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The unexpected in games is always a good feature. For example, you can be playing Metal Gear Solid and get to a section where there are lots of guards in your view, then your Codec suddenly interrupts you to advise you that "By the way, your weapons have been deactivated because it's too dangerous to use them here." That's the kind of surprise that makes you stop and think and reassess your approach to that particular section of a game.
But there are loads of different types of surprises, and some in particular I'd like to see more of that affect longevity in the RPG genre of game. Things like:
Levelling Characters
In most games, you can only level a character up as far as lvl 99, or level a skill up as far as Power 255, things like that. You're restricted by a silly numeral that detracts from the reality. How about if, once you hit lvl 99, you 'morph' into something altogether more powerful, and then discover that you can start levelling all over again? Or increase your 'swordsmanship' rating up to lvl 255, then suddenly discover a branching system that the manual didn't tell you about, whereby at lvl 255 you can now choose to go down the route of 'parrying' or 'fencing' and customise your character further?
Items
Items in games are usually just that; a box is a box, a potion is a potion, a sword is a sword. I've noticed developers starting to allow you to customise items more and more in games by being able to combine, merge, refine them and so on into new and improved items/weapons, but a nice surprise would be that if you were to mix a very specific and unique combination of items together that something wholly unexpected were to happen, like a new character would be created, or your weapon develops a mind of its own and can give you advice on upcoming battles, or you discover and entirely new class of item that has absolutely no immediate relevance to the game until much later on. This kind of thing would encourage experiment, which would in turn add longevity.
Collecting
Games like Shenmue, with its small plastic toys, and games like Final Fantasy 8 with its card collecting, only really touched on this. Imagine being told you had to collect 100 of a certain item, like a gem or a skillstone, and it took you over 20 hours of gameplay to find them all, only to discover that on collecting the 100th that your set is complete, but a whole new class of object is now collectable, which has a new function. For example, collecting 100 skillstones increases all your attack stats by one point, then you discover that collecting another 100 skillgems will add +2 points across the board to your agility related stats, and on completion of this task you discover that in the places where the skillgems used to be, skillcrystals can now be discovered that do something else yet again. The possibilities for increasing lifespans are pretty much endless.
Quests
The staple part of any Adventure or Role Playing Game, varied and interesting quests are vital. But most times you only get to do them once. It would be great if you could speak to an NPC (non player character) to get a quest, perform the quest, then get another quest from the same person. It would be along the same lines, but harder, perhaps throwing more obstacles in your way or more bosses at the end of it. And you could perform this quest as often as you wished, each time getting more difficult, until you feel that you've reached a stage where you can go no further but then simply move onto another NPC. So instead of getting just one quest from each NPC in the game, you could take on as many as you were capable of.
Areas/Maps/Locations
Some RPG storylines span years, and yet each time you revisit a location you've been to previously, they're exactly the same. No new trees have grown, no new monsters have evolved, landscapes haven't been affected by natural forces like earthquakes and so on. Most real-life environments are constantly evolving, constantly changing, and it would be great to see some elements of this reflected in some of the larger RPGs. That way, each time you revisited an area it would be different, sometimes just in a subtle way, like the grass is longer, or in a massive way, like a meteor crater has appeared that wasn't there before. Again this would make exploration more rewarding, and back tracking would bring surprises.
Adversaries
This is probably my bug bear with most RPGs. If you meet monsters of the same type, the chances are that they'll always attack you with the same skills/spells/attack patterns that all those of the same species use. It would be great to have some kind of random factor introduced, like one MonsterA will always hit you with magic, whilst another MonsterA will prefer physical attacks, whilst yet another MonsterA will prefer to work on their defense as a priority. They should, of course, all be relatively similar when it comes to overall capabilities, because nasty surprises like chancing upon a particularly overpowered MonsterA might detract from the gameplay, but a bit more variety wouldn't hurt.
Free Roaming
It's very rare that a console RPG will allow you to free roam. Usually you have to complete set tasks before other areas will open up to you, and this linearity can be annoying. In online RPGs, the chances are you can wander anywhere (at your own risk) right from the word go, and this provides you with a learning experience in that if you arrive at a dangerous area too soon you're going to pay the price, but at least you have freedom, which most console RPGs don't allow.
