I want to make a videogame.

[seawasp]

Specifically, I want to create an RPG that addresses the failings I've seen in the industry all along. I know that a perfect game meeting all my preferences is impossible; however, there are some things which can be fixed in my view.

I'm talking mostly here about console RPGs, though certainly some or all of what I say could be applied to any CRPG except, in some ways, the MMORPGs; those, however, have their own major problems.



The Four Major Failings I want to see corrected:

1) RAILROAD SYNDROME. This is present in most CRPGs to an extreme extent. It is, in some ways, impossible to totally eliminate (barring true artificial intelligence), but virtually no effort has been made to even mitigate it. Railroad Syndrome basically means that you are "railroaded" to follow a particular plotline. In some RPGs this is obvious -- you literally cannot GO anywhere except one of a small set of destinations that will advance your particular plot. In others it may be at least partially hidden (you can go just about anywhere except some set of artificially blocked locations, and getting new significant events to happen depends on your choosing the RIGHT location and performing some correct set of actions. Railroad syndrome expresses in both large and small ways, and is most obvious in that most CRPGs have one or at most two or three "ending" sequences. All events are guided to ensure that you end up in one particular place in the story.

2) INTRACTABLE DIFFICULTY. Most CRPGs have some requirements that must be met in order to advance in the plot. Many of them feature puzzles and minigames. VERY few feature a way to GET AROUND these for the player who is playing for the story and may lack the skill, patience, or reflexes to pass the requirements. Why should the player have to search for a walkthrough on the net, or buy a special book? There are no good reasons why there shouldn't be a "Let me PAST this!" option, or at least a "Okay, tell me what i'm not doing right" option. A few games (E.g., Atelier Iris) have had a good hint option, but even those are sometimes cryptic.

3) OBVIOUSLY UNLIVING WORLD. In reality, given the events in most RPGs, things should vary dependin on what you do. People should come to recognize you. When you have a major throwdown with a villain that rocks the foundations of the world, trees should be downed. And trees shouldn't get in your way if you're powerful enough to beat people like that. Monsters of intelligence should learn to avoid you -- or bargain with you. A small stream should not barricade you from crossing (especially if you're in a forest with trees you could use as bridges or rafts!).

4) PLAY IN ISOLATION. There is no Earthly reason why, as virtually all systems come with two game controllers and nowadays can handle up to four or so, that these games should be NECESSARILY one-player games. If I want to play Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger, I have to do that when no one else is around; I can't make it a real participatory game. This is simply stupid. The processing power and display capability exists to offer two-player RPGs -- even ones in which the players are in two different locations. This would be a vast change in the genre -- something permitting these games to offer the same kind of social interaction that other team sports offer. MMORPGs permit things of this nature, but as are well known suffer from a number of other failings (not the least being almost constant munchkinism destroying the ability of casual players to easily enjoy the games).

I want to write a game in which there is free choice for a player to follow many adventures. Where more than one player can participate, becoming a companion or even nemesis for the other. Where an ingenious player can use the world around him or her to assist in the quest, AND where a player mostly interest in the story can, after a few tries, decide they don't want to jump through hoops and just move on to the next plot element. A game where my wife and I could sit down and play together, rather than one or the other of us being excluded, or that I can play with my son since we both enjoy such games. A game that gives me MANY hours of entertainment, not because it has three hundred special set battles and required side-quests, but because once I've finished one quest there are other adventures waiting for me.

This may seem like a lot, but I think that the technology exists to do it now. It might not have ten years ago, but it is possible now.

Unfortunately, while I could write the scripts and world, I can't draw or program worth a damn...







There, periodic videogame rant over.

Comments

Lot of good points...

[bobmage.livejournal.com]

I find myself frequently wanting to sit down a write a game that I would like to play, but have not had the time to do so. I should have the programming skills, since I just got a CIS degree, and maybe the free time will appear now that I'm done...
I think that, in general, game play has been fairly stagnant, while graphics have "improved", for the last 10 years or so. In fact, I have only bought a couple of CRPGs in this time, because they all look like boring but flashy railquests. (As an aside, the 2 Fallout games are excellent fun, although they could use some kind of random side quest generator.)

[groblek.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I also don't have the skills to create such a thing (though if you need to make plants glow in the dark, I can do that. :)) But if you ever manage to make or inspire a game like that, I'd certainly buy a copy. I find that when I do play CRPGs now, it's always older stuff like Quest for Glory or Ultima.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I've been outlining a game in my head that I have far too few skills to write; if I had to pigeon-hole it in a genre, it'd be an RPG/RTS hybrid. Persistant world effects, multiple allied NPCs that are NOT tied to a "party", dynamic politics between PC and multiple NPC factions, free-form (to a point...) plot, multiple paths to victory, and a "world reset" that would allow players to replay the game after completion with a semi-randomly generated world map.

Alas, the last code I wrote was in FORTRAN on a dumb terminal; I'm so obsolete the self-help books are baffling. I can't even determine whether this is practical or not. But I can dream...

-- Steve's even mused about the promotion for it... it'd make for a dandy Alternate Reality Game.

