???
Okay, so first of all, I'm gearing more toward ARPG because I get bored/frustrated when gameplay amounts to clicking on an enemy and watching my dude attack. I don't know why I enjoyed Dragon Age's combat, though.
Turn based is also a valid alternative because it opens up a lot of strategical finagling if designed well.
Anyway, onto the team:
World building: Bioware.
Character design: Bioware or Ubisoft. I'm talking visual design, not personality design, though those do go hand in hand. But anyway, I can go on and on about Jack and Ezio being amazing. Even if the former doesn't make sense in the setting, I can forgive it because her design os just spot on.
Graphics: let's throw a curveball and go with Valve for a slick cartoony/retro thing. Alternatively, let's just get Toady One to procedurally generate the world.
Plot: uhhhh I'm not sure. Mass Effect has been like the only game story ive absolutely loved, and even then it was mostly because of the setting. So I guess I could use suggestions for games with great overarching plots. Playing Planescape Torment since everyone has told me that would be good, but I haven't gotten very far. Well, I guess I was blown away from Braid, but that's because I'm a pretentious douche bag.
Dialogue/writing: you know, I was going to say Bioware because of the likes of Varric, but everyone does have a point in that they're honestly not that great at line to line dialogue. And looking at Planescape so far, what's-his-face's dialogue won't translate well to spoken. And while I loved Cass, I was completely unimpressed with all the other characters beyond "oh they don't suck and they aren't archetypes." so screw it; fuck game writers. Give me Quentin Tarantino or Andrew Hussie on writing.
Production: I just want to assume infinite time and money, but I guess the closest analogue is Valve. Plus they can do QA.
Game mechanics: let me put this on the table where everyone can see it: I think the idea that you have to make your character before the game starts is dumb because it promotes refilling after playing for like an hour and therefore takes away from the first time explorer feeling. Also I agree with the Mass Effect 2 philosophy of not having to minmax each character individually with a cluttered inventory, so just do blanket upgrades with different items. So let's go with From Software to make dozens of ridiculously statted items to swap between with no clear tiers. Just don't let them balance it.
I don't know what studio to choose that will alleviate my first point. Eerykne RPG studio is stuck in the past of character design except Bethesda, but they're still not quite progressive enough and they still make a bunch of mistakes, which is understandable when you're paving a new road.
I'll think of more parts later
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
I...
You're joking right?
???
Woops silly iPhone and it's lack of autocorrect when you actually want it. I meant "like every"
And when say "stuck in the past" I mean the idea that you mist be intimate with the game mechanics and encounter design before you even start the game due to having to distribute stats and choose skill tree paths. Correct me if I'm wrong because I'm sure I am, since I haven't played a gigantic amount of RP Gs since they're all 40+ hour games (that's not a complaint, just a statement about my time schedule)
And when I say Bethesda is "progressive" I meant they espoused the idea of "use your skills to advance them" instead of "guess what increasing this number relates to and hope for the best" but it's still flawed.
Or maybe Ive been playing too many old games lately.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
By character design, you mean by how you make your character? As opposed to how the characters are designed?
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.
That's a valid point but use-based skill systems are usually pretty awful and discourage specialized character builds.
I thought you were referring to the stripped-down system in Skyrim. Pokemon has more stats.
???
THERE WE GO
Pokemon dudes can make the game mechanics. Yes.
But yeah, I just said "maybe the item stats should be on par with Armored Core" so I think assumig I like needless streamlining is kind of silly. That said, I do think streamlining did need to occur with RP Gs. On a computer, there is no reason that the player needs to know how to calculate the various equations by hand or simulate it with a D20 unless they're reverse engineering with like some AC communities in which case you find out the equations are closer to modeling real life wth allowances for fun than to modeling something you can do on paper.
And yeah, use based advancement promotes grinding. I won't pretend I'm a good enough designer to figure out a good system, though.
PS. Like a quarter of the stats in Oblivion were useless even after modding the crap out of the game to balance things. Kotor was worse with like 3/4 of the numbers being meaningless. I'm glad that there was some stripping down.
edited 9th Aug '11 12:29:15 AM by ch00beh
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
I like having some form of use-based advancement. I like the feeling that whenever I do something, I'm furthering my character's advancement. When there's some form of use-based advancement, I feel rewarded for using my skills and thus I use them more often, whereas if such a system doesn't exist, I feel much more cautious about using those skills, and that often ends up with me rarely using many of the skills.
