What I'd like to know is, if these games are so crappy and non-fun, etc, then why did they sell so many copies, and are STILL selling copies long after their release?

So we ask ourselves; are we making games for ourselves or for the people? If you're making them for yourself, that's fine, but don't complain when your game sells exactly two copies. If you're making them for the public, be ready to compromise.

No, but then again, I played it through only once as a Monk (too boring for a re-play). Intelligence wasn't a big deal for me.

In any case, did that really affect anything? Could I convince Fenthick that Desther was evil, regardless of my Int score? No; the game didn't let me.

As such, the story isn't significantly effected. Oh, sure, some small details may be flexible (which weapons you use, how to accomplish sub-quest X, etc), but nothing substantial; the actual plot remains the same. If the choices ultimately don't matter, if I can't actually be an evil character (even though my alignment clearly says, "Chaotic Evil", which, by all rights, means I shouldn't care one bit about the fate of Neverwinter), what's the point of having them in there?

It's still dice rolling.

The problem with dice rolling is that it takes something that could have been expressed as "You can do it or you can't" and adds a third possibility, "Maybe you can do it."

Good game design says that, if the player cannot (yet) accomplish task X, the player should be immediately told that task X is impossible, and some reason why (possibly with a solution). There shouldn't be this nebulous, "I might be able to accomplish the task."

If you allow for a middle-ground, and the task has no penalty for failure, then if it is at all possible to succeed, the player will eventually do so. So there's no real point in making the player sit there trying over and over again (since that would be dull). If the task has a penalty for failure, then a poor roll of the dice has just, potentially, denied a player the ability to do something nifty and inventive.

Actually, for the most part, yes.

Take FF2e, for example.

If Cecil attacks someone, hits them, and does 300 damage, on his next attack he, almost certainly, will:

a: Hit the monster.
b: Do 300 damage.

This is very consistent. Damage varies, but not by more than 10% or so (I've got a document that explains, in depth, how the FF2e combat system works).

Hitting is, also, very consistent. Except for weapons that have hit-percentage problems (arrows outside of Rosa's hands), or attacks from the back row, if you hit something once, you will almost certainly hit it the next time. Misses do happen, but they are quite rare.

Sure, it's possible, but that doesn't mean it is wise. Rather than drawing out the combat system, by making it difficult to kill stuff, I'd just rather take the most direct route to victory.

There is a clearly correct choice, and a clearly incorrect one.

You're calling me self-centered? I'm not the one who, basically, just made the claim that everybody else likes NWN/Planetscape/etc-style games (which just happen to be games you like). I never made such a claim; I said that people liking PC-RPGs does not preclude the existence of people liking console RPGs either.

I don't care if the people in the NWN/Planetscape/arbiturary other game community like the kinds of games I do. Regardless of whether you want to believe it or not, FF-style games are popular, and moreso than pc-RPG's.

You still have to make sure that arbiturary character X can complete the mission. If he can neither sneak into nor storm the house, and he failed his bluff-check, he's screwed, and the game is over.

The discussion has moved on to a question of fundamental RPG design; the issue of resource management has long sense been left behind.

Welcome to the conversation; glad you could make it

Yes. And RPG's were so much more fun back then.

I didn't say they were destined to fail (though I won't bother playing them). I said that it was a choice that has consequences; among those consequences is that the design process is much more difficult.

By whom? People who are already pre-disposed to like them? Show me a single die-hard FF-fan who considers NWN to be superior to his favorite FF game. Actually, show me a large number of FF-fans who did so; that would indicate a paradigm shift.

All that being said, I've always had this idea in the back of my mind for a game that builds a plot for you, based on how you play your character. It would create an appropriate "love-interest" character, an enemy "foil" (a guy who frequently gets in your way), various other heros who could be potential party members, and so forth, based on your character and how you interact with others. The game would be fairly open-ended, in terms of how you beat the game. Each of the three classes (fighter, wizard, rogue) would have their own advantages and weaknesses.

More importantly, rather than a system based on dice rolling, it is based on the player's skill with the character. Fighters, depending on weapon choice, would have a number of different maneuvers, which are based off of controller movements. Casting spells is not automatic; the user would have to perform some dexterious action with the controller (I haven't quite decided what, though). And using rogue skills would require actually doing something, like making a choice as to how to fast-talk someone based on the conversation, etc (it isn't just selecting Fast-Talk from the list of choices).

You should play the game before you start throwing assumptions around.
BTW diplomacy and the other inter-character skills as WIS based. So, no, you INT score won't help you there.

You don't know the game at all. You played it once (as a monk) and you already found the best way to play it? Now that's pretty impressive.

Um yes. Sure. Whatever.
I play games to have fun. Beating the game might be part of the fun. But removing the fun from the game by choosing a strategy I don't like seems strange.

