• Enclosure/closedness. I prefer linear stories and closed worlds. I want to be sure, that if I complete the game, I have experienced most things, that there are to experience. Knowing, that I have to restart from the beginning to get another story arc, is source of frustration and often turn me away from the game.
• Less is more. It is a game, not tool - so better to have few well thought out and implemented features, than tons of badly done things. Better a town with 3 buildings and 5 NPC-s, than huge and confusing place. A forest with 3 visually appealing trees, that serve as meeting or hiding spots for quests instead of large number of repetitive and useless trees.
• Easy to play, hard to master. I.e. there should not be important places, stories and things only available for those, who have time to perfect controls. Perfection should be rewarding by itself - i.e. winning sword battle with technique should feel cool but the same thing should be possible with button smashing and health potions too.
• Enjoyable in God mode. Good game should allow player to relax. Game should reward curiosity by unfolding story, not require you to constantly fight to get the game experience.
• Replayable story. This is hard to get right, but I think, that story-based game should be closer to book than to a movie. I.e. present the story in relaxed setting, allowing player to set the pace, focus on details and fill the gaps with imagination. And go back and look again things, that he thinks he missed. But there should be only single story and it should be complete.
• Aesthetics over realism. This applies at all levels - world setup, character design, background stories, behavior and so on.
• No forced moral choices. Player should be able to identify with main character, of course - but other than that, he should not be forced to like or hate anyone. This normally means, that there cannot be single main antagonist, but story should be more like constantly evolving mystery.

RPG's are hard to make, I know that.

No they're not just use RPGMaker.







Okay, serious answer? RPGs are not inherently hard to make and I have no idea where this rumor started. Making a GOOD RPG is hard. But making ANYTHING of merit is going to be difficult. And that's why I hate seeing things like "I know that RPGs are hard to make, but...", because it's completely missing the point. It has nothing to do with the genre or anything specific to YOUR ideas.

Making anything of merit is going to be difficult, and if you actually care about the difficulty, you're never going to make it anyway.


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That was my point, as seems not described properly Many games today are called RPG - Diablo is an RPG, Mass Effect is an RPG, hell, most FPS now add the RPG tag to their genre. For me, a true RPG is a pen & paper one. The computer has no way of making a real RPG, unless you use notepad, Skype or any other software that allows communication between two humans. Maybe, some day, AI will be bright enough to have personalities and creativity of enough quality to be a DM. I'm not saying that some games don't have epic storylines - they are more interactive books in a way than true RPG sessions. But what great books can some trully be.

Anyway, I didn't like the fact you ripped my sentence from it's context The full statement was:
RPG's are hard to make, I know that. And multiplayer makes it even harder. But I guess it's worth it. As long as I'm not the only one seeing the need, it's worth it.
That kinda sounds better and not so whiny, eh?

I'm intrigued by the idea behind Xenallure, it seems like an expanded ren'ai game, which always seemed like a fun idea to me. I hope you'll keep us posted on your progress!

Ahem... that said, I have a one line philosophy (meant to be said to myself repeatedly):
"you are not your target market"

That wasn't actually my point at all so I guess we have completely different points and I wasn't explaining mine clearly. You seem to be casting some sort of judgment about the current state of RPGs and are trying to assign merit in improving the genre despite the perceived difficulty.


I'm saying that coming up with notions like "Genre X is hard to make" is fairly pointless because doing anything of merit in any field is going to have the same vague and fuzzily defined kind of difficulty associated with it, no matter what you're doing, and there's nothing inherent to an genre/medium that would somehow make them more difficult to work in unless you're like, I don't know, intentionally limiting yourself to a really drastically bad toolset.

That's probably an important insight. I didn't realize until I was out of college that there aren't a lot of people out there who are more or less clones of me waiting with money in hand to buy a game I would consider great. But having realized that, it causes me motivational problems. I really don't want to make games for the average gamer because from my point of view they have terrible taste. I only want to make the games that I wish were available for me to play. But an idea that isn't popular won't get people volunteering to help make it, and a game that is unlikely to be a financial success makes it difficult to justify spending money paying people to make it.