Helpful Scripts and Stylesheets here.
???
But what do you do when you assign points and realize you pretty much never use that skill or that it has diminishing returns? Making the player do their own points does reward replay but it can straight up punish first time play, and if your players don't enjoy their first time, why will they play twice?
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
That's a problem caused by skills not being useful because of the world the game takes place in, not the skill system itself. It needs to be fixed from the other direction by making more circumstances where particular skills are necessary.
???
And that makes players feel compelled to create jack of all trade characters so they can get by every scenario, but that is at odds with promoting specialized characters. If a specialized character needs to pass high stat checks, then that means jack characters, by definition, won't be able to pass those.
In which case I suppose you have a fallback mechanic, such as combat, but then that punishes characters who specialize in the wrong stat, and it rewards players who specialize in combat, thus making it so that most players end up pumping strength at the end of the day.
So again, punishing first time players who don't like reading guides.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
Then create a system like Deus Ex where the game caters to every possible build and gives everyone a challenge whilst not cutting off characters who "messed up" their build. Obviously not all characters are going to be able to access anything...that's what an RPG does, create your own build and make your own way through game, accessing different types of content based on your build and your choices.
And integrate this into a well designed tutorial in the game for people can't rtfm.
Yes it's a very idealised vision...but that's what this thread is about I guess. Plus Deus Ex already did this, and that game wasn't even an RPG so....
edited 9th Aug '11 1:16:07 AM by ShadowScythe
???
I played Deus Ex and kept dying in the first level because I tried to approximate my standard RPG-sneaky-type character since the stats weren't your standard RPG stats but sneaky types didn't work well, or else I wasn't playing them right, but I don't know why I wasn't playing them right besides "enemies shoot me anyway so why bother"
And really, it's not about reading the manual. It's about making sure the player doesn't have to stop playing to refer to the manual because that breaks immersion.
Though I'm not saying immersion is the end all be all, and that trial and error gameplay is the devil. Let's take Minecraft, where the early-game for newbies is nothing but referring to the wiki, asking friends, and dying a lot. But the thing about Minecraft is that it has negligible start/load time, and "survival" is not the what most players play for. The early game is more of a nuisance to those who want to build cool things or build traps that stop intelligent mobs/players. Or take Super Meat Boy, again with negligible not-playing overhead, and where the objective takes less time to successfully get to than it takes to fail.
But for the majority of RPGs, the "survival" or the general "not dying" is the main point of the gameplay. Not story progression, but gameplay as something that is separate from the order of words that are being presented to you, and due to the presence of all these words/pictures/etc, there is that overhead of not-playing time to load, and there's an extra feeling of momentum as you go or an extra feeling of loss when you reroll.
I think I'm on a tangent. The point is, that "idealized version" requires a real live person holding your hand in the tutorial since there are so many possibilities and so many ways a person can absolutely fail at making a character as you increase the amount of numbers presented at the start of a game.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
In any case, a tip on the character screen saying "hey, jack of all trades master of none characters are not effective consider havign an actual build in mind!" and problem solved.
I would like to see a more usage-based system combined with assigned skill points. Like in Fallout, my lockpicking skill would be 60/75. I get the 75 by raising the limit with skill points, and the 60 by actually using lockpick. Tag skills would raise faster, etc.
edited 9th Aug '11 1:44:58 AM by Mammalsauce
Deus Ex did do a tutorial that held your hand through every different aspect of the game (aside from dialogue but like anyone needs a tutorial for dialogue, esp when it isn't that complex in Deus Ex's case) and then at the end of the tutorial it gave you a very simple level with multiple paths for different builds and asked you to figure it out on your own. It was a great introduction.
If you kept dying in Liberty island while playing stealth, it honestly sounds like you were doing stealth wrong. Liberty Island is fairly easy, the destination is pretty clearly labelled for you (The big building in the middle) and there are multiple routes in. The AI is also pretty dumb in those early levels so unless you were deliberately attacking everyone when you should've been ducking past them or firing nonsilenced weaponry I don't see how you could've died in those early sections on a moderate difficulty.
RP Gs could use better tutorials that introduce you to the mechanics pretty easily and quickly, no doubt. But accessibility isn't improved by stripping away the defining features that make up rpgs for the people who clearly weren't fans to begin with. Might as well strip away the gun from an FPS to increase accessibility for people who don't have very good twitch reflexes and don't know which gun they want to shoot with before playing the game.
edited 9th Aug '11 1:49:55 AM by ShadowScythe
???
