CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

I'm not so sure if it really depends on the gamers. I suspect this has more to do with the developers and the market.

First off, there are different strategies you can try when selling. You can make a niche game. This appeals to less people, but the advantage is that you have fewer other games to compete with. You can also try to appeal to more people. The broader the audience, the less potential customers you have, but the more other games your game has to appeal to.

Nowadays, the recipe the big companies uses is high budget games that has to sell a lot of copies. This means they want to appeal to as many as possible. I don't think the RPG market is exactly a niche market, but it's still not as broad as say "RPG plus FPS". As a consequence, we get less games that are tailored for the RPG fans alone.

Another problem is that the vast majority of RPGs don't have much dept to combat at all. You have maybe more than 50 different skills between the characters, but combat boils down to offense, offense, offense, heal (offense used to be attack even) with most strategies being useless due to poor design. Heck, at some time I used to play Contra and I noticed that game had more thought put into it than a lot of RPGs I've played.

The only advantage turn based games have (not limited to RPGs, see the Civilization series and games inspired from it) is that you have time to think. If you design a game that way, it's important that there actually are things to think about. Problem is, the RPG genre has for a long time produced games which gives you the time to think, but doesn't really have much to think about. It should come to no surprise that people start to look for enjoyment elsewhere.

I've been playing around with Yanfly animation system. That and created some skills that are actually supposed to be in the game (previously I've just used test skills).

author=LockeZ
Yeah, this is absolutely true, and it's the ideal situation. The problem is that so often it doesn't happen, because the designer includes sidequests, or bounty hunts, or item synthesis, or collectible power-ups. This is what I mean by "guiding the player". These kinds of systems say to the player, "Hey, here's a part of the game. You should do it, unless you don't care that you're skipping part of the game." And people don't want to skip part of the game, they want to experience whatever the game has to offer, so they do all this optional crap. And then they're way too powerful.

I see what you mean. Well, from what I've read in other forums, there are a lot of people who in fact do skip most sidequests. So, assuming that the player does the sidequests isn't a good idea and I don't think people will be happy if the sidequests are reward free either. This leaves not having them as an option, but I do know that a lot of people prefers having sidequests to not having them. Name your poison I guess.

author=Felix20
@Crystalgate: Ok I see your point.
I was thinking that, in the case of Barbatos at least, the "anti play-the-game-in-another-way" feature is easy enough to avoid so it seems no different than ordinary hazards in the game (I'm not very good at explaining this am I :P)

I did say I don't mind Barbatos. Also, I said you should be careful, not that you necessarily have to skip those features. For example, if you're bad at balancing your game, you should not both attempt to make your game challenging and implement an anti grinding feature. There is a high risk you roadblock a large percentage of the players then.

author=LockeZ
As developers it is our job to guide people to play the game in the way that's the most fun. In fact that's basically our only job. If you don't have a better idea of what's fun than the average player, you probably shouldn't be designing gameplay. Most people simply play the game that's presented to them - they don't consider the different ways to play the game and try to decide which one is more fun, they just pick the one that the game seems to be guiding them towards. If the game rewards them for grinding, they will grind, and then they will not have fun. Your job is to keep them from not having fun.

I could argue that if a game is well made, it rewards you for progressing. You get more story and you get to fight new enemies instead of the same old ones. Also, if you want more power, progressing is usually faster than grinding. The further you progress trough the game, the more exp enemies will give you. Sure, you lose time by going trough the cutscenes and towns, but when enemies give you 600 exp instead of 60, you will quickly win back the time you lost by going trough non battle events.

I don't mind the idea of Barbatos, but I think you should be careful if you implement an anti play-the-game-in-another-way-than-intended feature. Punishing the player for playing your game in a way not intended will make doing so less fun for them. It will however not make playing the game as intended, any more fun.