HOW SOON DO YOU HAVE TO REVEAL THE MAIN ANTAGONIST?

Heh, I was about to make a thread about this. I think the main antagonist should be revealed at midway through the game. Though that is usually the case, Persona 4 didn't reveal the main boss until the very end. So, it all depends on how good your storytelling is.

Just don't reveal it right from the start :

-Dr. Wily has escaped from jail and you need to stop his evil robots.
-Sigma has released 8 mavericks causing chaos around the world
-You are a chosen hero with amnesia, you must defeat the demon king who is destroying the kingdom.

For my game, I have an interesting antagonist, and I am deciding whether to reveal him right in the beginning, or wait until later. I have a demo coming up and it covers half of the first chapter, so if I reveal him in it, I am worried that it might be too soon. :D

Standard literary theory suggests introducing all the main characters, including the main antagonist, in the first act. Standard RPG theory suggests spreading your protagonists gradually across the first two thirds of the game, but I think the villain should still show up early on.

A game is much longer than a play or TV show, and it's tempting to save the reveal for later. But the player expects to see, at the beginning of the game, a hook telling him why he should play this game. If that hook is a lie, the player feels betrayed. Though by a lie, I don't just mean a plot twist - I mean that the key motivation for playing the game, the core of your game's goal, was misrepresented. You can say that one thing is minor and the other is major when in truth it's really the other way around, but if you just completely leave out the whole point of the game for the first half of the game, you're gonna have a shitty first half of your game and a bunch of betrayed-feeling players when that second half hits.

In short, that means you should introduce the player to the villain early if at all possible, but you don't necessarily need to reveal that he is the villain.

For example, let's take a very very typical example of an RPG plot: FF7. FF7 is also a good example because it has multiple left-field twists, and because it changes the main villain of the game on you twice - once from the old President Shinra to Rufus at the end of Midgar, and again from Rufus to Sephiroth in the Northern Crater. And yet FF7 has Sephiroth appear - and it's a big appearance - at the end of Midgar, about 25% of the way through the game. You just don't know he's the main villain yet.

This seems like a good way to do it if you want a plot twist main villain. Your evil empire can appear to be the main villain at first and then later get destroyed by demons, but make sure the demons are introduced to the player before that. Your evil usurper viceroy can kill the evil emperor and take his place, but a random dude we've never seen before cannot do so.

Wild ARMs 3 is an example of doing it wrong. 30% of the way through the game, the main villain is revealed. 80% of the way through the game, you kill that guy. And someone else, who you've never seen before, shows up and replaces him. Because you've never seen this person before and it's completely out of left field, this makes it feel like it's a brand new conflict instead of the conclusion of the previous conflict. Instead of feeling like you uncovered the truth, you feel like you should be done with the game.

Meanwhile, Zelda: Skyward Sword doesn't have the main villain appear until part 4 of the final battle. You have heard his name, and you have fought, uh... a giant black blob that is composed of his soul's essence or something? But as a person, he does not appear until the final stage of the final battle. This is different from FF9's stupidity, though, in that this isn't a plot twist. You've know for the entire game exactly who you were fighting. You just spend the entire game trying to keep him sealed, and only at the end do you (predictably) fail. It's not my favorite method, but I think it kinda works. But I'd have preferred if you were trying to keep a power sealed instead of a person, and in the end that power took control of someone who was already part of the story. As it stands, the main villain is essentially not a character. For all intents and purposes, he's just a force, a name, a macguffin. So I felt no hatred for him in the final battle. I only felt hatred for his leiutenant (and for Groose).

You gotta have the big villain do stuff. Not just threaten to do stuff, and not just be revealed to have been secretly responsible all along for stuff. He's gotta personally piss the player off.

I have the main villains appear in the flashback prologue in my mediocre old RM2K3 game, and then again briefly (in a mysterious and ominous scene that provides no useful information) at the end of the second dungeon. After that it's a long time before you see them again - half the game. But the hook is there. And once they do appear, I try (perhaps unsuccessfully) to make them show up enough times that the player can get to know them and start to really hate them. (Though... it could also be argued that the main protagonist is the main villain in that game.)

