It’s hard not to learn something after releasing a new game. You receive valuable feedback from reviewers and players alike on what worked, what didn’t quite hit the mark, and what was horribly misguided. Plus, having put a little distance between yourself and your work makes it easier to look at it again with a more critical eye.
Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned from making our previous RPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves the World, and Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 & 4) and some of the ways we want to implement those lessons in our next RPG, Cosmic Star Heroine.
Lesson 1 – Variety is Invaluable.
In your typical old-school RPG, there are 4 main elements to the game: exploration, combat, character management (who do you put in your party, what equipment to use, what choices you make with whatever LV-Up system the game uses), and story. You can add variety to these 4 main elements in a variety of ways (give the player new abilities to use and enemies to fight, change up the locations that they visit, switch party members in and out, etc.) but there’s only so much you can do within these systems.
However, since the early days of RPGs, we’ve seen many different approaches to adding variety to the gameplay. There are games that add a level of interactivity to the story (most PC RPGs). Many games add a puzzle-solving element to help break things up (Lufia 2, many of the Wild Arms & Tales games). Some games will throw in special rules & gameplay for specific scenarios (Final Fantasy VI was especially good with this with situations like Defending Terra, the Opera House, the raft escape, and the multi-party dungeons). Some games add entirely new mini-games to help flesh out the world and give the player something to do when they grow tired with the main game (very common with Final Fantasy games in the PS1 era and on). And some games even take variety so far that it feels like you’re playing two very different yet connected games (like Persona 4 with its RPG + Life Sim approach or the Atelier games with their RPG + Alchemy).
How exactly we implement this in Cosmic Star Heroine is still up in the air, however we have a few ideas. The big addition that we know we’re going to do is the addition of a home base that you can customize and fill with various recruited individuals. This would likely have a light life sim element to it and may provide some fun mini-games (a few people have suggested having the base unlock contests ala Suikoden like a cooking competition or singing competition which I think is a great idea). Beyond this we also want to add more unique scenario-based gameplay situations – for example, in true spy fashion, I think we’ll probably have a Dinner Party scenario where combat is minimal or non-existent and your goals must be met primarily through your wit & conversation skills. And I’d love to be able to have some special gameplay systems in place for things like ship/mech combat & cyberspace hacking, although how much we’re able to do there will depend a lot on how much funding we receive.
Lesson 2 – Story is Important.
This may seem like a “No duh” realization to some of you but you have to understand that many of my favorite RPGs are ones with minimal or no story like Titan Quest and Dark Souls. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate a good story & well developed characters, but for me, story is usually a nice extra and not the main attraction. Unfortunately, I think this shows in our games with the stories frequently being mere excuses to go through dungeons, fight bizarre monsters, and tell jokes.
With Cosmic Star Heroine, gameplay will still be our #1 priority, but we’ll be putting a lot more effort into the story than we have in the past. The story will be more sophisticated than “Here’s a goal, now go do a bunch of random things until you reach the endgame when we’ll resume the main story.” There will be twists and turns. Characters will be more developed. There will be more dialogue outside of “dungeons” – for example, the ability to spend time chatting with various party members between missions – so that people who want more story & character development can get it but it’s not forced upon those players who just care about the main plot. And who knows? We might even give the player the ability to affect the course of the story in certain ways.
Lesson 3 – Optional Content Should Feel Meaningful
People like to have the option of going off the beaten path and doing content in games that isn’t mandatory but is just for fun (or profit). Unfortunately, we haven’t been this best in this regard with much of our optional content feeling tacked on. This is mostly a matter of time & poor planning – a simple optional dungeon with a handful of enemies & treasures might take us a day or two to make but a meaningful side-quest like The Beginning of the End bonus scenario in Precipice of Darkness 3 can easily take several weeks.
With Cosmic Star Heroine, we want to make side-quests more meaningful to the game. You should want to complete everything because the side-quests are just as fun as the core quests and add depth to the story, characters, and world, and not just because you want the extra XP, gold, and equipment. Just how much we’ll be able to do here will depend on our time & resources, but we will plan out a few key side-quests from the early planning stages of the game; they will not be just an afterthought near the end of development.
Lesson 4 – Make Grind Optional
The need to grind out random, easy battles in order to become more powerful is one element of RPGs that many people (myself included) absolutely hate. Because of this, we’ve tried to design our games in such a way that if you use decent strategies, you shouldn’t need to sit and grind up a bunch of XP & money just to progress.