Oh... and you're sure you're playing a choactic evil monk?

Yep.

Uh, sorry then.
But you could just answer the question why all games with non-resource eating spellcasters suck?
Just that I can check that question on my list of "things I really need to know".
I've realized that you like to switch topics to avoid having to submit that you're wrong, but I prefer to stay on topic and answer questions first.

You said it would make all characters alike, IIRC.

Now that is a good one
I'm just not sure if I like the answer more, or that you consider "die-hard-FF-fans" the only group of people have the right to declare milestones

BTW, I don't want to prove that NWN or any other game is better than Your-Squate-Game-Of-Choice.
In fact, all I want is that you realize that there is more than FF out there

Open your mind, young grasshopper.
On the other hand, it might be hard to find a die-hard-FF fan who thinks that having an open mind is a good idea. So I'm not sure if I can convince you.

Anyway, I doubt that this will lead us anywhere.
So maybe we can pull this into another direction?

There's one thing I'd really like to know: How can you create an innovative FF clone?

Who wants replay value anyway?

IMO that is (should be) the difference between games and movies. I'd expect a game to be different everytime I play it.

It's hard to find real life games that are the same everytime you play them.

Besides: There's a difference between "playing the game" and "knowing the game".
If I played rugby once, I'd never dare to think I know everything about that game...

Nope. One consequence is, for example, that you couldn't be a chaotic evil monk. At least, you can't raise your level as a monk while being chaotic.
And there're are other differences as well... sometimes pretty drastic.

You do realize, that all I wanted to hear is that you admit that?
The whole discussion erupted because you told us that there is just one-true-way and how freeform engines spoil the plot

Nope.
See the complete discussion we had till now for reasons why.

Um... I said "they are considered milestones", you said "show me one die-hard FF Fan who considers them milestones".
If your answer is supposed to be a reply to my comment, it means that the set of all people able to define milestones for RPGame is made of die-hard FF fans.

I was more referring to stuff like sales, critiques from magazines, players and industry insiders, etc.

Each of these games added something new to the Genre.

No it isn't.
It's more like saying "who do you create an inovative copy of shadow warrior".

Regarding your list: I miss the innovation. Taking existing features and prefixing them with "better" is not really innovative.

That's not what you said; you said an FF clone. Clone by definition is an almost exact copy of a particular game; Now, creating an innovative console RPG is another matter entirely.

Yes, I did... if I have suddenly become Spellcaster. Do a search for the word "Clone" on this thread. You will find that my only use of the word is in this post.

My point is that I have a pretty good understanding of how NWN works; I don't need to have played it as every class (or even more than once) to understand what is and is not possible.

But I do.

Everything that makes NWN what it is is stored in publically avalaible game scripts. Many of which I looked through in an attempt to determine what the engine could and could not hanlde. While there are all kinds of conditionals in conversations based off of a variety of factors, the basic story doesn't change; only some minor details.

Doubt all you want; Final Fantasy sells better than anything Bioware has ever made. While sales figures don't show a milestone, it does show a fanbase; one that has only grown in it's 15+ years of existence.

Maybe 'spoil' is the wrong word, but it does hamper the possible plots. The plot you mentioned was specifically designed to work within your system (hence the allowances for evil characters). Here's an example plot that just can't work that way:

The main character is a great hero who died in battle 500 years ago. He is ressurected as a vile undead warrior by an evil Sorcerer bent on world domination. However, on one of his missions, he encounters a wizard who attempts to destroy him. That attempt fails, and he is teleported away. However, the Sorcerer's control is lost over him.

As the game starts, this undead entity awakens without any of his memories. He saves a nearby young woman who is being acosted by a local thug. He now embarks, with the young woman at his side, who happens to have her own story, on a voyage of discovery: who is he and why is he back?

Clearly, a flexible-class/skill system is right out. The fact that he is both a warrior (not spell-caster or anything of that sort) and has undead powers are part of the character. In a role-playing sense, this character would never dream of taking levels in, say, Rogue or adding a few thief skills, and any player playing a table-top RPG of this character who did so would be out-of-character.

You might allow some variation amongst other characters, but that, also, assumes that it is not a plot-point of your world that magic (or various other skills) are hard to learn.

First Person Shooter is a sub-genre of First-Person games. FPS's are not normal "Shooters"; they have precious little in common with anything in the "Shooter" genre (Gadius, R-Type, MegaMan, StarFox, etc).

And just because I tied the FF-esque RPG to a particular game doesn't mean that the level of abstraction is different. The subgenre of console-RPGs (ie, FF-esque) is vast. Though, percentage-wise, not equal to the percent of First Person games that are also FPS's, but that's more due to the automatic associations that people make about a First Person game (namely, that it must look and play like an FPS).

