Also: Huhuhuh. Gay bar.

Anyway.

This is sort of appropriate for this thread, I guess. Okay. So, in older RPGs, I notice a lot of like, fatalism, maybe? I can't really describe it. It's a certain mood, that I think is shown sort of well by FFL1. You know that you're goal is at the top of the tower, and you're basically headed there from the beginning, and along the way you see people living miserable lives and dying pointless deaths, each life more miserable and each death more pointless/horrible than the last.

Sort of some march towards inevitability thing.

Oh, what else? You know how in Dragon Warrior 1, the final castle was like, right across the lake from the starting town? Things like that. The story in DW1 wasn't really anything major, but there was a certain mood there that was basically the same thing as in FFL1. You have a defined path to the enemy, with a lot of towns along the way in the immediate path of destruction. It does give a sense of... maybe urgency or impending doom.

It's not a distant evil. It's a very looming, clear and present threat.

I think this is also an important concept to dungeon crawlers. I mean good dungeon crawlers. The kind with puzzles and characters. Not the ones that are equivalents of mazes with lots of meaningless killing. The good ones use your progression downwards, to some inevitable evil, as a mirror of the progressing difficulty, strenth of characters, distance from safety, and... shift from the status quo, I guess.

Also, one plot mechanic I see used WAY too much -- So in so isn't really the true villain! I think too many games focus too much on shocking the player instead of, say, taking the FFVI route and just coming up with one well thought-out villain that's there the whole time.

Aaaalso the tendency for RPG stories to be macro-epics anymore. I think you CAN pan the story out to the point where it stops feeling important, even if it's not just filler you're putting in.

It's not thin. They're just mislabled. And in any case, I was refering to the ones that aren't games (The most notable English-produce one is probably Photopia, actually).

There's nothing really unbelievable or unexpected about the gay that bar represents.

Visual novels and text adventures are... quite different. Not just quite different. Completely different.

Text adventures have puzzles. Visual novels don't. Text adventures let you move around freely in the gameworld. Visual novels don't. Text adventures usually aren't completely linear. Visual novels usually ferry you from one seen to the next. Text adventures are primarily interaction. Visual novels are primarily reading story bits, with very little interaction.

Visual novels also don't really qualify as games.

Nocturne's rate really wasn't any higher than any other RPG as far as random encounters go.

No, it's not the story itself, it's how it's written. If a story's plot twists lose all of their impact simply by knowing them ahead of time, it's not well written, because if that's the case, said plot twist is relying entirely on shock value, and the execution is lacking in other parts.

No, THAT was my point. I was more going for WHY systems like that end up happening. As you put it, a lack of elegance in how they're attached to the game is what I was saying led to systems like that.

Basically, if you're trying to implement them in a way that's graceful, you're not going to come up with extremely abstract and insane systems.

Actually, no, it's not the probably of making them too abstract. About abstract as you can get is a menu with a list of possible skills to choose from. Making the skill system a board game is effectively un-abstracting it. THIS is where stuff stops making sense. Because it's unabstracted only partially, and into something that really has no correlation with what it's supposed to represent.

FFXII's license board was mostly a menu, really. Slightly odd represenation, but you're spending skill points on skills. Nothing terribly odd about that.

Rogue Galaxy's... skill board thing, on the other hand, has you fitting random junk you find into slots to unlock skills. The hell? "I found a tin can, some lipstick, and a pair of earrings! NOW I CAN SPEAK DANISH!"

FF12's combat was basically ATB, though. You could move around on the battlefield but this was mostly inconsequential. The only main difference was the ability to swap people out.

Oh, the whole 'system' design concept. The idea isn't anything new -- having various portions of the game function differently, I guess -- but the implementation and... subtext? of it is something I've never quite understood. That seems like it's almost entirely a JRPG invention, and something that's not reallyexisted in its CURRENT form for THAT long.

anyway, right. The thing that annoys me about this design philophy is how modular it feels. You have the battle system, the character growth system, the shop bartering system/some bizarre minigame for diplomacy (And yes, I'm making fun of oblivion on that one because that entire diplomacy thing was STUPID), a couple minigames, and item creation systems. Nothing inherently wrong with this, but there's limited interaction between systems or, even worse, like in the case of Oblivion's talky wheel, or the license grid, the lack of interaction means you can easily make a system that in and of itself works fine, but in context of everything else, really makes little sense as a way of representing whatever it's supposed to represent. (For clarification, though, I don't think the sphere/licence grids anywhere near as WTF? as oblivions talky wheel. But I think I can safely say that making the interface a minigame in and of itself isn't something I'm typically fond of).

