Quote:Original post by Hawkins8

Quote:Original post by QuantifyFun
If you need me to explain why you can't state that silly opinion as if it were a fact, than there are some life lessons you still need to learn and I can't help you.

I'm done with this thread. No flame war intended, just keepin' it real.

The term 'EQ clone' itself is self-explanatory enough to state the truth. Live with that. Continue to live in denial does none helpful to the industry.

I start to know why a giant such as EA has to embrace a 10-year-old UO for its its own survival in the MMORPG game sector. Its executives never think that they lack the genius to...hmm...patching such an old game.

There are only two kinds of games in the world: games I like and games I don't like. Everything else is just someone else's opinion. You're certainly entitled to yours, but stamping your feet and throwing a tantrum is no way to make friends and influence people.

To my eyes, almost every MMORPG seems to be the computer game equivalent of Tolkien fan-fiction crap involving elves, dwarves, trolls and all those other Germanic and Scandinavian mythological clichés (all in a medieval setting). This doesn't appear to have stopped millions of people paying good money to play them, so you won't find me shouting that all those customers are sad, mad and dumb, or that the developers are creatively bankrupt.

As the late SF author Bob Shaw once asserted: All art is about communication. A good writer wants to communicate with as many people as possible. The fact that this tends to mean the writer gets paid steaming great piles of wonga for his work is proof that he's reaching lots and lots of people and therefore achieving his goal. What's the point of writing a message where nobody will read it?

Making money isn't something to be sneered at with snobbish contempt. It's not a perfect system, but financial success is incontrovertible evidence that you're doing something right.

EA may crank out umpteen iterations of sports sims -- American and Association Football haven't changed much in decades, so any simulation is going to struggle to stand out from the crowd -- but these are still perfectly valid, perfectly successful games. Besides, EA also took a gamble on "The Sims" when nobody else would touch it. Can you really blame a company for milking an IP if customers are clearly willing to pay? If you can, you're not living in the real world. Most of us have bills to pay, cars to keep and, often, a family to feed.

Sure, there are lots of sequels out there, but so what? Every single franchise started with its first, risky, release! Nobody had even heard of "Lara Croft" before the very first "Tomb Raider"; certainly no one expected it to take off the way it did.


That said, it's sad that hardly any newbies on these forums ever want to start small. Not every gamble needs to be high-risk and high-return. How much more satisfying it is when you gamble relatively little money and end up creating an entire market.

A professional designer can strip back the essence of a game to what it must be, whether that's consciously or subconciously, and build from there. For example, an RPG contains many preconceptions or prior experiences involving RPGs just by the word alone.

The job of a designer is to strip back these preconceptions to what an RPG is. I only realised this today - before I had a similar opinion to the OP in the irrationality of employment. If I keep my preconceptions in my subconscious I will undoubtably unknowingly hurt my game design by not making a conscious effort to be conscious of them. On the other hand, if I think of these preconceptions in my mind and strip them down to stereotypes and essential facts - eliminating the chances of negative thin-slicing - I will see a vast improvement in the originality of my designs.

Without pressure to use so many different elements (most of which are not needed), I can focus on making a fun game, and be assured that it will be original without worrying about it. The professional designer includes commonly-used elements only when he is sure it will aid his game design - or at least he should.

Some designers may be sloppy or unimaginative, as you believe, but I think the real reason behind so many cookie-cutter game is that they use the elements they believe will make their design more familiar or popular without looking it the merits and problems of each system.

Write a list of elements needed in an RPG.

Write an original concept for a RPG's battle system.

Explain what an ideal setting for an RPG would be.