Black&White got great reviews, too. Yet, everyone I have spoken to has said the same thing, "It's not fun. It's not even a game."

Why is "better" not an innovation? It is not necessarily in the general case, but that doesn't prevent any particular case from being innovative. As I pointed out, revamping the combat system from FF1 to FF2e was an innovation for the genre.

Actually, that is one of the definitions of console RPGs. What makes a console-RPG a console-RPG can be found in most FF games.

In no way were the first Ultima games in the "console style". I played Ultima 1 and Dragon Warrior (the first console-style RPG); they shared very few similarities, most of those similarities being that they were rendered in 2D.

Sure... except for the fact that it is real-time, and is based on Rogue (which, as far as I'm concerned, was a far better game), which clearly makes it nothing like a console RPG.

Except, of course, that it lacks any sense of resource management outside of an actual in-combat situation (resources left over from the last battle are forfeit).

The term itself may be a bit dated, but the history is not.

Console RPG's are RPG's as derived from conventions born on consoles. That is, limitted controller (few buttons = lots of menues), not wanting to waste precious memory on graphics for items (textual inventories), etc. Heavy emphesis on story and combat.

PC-RPG's are derived from Ultima and the early D&D RPG's. That is, a combat system involing moment, a greater willingness to use graphics to replace textual things, less emphesis on story, but more on exploration, larger worlds, etc.

BTW, FF doesn't sell well on PC's, and Diablo doesn't sell well on consoles. This is due to the two populations wanting different things out of their games.

Actually, this board is called, "Game Design & Concepts". Which is what we're discussing.

This board as in Allegro.cc, not this forum.

Are you not going to implement your own concepts?

As you pointed out, "Save the kingdom" isn't a plot. You added plot points to the quest that turned it into the sketch of a plot. There were an infinite number of possible plot points in terms of how that quest played out. My point was that you choose plot points that allow your system to work.

These games are not First-Person Shooter. The genre is defined by it's members. One of the features of the genre is that the player is an individual who does a lot of walking/jumping. Not much in the way of flying, though that can be a possibility on occasion.

Odd though it may seem, just because it is in first-person perspective, and is a shooter, it isn't an FPS. Flight-sim games that involve shooting (ie, Tie-Fighter. Speaking of which, why don't they make games like that anymore?) are not FPS's.

After all, Knights of the Old Republic being on a console doesn't make it a console-RPG any more than FF being on a PC makes it a computer-RPG.

There is no clear answer to that. Unfortunately, genre's are hard to define. Some people out there refuse to believe that Metroid Prime is an FPS.

The only real way to tell for certain is to actually play it. However, the FF and Dragon Quests are pretty good guidlines as to what makes a console RPG a console RPG. They are the originators of the particular style that defines the sub-genre.

Lufia and Terranigma, I've never played. But Castlevania and Zelda are clearly not.

These concepts are not a full-fledged design, nor are they meant to be. I'm still thinking about how I want combat to work.

Of course they're hard to define.
That is because games define the genre. Genres do not define the games.

Try and tell me what a fighting game is without making references in your head to another fighting game. Imposhibibble!

The Original Final Fantasy is often called the "Father of RPG's", because it defined the genre.
It's fairly safe to say that Final Fantasy is the definition of CRPG's.

The idea in what I said, SC, is that there are no genres without games. That's why I said don't make any references to games (in your post, or in your head).

You cannot define a genre. You haven't really given the definition of a fighting game... you could do that in many types of games that would not be considered fighting games. You do that in GTA!
You do that in Zelda.... or any other game involving fighting.
What about boxing games? Do they have a different definition? Why's that?

Then why isn't Zelda a fighting game?
Because it has story? Fighting games can't then?
What about DOA2: Hardcore? It has story..
Is it the weapons in zelda? I'm sure we could find some of those in a fighting game....
Is it the saving and length of the game that defines it?

It's more difficult when you need to be specific. Especially comparing a general RPG to a CRPG. A CRPG is a specific style. The difference between Street Fighter II Turbo for SNES, and DOA3 for XBox isn't so disimilar when comparing Final Fantasy to Final Fantasy X.. or Breath of Fire to XenoSaga.

[many edits.. I mangled my post I added a bunch in later too.. hahaha.. ]

Um no. The objective in GTA is not to fight one or more opponents. That's part of the game-play, but it's not the objective of the game.

Because the objective in Zelda is normally to free Zelda by finding n pieces of Something.
The fighting is part of the game, but it doesn't define the game.

No. Why should they? They fit the above description nicely.

That's fine. But it still fits the above description

IMO the whole "CRPG" problem is due to the fact, that there is such thing as a CRPG in the first place.

Could you rephrase that? I must admit that I didn't get that sentence.