Quote:I'm actually a bit nervous about making status effects more prominent in the game, because I feel that it may annoy players

Ultimately, players will make the comparison to the Final Fantasy series because you're gameplay appears to be heavily inspired by it. And players will see themselves being unable to just "heal up and continue" as an annoyance, since Final Fantasy makes it so easy! The problem isn't in your concept, it's in the fact that people like what they are familiar with and fear any challenge they have never before faced.

The only trick I can think of to fix this is to hide the fact that you're modeling yourself after Final Fantasy. It's probably too late in the project to consider this, but rearranging the combat screens, renaming the status effects, and slightly changing the way they behave might help mask the fact that they really are just "Poison", "Stop", etc in disguise.

Once that mental link is broken, the player will be more likely to accept this new rule set as being a welcome challenge instead of a frustrating "limitation".

Quote:KungFooMasta
You should be able to run in and mash buttons without knowing what you're doing, or charge in knowing what you're doing, or sit back and cast a spell, send your allies out while you summon a beast, etc.

I can see where you're coming from, but if you can play equally well without using any strategy, you are negating any need for a strategy in the game. Why should I worry about proper tactics when I can just hammer on the "attack" button.

Not that this is uncommon... many games are done in just this way. Most Final Fantasy/Dragon Quest games can be beaten by holding down the A button through 3/4 of the battles. Kingdom Hearts gives you a wide variety of magic and summons, but your sword is more effective than any of them.

So in the end you waste a whole bunch of time making all sorts of skills that the player will never use. If you want a hack-n-slash, focus all of your resources on making a good hack-n-slash (fast action, good enemy AI, and a variety of melee attacks). If you want any sort of strategy, though, you need to compromise some of that mindless slashing for real tactics.

[Edited by - JBourrie on May 7, 2007 6:56:16 PM]

Time to play devils advocate! :)

Quote:Original post by KungFooMasta
Another important idea is that the game should try its best to let the player progress forward, while still being somewhat challenging. The players that charge in and don't pay attention to the system will find themselves spending more time during battles. Eventually they will try to find ways to keep battles fast paced and learn some of the battle essentials.

Either that, or they will get bored of the shallow gameplay and quit (because they never needed to take the time and learn the underlying system).

Quote:Sure you make a lot of skills and put in effort to create things for player use, but it should be up to the player to use them. Forcing them to use it is forcing the gameplay, and we should try to minimize that.

Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by "forcing the gameplay", but game* design is exactly that: creating a set of rules that define an experience. If you don't enforce those rules they become unnecessary. So "forcing the gameplay" seems to be exactly what we should be doing. Would Tetris have been a better game if the player could just say "yeah, I don't like that block, give me a different one"?

People seem to think that our goal when designing an RPG should be "let the player go anywhere, do anything, be anyone!" when in reality this is the antithesis of creating a good player experience. To have good pacing, balance, story, and rewards structure you have to minimize your verb set so that every action is meaningful. A useless verb (whether it's a button press, magic spell, or action, or weapon attack**) will detract from the experience.

I think the secret to making a "great RPG***" is to create a verb set where every single action is useful in a variety of situations and it's up to the player to decide what combinations work best for their own playing style. That's why I think FFXII was such a huge step forward for the genre, there were very few wasted verbs.

Quote:You can always encourage certain skills/items to be used, but if you really want to force it's use, make it required to defeat a particular opponent.

That's a slingshot too far in the other direction, now we have an opponent who we no longer have any options on how to beat. There's no strategy, there's no choices, there's just "he can only be damaged by the Lv.10 Sword of Slaying Everything Except Squid".

And what happens once the opponent is dead? That verb (the action used to slay it) is now useless. You've forced a "puzzle" on the player where this one skill is the "solution", and from then on you have another wasted verb.

Quote:In cases where there is only one solution to a problem, the solution needs to be somewhat obvious. Otherwise you're back to buying the Strategy guide. =(

Ah, Strategy Guides. A huge misnomer, since the real reason for most of them isn't to teach strategy at all. It's an answer guide, a cheat sheet for a game, and it works because events in most RPGs have one "best" solution and one outcome. I'd like to see an RPG where the strategy guide is a guide that teaches strategies. That would be nice.