If everything works, then where's the game? Why not just read a choose your own adventure book?
Though, when I say jack of all trades, I mean that, let's say, in order to get some prize in a chest, you can lockpick it, hack it, bash it, or kill someone for a key. Then the next encounter, because you're not playing a choose your own adventure movie, it's lockpick or combat. And then the next one is combat or hacking. What do you do?
Pump strength, or spread your stats around every which way so that you can get into the next chest without having to engage in the combat mechanics. Because if you don't, you get a negative reaction when you see an obstacle you can't pass.
@Shadow: yeah, you don't strip away every gun in an FPS to increase playability, but you do strip away every gun except for the basic gun that sucks equally at everything until you pick up a new gun that works really well for the next level due to whatever advantage it has, and then it gets outclassed by something else the enemy throws at you, so the game lets you struggle for them for a bit as a boss then introduces you to a new gun that helps you out immensely.
But yeah, I was probably doing stealth wrong because after I ran out of crossbow ammo I gave up and just started trial-and-error-ing with the various guns I had picked up and lots and lots of reloading. Which is not actually good gameplay for most people.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
on the first level, its not really necessary to kill anyone, and it only actually helps to kill the first one you see.
the idea of stealth is primarily to avoid combat altogether, killing enemies only when necessary, with the advantage of being able to sneak up on them for a much easier kill (either by being close enough that a headshot is easy, or through a close range weapon like a stungun or a baton, that can 1-hit ko if you aim for the lower back), if you went around sneaking up to enemies to kill them in the first level, where its completely unnecessary and you dont have decent weapons, instead of going directly for the goal area, then yeah, you werent exactly doing stealth that well.
...wait do you get the baton in the first level?
edited 9th Aug '11 2:26:25 AM by Tarsen
Though in the case of the main quest, it should be completable for every character type. If that means hacking the lock of bashing or picking or killing someone for a key, then so be it, but that is a case of bad quest design rather than a broken system.
???
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Well, the way I build my characters is as a glass cannon: high damage output on the initial, preemptive strike. I use sneak to make kills so I don't have to worry about anything sneaking up behind me and cherry tapping me dead, not just to finagle my way past enemies because that's a liability. So then is my playstyle invalid? But I thought all builds were valid! I don't think my logic is necessarily "wrong," either.
So it's a choice between bad quest design, strong hinting that leads to railroading character progression, or nonstandard game overs for uninitiated players?
I mean, yeah, I agree that just having a different path for each different possibility is great, so I'm going to toss that in the "infinite time/money" wish since this is the dream topic. That would be totes legit.
Anyone heard of Sleep Is Death? The idea of two player storytelling, with one narrator and one player could be interesting for covering that, bringing back the social-ness of RPGs and solving the multiple paths thing.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
As RPGs are my favourite genre, I thought I'd throw in my two pence, so...
World and character design: They are a love it or hate it company as far as design is concerned, but I'd go with Square Enix. They can do architecture well and really understand how to pretty-up 'natural' environments too.
Writing and producer: I'll throw a curveball here and go with Takashi Miike. The man may possibly be insane, but God, I would play an RPG percolated through the filter of his brain. Pretty much guarantees it an 18+ rating here in the UK though.
Plotting and world building: David Gaider as, as far as I'm concerned, the Dragon Age series is the series with the best world building in recent times. I do have a weakness for the steampunk-genetic engineering technology of Final Fantasy VII though, so I'll throw in Kazushige Nojima and Yoshinori Kitase, just because I can.
Mechanics: I'd probably envision an SRPG system with similarities to that of Final Fantasy Tactics (with a full job system), but in fully 3D in a manner similar to that of Valkyria Chronicles (but without the pressure of the enemies attacking you while you move, to allow time for proper planning). But in a fully realised world... where you can run around and enemies can be approached to enter the battle system, preferably the battles would take place in the 'real world' without separate stages designed especially for combat, so picking the right place to fight would be very important. So, a Sega WOW and Square Enix collaboration.
Music: Definitely a full orchestral score, but who would actually compose it is a toughie... I think I'd go with Howard Shore of The Lord of the Rings fame, he could provide a score that was suitable epic. Or possibly Masashi Hamauzu, who composed the score for Final Fantasy XIII, in my view one of the best things about that game.