Eliminating the need for grinding is good but making grinding optional is even better. Some people actually like to grind (see the popularity of the Disgaea series) and were disappointed to discover that it was nigh-impossible to grind in a few of our games. In short, most people don’t like grinding but some people do, so how do you make grinding enjoyable for those who like grinding without making it feel mandatory? We’ll be exploring a few options to accommodate both styles of players with Cosmic Star Heroine.
Lesson 5 – Keep Things Interesting but Unlock Options Early
Most games are not finished by most people. Our games are no exception to this rule – we can view playtime statistics on all of our games on Steam and unless there are a lot more speed-runners than I think there are, most people aren’t finishing our games (we have been improving though – the average playtime for our most recent game is drastically longer than our first few games). There are a number of reasons that people end up not finishing a game but I think the biggest reason is that the game just stops being interesting. The player feels like they’ve gotten all there is to get out of the game – gameplay has been mastered, the story has become predictable, and they’re ready to move on before the game is.
The easiest way to keep people interested in your game (besides just making better games in general) is to keep introducing new content (both gameplay & story) throughout the game. However, it’s possible to take this too far with the result that it takes too long for the game to become interesting in the first place. Final Fantasy XIII is probably the best example of this with some people complaining that the tutorial lasts almost as long as the entire game does. So with Cosmic Star Heroine, we’ll want to avoid both of these traps and introduce enough gameplay & story details early on to make things interesting and then build from that solid foundation throughout the entirety of the game.
Of course, these aren’t the only ways we’ll be looking to improve Cosmic Star Heroine. And we’d love to hear feedback from you. What have you’ve enjoyed about our previous RPGs? What areas would you like to see improvement?
The latest of comments, but I got linked here from your CSH kickstarter page. I own all of the Zeboyd Games so far, but I haven’t really played them, so I’m not really able to give much opinion on them. I know, sorry, I’m bad with my backlog. That said, there is something I’d like to see in CSH that I’ve seen done well in a few other games: Non-intrusive fleshing-out of the world. There’s probably a better term (maybe “stopping to smell the roses”?), but it might be easier to list examples from two series that do it well: Deus Ex, and Metroid Prime.
Both series have a story that revolves around the player character, but there’s a lot of things you the player can miss if you don’t bother to look and play the games like a typical FPS. In Deus Ex, you can hack into computers to read emails people send to each other and get useful things like passcodes and so on, but you can also get honestly useless information like knowing when this company’s next visit to the Fun Dome is, or that some soldiers you’re probably butchering keep intentionally screwing with the staff at their secret research site because they think it’s hilarious. Metroid Prime did it in a different way, in that you had to use the Scan Visor to activate some things, but so many creatures had small biographies and you could read logs on some terminals, like the ill-fated results of the Space Pirates trying to copy the Morph Ball technology…and it was honestly kinda interesting to read the useless facts on all of the critters you came across.
These things were there, but they weren’t in the way. They helped flesh out the world and its inhabitants, but if you didn’t want to know, nothing stopped you. I recently did my first run in Deus Ex Human Revolution with the intent on not hacking except where necessary. And then I went through The Missing Link DLC going full hacking and I learned quite a bit about the people I was fighting. And Metroid Prime, I honestly liken to something of a scientific field-trip…with lots of shooting. Something like this might be pretty easy to implement in the game given the heroine is a spy, though then you’d obviously have to figure out what information to hide away in the world so that it being found does enrich the experience, yet its exclusion doesn’t adversely affect it either.
Balance, balance, balance, balance.
It’s what killed BoD7 and Cthulhu for me (didn’t play penny arcade, so can’t say much there). Normal was way too easy, you could win every normal battle by just mashing A, not needing to target or cast skill. Hard on the other hand was arbitrarily hard, as soon as there were more than 3 enemy in a fight it was essentially a dice roll, since if the enemy decided to focus a character you could lose a fight before you even had the ability to take a single action.
You brought dark soul up (which BTW has one of the most awesome story in recent memory) dark soul secret is that it nailed balance so well it does critical hit. The biggest reason here is that it has only one difficulty setting, now you won’t do that because otherwise the video game cop will burst trough your door and send you to video game hell (but seriously make a list of all the great JRPG you’ve played and check how many had a difficulty setting). The secret is that letting a simple algorithm (every enemy has twice as much health) handle balance is a terrible terrible idea, to have great balance you need to balance every encounter individually, something that require ridiculous amount of work if you do it across 3-4 difficulty. For a simple example try to make up some situation for a game which use a simple formula to determine damage (ATK-DEF=damage) and what would happen if the harder difficulty simply double enemy stats, think about different type of attack (slow strong, quick weak, ignore defense and so on). It just lead to difficulty spike and valley and reduction of possible play style.