I enjoy the idea of the antagonist being there the whole time, but you not knowing they are the antagonist until later. That plot twist always gets me. Have the player develop a falsified relationship or presumption of said character, then have the character rip off their facade with a long speech and a final battle (okay, maybe not THAT late).

I do grow tired of the generic "the-world-is-in-darkness-you-are-the-chosen-one-kill-Ogblargh" storylines where the evil guy is stated and, from the get go, you have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen, why it is happening, and who the culprit is.

I think that having the antagonist appear later is a fairly nice deviation from the norm. Now, there isn't anything wrong with having the same ol' obvious big guy doing big bad things. In that regard, you have to make sure the story has a good amount of meat on it so that it doesn't fall blandly in line with every other game that has been done in that fashion.

As far as games I have written, I have one in development now, and one in the planning stages. But, for the latter, I introduce the main antagonist later on. Actually, I plan on introducing him at the end. But the reason for that is because I have a build up. The object (or my intention) is for you to be on the edge of your seat, hungry to know who this man is, but to also grow to hate this man (whom you nor the player knows), for the evil that he has done. So, by the time you find him, you're more than ready to tie him to a pile of thickets and burn him. For my other project, I introduce the antagonist from the very beginning - Because the antagonist is the main character. The thing is, you don't know that the antagonist is the main character (or so I hope you wouldn't know...)

So yeah, I guess it depends on your story, your execution, and your reasoning behind your method.

There isn't a right answer to this. Lots of people come here asking for the "right answer" to game design questions when there isn't one.

It's your game, tell what you think when the big bad comes out of hiding.

Usually, you may get the big bad to come out and play earlier, but you find out he's just controlled by a another big bad, twist.

Aside from the generic answer of "do whatever you want, it's your game," which I happen to agree with...

I will add that it's fairly difficult to make a compelling antagonist with little to no screen time (assuming it's a person and not some kind of otherly being).

I'd recommend that the antagonist's influence is ever present. If it's a person, the antagonist is preferably fully characterized. You probably need ample time in the story to do so. That's the case even if you introduce the main antagonist before the party/gamer realizes that this will be the main antagonist.

Having the main antagonist appear at the end of the narrative is many degrees of lame. Though I do like Zephyr's distinction between main antagonist and final boss.

I was going to say in much poorer wording pretty much what LockeZ said and I'd also like to add that there is a right answer to this. Or maybe more specifically there is a wrong answer to this. (which means that the right answer to this is at the very least to do whatever isn't the wrong answer)

I think the main antagonist needs to be introduced as early as possible. Even if the introduction is in the vein of "Someone's ordering these guys but we don't know who." In this case the main villain is unknown, but we know what he is doing and when he appears it won't be out of nowhere.

Though even there it is best to at least show the villain at some point even if the player doesn't know who it is. A bad example (but still an example) is Human Revolution (spoilers for Human Revolution) where the final villain is revealed late in the game but has been present earlier on. Mostly as a background character but nonetheless he's someone we've seen before. Still Human Revolution is a pretty good example of a bad main villain reveal since it feels like it comes out of nowhere, despite having been introduced earlier. (which means you CAN be too subtle about it. Though if that is your fault or the player's fault I don't know)

There isn't a right answer at all. Movies are all over the map as well. I mean, Dr. No wasn't introduced until an hour and a half into the first bond film.

Except of course that Dr. No was introduced a lot earlier than that. In the name of the movie! Even before you sat down and watched it! Just like Diablo. You know what you're in for when you start it and then it won't matter a whole lot how much Diablo actually is mentioned or appears (though I bet Diablo is mentioned plenty) because just by the sheer act of reading the title of the game you know who you're up against.

I think I like the type of villain that is actually participating in the story, but that neither you nor the protagonists knows that he is the villain. Of course, I also love the type of villain who starts out with nothing, but actually works his way up to the top. Kefka is actually a good example of that. Mad as he may be, he actually worked his way up to the top. I don't like villains that just suddenly appear as the king/God/whatever you call it as those kinds of villains are just meh to me.

In short, I like villains that are unpredictable.