On the upside, most online RPGs are starting to incorporate most of these features, albeit they occaisionally need to patch the game with an update to permit new features to be added. But it would be great if console RPGs had these 'updates' already built in, and all it needed was for a player to unlock them via various methods (unknown to the player though, as where would be the surprise in that?) as they went through the game.
But there are loads of different types of surprises, and some in particular I'd like to see more of that affect longevity in the RPG genre of game. Things like:
Levelling Characters
In most games, you can only level a character up as far as lvl 99, or level a skill up as far as Power 255, things like that. You're restricted by a silly numeral that detracts from the reality. How about if, once you hit lvl 99, you 'morph' into something altogether more powerful, and then discover that you can start levelling all over again? Or increase your 'swordsmanship' rating up to lvl 255, then suddenly discover a branching system that the manual didn't tell you about, whereby at lvl 255 you can now choose to go down the route of 'parrying' or 'fencing' and customise your character further?
Items
Items in games are usually just that; a box is a box, a potion is a potion, a sword is a sword. I've noticed developers starting to allow you to customise items more and more in games by being able to combine, merge, refine them and so on into new and improved items/weapons, but a nice surprise would be that if you were to mix a very specific and unique combination of items together that something wholly unexpected were to happen, like a new character would be created, or your weapon develops a mind of its own and can give you advice on upcoming battles, or you discover and entirely new class of item that has absolutely no immediate relevance to the game until much later on. This kind of thing would encourage experiment, which would in turn add longevity.
Collecting
Games like Shenmue, with its small plastic toys, and games like Final Fantasy 8 with its card collecting, only really touched on this. Imagine being told you had to collect 100 of a certain item, like a gem or a skillstone, and it took you over 20 hours of gameplay to find them all, only to discover that on collecting the 100th that your set is complete, but a whole new class of object is now collectable, which has a new function. For example, collecting 100 skillstones increases all your attack stats by one point, then you discover that collecting another 100 skillgems will add +2 points across the board to your agility related stats, and on completion of this task you discover that in the places where the skillgems used to be, skillcrystals can now be discovered that do something else yet again. The possibilities for increasing lifespans are pretty much endless.
Quests
The staple part of any Adventure or Role Playing Game, varied and interesting quests are vital. But most times you only get to do them once. It would be great if you could speak to an NPC (non player character) to get a quest, perform the quest, then get another quest from the same person. It would be along the same lines, but harder, perhaps throwing more obstacles in your way or more bosses at the end of it. And you could perform this quest as often as you wished, each time getting more difficult, until you feel that you've reached a stage where you can go no further but then simply move onto another NPC. So instead of getting just one quest from each NPC in the game, you could take on as many as you were capable of.
Areas/Maps/Locations
Some RPG storylines span years, and yet each time you revisit a location you've been to previously, they're exactly the same. No new trees have grown, no new monsters have evolved, landscapes haven't been affected by natural forces like earthquakes and so on. Most real-life environments are constantly evolving, constantly changing, and it would be great to see some elements of this reflected in some of the larger RPGs. That way, each time you revisited an area it would be different, sometimes just in a subtle way, like the grass is longer, or in a massive way, like a meteor crater has appeared that wasn't there before. Again this would make exploration more rewarding, and back tracking would bring surprises.
Adversaries
This is probably my bug bear with most RPGs. If you meet monsters of the same type, the chances are that they'll always attack you with the same skills/spells/attack patterns that all those of the same species use. It would be great to have some kind of random factor introduced, like one MonsterA will always hit you with magic, whilst another MonsterA will prefer physical attacks, whilst yet another MonsterA will prefer to work on their defense as a priority. They should, of course, all be relatively similar when it comes to overall capabilities, because nasty surprises like chancing upon a particularly overpowered MonsterA might detract from the gameplay, but a bit more variety wouldn't hurt.
Free Roaming
It's very rare that a console RPG will allow you to free roam. Usually you have to complete set tasks before other areas will open up to you, and this linearity can be annoying. In online RPGs, the chances are you can wander anywhere (at your own risk) right from the word go, and this provides you with a learning experience in that if you arrive at a dangerous area too soon you're going to pay the price, but at least you have freedom, which most console RPGs don't allow.