Older JRPG use to have this weird system where your character health wouldn’t regenerate after battle or using save point (how weird, everyone know all injury are immediately healed 5 second after a battle). This meant that even normal battle that weren’t a danger to you would need to be handled properly otherwise you’d use too much mana or item before the upcoming boss fight. Then stuff got more and more ridiculous and now normal battle are either way too hard or way too easy because health just miraculously come back, so finish a battle with everyone up, or only one character in critical health is just as good.
Proper balance also means you don’t have to worry about grinding, just properly balance around the level people would be when they fight the boss, it really is that simple (then just implement a system a la earthbound where enemy run slowly away from you if your too high level, most people won’t chase after them so that’ll stop them from gaining too much level). And here’s the genius part of the single difficulty with good balance, that one is gonna blow your mind because of how elegant it is. The girding, it’s the game difficulty setting! Yup, game is too hard for you? Grind a bit, easy mode unlock, go ahead and steamroll the next boss. It’s such an elegant solution, reduce work and makes a better game all in one.
It seems like a lot of folks just want another FFVI. And I am okay with this. So very very okay. That is probably the longest JRPG I’ve played all the way through.
You know what I’d really like to see though? More action-RPG elements in games. I still remember playing a translated version of Tales of Phantasia and loving it. Illusion of Gaia was another of my favorite action-RPG SNES games. Even Paper Mario kept turn-based combat interesting with action commands. I think little things like that really make the game interesting. A game that requires both the mental analysis and planning and preparation before and during combat, and lets us utilize our reflexes to influence the outcome as well, is really my kind of game. This may not be the direction you’ll be taking with CSH but perhaps something to ponder for the future!
When it comes to customization, and giving people a reason to learn obscure skills, I highly recommend taking the Star Ocean 2 customization options and using them as an example of an awesome way.
Also, my main problem with people implementing grinding in a game is they tend to not make the game keep up with the person who likes to grind. I like to grind, to look for item drops, to build up gold and buy all the gear, and so on, but I don’t like how the game becomes a joke afterwards. If you allow people to grind, I highly recommend offering some sort of system to make the game get tougher the more you grind, like maybe a timer in place where after so much time the game powers up, like the old Square games I can’t remember where you played multiple people and if you didn’t play smartly, the game got so powerful you got your behind kicked and couldn’t beat the game.
Also, as far as optional content goes, something out of the ordinary owns. Maybe, since its a space type game, you can make a robot war mini game with combat styles similar to Dragon Force, with up to 100 soldiers on each side of the battefield and the main character as the general on the left and the opponent as the general on the right. Can put in hidden parts for your robot army to make them stronger but requires a bit more than going to point B and looting it.
I’m a big fan of all of your games, and I think your lessons learned hit all of the major topics. As others have said, character customization is great, and I found that the class pin system in Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 was one of my favourite customization systems to play around with. It was simple to understand, but provided a lot of depth for finding interesting combinations. I think that is the key to having a good system. When comparing that to Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4, I found that it was a little overwhelming trying to decide which trainer was best for each monster, since there were benefits for leveling while each trainer was assigned, and you had to try and guess what the monster would be good at later on. There was too much guesswork, so the permanent choices like how to level the creatures felt more arbitrary than fitting an intentional plan of attack.
I wanted to make a suggestion regarding tracking what people do in your games. Now, I’m not one who believes that putting in player behaviour monitoring without informing the player or allowing them to opt-out is appropriate. However, an excellent way of seeing how many players are inclined to do what in your games, while giving them something back that they can work towards, is to put achievements in the game. These should be few and should be meaningful, so that players get rewards at a good pace, and are rewarded for exploration and extraordinary feats. With these in place, at least on Steam, you can see what percentage of players reach each part of your game instead of just using play times, you can see how many people went out of their way to find all of your hidden items, or completed your bonus dungeons, etc.
[SPOILER ALERT]
Looking at some of your existing games, you could have an achievement for beating Cthulhu’s Angels mode in Cthulhu Saves the World, to see how many players went through that (I know I did, and I loved it). You could have an achievement for defeating Molly the Were-zompire in the arena, or the Seamstress in the Lair of the Seamstress for Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3. You could have an achievement for collecting all of the monsters in Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4. These are all challenges that reward the player, and the achievement helps to commemorate it. For those who seek out achievements, these give them new content that they may otherwise gloss over, enriching what they get out of the game. For you, it helps you see how many players complete each piece of content. Based on this, you have a better idea of how much of your audience is actually seeing that content, so that you can decide if it hits your mark for how many you’d want to see it, or if it needs to be more accessible in the future, etc.
