morewordsfaster

With something like this, I would think about dumping the experience-based leveling system. Base stats would stay the same throughout the game and are indicative of that character period. Improved attack and defense, etc comes from gear and from skills or traits that are purchased with experience points or job points or whatever. Skills/traits could be innate and merely impact the derived stats (ATK, DEF, etc) or actual skills that are used in combat or on the map. Or heck, they could be both. Then, you could do a combo of the save-carry-over that HumanNinja mentioned and a blank slate for people who didn't play the earlier game (or don't want to reuse a save) where the player gets basically as many skill points as they would have gained in the previous game and the opportunity to basically spec out their character prior to playing.

Well, just to clarify, my point wasn't that you shouldn't have super special end-game weapons for your characters. I agree with you that it can provide a sense of accomplishment, and when the stat curve starts to level out at high-level, it can provide a more obvious damage-output (or healing-output) bump than getting 1 pt of STR or whatever. My point was more of games where there are exactly as many Vorpal Swords as you have characters. If you're going to have unique end-game gear, please just make one set per character or one set per class or hell, even just one item per character or class. You want it to feel unique not like World of Warcraft where everyone and their mother has the same gear you do because they ran the same raid 50 times. Also, I'm glad you share my sentiments on difficulty. I always joke that when I release my game it's going to have a "NES-hard Mode" where all the stats are completely randomized and the quest completion requirements are hidden and enemies can all one-shot you.

I think the best puzzles are those that tie together a thread that appears in several game areas. If you can set something up prior to the puzzle, like giving the player an item or spell or something that will payoff as the solution to a puzzle later on, that's kick ass. It helps make the game world feel more cohesive in my opinion. Emergence is another great concept to play with in puzzles; Portal and Portal 2 were completely based on the idea of emergence. They set up some pretty simple rules (only certain surfaces can have portals, momentum carries over through a portal, etc) and then built hundreds of puzzles based on the emergent dynamics of that rules system. In fact, there's a flash-based 2d Portal game that is terrific for showing off cool puzzles. But when I think of great puzzles in games, I think of point-and-click adventure games. The LucasArts games like Maniac Mansion, Loom, and Secret of Monkey Island had some of the best puzzles I've ever experienced and considering puzzles are the main gameplay mechanic in those games, they HAD TO do it well or the game would be a failure. The Myst games are a great example of environment puzzles. And for those who want more recent examples, the Puzzle Agent games, Zack and Wiki, and the Sam and Max series were all great as well.

Yeah I love Strawberry, but Rob seems a little Harlequin-romance-cover to me lol. Hard to take a pirate seriously if he looks like he just came out of a shampoo commercial Still, you've got mad skillz yo.

Very nice! I like the simplicity of it

I actually think that having just using connecting areas and no world map (aside from an actual in-game map) can make a world feel bigger than a world map where it only takes seconds to traverse an entire continent. One of the examples used above was Earthbound and I think Earthbound was a HUGE world. Each area was enormous on it's own and hinted at an even bigger world beyond the edges of the areas you explore in the game. I remember getting lost in the Dusty Dunes Desert and taking the long walk from Fourside all the way back to Onett (I'm a cheapskate and didn't want to play for bus fare ). The difference between places like Summers and Winters and Dalaam and the Deep Darkness made the world seem so varied and interesting. Still, a well-made world map can be cool; I loved the way it was done in Lunar: Silver Star Story, mostly because the characters and the landscapes were much more proportional. Mountains and trees were bigger than the character sprites. Victor Sant's Character Effects script can be used to do this by shrinking the character sprites down to 50% or 25%. I've seen it done in one or two games I think and I am using it in one of the projects I'm working on. It would also be interesting to do some unconventional world maps with parallax maps like a hand-drawn treasure map style for a pirate game or something like that.