Anyway, the lack of interaction between systems means you're focusing individualy on certain systems, and not on the game as a whole. This creates a rather skewed experience, with a bottom-up architecture:


       Battles
Items  | Character Creation
        \ | /
         \|/
       Story

Basically, little cohesion and ways of abstracting and representing rules that don't make sense.

SH:Covenants does this a lot. I think it works in spite of it. I have absolutely no idea how.

I think there are two other larger... paradigms? that work better. One of them: In this setup, you have, say, a large number of simple systems, all of which interact extensively and semi-predictably with eachother in such a way that you end up with one large and complex super-system at the top of it. I recently talked about a game called Exile on Misc. Games. Something like SimCity 2K or a lot of the roguelikes also work off of this idea.

In another, you'd have one major trunk system, and then branch systems. Branch systems can consist of one or multiple subsystems, all of which need to extensively interact with eachother, though. Each of the branch systems would have limited directed interaction with other systems, but would produce output/products/results that would feed back into the trunk system, and then have direct effects on the other systems, through various means (usually said output would affect other systems branching off the trunk). The modular systems type thing I was talking about first uses this to an extent too (Actually, all three would), because obviously your modular systems DO have to feed into something, but I guess the main difference is that if you're not going the modular route, you'll need to have all of your systems work in roughly the same way to make sure they interact properly, but just work on different portions of the game. It's a really minor distinction, I guess. Maybe someone will knwo what I'm trying terrible to say and rewrite it for me XD

Anyway, I guess in a nutshell, it's battle systems that feel like seperate minigames versus battle systems that feel like other ways of interacting with the gameworld.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(arcade_adventure)

Okay, for starters, I'm talking about that. Not the popular Spiderweb PC RPG series.

Okay. Yeah, I just felt like talking about this because it keeps impressing me.

basically, what it is, is a early-nineties/late-eighties Metroidvania game, with some neat minor additions to the basic formula, and then one really massive set of additions.

What makes the game so impressive is the physics, and how it's used. Every object in the game that can be interacted with is bound to the internal physics in the game. Gravity works on anything that can move, and everything you pick up has weight which affects how you can fly while holding it. Equal and opposite force is in play. All in all, it's very impressive.

But you know, it doesn't stop there, and I've never seen another game do this. almost every puzzle in the game relates back to the internal physics used. Even puzzles that don't, like... sometimes you can find alternative solutions involving using the games physics. Really, genuinely emergent gameplay. A walkthrough exists, but as far as I know, there's no major set sequence of events, and even when I had to look at this walktrhough, I've often found that I didn't like the solutions presented, tried something else, and got results.

Really big example. In one part, you have to go into this one area of the cave to get a key. The way you're supposed to do this is to get to some teleporter, shoot at some switch beyond it, and this switch changes the teleports target to the room you need to be in.

I found an alternate entrance. Said entrance opened to the planets surface, and had strong wind coming out of it. At that point, I had the jetpack booster item which lets you move faster, thus fighting against the wind somewhat, though not enough to really get into the tunnel. What I did was thrust down as far as I could and then let the wind blast me up, thus picking up speed, until I could eventually get down far enough into the tunnel. This actually didn't work. However, I DID find that the right wall had some weird slope to it that I could actually repel off of, thus keeping a steady downward motion going and not getting blasted out.

Really, really fascinating stuff. The fact that it was made in 1988 (Er, ST version I was playing was 1990 I think, actually. BBC version asn't much different) for BBC Micro is just amazing.

Good point about CC. Suikoden has 180 characters (because I am feeling moderately dyslexic tonight) and you can have six people in your party.

Anyway, small parties for battles. The problem isn't LESS STRATEGIC ZOMG, but more a matter of being unfairly forced to pick favorites thing. Granted, with the latter FFs, the characters were so rarely that different that it really didn't matter from a gameplay perspective.

Not convoluted. Just crappy documentation.

That's... not really true at all :/ Care to give some examples as to what you mean? Like, in regards to american or PC RPGs games that lack emotional subtlety? And I mean games that are actually trying to be emotional. Not doom, here.

while i am by no means defending him, i do think that if a story is truly great, it's still great even if spoiled. if being spoiled ruins the effect, then the story POSSIBLY relies too much on shock value.