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* Note that game is in italics. You could argue that some interactive media types need a more relaxed set of rules, but that's a whole other issue and one that veers into uncharted territory.

** Yes, I'm grouping weapons in with the verb set, instead of calling it a "noun". It's just for terminology. Consider it "Attacking with an Axe".

*** Again, RPG as a video game genre, not the broader definition

Quote:Original post by JBourrie
People seem to think that our goal when designing an RPG should be "let the player go anywhere, do anything, be anyone!" when in reality this is the antithesis of creating a good player experience. To have good pacing, balance, story, and rewards structure you have to minimize your verb set so that every action is meaningful. A useless verb (whether it's a button press, magic spell, or action, or weapon attack**) will detract from the experience.

I think the secret to making a "great RPG***" is to create a verb set where every single action is useful in a variety of situations and it's up to the player to decide what combinations work best for their own playing style. That's why I think FFXII was such a huge step forward for the genre, there were very few wasted verbs.

Absolutely.

Quote:Original post by KungFooMasta
For example, there are people who like to level up to be well/over prepared for future dungeons, and there are people that like to push through the game without taking time to level up. Those are preferences.

My first reaction is to ask why "leveling up" should even exist. But that's going in a whole different direction, so I'll ignore that for now and assume that it's a staple of RPGs.

I really wish I had more examples to go off of, because I keep falling back to the same couple of games that did it right... oh well, time to pull Paper Mario out of the bag again. In Paper Mario, you get a level up every 100 experience points. Simple. The number of experience points that enemies give you is relative to your level, so at level 15 a goomba isn't going to give you anything.

What happened there was that players couldn't grind on low level monsters for hours, because at a certain point they got nothing out of it. At the same time, you couldn't over-level because at a certain point you have to move on to the next dungeon in order to keep fighting harder monsters.

If a player was too low level the enemies would be hard in the next dungeon, but each enemy killed there would give alot of experience so it would catch the player up quicker.

Some stat balancing, some playtesting, and you have a pretty much unbreakable system where the player can level grind to a certain point but just playing through without grinding will keep your levels at a reasonable point. A great system, if you insist on implementing a level grind.

Quote:Some games like Evermore for SNES made the game hard at all times. Even if you spent time leveling, the monsters leveled with you. Trying to fight and save up money for new armor was painful, as the monsters were always hard to kill, and I always felt like death was close by, even in familiar areas. If people want to stay behind and level up or get money, that is their choice. Like you say, if you don't allow this, they get annoyed and quit.

Leveling up the enemies along with the player is possibly the best way to make sure the game difficulty is always balanced. It is also part of the basis of my argument that "leveling up" is a broken concept and needs to be replaced.

So here we have a system that's supposed to make the player feel stronger. Oh, but it unbalances the game so we have to rebalance it by making the enemies stronger. Of course, that negates the "level up" altogether, because now the player isn't actually any stronger. All you did is multiply all of the numbers by some factor, the proportions are still the same! This is crap.

A hard dungeon is a hard dungeon. If I enter that hard dungeon unprepared, I should get my ass handed to me. If I enter that hard dungeon prepared, I should have a reasonable challenge. Likewise, an easy dungeon is an easy dungeon. If I re-enter later in the game, I should feel as if I'm better equipped to deal with the enemies. Not necessarily that I'm killing them in one hit with my eyes closed, but that as long as I'm paying attention I'm not afraid of dying. This is something that the Zelda games do fairly well, especially A Link to the Past.

Quote:Here is what I want to do, tell me how it sounds:
... stuff about lvl modifiers ...

It's an interesting approach to the problem, for sure. It has that open-world "explore anything in any order" mentality to it, but isn't as obviously "auto-adjusting" as the Elder Scrolls games are.

I do have a problem with the very fundamental concept of these systems, though... automating your game balancing requires that the dungeons are designed generically to cover all different player skill levels. It requires that enemies are also designed generically, so that you can have a Level 4 Imp and a Level 87 Imp... the player can't rely on past experience to devise their strategy. Basically, it makes you play the game minute-to-minute, dungeon-to-dungeon, instead of a consistent and interconnected world.