Wow, cool stuff. You hit the nails on the head here, I’d love to see all the improvements but unfortunately game design is something of a zero sum game.
What I’d love to see:
The expansion of the open world was a cool thing in 3, but I don’t think it was explored to its fullest as the sidegame content was largely unexplored, there wasn’t a lot to the bonus content. You were spot on when you mentioned that other games like to mix things up with puzzles and other mechanics. FF7 had some really cool divergences, as did FF6 as you mentioned. I think puzzles are great, especially with optional rewards, as our cool little minigames. That suikoden side element makes me so excited you do not even know and any game that takes inspiration from that series is improved.
Story is another great point, I love the story in RSPD but it feels tacked on to a largely unrelated game, there are great moments of dialogue between and before fights, but I also think there’s a missed opportunity of during as well. That said, making story a more core component of the game is a great idea, and I’d like to see what you can do with it. I find I play Zeboyd games for mechanics first, and amusing dialogue just comes for the ride. I love story in game so any attempt to make it a more important part is very welcome
End game content really drives me to play RPG’s. Things like really cool bosses, really interesting mechanics, but largely it’s the epic build up of neat bosses. For example the Kingdom Heart series does this to good effect especially in their re-releases with Lingering Sentiment especially, I felt there was good potential with a few of the bosses in RSPD3, but there wasn’t much dialogue or narration in general to bring that feeling.
The lack of any sort of ability to grind made my insane mode run hugely difficult, especially end game, making me have to pingpong between areas to fight the fights I could win to scrape up a little more power to fight the other bosses. That said, I like a ceiling. I like to be unable to remove a challenge entirely and instead only be able to give myself a bit of a jump up. End game level caps being appropriate to the end game content is best, I feel this was done best in RSPD2, making that secret (non-dlc) fight pretty fun on insane.
Lesson five is absolutely vital, I don’t encounter this in your games but I do occasionally feel a slog as I punch my way through dungeon after dungeon, story is my reward, cool mechanics are my reward but content can get stale every so often. It’s possibly my fault for marathonning a lot of the game at a time but I still feel there’s a chance for improvement here.
Oh hey its that one guy who contacted Zeboyd long ago for some very helpful help in response to BoD7 speedrunning. Though I’m pretty sure its a thing.
I just want to say, I am looking forward to see what you guys will do with CSH but there are certain aspects I really hope you guys managed to nail.
1. The appropriate level of difficulty from start to finish. With BoD7 and CStW you guys had the “not that random” random encounters that were “exploitable”. The reason this was good is that it set a precedent on how much you guys “thought” an area should take to finish. Or roughly how many battles you guys should have under your belt to progress but never removed the ability to further grind. This was helpful because it let us know what the “developer ideal” was….
But I really didn’t appreciate the punishment that was to “escape from a battle”. I feel a player shouldn’t be outright punished for running (high MP cost / good chance of failure) just because of balance or expectations. As a speed runner, sometimes the biggest challenge is finding that “minimum point of accessbility”. The challenge modes of BoD7 / CStW were nice for this but sometimes I wanna do it in the context of the norm. Cause the ideas of random battles serve as thresholds or points of reference.
I really love FF4 for this single fact. The game is completely do-able without grinding except for the final boss (or secret bosses to some extent). In fact the speed run of the game (of which I held the eng WR for a while and could still contest the 3:35 Real time goal) doesn’t grind at any point except in the Giant of Babil because its the most efficient grind spot for getting the needed powers for the Final Boss.
I’m not expecting this level of polish or thought, but something I’d ultimately really really like.
2. I agree with the lack of respec options or ideas as problems in CStW. I found that certain abilities were just bad in certain ways. I never found Fire Sword on Dem to be great, but the Fireball was good. it was a hidden choice (In fact the speedrun tactic gets Fireball + CB&B to help nuke armors in the jail) that a spell on dem MIGHT be a good option. Fire sword’s physical property almost hurt it too much when you wanted the elemental effect. It felt like sometimes it got kinda trappish with the ideas. Even limited point respecs or something would’ve been nice.
Just if you put a customization system. Let a player backtrack a mistake. Things happen, we might not perceive was the best choice was… or it lets us speedrunners abuse whats good when it is and change to whats better later.
3. If you include status effects, dont blanket make them useless on bosses or make them 100% required to have a chance to progress. I HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE (insert more kefka-esque HATE here) that soo many JRPGs are two points on this spectrum. Status effects are too damn useless (some SMTs, a lot of FFs) because of hit rate or intended effects, or they are too GOOD and are damn well necessary to progress (Etrian Odyssey… Binds too OP). I liked BoF3’s sorta system where some status effect abilities could hurt things more (Blind on Eye goo…).