On the upside, most online RPGs are starting to incorporate most of these features, albeit they occaisionally need to patch the game with an update to permit new features to be added. But it would be great if console RPGs had these 'updates' already built in, and all it needed was for a player to unlock them via various methods (unknown to the player though, as where would be the surprise in that?) as they went through the game.
FantasyMeister wrote:
> Mr Lover Man wrote:
> ... i think you raise some good points there that
> games developers should be listening to...
>
> Things move fast these days, look!
> http://special.reserve.co.uk/news/story.php?id=2404
>
> :)
Quite scary in a way, you could almost live your life on a game!!
> Mr Lover Man wrote:
> ... i think you raise some good points there that
> games developers should be listening to...
>
> Things move fast these days, look!
> http://special.reserve.co.uk/news/story.php?id=2404
>
> :)
Quite scary in a way, you could almost live your life on a game!!
Yeah, you've got some good ideas in there.
I agree with you on the whole levelling-up thing. I hate it in a certain RPG where you get so far, only to learn that that's it, and your feelings about the game begin to change.
I also think that collecting only works well in certain RPG's. It worked well in Shenmue purely because it came across as something different that caught your attention and it was something you didn't neccesarily HAVE to do. I wouldn't work in a game like Zelda - and I think this has been proven with Ocarina of Time and all those 100 Gold Skultulas. :S
Have you heard about Fable? That sounds like a game you'd really enjoy.
You basically start of as a kid, and progress through the games, growing older through the years, in a certain way which is decided by the things you do while you grow-up.
And when you travelled through time 7-years in Zelda: OoT Hyrule looked like a very different, evil, place. I still remember walking into the Courtyard for the first time and seeing what looked like "Hell" with buildings destroyed, Re-Deads, and darkness all around me.
Not only did that really shock me, but it scared me a little, you know?
I felt instantly that perhaps what lies ahead was going to be too-big a task for even Link!
I love RPG's!
I agree with you on the whole levelling-up thing. I hate it in a certain RPG where you get so far, only to learn that that's it, and your feelings about the game begin to change.
I also think that collecting only works well in certain RPG's. It worked well in Shenmue purely because it came across as something different that caught your attention and it was something you didn't neccesarily HAVE to do. I wouldn't work in a game like Zelda - and I think this has been proven with Ocarina of Time and all those 100 Gold Skultulas. :S
Have you heard about Fable? That sounds like a game you'd really enjoy.
You basically start of as a kid, and progress through the games, growing older through the years, in a certain way which is decided by the things you do while you grow-up.
And when you travelled through time 7-years in Zelda: OoT Hyrule looked like a very different, evil, place. I still remember walking into the Courtyard for the first time and seeing what looked like "Hell" with buildings destroyed, Re-Deads, and darkness all around me.
Not only did that really shock me, but it scared me a little, you know?
I felt instantly that perhaps what lies ahead was going to be too-big a task for even Link!
I love RPG's!
Mr Lover Man wrote:
> ... i think you raise some good points there that
> games developers should be listening to...
Things move fast these days, look!
http://special.reserve.co.uk/news/story.php?id=2404
:)
> ... i think you raise some good points there that
> games developers should be listening to...
Things move fast these days, look!
http://special.reserve.co.uk/news/story.php?id=2404
:)
Well thought out....i think you raise some good points there that games developers should be listening to as theres nothing worse than a game with a poor lifespan, and it would make you comeback and buy the second or third installement of the game knowing that things WILL just get bigger and bigger!
The unexpected in games is always a good feature. For example, you can be playing Metal Gear Solid and get to a section where there are lots of guards in your view, then your Codec suddenly interrupts you to advise you that "By the way, your weapons have been deactivated because it's too dangerous to use them here." That's the kind of surprise that makes you stop and think and reassess your approach to that particular section of a game.