Here's what I'd like to see more of in an open-RPG:
- The regularly traveled path is populated with easy monsters and the occasional inexperienced bandit. An experienced adventurer will have no trouble traveling these roads.

- The less often traveled roads will sometimes have a harder monster or more experienced bandits.

- The dungeons are predesigned with enemies, and various hints (or maybe a "guide" character) will let you know when a place is really dangerous.

- The game auto-saves when you enter a dungeon, so if you get pwned by a Lvl 99 Dragon you will respawn at the entrance without penalty.

- Going into dungeons actually has a purpose. More on this next.


Why should the player want to go into a dungeon? I think the answer to this is the big deciding factor as to what kind of RPG game designer you are. I'm curious where people would rate themselves.

The Storyteller would say that the player was sent there on a quest.
Pros: It gives the player a sense of purpose, makes it feel more real.
Cons: Any decent quest requires extensive content/writing. For many people a resolved storyline isn't enough of a reward.
Examples: Pre-XII Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest

The Gameplay Purist would say that they only care to explore a dungeon if it's intricately designed and gameplay focused.
Pros: A smaller number of dungeons will satisfy this gamer, leading to shorter games.
Cons: Shorter games (is this a con?). Dungeons are significantly harder to design. Gameplay balancing is critical.
Examples: Zelda, Deus Ex

The Grindmonkey would say that the player went there to level and find loot.
Pros: This stuff is really easy to generate randomly, and automate balancing. It appeals to our consumer instinct. Hardcore players will grind for hours just to find that one jewel that finishes their collection.
Cons: Repetition, repetition, repetition! Everything starts to feel the same, just the same old grind.
Examples: Diablo II, FFXII

The Explorer would say that exploring the dungeon is a reward in itself.
Pros: You can churn out crazy amounts of content, because you don't have to worry at all about gameplay balancing.
Cons: Dungeon after dungeon with minimal rewards becomes disheartening to the player who is looking for something more.
Examples: Elder Scrolls


I would say I'm pretty far along the "Gameplay Purist" side, so far that I think exploring one dungeon should have a direct effect on your experience in other dungeons. Zelda does this in a linear fashion by giving you a gadget that gives you access to new places, such as the hookshot or the gloves. However, I'd like to see this same design strategy used in a non-linear game, so a person can complete dungeons in any order, using different strategies based on what items/skills you have found in previous dungeons.

Quote:What would you rate ff12 for its replay value?

Well, I'm 130 hours into my second playthrough, and only have three "secret" bosses (Zodiark, Yiazmat, and Omega Mark XII) left, plus about 40 rare game to find. And I'm still loving it. I need to call it quits at some point though... it's been almost half a year now and I need to finally say goodbye. Plus, Rogue Galaxy has been calling...

Quote:Regarding difficulty of monsters, it depends on your world. My meaning of the word "dungeon" does not only refer to castle's and caves, it is possible to have outdoor dungeons.

Oh, of course. A "dungeon" is just my way of saying "a distinct, enclosed area that presents a challenge to the user" as differentiated from an overworld or town. You can blur these lines all you want, or get rid of them altogether if you want, but working with pre-defined area types makes it easier to get the point across without writing a 10 page dissertation :)

I'm not much of a RPG player anymore. Mainly this is due to both a lack of intrest and time.

My favorite RPGs are the old SNES Shadowrun game and the Phantasy Star series (the whole "rouge" like feeling of PSO was a turn off though). Yeah, I guess I'm more into console RPGs, all that character customization and class stuff just bores me to tears. Along with level grinding and random encounters. Combat in most of these games is dreadfuly dull and annoying.

I'm no CRPG player, but the old Septerra Core had its merits.

What I would like to see in a RPG is much more interesting settings, stories, and characters. No random encounters and combat systems that have less to do with stats and more to do with tactics. Fewer items would be welcome too. Also something that can be picked up an played easily seeing that some gamers cannot dedicate endless hours to the game....and keep in mind that realisam in combat is pretty nonsensical when you are fighting unrealistic monsters...