquid has already been consumed from it. Preferably, bottles should be able to be mixed, such that one partially-filled bottle can "top off" another partially filled bottle of the same type of potion.

Again, what are you suggesting? That the player choose 1/3 or 1/2 from a selection menu every time they down one? What if 1/8 is more than they need? I don't see much improvement over just having a hundred tiny bottles.

Quote:Original post by Jiia
Only kings and emperors care about how pretty their weapon is.

Which ties back into the issues about reputation and combat-centric gameplay. If someone has a really flashy (unique) sword, then they're easier to identify on sight (unless the sword is concealed) and tales of their exploits will tend to accumulate together - having 10 stories about the man with the crimson blade rather than 10 stories about mysterious strangers. On the other hand, if the game revolves around combat, then barely anyone would bother to make their sword visually impressive (then again, one of the "wow, cool" moments in Kingdom Hearts was seeing "Leon" (Squall from FF8) change from his regular weapon to a Lionheart). Equally, people would be disapointed if, in a Star Wars game, lighting up a lightsaber didn't make the familiar noise...

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On the topic of implementing a good reputation system, maybe we can't come up with any noticeable impact on existing games of replacing a slightly tweaked "good enough" system. On the other hand, once you've got a system implemented and can play around with it, it's a lot easier to see just what you can do with it. One (possibly apocryphal) example of a gameplay feature that wasn't designed in is rocket jumping. Without actually playing with a "proper" reputation system, it's very hard to be sure what the possibilities and limitations of such a system would be.

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One of my pet hates in RPGs that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet in this thread is the massive mismatch between the pacing of the plot and the pacing imposed on the player by the basic mechanics - "Oh no! An extinction level asteroid is going to impact soon! We must hurry and spend everal months running round in small circles to get enough random encounters to level up far enugh to be able to take on the final boss!" The number of times in Final Fantasy games where I've got caught up in the tension of the plot, and moved rapidly through several areas, only to find that I'm sufficiently underpowered to not have a chance against the boss at the end of the section, is ridiculous! Having a role-playing game where the only way to progress is to ignore the role the game presents for you and wander off somewhere for a while is just plain wrong. And then people complain that all cRPG players are munchkins. It's because any other approach gets you killed!

Has anyone on this thread mentioned a design reliant on player 'saving' as part of its 'challenge level'?

What I mean by this is a plot/level design that oviously assumes a player will be regularly saving the game and retrying levels until they get them 'right'. Most of the games I've played lately, even on the easiest difficulty settings, outright require a regular, and careful, saving strategy just to get through the game.

The problem with this, especially in games that are intended to be immersive in any way, is the artificiality and the distraction of having to dick around reloading levels all the time. It's like paying to see a movie and then being forced to rewatch the same scene ten or fifteen times before you can go on to the next. I'd really like to see some alternatives to this sort of nonsense.

Some things I don't like are:
*When I have to do a simple thing over and over again just to get to the hard part I failed with.
*To travel. For example the plains in ocarina of times at day before getting Epona.
*The leveling systems of all RPG's I've played. I would suggest that instead of gaining xp and suddenly when reaching a certain amount, growing to a superior character with increased hp and skills, you would gain points (or whatever) for every little thing you do or hear or see, or experience in any way, to the specific attribute(s). Some magic skills should then be learned from somewhere when you are skilled enough in the right magic type and other spells should be selflearnable either by instance (being at the right place at the right moment) or just by having the right knowledges.
*The combat in some games. I have a suggestion here to that might be neat. Lets say you figure out an own melee-combat-combo for example hit-spin-kick-crouch-stab. Then you should be able to save it and bind it to a preferred key for easy access in combat and so your character can perform it without pauses between moves.

As you can probably see my suggestions need a lot of further developing ;)

Wow, I have to agree with MSW. I loved Out of This World and the Prince of Persia games because of their innovative and diverse worlds. I would love to say that I enjoyed this-and-that RPG because of the same reason, but there are none to mention. Most of them could literally share the same game world. Agreed, Final Fantasy does the best job. But Final Fantasy is also becoming more and more of a simplified RPG, and less enjoyable for hardcore players.