COZZER'S PROFILE

Short answer:

I like western RPG that give me a lot of possibilies to roleplay without being costrained in the "good-bad" dicotomy and with some real influence in the game world and the plot. (Planescape Torment)

I like jRPG that have a cast of lively characters with a good chemistry, and it's even better if they can express that both in the cutscenes and in the gameplay.

You know, I feel like I have to comment here because I know this game from when it was on a little site with some MSPainted comic of the main character surviving a nuke and getting killed by a papercut, and then so many years later I see it here and it just takes me back.

And, with all its faults, it has the best tutorial ever.

author=Craze
Or you could balance your game appropriately? Like, LockeZ brings this up whenever possible and every time my response is "just balance your game well."

We're kinda discussing how to do that, you know...

author=Solitayre
It all depends on how you implement it. This is literally the answer to absolutely everything, ever, in any game design topic.

Well, that's true, but there are ideas you have to be a genius to implement well, and there are ideas you have to be a negagenius to implement wrong. So, we're just throwing a lot of ideas and trying to determine in which category they belong.

About Chrono Trigger: I'd argue that the ones at the end of the game are a special category of sidequests: the game actually expects you to complete some to have a good chance at defeating the final boss, so they could be considered parts of the main storyline...

author=LockeZ
XP is really the thing that makes sidequests feel broken to me in most RPGs. The other rewards are much more easily managed.

Well... since in most RPGs XP come directly from battle, making sidequests that don't involve dungeons would avoid the problem altogether. (Even if a sidequest involves a miniboss or two, the XP provided wouldn't probably be enough to unbalance everything).

@Darken: maybe we're saying the same thing, just giving more weight to different parts of it.

When you say more people should experiment with the genre (at least in the RPGMaker community), I completely agree. I'm just saying that if you change a basic part of the genre, in this case the length, you'll have to change a lot of other parts that use the length as an assumption.

Which, I repeat, is a good thing: what I wanted to say is that I don't think you can just make a short story, take a basic jRPG structure, cut off level advancement and 20 and call it a day. Not if you want to create the best possible game for your story.

EDIT: Ugh, double post. Can somebody delete this?

author=LockeZ
The fact that you enjoyed games that did something is never a good enough reason to do it in your own games.

This will never be quoted enough. Anyway, my two cents:

About what to put into sidequests, I think they're the ideal environment for:
- Minigames (you know those players that get addicted to them, and those who hate them disrupting the narrative? In this case you can please everyone)
- Lighthearted character development: what happens when the dark brooding warrior in your party goes shopping? Sidequests give you a way to explore sides of your characters that would rarely come up in the main quest, making them more 3-dimensional.
- Harder puzzles: you've just completed a dungeon with easy-to-slightly-hard block puzzles; then, in a room near the exit there's a chest protected by a very hard block puzzle.
- All kind of gimmicks: you know, those things that only work once and would seem out of place in the main quest. I already mentioned minigames, but there can be trick battles, quizzes, investigations, everything.

What I really don't like seeing in sidequests is more of the same. They should be a diversion from the main gameplay as they are from the main storyline.
I mean, I've just completed the fourth iteration of the town-dungeon-town formula, and now to relieve the monotony I'll do... a dungeon?

About rewards and balancing problems mentioned by LockeZ, I think a good idea would be to give "temporarily better" items as a rewards.
I can only explain it with an example: let's say the hero has MagicSword+1 at some point; by doing a sidequest, he can get a MagicSword+2. If he doesn't get it, though, he'll find it (or will be able to buy it) at a later point into the main storyline.
By that point, the player who did the sidequest will have had an easier time and will save money (he won't have to buy the MagicSword+2 or he will be able to sell the duplicate), so he won't feel "cheated".

This way, a player who does every sidequest will constantly be a step ahead of one who doesn't, but he will never be twenty steps ahead.