But there are loads of different types of surprises, and some in particular I'd like to see more of that affect longevity in the RPG genre of game. Things like:
Levelling Characters
In most games, you can only level a character up as far as lvl 99, or level a skill up as far as Power 255, things like that. You're restricted by a silly numeral that detracts from the reality. How about if, once you hit lvl 99, you 'morph' into something altogether more powerful, and then discover that you can start levelling all over again? Or increase your 'swordsmanship' rating up to lvl 255, then suddenly discover a branching system that the manual didn't tell you about, whereby at lvl 255 you can now choose to go down the route of 'parrying' or 'fencing' and customise your character further?
Items
Items in games are usually just that; a box is a box, a potion is a potion, a sword is a sword. I've noticed developers starting to allow you to customise items more and more in games by being able to combine, merge, refine them and so on into new and improved items/weapons, but a nice surprise would be that if you were to mix a very specific and unique combination of items together that something wholly unexpected were to happen, like a new character would be created, or your weapon develops a mind of its own and can give you advice on upcoming battles, or you discover and entirely new class of item that has absolutely no immediate relevance to the game until much later on. This kind of thing would encourage experiment, which would in turn add longevity.
Collecting
Games like Shenmue, with its small plastic toys, and games like Final Fantasy 8 with its card collecting, only really touched on this. Imagine being told you had to collect 100 of a certain item, like a gem or a skillstone, and it took you over 20 hours of gameplay to find them all, only to discover that on collecting the 100th that your set is complete, but a whole new class of object is now collectable, which has a new function. For example, collecting 100 skillstones increases all your attack stats by one point, then you discover that collecting another 100 skillgems will add +2 points across the board to your agility related stats, and on completion of this task you discover that in the places where the skillgems used to be, skillcrystals can now be discovered that do something else yet again. The possibilities for increasing lifespans are pretty much endless.
Quests
The staple part of any Adventure or Role Playing Game, varied and interesting quests are vital. But most times you only get to do them once. It would be great if you could speak to an NPC (non player character) to get a quest, perform the quest, then get another quest from the same person. It would be along the same lines, but harder, perhaps throwing more obstacles in your way or more bosses at the end of it. And you could perform this quest as often as you wished, each time getting more difficult, until you feel that you've reached a stage where you can go no further but then simply move onto another NPC. So instead of getting just one quest from each NPC in the game, you could take on as many as you were capable of.
Areas/Maps/Locations
Some RPG storylines span years, and yet each time you revisit a location you've been to previously, they're exactly the same. No new trees have grown, no new monsters have evolved, landscapes haven't been affected by natural forces like earthquakes and so on. Most real-life environments are constantly evolving, constantly changing, and it would be great to see some elements of this reflected in some of the larger RPGs. That way, each time you revisited an area it would be different, sometimes just in a subtle way, like the grass is longer, or in a massive way, like a meteor crater has appeared that wasn't there before. Again this would make exploration more rewarding, and back tracking would bring surprises.
Adversaries
This is probably my bug bear with most RPGs. If you meet monsters of the same type, the chances are that they'll always attack you with the same skills/spells/attack patterns that all those of the same species use. It would be great to have some kind of random factor introduced, like one MonsterA will always hit you with magic, whilst another MonsterA will prefer physical attacks, whilst yet another MonsterA will prefer to work on their defense as a priority. They should, of course, all be relatively similar when it comes to overall capabilities, because nasty surprises like chancing upon a particularly overpowered MonsterA might detract from the gameplay, but a bit more variety wouldn't hurt.
Free Roaming
It's very rare that a console RPG will allow you to free roam. Usually you have to complete set tasks before other areas will open up to you, and this linearity can be annoying. In online RPGs, the chances are you can wander anywhere (at your own risk) right from the word go, and this provides you with a learning experience in that if you arrive at a dangerous area too soon you're going to pay the price, but at least you have freedom, which most console RPGs don't allow.
On the upside, most online RPGs are starting to incorporate most of these features, albeit they occaisionally need to patch the game with an update to permit new features to be added. But it would be great if console RPGs had these 'updates' already built in, and all it needed was for a player to unlock them via various methods (unknown to the player though, as where would be the surprise in that?) as they went through the game.
