79 replies to this topic

[Amethyst]

No, that makes you racist.

[kspr]

[kspr]

who makes good rpgs? ive pretty much given up on making my game myself, it just isnt going to get done in my lifetime if im left to it myself. i figure im just as good off if i can sell my notes and binders and concept art. i emailed bioware, saying that i really like the flow of dragon age, and that my game would flow with similarity. this is the autoresponse i got back-

At this time, BioWare is not in the business of developing or publishing outside proposals or submissions for new games or software products. As a result, all unsolicited submissions, proposals or ideas relating to game concepts, story ideas, or other proposals cannot be accepted and will be destroyed upon receipt.

[rekaru]

I have given up game making for writing novels. There are too many skills that I don't possess that would hinder my RPG Making ability greatly.

[kspr]

i can flesh out my story and characters pretty quickly, its just that the programs i have access/ability in no longer suit what i want to do. i definitely want to make a great action rpg. im really dissapointed in white knight chronicle's rating, and it seems like the jrpg is on its way out as a console experience. i also want to have a ton of scenes like this one, and ive even made fight trees so the paths it can take are all organized and make sense. my main problem with the rpg makers, is that i just cant do the type of story that has the type of action i want. i realized this when i was writing scenes, and they had things i couldnt do in rmxp/vx.

[Stars]

im really dissapointed in white knight chronicle's rating,

D=
I'll still give it a rent since it was one of the reasons I wanted a PS3 in the first place...

[Amethyst]

and it seems like the jrpg is on its way out as a console experience.

This wounds me. I think they are getting stale, but they just need to be reborn.

[kspr]

and it seems like the jrpg is on its way out as a console experience.

This wounds me. I think they are getting stale, but they just need to be reborn.

the whole turn based battle thing is stale too. the console hardware is at the point where it seems silly to do it that way. i always feel a lot more connected to the character and the story when i can only control the one, and order the others to do things.

[Maelstrom]

You might do better to write a novel involving a video game with the novel fleshing out how the game works/plays. If it becomes popular, you may get approached to turn it into an actual game. The way into business is fame, mad skillz, or both.

[kspr]

this thing would be a ridiculous book. i just fleshed out the story arch for the prequel game in my speech class.

these are all the notes that went into my old game. theres also another binder where things are put together that i couldnt find. the notebooks are from left to right, a script of nearly all the scenes, plus a codex. i was trying to do something like the game Siren which had this cool archive system that had all kinds of backstory and pictures to glue the story together.

After that, the are two sketch pads where i had surprisingly, sketches of characters, and scenes, and the other one had chapter plans, maps, item lists, shop lists, side quests, and a divergant story map that covered plans for different branches depending on what characters ended up getting killed or otherwise leaving the party.

the last big one at the bottom was a pathetic attempt at writing music. i can't read or write music at all, so i ended up individually numbering my keys, and writing the numbers down note for note along with cords, and drum samples. the big one was also used for drawing tileset drafts.

[lazlo falconi]

and it seems like the jrpg is on its way out as a console experience.

This wounds me. I think they are getting stale, but they just need to be reborn.

RPGs in general have been getting steadily worse since about '93. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who sees it now, but I honestly haven't liked an RPG since Golden Sun... Unless you count Pokemon Pearl, but I don't because it's basically the same game I've been playing for over ten years. RPGs, and jRPGs especially need to stop trying to be so cool and feature packed, and just get back to what makes you play RPGs in the first place: Interesting characters that don't set off my gaydar, engaging plot lines, and villains I actually enjoy seeing.

[kspr]

thats exactly my point in all this. this whole game making journey for me has been like my reaction against what i dont like in rpgs. it started after final fantasy 10 came out and i was all like "wtf i can fart a better story" and then i found this list a few years later, and tried to just do the opposite. some of it is unavoidable, but you can always try. i think if a game is part of a planned series, it needs cliches however, because then it follows the scream law of trilogies "the first movie sets the rules, the second movie bends them a little bit, and the third movie blows all the rules away" but if its only a two part series, then they get compressed into rules being set and bent a tiny bit in the first game, and then bent until breaking in the second. i think the best example for this is sonic 1-3. you have the run/jump/kll scheme of the first, then the chaos emeralds actually mean something in the second, along with a playable second character, then in the third the secondary character is actually meaningful, and you need the emeralds to get the good ending.