Yeah, so I think that about covers it. And it would only cost the GDP of a small country to make.
EDIT: And in the freedom/linear debate, I'd go linear but with two vastly different half length plots starring different characters which both show a different parts of the plot and world. Then when you've completed both, you unlock a final epilogue where the two save files meet and the final resolution occurs. Essentially, linear with a twist; very similar to what the first two Golden Sun games did, but over the course of one game.
edited 9th Aug '11 3:19:25 AM by CottonWolf
???
Oh! I forgot music, which is like my #1 thing like half the time in games.
I want to see what Clint Mansell does with Mass Effect 3 to see if he's any good at game music, but he's like my favorite composer and I get like all my inspiration from movies rather than games anyway, so I might as well put his name as a tentative.
Otherwise, give me the Homestuck music crew and we'll just go pseudo-retro. That stuff is like the only thing I can listen to on loop if there's a clear lead instrument.
Also, Square for environment art. Yeah, they're good at that stuff.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
its not wrong, in fact, its completely right. but not on that map. the first map you dont have any weapon that can reliably 1-hit ko, making it a bad idea to give away where you are, especially in the next part of the level where you cant quite as easily get away.
when you get the baton, you can reliably 1-hit ko most enemies when you know where to hit, but untill then, you might aswell just avoid enemies all together, unless you're attacking from a place they cant get to you
so later on in deus ex, the situation reverses to make my playstyle wrong, and yours right.
EDIT: actually, i just checked, you do get the baton in the first map so ignore the above.
incidently, just because it isnt the right way to do it doesnt make it impossible. so, in my opinion, yes, all playstyles are valid, but they differ from map to map, some more than others. in particular, just going in and shooting everything like in a normal fps isnt really viable untill much later on.
edited 9th Aug '11 4:30:07 AM by Tarsen
The skill and gameplay comes from understanding your build, realising what their strengths and weaknesses are and then analysing what the approach is. The game also caters to each mode of gameplay ensuring that each mode is balanced in each map.
For example, Stealth players should actually have to use surroundings to cover them, hide in dark areas and make sure they aren't walking on noisy floorboards (only really seen that in Thief tbh, that's a shame more stealth games need to use this instead of magical sticky cover that lets to combat roll to each part of the game). You can't as a stealth player hit an invisibility skill and make a beeline to the end of the map.
Combat players will need to figure out how they're going to approach it, it isn't always going to be a cover run/pipe shooter (in a well designed game at least). Dialogue players need to read up on characters and figure out what the best way to butter them up/piss them off is and whether that'll lead to a desireable consequence (hopefully a branching consequence). Dialogue should be more than just a magical speech skill (something Alpha Protocol did incredibly well). And so on.
I really can't explain this without showing an actual level of Deus Ex but I hope that vaguely clears it up.
Sounds good to me, using that analogy that'd mean that instead of getting rid of/streamlining skills you divide them into tiers. For example early levels the only skills/attributes they can access are, say, Stealth, dialogue, combat (magic/melee).
There's an extended tutorial that allows the player to try each one out and then at the end of the (skippable) tutorial they can choose which skills to run. Then after say 5 levels they get access to another 5-10 more attributes and this is the point where everything starts to diversify. Dunno if that should be the norm but it'd be a good way to improve accessibility without losing complexity.
Ah, there's the issue. Deus Ex is about resource management as well. And Crossbows are specifically set up not to have too much ammo else it'd be way too easy to tranqshot at range with no consequences.
Stealth characters are meant to be all about sneaking past everyone with no one noticing and the crossbow/stun prod is more of a last resort or against people who just have way too difficult a path to manouevre around. This is the main reason I think the stealth tutorial has you avoiding guys instead of just stealthing behind them and killing them.
When you got low on ammo you should've tried to finish the level without it. Because the game in general will be resource managing what with all the limited lockpicks and multitools you get.
And holy shit wall of text. That's enough today.
???
guess I completely missed the point then. I should try the game again sometime and pump strength.
Anyway, I forgot to mention that while I don't want game writers to touch the dialogue, I do want Bioware to work on the cinematics of a conversation.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." Twitter
i can never get into tactics ogre
i just cant figure out what im doing, which is a shame because i really want to see what ending i would get if i didnt engineer it through a walkthrough