But there are loads of different types of surprises, and some in particular I'd like to see more of that affect longevity in the RPG genre of game. Things like:
Levelling Characters
In most games, you can only level a character up as far as lvl 99, or level a skill up as far as Power 255, things like that. You're restricted by a silly numeral that detracts from the reality. How about if, once you hit lvl 99, you 'morph' into something altogether more powerful, and then discover that you can start levelling all over again? Or increase your 'swordsmanship' rating up to lvl 255, then suddenly discover a branching system that the manual didn't tell you about, whereby at lvl 255 you can now choose to go down the route of 'parrying' or 'fencing' and customise your character further?
Items
Items in games are usually just that; a box is a box, a potion is a potion, a sword is a sword. I've noticed developers starting to allow you to customise items more and more in games by being able to combine, merge, refine them and so on into new and improved items/weapons, but a nice surprise would be that if you were to mix a very specific and unique combination of items together that something wholly unexpected were to happen, like a new character would be created, or your weapon develops a mind of its own and can give you advice on upcoming battles, or you discover and entirely new class of item that has absolutely no immediate relevance to the game until much later on. This kind of thing would encourage experiment, which would in turn add longevity.
Collecting
Games like Shenmue, with its small plastic toys, and games like Final Fantasy 8 with its card collecting, only really touched on this. Imagine being told you had to collect 100 of a certain item, like a gem or a skillstone, and it took you over 20 hours of gameplay to find them all, only to discover that on collecting the 100th that your set is complete, but a whole new class of object is now collectable, which has a new function. For example, collecting 100 skillstones increases all your attack stats by one point, then you discover that collecting another 100 skillgems will add +2 points across the board to your agility related stats, and on completion of this task you discover that in the places where the skillgems used to be, skillcrystals can now be discovered that do something else yet again. The possibilities for increasing lifespans are pretty much endless.
Quests
The staple part of any Adventure or Role Playing Game, varied and interesting quests are vital. But most times you only get to do them once. It would be great if you could speak to an NPC (non player character) to get a quest, perform the quest, then get another quest from the same person. It would be along the same lines, but harder, perhaps throwing more obstacles in your way or more bosses at the end of it. And you could perform this quest as often as you wished, each time getting more difficult, until you feel that you've reached a stage where you can go no further but then simply move onto another NPC. So instead of getting just one quest from each NPC in the game, you could take on as many as you were capable of.
Areas/Maps/Locations
Some RPG storylines span years, and yet each time you revisit a location you've been to previously, they're exactly the same. No new trees have grown, no new monsters have evolved, landscapes haven't been affected by natural forces like earthquakes and so on. Most real-life environments are constantly evolving, constantly changing, and it would be great to see some elements of this reflected in some of the larger RPGs. That way, each time you revisited an area it would be different, sometimes just in a subtle way, like the grass is longer, or in a massive way, like a meteor crater has appeared that wasn't there before. Again this would make exploration more rewarding, and back tracking would bring surprises.
Adversaries
This is probably my bug bear with most RPGs. If you meet monsters of the same type, the chances are that they'll always attack you with the same skills/spells/attack patterns that all those of the same species use. It would be great to have some kind of random factor introduced, like one MonsterA will always hit you with magic, whilst another MonsterA will prefer physical attacks, whilst yet another MonsterA will prefer to work on their defense as a priority. They should, of course, all be relatively similar when it comes to overall capabilities, because nasty surprises like chancing upon a particularly overpowered MonsterA might detract from the gameplay, but a bit more variety wouldn't hurt.
Free Roaming
It's very rare that a console RPG will allow you to free roam. Usually you have to complete set tasks before other areas will open up to you, and this linearity can be annoying. In online RPGs, the chances are you can wander anywhere (at your own risk) right from the word go, and this provides you with a learning experience in that if you arrive at a dangerous area too soon you're going to pay the price, but at least you have freedom, which most console RPGs don't allow.
On the upside, most online RPGs are starting to incorporate most of these features, albeit they occaisionally need to patch the game with an update to permit new features to be added. But it would be great if console RPGs had these 'updates' already built in, and all it needed was for a player to unlock them via various methods (unknown to the player though, as where would be the surprise in that?) as they went through the game.