Well, to Arco's point, "rogueishness" or "comedy" isn't really a theme. I guess if you mean "rogueishness" to mean lawlessness, anarchy, or rebelliousness or something like that, that could well be a theme. I like the family element where the antagonist is the protagonist's brother, especially older brother. I'm sure that the protagonist mostly looks up to his older brother so there will be an internal conflict for the protagonist having to overcome his love and admiration of his older brother for the good of the world. I think that the motivation for the older brother is a little weak, mostly because I think it's a pretty big stretch to go from feelings of inadequacy straight to raising a skeleton army. Also, I'm confused how raising a skeleton army will remove emotion from the world. I think it's a good thing to have a believable and sympathetic motivation for your villain and you're on the right track, I just feel that there's something missing. Often deep-seated feelings of inadequacy can be set off by something like betrayal or a rivalry coming to a head, and can result in an overzealous response. Here's an idea: what if the town bully went on to become a famous knight or warrior, maybe the Captain of the King's Guard or something, and hasn't been seen around town in years. The older brother has been able to find some modest success in town and maybe is the Magistrate or Seneschal or something and now is being upstaged by his old rival. Maybe all of his plans are thrown into jeopardy; the ex-bully is in town to marry the girl that the older brother loves from afar, etc. From outside looking in, it would seem like the ex-bully is just a good guy that everyone likes and the older brother is the jealous, weaselly guy who was always in his shadow. Then all of them have to go to the capital city for the wedding, giving the ex-bully more opportunity to show-up the older brother as he schemes and tries to come up with a plan to foil everything and "save" the woman he loves and destroy "the bully" once and for all. The main character comes along with his older brother and that's how he gets involved. As for the rogues, I think that they could be more comedic and fun if they somehow got dragged into the plot instead of them dragging the main character along. That would set them up perfectly to be Those Two Guys. I also have to say I really like that you're talking about using a skeleton army rather than zombies. Maybe it's just me, but zombies are really starting to get a little overplayed in my opinion. Skeleton army sounds awesome and makes me think of kick-ass Ray Harryhausen effects in Jason and the Argonauts or the eponymous Army of Darkness.

I think it can work, if there's a reason for that sort of mix-up to exist in the game world. Maybe there is a society that has been kept segregated from the rest of the world for some reason that has advanced technology while the remainder of the population is still technologically in a pre-industrial stage. Or maybe it's like Christopher Stasheff's Warlock books where an intergalactic civilization tends to "meddle" in the affairs of pre-space-travel civilizations on other planets. This has been done numerous times in both novels, comics, films, television, and games (Star Ocean comes to mind). Even if there's little internal consistency, or there's no real explicit reason for the world to be that way, I think the game can work, but you will probably run into some naysayers who want the story to really make sense or the world to be more realistic. But think about cartoons like Loony Tunes, etc, there's little consistency in their worlds--things tend to exist or happen just because they do, and it works in that milieu. Do you have a specific mix-up in mind?

Did you notice the colon after "TL;DR"? That statement was for people who didn't want to go to all the trouble of reading MY long post which was pretty rambly and didn't directly answer your question. I'm sorry if it seemed conceited, it wasn't intended to. Okay, you argue that FFXIII is trying to establish new genre conventions. I would argue that it's simply not a "role-playing game" it's what so many people on these forums call a "visual novel." The biggest problems people have with FFXIII seem to be because more than half of the game is spent in a "tutorial mode," the voice-acting is crap (English specifically, can't speak for Japanese), the characters are weak, and the story is just plain weird. Now, sure, SquareEnix has the choice of doing fan service and giving the players what they are asking for (more of what made them fall in love with FF in the first place) or doing something different to be creative, but I don't think that they are trying to establish genre conventions. I think that they are just trying to make a different game than they made last time. My argument was that the "differences" don't make them "opposites" -- I'm sorry that didn't come through clearly. I'm also sorry if I misunderstood your summaries. From your follow-up it seems that you were less trying to define what makes a WRPG or a JRPG, and more trying to list the characteristics that you are interested in taking from each sub-genre and melding into your game. For what it's worth, I think those features are all good ones and can definitely be melded into one game. Um, so you're going to tell me that the story in Mass Effect wasn't "refined?" How about Fallout 3 or New Vegas? Dragon Age: Origins? KOTOR? The examples that I gave were examples of the beginning of video-game RPGs and showed how similar JRPGs and WRPGs are with all the visual trappings taken away. Hell, I could just as easily have said go read some D&D sourcebooks, since that was basically the foundation for video-game RPGs in the first place. But since that requires imagination, not a high-end graphics card, I don't know how it would stand up to your "resolution" test. Did I say that ATB and Attack/Magic can't be interesting gameplay? No. You make my point for me! I argue that Skyrim is essentially a sandbox game with some RPG elements. I'm sorry that you thought it was sarcasm. I was going for encouraging enthusiasm. It was not my intention at all to make you feel dumb and if it came off that way, I apologize. As I said in my first post, I think that you can definitely meld those game styles together and it would probably be a great game.

