@JoeCooper and jbadams - Good comments, let me clarify a bit what the game's design is like. This is an "octopus" structured game if anyone has heard me talk about that before. It has about 6 types of gameplay which can be considered "core", even though all are optional. Each of these types of gameplay has its own path of quests or achievements (an octopus arm) along which the player travels from the common starting point for them all/social center location of the game (the octopus head). Monster capturing and breeding is one of these arms, and the bred monsters provide the basis for a second arm which is the secondary combat system: tactical turn-based as opposed to the primary combat system which is a standard realtime spellbar/cooldowns system. This secondary combat system exists in both pve and pvp forms and can be played by purchasing monsters other players have bred in the marketplace, if the player does not feel like capturing the monsters themselves.

I'm not sure there's any completely new gameplay in the design to teach players, assuming that players have played some kind of monster capturing game before, and some type of tactical combat game before, and some type of MMO with crafting recipes and an auction house before, and some game with a reputation/relationship system before, and some game with a pvp ranking system before, etc. My style as a designer is mainly to combine existing gameplay elements in new ways. If you want a specific comparison for the monster system it's a bit more like that of the Monster Rancher series than Pokemon. Every monster type exists in a standard range of colors, and each color is associated with a combat type - for example, all red monsters might have extra high attack and extra low defense, while all green monsters have the opposite, and all white monsters can heal themselves and all pink monsters inflict status ailments, etc. Monster color could be seen as corresponding to the array of possible classes in a traditional RPG. (This all only applies to monsters in the wild though, bred monsters can pair any appearance with any set of tactical combat skills and tactical stats like action points and movement points.) So the point being there's nothing really arcane or confusing, although there's a minor danger of the player feeling overwhelmed at the beginning by being introduced to all the octopus arms and their respective gameplay at the beginning.

I don't see explaining that mini t-rexes are the local equivalent of rats to be a waste of time - it's characterizing the world, and conveying the unique game world to a player helps the player become immersed in the game's atmosphere and story. On the other hand I never really liked the more extreme made-up monsters in Pokemon or Monster Rancher. Some of them are transparent - both have a cat monster, both have at least one dragon, etc. I don't care what they are called if I can recognize it as either a real animal or a mythological animal, or a real animal with a minor added element like horns or wings. But I personally don't like the ones that are like nothing I've ever seen before, because they have no associated meaning to me. It's often not clear how they might go about their daily lives or fit into any sort of an ecology, and not being able to picture how the game world works breaks my immersion. I also don't find the unrecognizable monsters to be memorable when I think about Pokemon or Monster Rancher in retrospect. Thus this poll, to see whether it would be regarded as boring if I don't have any monsters more original than griffins, winged versions of normal land animals, dinosaurs, and fish that swim through air instead of water.

I find myself being increasingly critical of games lately for not being original. I usually take more fault with the available player species and setting than anything else (i.e. elves that live in the trees and dwarves that live in the mountains / underground), but monsters can bug me too. I'll be honest in that I literally can't think of the last fantasy RPG that I played that didn't have giant spiders somewhere in it, and 90% have orcs and / or goblins.

I don't mind fantasy games having interesting or even fantastic creatures like dragons, but I would like a little originality please. In particular, slimes / gelatinous cubes are one of the types of monsters that bug me most because of their implausibility and ubiquity. Giant arthropods are a close second, followed by green skins.

If I was in charge of designing the critters that the player would come across, I'd do my best to make them original and reasonable. I don't know how much emphasis you're putting on the world itself, but as a player I would be impressed if the designers took the effort to draw up new and plausible creatures for their biomes. In a rain forest, for example, I'd expect to see lots of small reptiles (snakes and lizards of various sorts), lots of colorful birds and other things that like to hang out in trees or hide under fallen leaves. In a desert I'd expect to see little of anything, and what I do find would be small and hide a lot during the day. In the plains I'd expect to see larger herbivores and the predators that hunt them.

I suppose if you reuse old "tried and true" monsters in an original way, I might be satisfied. Instead of carnivorous plants that are large enough to eat people, why not make the slimes a giant evolution of slime molds that eat smaller critters that get stuck in them? Instead of basilisks, why not just lizards that are large enough, intelligent enough and social enough to be trained to use as mounts or sentries (like a dog might)? As an aside, I do like the idea of mini t-rexes. It's plausible that such a creature could exist and adds a little flavor to the world. It's probably cute too.