I guess what I’m asking for. Dont make status useless by condemning everything to basically only be useful as a tool to screw a player. ultimately that just feels UGH!
Also be wary of putting in status limitations. Killing Golbez before _____ shows up in FF4 is a reality cause only 1 status can be put on at a time… Its kinda hilarious to see the menu of that character up but they are not on screen because of this 😛
4. Speaking from when I played PA3. It irked me that I just couldn’t find solid good uses of some classes cause I felt the tradeoffs were just NOT worth it. Diva was one for instance. I found it tried to break a lot of synergies early and dropped it. I’m pretty sure its a good class, but after my “initial bad taste” i left it to be its own thing. Same thing with Dinomancer. I just didnt’ feel the “lack of control” trade off was worth it. it had a “Gau’s rage” feel to it. It could be the best thing in the darn game for handling 99% of all things but… Unless I pre-knew what I was doing… The class felt “bad” to me.
Point I guess i’m trying to make – Try not to make everything almost require “meta” knowledge. I, as a player, usually don’t take 2nd tries to do things. I pre-plan a road map. That map might be horribly off, but thats the thing… ideally you can pull over and re-adjust routes on the fly. It has lead me to beat almost every Zeboyd boss on try #1 or try #2 (with the exceptions of a few superbosses). With the minority being try #2. To assume that i’d “throw caution into the wind” and intentionally game over to learn is a bad idea. No one likes death, “Meta” information is bad.
5. Beware of all assumptions that you make about players/etc. Extradinary things happen. As a guy who likes to break things to learn how to make them speedrunnable, I do REALLY stupid things. For example casting Confuse on a party member during a story cutscene where they are supposed to finish a boss themselves but thanks to how it works.. it softlocks the game. People are awkward and some will try ANYTHING if they get desperate. Also Its possible to die to Water Hag in FF4. I’ve done it many a times in a speed run. If Edward is the same level as you got him it is literally a slug fest where Water Hag hits first, and can kill you in 3 hits (not guarenteed) and the story requires 3 hits of your own to land. I’ve had too many “miss” wars and bad things happen there.
Ultimately – try to keep story elements out of my battles. People do dumb things when this happens… They also might blow resources or whatever.
Side Note – I really really really really really hate when a game has a forced “Game Over” scene. I hate it less to have my party get wiped out automatically outside of battle. But I HATE IT EVEN MORE if you do either of these things when my party was actually strong enough (perceivable) to do something about this. Ultimately I hope you do something like FF9 and the battles with Beatrix where there are the “survive” conditions or the “do XXXX damage”. Both of which feel OK. She out right overpowers you, and putting up the damage shows you aren’t as weak as you think (of which she still shows that “Your done” move). I’m not forced into a game over, but instead it shows a “critical state” as being endangered. Also never do like the Dias fight with Claude in Star Ocean during the swords tourney. Any and all fights should either be winnable or on a timer (maybe). Thats really annoying to be forced into a loss…
Side note #2 the sequel – You’ve established that CSH is a badass (at least seemingly so since she did spy work for years) don’t betray that notion. And especially DONT START ME AT LVL 1. Thats like the ultimate dick move IMHO. Cecil from FF4 starts at lvl 10 and resets to 1 when he gets to be a paladin. To me the stipulation that I’m lvl 1 means i’m new to what i’m doing. Telling me CSH starts at lvl 1 is going to be…. frustrating unless its something new she is doing.
6. Dont hate the rambling.
Maybe I’ll say more at another time but this is all i want to say now. Maybe some bad info, maybe too much info. Maybe i’m just some dedicated jerk who likes to break RPGs in half for no good reason.
I would like more control over character development, either to be able to see at least a couple levels ahead what abilities and stats a character will gain if I do X, or a limited ability (cost or limited uses) to re-spec characters.
While it wasn’t a problem in the previous games, in Precipice 4 having to separately scroll through party, equipment and status and scroll through the whole party gets pretty tedious pretty quickly with so many characters.
Basically, random encounters is an alternative to a difficulty setting; if you want the game to be easier, grind more. I like not having to do that; if you want the game to be easier, just turn down the difficulty. I guess if you make the random encounters easy enough, some people may use them as a form of abnegation. If you do go that route, please keep it purely optional, and make sure it is clearly so.
My absolute favorite games of all time in terms of story are the Shin Megami Tensei games, particularly the original on the Super Famicom which uses extremely minimal effects to produce an amazing sense of atmosphere. Going big on things like atmosphere can help a lot, people remember things like the starting festival in Chrono Trigger because it felt like a festival, and Harvest Moon because the seasons feel like seasons.