OK TL;DR: your premise is flawed, but no they are not mutually exclusive. First of all, understand that WRPGs are just as story-centric as JRPGs and JRPGs are just as gameplay-focused as WRPGs. These are not the elements that set the two genres apart. Honestly, to understand what sets them apart, you need a bit of a history lesson and should look at games like Wizardry and Ultima, Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest, and DDS: Megami Tensei. These games evolved from the same place and are the foundation upon which the RPG genre as a whole is built upon. They set up genre conventions that still exist today. And here's the real difference between "JRPGs" and "WRPGs:" point-of-view. So-called WRPGs have been focused on first-person storytelling where the player character truly is the player's avatar in-game and can be customized 100% from skills to stats to hair style to personality. Alternately, so-called JRPGs are more about telling an ensemble story in an almost third-person omniscient or third-person limited style. The player takes control of an existing character (who often is still reduced to a blank slate at the start of the game, but more as a plot device and storytelling conceit) and the player often gets to control not one, but several in-game avatars. Many people tribute this to the shift in PC gaming in the 90s to first-person shooters with a 3d visual style. When consoles were in the golden age of 16-bit masterpieces, the RPGs on PC were trying to compete with Doom and Quake and all the other FPS juggernauts. The resources that once could have been spent on elaborate spell systems or gads of interesting party-members or hours and hours of back story and dialogue now had to be spent on flashy graphics engines. Aside from a couple of sleeper hits like Fallout, the industry moved away from the party-based games that defined the old RPG genre and to the WRPG style we see now. Now, to avoid going even further off-topic, I'll swing back to your main question. These two are not opposites at all, they are just different presentations of the same basic genre--role-playing games. I would say that a JRPG without interesting gameplay is a waste of time--chances are there's better writing in a book or a film. And a WRPG without a compelling story is just a dungeon crawler or sandbox game, really. So, yeah, go do it. Make a kick ass RPG with a great story that your players will be excited to participate in and game mechanics that keep them playing long after the main quest is complete.

As for copyright, there are thousands of novels in the public domain. You wouldn't be able to use anything recent, but you have a wealth of excellent options like anything by Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, etc. Copyright is only 50-70 years in most countries, and anything published prior to 1928 is in the public domain. Anything published before 1960 (I think) is in the public domain unless it was renewed within 28 years. That being said, I think short stories would work better if you're focused on keeping the gameplay sessions in the books short.

I think this sounds really cool. I've been really vocal in a couple of threads, most notably Wren's Monster Hunter Logan Redux thread regarding interesting/compelling choices in battle systems to reduce the "mash-the-attack-button" approach to combat. I think the main challenges to doing a system like this are creating something where each battle doesn't end up taking a long time, and differentiating boss battles from regular encounters. I'd also add the challenge of avoiding overcomplicating things just for the sake of overcomplicating them, or forcing players to do something just for the sake of doing it, rather than because it's fun and interesting. Your archer idea sounds interesting, and the swordmaster/reckless strike interaction sounds good as well. Honestly, if you make something that is fun and different from the norm, people will probably love it. ***EDIT*** I almost forgot -- one thing to keep in mind as well (although it sounds like you're already working on this) is that most players will spam the most powerful attack, if there is clearly one attack that is the most powerful. To create compelling choices and avoid your battle becoming just another spam-fest, make sure that there isn't necessarily just one skill for each character that is the "obvious" choice in every situation. Different choices should each have their own pros/cons and their use cases should come up often enough that there isn't a skill that just never gets used because it has no purpose.

Why does the player have to be "trapped" in the library? Frankly, I'm kind of sick of people being forced into becoming a hero. Why did that ever become chic? What ever happened to people who want to do what's right and "save the princess" simply because it needs to be done? How about a hero who CHOOSES to be a hero, a hero who goes on a quest by choice? Don't get me wrong, I like Joseph Campbell as much as the next guy, but Refusal of the Call has really been misunderstood and blown way, way out of proportion. I like the idea of "jumping" but I also cringe at the reference to Kingdom Hearts. I struggle with the idea of short play times when you're talking about multiple worlds in BOOKS -- possibly the longest (from a time-investment on the part of the entertained) storytelling format there is. Are you planning on using specific novels in your game? I think your party system has merit, but I'm interested in how you will make certain literary characters fun to play from an RPG combat system perspective.