I agree with all your points, so there is no discussion But I want to add that as you know those supermonsters are used for final battles on given quests, or those are the bosses in other game genres. What I'm looking for is a way to make the game interesting for the player after those quests have been finished. The monsters are now buried, what is the character going to do now with his own life (appart from maybe getting married)?

For example in LOTR, Frodo ends wounded in the physical, emotional and psychological, and he goes to Valinor. Is he looking for more adventures? No, he is going to recover his soul. And how is he going to confront his "addiction" to the ring? In my mind that's a character improvement path.

What I'm looking for is a way to make the game interesting for the player after those quests have been finished. The monsters are now buried, what is the character going to do now with his own life (appart from maybe getting married)?

But that could be said about anything that isn't infinite. At some point, you have to either add some game elements that are infinite (e.g. creative features like in Minecraft and similar) or keep on adding bigger and bigger scopes (WoW, anyone? ) until you decide that there's no real need for more, because players won't bother progressing that deeply into the game before moving on to a new game.

I think the most important thing any game developer can do in this regard is to just add new core elements to the game - I.e. new dimensions of gameplay, as opposed to taking an already existing dimension to new heights. The problem with being too linear with the game content is that, if a given game feature lies too far into the future (inaccessible to newbies), then fewer people will end up enjoying it because they may very well get fed up with the game before that time.

One example for me was Age of Conan. I tried it till level 25, and then I got fed up. It just felt too repetitive. But then some people said that I should get to max level because that's when the fun starts. Well, I'm not going to play a game where I need to do a million different boring things just so I can get to the fun part. So I quit. A game should be fun to play when you play it. No excuses.

I think proper progression in a game is important, but I also think a lot of people overestimate that importance and let it get to their heads. One way of solving progression "bottlenecking" is to provide players with additional dimensions of progression - something that is available to everybody, regardless of their current level of progression. This is what is sometimes called "horizontal progression".

A good game should have a nice balance between horizontal progression (n specializations) and vertical progression (the depth of each specialization), IMO.

I think the most important thing any game developer can do in this regard is to just add new core elements to the game - I.e. new dimensions of gameplay, as opposed to taking an already existing dimension to new heights.

Yes! That's exactly the side of the problem that I'm attacking. One dimension is the quest oriented gameplay, but now I'm designing a new journey for the character, with a foundation that starts with the player's ambition to enhance his character. I think of it as a strategy game, in which you conquer territory (RPG: level) and then build cities/buildings (RPG: skill hierarchies/perks). The player can "improve" as much as he wants, but if he does it carelessly things can get out of control and enemies will take advantage. If you are a good strategist you don't aim to have the biggest, but to make the most of less. A player might believe that having the strongest warrior he will defeat any super-monster, but the new journey won't have monsters, instead it will have antagonists. My game will confront the player with characters that he just can't defeat with brute and direct force, no matter how high his level is, and the only way around is to be a strategist of skills.

All comments are welcome, as I'm looking for different points of view, and even found ideas that helped me to bridge some of my early ideas with others, and to proof test my current design that I shaped under the light of the almighty Monomyth

I want to note that I'm not dropping the idea of quests from my game, and I totally agree with everything related to them that have been mentioned. But I do believe that the game can challenge the player's imagination to create his own quests, and then expand considerably the value of the game itself. I do believe this can be done because in a 4X game the player is the one that creates the quests. Little and simple quests, like "I must send a unit here, so the enemy is distracted, and I can enter thru this path to the city". The game is just allowing the situations, and I want to translate this dynamic to an RPG, without converting it into a strategy game. RPG is about roles, so the strategy must be about roles, not about a building mechanic.

If you can provide a system where resources for these roles do not deplete ( like fishing ) player can continue to steal or raid camps as long as he wants.

Yes, and that was also one of my early points in my very first post: "...like Civilization, in which you can continue playing after defeating other opponents. As long as there are resources to extract and advances to achieve it will be fun." So I agree and there is no discussion. More on that, it's a way the player can play the game, and it's totally valid.

But that way is limited. From the point of view of the Monomyth (I was editing my last post to include it when you replied) this situation is equivalent to the mundane world of the character. The character is just doing his chores (from you example, the thief is stealing, so the thief is being a thief), and so the game must bring a supernatural aid to take the character out of that repetitive situation. To solve that I re-defined the ranks concept, so that now the player will have a mentor or helper that will allow him to enter the super-specialist rank and start his other journey. What if the thief reforms, and becomes a missionary?

Well, I still remember talking once to a good strategy games player about how cool it would be to make a game with random events, and the emotional way in which he told me that everyone would hate that game because players like to have full control on the effects of every action they take hahahah

I think this could be useful to punish or reward the player for following a given role, for example if you are a Landlord that has the bad habit of stealing, you could attract some negative karma that will make easier that your trade caravans are assaulted. But it must be used wisely because as I learned can make the player mad. Interesting indeed, thanks for sharing.