Also, having characters you fight with actually do real things (in the SMT example, fighting you if you disagree with them, to the death) because of your decisions or your characters decisions can help a lot.
Heya! Love all your games so far! I think you’ve got the core stuff covered very well. Perhaps too well — I think some of the time spent on the beautiful backgrounds would be better spent on less glamorous elements. For example, unique icons for items or abilities. Or as others have mentioned, animated characters for cutscenes. (I know there’s dev time involved there too, but you may have to bite the bullet on that…)
The thing is, as beautiful as the backgrounds were in PA4, they aren’t anything more than static backdrops. They are briefly admired and then forgotten, because in most cases the player doesn’t interact with them. On the other hand, a character quirk expressed visually will stick with the player so long as they have that character. And an image of an item or ability will be thought of when the player uses it, equips it, or swaps it out.
Similarly, I’d recommend almost always expressing stat values or similar (such as +1 Attack) as icons rather than text. I can’t tell you how many times I thought “Armor.” was actually part of the description of the item I was examining in PA4. Oh, and PA3 would have REALLY benefited from class pin icons!
Anyway! That’s all I got. It goes to show how much I enjoyed your games that my big complaints are just nitpicks :p
Please avoid depowering people and/or having meaningless quest.
In paa3 i went from here having dozens of capabilities to combine and use (end of main game) back to “punch things with your fist repetitively” in The Beginning of the End. Still haven’t finished it, it just feels boring. Even the story doesn’t make me want to play since it’s a prequel.
I play your games for the challenging gameplay, ie tactical combat with high difficulty but no grind. Also enjoy the humor /story
Chtulhu’s Angels was a GREAT example of what I’m looking for in additional content. A new take on both the story and the combat system.
@Imaria
I know we’re getting into quite ideological territory here and it’s easily possible that a compromise we would both enjoy doesn’t really exist, but I’m going to have to disagree with you about the “you own the world” feeling making for a better game. While it’s been fun for me in some games, it’s also by far the most common point for me to simply lose interest and stop playing a game – PA4 being a prime example.
The reason for this is pretty simple, I think – with the game “on rails”, the gameplay challenges are in some kind of order (mostly fixed but sometimes with a bit of flexibility, for example through backtracking to earlier areas) and you’re essentially driven from one challenge to the next by the story. Through these sections of the game, you build goals for yourself – “I want to get enough money to buy x equipment”, “I want to learn y ability on character z” etc. The purpose of those goals is to help you beat the next gameplay challenge and unlock the next part of the story.
Once you open up everything, the optional objectives (and indeed in many cases the next story objective) usually aren’t very well signposted. The Deep Sea Research Centre in FF8 is a great example, as it’s well-hidden and it’s not obvious at all what gameplay challenge it represents. You have no idea what difficulty Bahamut is going to be and what level you should be at, nor what the rewards are for killing him. It’s just something you can do amongst a sea of other things to do – there’s no way of knowing what the best choice is and my most frequent response to this is to avoid making the decision and switch off the game.
Whatever’s available has to be extremely compelling (I loved the chocobo minigame in FF9 way too much) or completely skippable, or I just lose all interest – I play the game to be challenged by the gameplay and to improve to the point that I can beat the next challenge put in front of me. More open games often ruin that experience by making the direction too unclear and the payoff too indirect.
TL;DR: Gameplay, story, and getting better (so you can beat harder gameplay and unlock more story) drive RPGs. More linear games mean you always have a new gameplay challenge to square off against and always know how to unlock more story. More open games give you no clear direction and too many things to choose from, and I usually quit them once they open up.
Personally, I’d rather have a bonus scenario, like The Beginning of the End or Cthulhu’s Angels, than a dozen random minigames. If I want to play minigames for their own sake, I can fire up Mario Party.
The exception is minigames that tie into the story and the personalities of the characters, enriching the overall experience. Suikoden II’s cooking minigame is popular because of this; it’s actually a complete subplot, and alluded to in later Suikoden games.
You seem to be leaning in the direction of story and character-driven minigames, so I’m keeping my expectations high. ^_^
I’m really looking forward to this one, and if you can do something like Suikoden I’ll be thrilled. Getting a base and filling it up would be great! Especially if hunting around for base characters let you upgrade the base and add more options for stuff to do there.
One other thing, if you’ve played the new Fire Emblem with its support and intra character dialogues is a great additional little bit. You get to hear the charcters interact and all.