That's all very general though. For a starting area, I see nothing wrong with having players capture, train and / or breed things like rats, bats and snakes. It would probably take a bit of explaining for me to accept that you could train a spider, or that a mushroom can move around and attack people though (both of which I've seen in real games).

In the end, it probably wouldn't really bother me all that much if you did just reuse the stock fantasy monsters. Literally everyone else does. I'd give definite bonus points if you had all original creatures though! After all, Pokemon did it.

Rats, spiders, and little goblins don't bother me.

What bothers me is boring game play, level/character design, story telling, and general feel of a game. The fact that it happens to use rats, spiders, and little goblins is of little importance.


Awhile ago I was involved in a pen and paper game, and for several sessions we battled nothing but giant rats, swarms of rats, or the big boss,... a swarm of giant rats. It was still fun because the GM made it fun and interesting.


I have also played games where all the enemies were big red Es and everything else was represented by other colored ASCII characters, but I still had a great time playing it.

There are at least two rather orthogonal issues in the original post: which "traditional" monsters should appear in various stages of the game and which monsters are appropriate PC pets.
Traditional monsters have an impact on the game's setting that depends on their type.

• Natural dangerous animals (rats, snakes, birds of prey, etc.) are expected to be common. If they are rare or absent, it's clearly a very peculiar world and/or an extreme environment.
• Straightforward exotic variants of natural animals (giant or intelligent varieties, flying snakes, 8-legs horses, etc.) are likely to be important. Only a few such species would exist (e.g. sentient penguins and 9' hamsters but no giant rats) and they are likely to be an important setting-defining feature: for example, how do fishermen coexist with sentient penguins?
• Fantasy races of people and monsters have an heavier baggage of stereotypes: traditions of fantasy literature and games replace zoological common sense.
  Being original or adding details on top of the stereotypes are the two main ways to do a good job, and a lot of "screen time" is implied in both cases: few good races are usually better than many bad ones.
• Some stuff is so cliché that the appearance of unoriginality is unavoidable. D&D-originated monsters (e.g. gelatinous cubes and illithids) are the worst offenders; the usual approach of roguelike games (using many of them as an affectionate semi-parody, and being original in other areas) might not be suitable for other genres.

Appropriate pets should be cool, useful and interesting. Picture yourself with a domesticated ameboid slime in your lap, caressing it gently and hoping it doesn't squirt acid on you: wouldn't a plain old kitten be better?

Depends.

It depends on the type of game and the target platform. If it is a current PC, 360, PS3 game then yeah, there isn't much point for too much overuse when you have a budget of 8 million and a development staff of over 50 artists (including outsourcing). There isn't much of an excuse there, because you can have a lot of resources and storage space. Not to mention that there are a LOT of techniques that can be used to mitigate this (texture-swaps, generic models that can be fitted with different accessories, etc.)

With an idie-type game or games for a portable console (PSP, phones) I can forgive it.. After all, it may be one or two people on the project working their a$$ off...often working a regular job as well. Portable target platforms also have limited horsepower and storage space.

Careful character design for characters can help control the overuse. Plan for different textures, accessories, weapons, armor, etc and really mix it up. I knew someone once that was even working on an in-engine morpher that would automatically vary the height and body type for generic characters while preserving texture coordinates. Pretty cool stuff.

One other thought I just had:

If you have a training area with 3-4 different monsters available, and every player will have one of those four monsters as a pet for a period upon leaving the training area, they will be extremely common, particularly in areas where newer players will be spending a lot of their time. With that in mind, any special flair these starting creatures would have would be quickly overwhelmed by the fact that they are constantly in view and encountered by the players. The "everyone has one" mindset would quickly erode excitement I had in getting an original creature right away.

Given this, I would probably prefer to see more common creatures in the mandatory training area and then quickly get the option to have at least one of a much wider variety of creatures.

My main complaint about commonly used monsters is games where they recycle early enemies with high level ones of a different color. So you fight blue slimes at level 1 but then red slimes at level 5.
Other then that while preference would be for more interesting and orginal creatues, I have no problems facing the same old set of predictable enemies.