[k-kinnison.livejournal.com]

FF8 kind of tore it for me when a lot of "offical guide" spoilers and easter eggs were not even in the guide but online which required more $$

Fan made player guides and walkthoughs might not have been as colorful... but at least they made sense.

one problem about avoiding the railroad system is that one action could force you to have to restart a game. Not to metion an action could prevent you from getting some items. I don't like being barred form getting something in an item based game becasue i forgot to unlock a certain character before I beat a certain boss

But what i really despise is leveling... I really wish games would avoid the old D+D style EXP/Level system. There HAS to be a better way like a skill based system

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

The shareware game Nahlakh did this. No levels, no experience even; just skills that improve through use.

[jerith.livejournal.com]

Not a console game, but I'm rather fond of Neverwinter Nights. Not so much for the main game, but there are a whole bunch of really good user-contributed modules out there, many of which work equally well for single or multiplayer. On the other hand, you need one PC per player which may be problematic.

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say, I likely wouldn't play it. Closest I've come to liking a game like that is Romancing SaGa. (Which I REALLY like, but even then it's almost too 'free' for me.)

Minor correction on controllers

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure most systems come with only one controller these days -- the next gen ones for sure (although yes, they can all handle at least 4). In this generation, the PS2 can only handle 2 controllers without a special add on. IIRC, the last systems to come out with 2 controllers in the box was Super Nintendo (unless Dreamcast or original PS did).

Re: Minor correction on controllers

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Dreamcast and PlayStation shipped with one controller each as did Saturn.

Super NES and Genesis originally shipped with 2 controllers each. They were the last consoles to do so.

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

You should check out Ultima V: Lazarus. It's a fan made adaptation of the old Ultima V Game, for Dungeon Siege. It has a mostly non-linear plot, in that there are several things you _have_ to do, but you can do them in any order you like. There are also about 90 side-quests, which are completely optional, but useful sources of goodies and experience. Your actions will affect your interactions with the NPCs, and the other members of your parties. It's single player, but hey, you can't have everything. You should be able to find a copy of Dungeon Siege for less than ten dollars, and the Lazarus mod itself is a free download.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Railroad Syndrome: It is difficult to make a good game that has both a coherent, cohesive story and plot and make it entirely free-form. It has been tried but the results usually resemble trying to read the chapters of a novel in random order. Based on experience as a player I think that the only way to make it work is not to have such a coherent, linear story to begin with. Valkyrie Profile takes this approach. It has a set of key scenarios with associated dungeons to explore but outside of those "arc episodes" the player is free to explore and recruit however he wants. While it has "only" three endings, the best ending (A Ending) is damned hard to get.

Intractable Difficulty: This is a fundamental problem with game design (and game designers) in general. Computer games should adapt to the player's skill, becomming easier for less-skilled players and more difficult for better players. As it is, most games reward the better players with more power-ups and what-not while penalizing the worse players with many deaths and much frustration.

Unliving World: How dynamic a world can be depends on the resources available. Most consoles lack the memory and fast rewritable storage needed to make a truely dynamic world. And, of course, it is much harder to make a dynamic world than a static one. :)

Isolation: There are a few RPGs that allow other players to control characters during fights. Nevertheless, a problem with trying to make multi-player games is that different players have different paces. Some are faster (or slower) than others. Trying to play with players that don't match your pace and style can lead to frustration if the other goes too fast or boredom if the other goes too slow.

[nerem.livejournal.com]

There's always the Symphony of the Night trilogy (Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Aria of Sorrow, and Dawn of Sorrow) which have open-ended exploration in an utterly massive castle (SoTN for PSX has /two/ castles) where once you get a couple key abilities (namely, the ability to turn into a bat and fly, and the ability to stop time [or recognize when it is stopped and return it to normal speed in the second game] in the later two games) you can explore the entire castle freely, with nothing holding you back. There is no multiplayer though, mainly because it would probably be too easy. There are four endings to all games, usually based on if you went evil or good.

Though not a straight RPG, there is also The Lord of Elemental for the SNES, which had a very unique scenario system where doing seemingly minor things (like refusing to let this little girl join the party, and then refusing to cross the border to go after her into another country) will help shape what ending you will get. That one has 6 or so completely different endings, based on what 'story' you ended up on.

Design strategies for a free-form RPG-plus

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

The problem is not the coding; you can probably start with any off-the-shelf framework in a "How To Write Games" book.

The challenges are (a) devising a script and rule system to support this kind of non-linear play, and (b) designing data structures to store the state of the player(s). (I asked a friend, who's both an avid RPG gamer and an excellent programmer, why they're limited to specific savepoints: it's dirt-cheap on storage.)

Well... the coding *is* a problem, if you want destructible scenery that reacts to player combat. (Instead of the usual: sprites walking against a 2D, or through a 3D, backdrop.) Even fully-3D games on the PC (which has certain advantages over platforms) don't yet do arbitrarily-destructible environments. You might be able to fake it if the combats were scripted to occur only in specific places, and the scenery were limited to certain damage modes. (Trees get leaves blown off, then fall over; craters appear in the ground; hills collapse into piles of rubble.)

There are probably SourceForge projects that have attempted to do all this.