[Stars]

Ah, the Grand List. Always fun for a laugh. I particularly like #80 and #161.

EDIT: And I believe I'm guilty of #84 and ended up killing Kamau with it.




:3

[Amethyst]

Interesting characters and engaging plot lines in a '93 RPG? I'm not fooled for a second.
In my opinion, plot-lines are only starting to explore where they should (that is, when they're not busy being bogged down in 8-bit standards of those of the games of the 1990's) Turn based is hella arcane, I concede, but I don't think the genre itself is spent, by any means.

[Kamau]

Ah, the Grand List. Always fun for a laugh. I particularly like #80 and #161.

EDIT: And I believe I'm guilty of #84 and ended up killing Kamau with it.




:3

You did? I don't recall any blaringly obvious traps that I should have seen coming.

Unless you're making a lame attempt at the vampire thing again?

Edit: #19 isn't always true. Wild Arms 4's main character uses a gun.
Edit2: Dangit, now I want to play that game again.

[Stars]

I think you misread the cliche. And it wasn't so much the trap that was hidden, but more the way to escape the trap. And by trap, I of course mean winding-cavern-filled-with-poison-gas. =p

[Kamau]

Oh yes, that one.

[Monkeydog]

In my opinion, plot-lines are only starting to explore where they should

No they aren't. They're all just recycled cliche ridden plots that were exactly what early age RPGs were. Just making it prettier and unlike the old RPGs, they're no longer original in any way. (Almost any game you can find something from an old Shin Megami, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales of Phantasia/Destiny, Seiken Denetsu, or Chrono Trigger)

I hate JRPGs today, they're so boring and lame and I've played them all far too many times in the past.

And I've NEVER EVER played a JRPG with as good a story as something made by Bethesda or something like a modern day GTA.

[lazlo falconi]

Interesting characters and engaging plot lines in a '93 RPG? I'm not fooled for a second.
In my opinion, plot-lines are only starting to explore where they should (that is, when they're not busy being bogged down in 8-bit standards of those of the games of the 1990's) Turn based is hella arcane, I concede, but I don't think the genre itself is spent, by any means.

What are you talking about? Nearly all RPGs these days are just reusing the same characters and plots from Final Fantasy 7, and even that used mostly the same characters from earlier games. They're just thinly disguised as having different names and being 3D this time.

In my opinion, plot-lines are only starting to explore where they should

No they aren't. They're all just recycled cliche ridden plots that were exactly what early age RPGs were. Just making it prettier and unlike the old RPGs, they're no longer original in any way. (Almost any game you can find something from an old Shin Megami, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Tales of Phantasia/Destiny, Seiken Denetsu, or Chrono Trigger)

I hate JRPGs today, they're so boring and lame and I've played them all far too many times in the past.

And I've NEVER EVER played a JRPG with as good a story as something made by Bethesda or something like a modern day GTA.

Yep.

[Amethyst]

Exactly- suppose a modern RPG re-uses the same character archtype that a 90's game did. But the 90's game is drawing the same stock character from some Dungeons and Dragons manual, which took it, say, from some middle-earth like setting, which was derived from an older fantasy transcript which in turn was from etcetcetc.
You get my point?

All of art is recycling, and rerolling. You take something that people know, and give it a new spin, take it a new direction, try and send a new message. This is as true for game design as it is for visual arts, writing, music, and all of such. Such a criticism can then be applied to virtually any creative work back down to ancient egyptian heiroglyphs- no, far before that, even.

You're criticising modern games essentially on grounds of unoriginallity, when the games you use for reference are just as guilty. Dragon Warrior the RPG was a massive improvement from Dragon Warriors, the tabletop RPG system of the same concept. Now we have Dragon Age- the current slay-the-dragon archetype game of choice inarguably offering a much better story, presentation, graphical and aural demonstration, and charcter database than Dragon Warrior. Yet, the common theme runs between them all. You can play as a human, elf, dark elf, dwarf, and so on, work in a party, kill stuff on your way to the dragon, kill the dragon. So why is Dragon Age so much more guilty?