@smacd:
I’ll also throw in against episodic content, if only for Zeboyd’s bottom line. Watching how the Precipice games were received, there was a serious case of “sequelitis” where people wouldn’t buy into the later games because they’d already missed out on the earlier ones (even though the game didn’t NEED you to have played them). Episodic games have this same effect, meaning you can only LOSE players as you go down the line. Better to sell one larger, complete package.
My only feeling from previous games is that they’re all very strongly “on rails”, even including side-quests. That first feeling when you get the airship in FF6 comes to mind, that “I own the world” idea. There’s normally a touch of that RIGHT at the end of your games, but introducing that freedom a little earlier might be nice. Allow earlier access to some of the “end-game” dungeons, and those who can manage the increased difficulty can manage to earn those sweet rewards early.
@smacd
I respectfully disagree with the “episodic” notion that you said you liked. I can see how you or others would like the more “bite” sized. For me I want the whole package where I can pick it up and put it down when I want. I hate the “episodic” feel because to me it doesn’t feel complete. Final Fantasy 4: The After Years is a perfect example of that episodic game that just left me as meh.. I don’t want to pay for individual episodes as it is a “right” that you can have them. I’d rather fully support the game as a whole package.
Perhaps Zeboyd can cater to the “episodic” crowd by maybe switching the narrative to different characters à la Final Fantasy 9 style. That kept the game fresh to me.
I agree with a lot of your own commentary on your games here, with what can be improved. With regard to those points, the story is the number one piece for me. When I play a Western RPG, its about gameplay, but when I play a Japanese style RPG, its all about the story- gameplay mechanics and battles mostly feel like filler getting in the way of the story progression. With your first two games, I can’t recall virtually any of the plot and other than Cthulu (and his need to save the world) I can’t really remember any of the character’s either. I don’t think this was as easy to help with Penny Arcade, since the story wasn’t yours and was already difficult enough to follow (so I stopped trying).
The “sim” elements you suggest are a huge turn off for me, but I’m sure others will like it.
You mention that many people don’t finish your games at all, and I know game length has been discussed elsewhere. Personally, I’ve felt that your games are just about right, not really overstaying their welcome, but there is a point where they feel a tad too long and drag a bit. Mostly once I’ve figured out a strategy, and start moving from one battle to the next. You seemed to be tossing around the idea of more episodic content before, could it make sense to make your games more bite-sized than they already are? Perhaps making a 2-3 hour game episode where more people are likely to finish, and if episodes come out more frequently, you might be able to get more people interested and completing them. On the other hand, sales might drop off with each episode. But a 2-3 hour game with say a $2 pricetag per episode might be a workable solution.
All I can say is try and grab a more holistic view of the genre.
“Grinding” is “bad”, but in PA3 the encounters are arbitrarily placed and running back and killing all the enemies in each area to achieve the character’s “appropriate” level you’ve set during design isn’t any different. You’re still killing x amount of enemies to get to y level so that the next area is “the right difficulty”.
I hear people call the DQ series grindy, but after the oooooold NES games (during a time where grinding was simply a feature of the genre across all spectrums) the games stopped being grindy. You could go from the beginning of the game to the end with a little bit of wit and not have much trouble (maybe you stopped to grind gold, but that +3 attack or defense wouldn’t help you out THAT much). The balance in the newer DQ’s (not 9 or 10) is probably a great place to do some research. It uses a standard random battle and XP reward system but in a way that isn’t obtrusive.
While I appreciate attempting to break up the irritation of random battles, the downside to the set combat feature is that you’re still running back and forth through empty areas on occasion, which is just as monotonous. Earthbound manages both perfectly – battles are semi-random and enemies will chase or run away from you, but are still generated in “dangerous” areas. Basically, grinding may not be fun, but combat IS.
For encounters, it sounds like you’re trying to do something akin to CT with the new game, and you really ought to study intently how CT does things. For instance, you’re familiar with a particular zone in CT, you can avoid many of the battles by walking along a particular path. This was a great feature.
Finally, don’t get too caught up in trying to make alternative gameplay styles or minigames within the main game to spice things up. It’s fine, great even to have other things you can do, like crafting, managing your castle ala Suikoden (2 and 3 did this really well), or even a casino (maybe even full of minigames like Gold Saucer) when you just want to do some gambling, but if you have sequences that are entirely different from your core game and the audience that plays them you’ll run into some problems. Like the atrocious blitzball fiasco.
FF6 managed to stay interesting all the way through because the narrative followed many different intriguing characters that all had great plots. The strategy minigames were fun, but they weren’t exactly a gigantic innovator or even a reason why the game has so many fans.
Sorry for the wall, just keep in mind you’re making an RPG. Don’t innovate too hard, just let it come naturally, and learn from the mistakes of others.
I’m glad you’re soliciting feedback. I’ve really enjoyed your games, but I also think you have some easy areas of improvement. This post might come across as negative, so please bear in mind that these are minor flaws in otherwise well-designed games.
BoDVII and CTSW: The lack of an option to re-spec characters meant that you had to allocate your level-up bonuses blindly. To a large extent, this meant you had to rely on character stereotypes to determine which bonus would be better for a character; it also removed the opportunity for experimentation.
PA3: I’m in the minority, but this is actually my favorite Zeboyd game. The character-focused combat works for me in a way that monsters doesn’t (disclaimer: I am about halfway through PA4). My sole gripe with PA3 is related to the combat flow: overlapping icons on the battle gauge can conceal important information, and it’s hard to tell sometimes in what order attacks are going to resolve (maybe this is intentional, but it’s disappointing when my victory hinges on an interrupt that may or may not resolve in time). The battle flow is a modified form of the one in Final Fantasy X, but FFX gives you a much clearer representation of action order.
PA4: The battle system issues in PA3 apply here, obviously. In addition, the party is split for far too long in this game (see also: 4 Heroes of Light). This has the frustrating side effect of limiting your options for growing your characters: maybe I want to boost Deep Crow’s speed, but I can’t do that while Moira is in a different party. Tying stat growth to trainers might not be a great idea anyway, since it can lead to tedious micromanagement like Esper swapping in FF6 — changing over when you know you’re about to level up — albeit not as bad, since you can equip one trainer to many monsters.
General: I’ve mentioned this before, but all of your games are severely lacking in environmental interaction. When I get to a new town or castle in a Dragon Quest game, it’s exciting, because I know I’m going to find lots of treasure if I comb every corner. When I see a really cool landmark, I want to investigate it — it’s not going to give me a tangible benefit, but the flavor text is an easy way to sneak in some free worldbuilding. Putting an Elixir in every clock makes your game more interesting, and it doesn’t cost much from a development standpoint.
Finally, and relatedly, putting more effort into dungeon design would go a long way towards making the games feel like more than a series of battles punctuated by the occasional treasure chest. Make your locales distinct. This doesn’t have to mean gimmicky puzzle dungeons; it could be as easy as applying a battle effect across the entire dungeon (e.g. this is the dungeon where your MP charges twice as quickly, this is the dungeon where you slowly lose HP in battle).
The directors commentary was great; even before Cthulhu’s Angels which I will never forget.
Either way, you guys get better each time. I’m just gonna sit back, throw some money at you during your kickstarter and let you do your thing.
Just wanted to throw in my input real quick, I really loved the side story of Cthulhu’s Angels.
Would love to see something like this, following a side character through it’s own narrative, in a future title even if it was DLC 😀
Oh, and loot. Sweet, sweet loots. Gear in general. Acquisition is a big part of my joy in these games, and variety is the best. +stat is fine, +effects is better, learning abilities (FFIX, FFTA) is an unspeakable ecstasy.
Weapon type choices as in Grandia or Dragon Quest are also super neat.
Essentially it is my goal to have you spend a thousand years in production. I might as well just ask you to make every enemy in the game a potential party member. Seriously though, there’s a million things I love about dozens of rpgs, and so many of the series are just flat out dead.
One thing I hate, though: Random generation. For both gear and game space. God I hate Diablo.
Don’t forget that the tutorial for FFXIII also teaches you how to balance two party members and their set ups rather than three, making it almost entirely useless once everything kicks off~
I’d like to see the combat system made a bit more robust. There’ve been special rules for specific fights in the previous games, but since they tend to be limited to one fight I haven’t really tried to adjust my gameplay much. So maybe zonewide effects or possibly the ability to choose the default mode for fights, think choosing the party formation that alters the mechanics of your fights. Also, I like stealing more than is probably healthy, so that’d be cool.
Well, if you’re looking to increase your focus on story, I have one suggestion: remember that the best rpg stories aren’t always the most cohesive and complete, or the ones that are present in every segment of the game, but the ones that make the player feel something.
And animated character sprites go a long way when it comes to drawing a player into the game. It’s always better for your puppets to act out a scene on screen, rather than describing it with text.
I adored the “director’s commentary” in CStW. It was cool walking around to find one of those little spaces and hearing about something about the game. CStW was my first Zeboyd game and I was bummed not to have seen it in BoD7 and PA3 (only half way through) not sure about PA4( bought but haven’t started it yet)
Put directors comments in the game it gives us insight to the game that we would have never known. It feels like the soapstone in Dark Souls in a weird sort of way.