CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

author=meteomage
If you want to make the battles more interesting, you can check out Yanfly's tips and tricks for ideas on unique skills.

In my opinion, doing that doesn't solve much. It will be fun for a while, but then the player gets used to it and we still have the problem of sameish combat.

Anyway, in order for combat to feel fun, the player has to feel that the options are effective. In general, this means skills have to be good. If the player pulls out the offensive skills, they have to pack a punch. Status skills have to work and not fail 80% of the time against enemies you want them to work on and 20% on enemies that are too weak to be worth using them on anyway. Buffs and debuffs have to make a noticeable difference. Do note that this does not only apply to mechanics, animation and sound effect can also help selling a skill.

On the other hand, the skills will only feel powerful if they aren't used constantly. Black magic that are spammed is for all intent and purposes the same as the attack command (you can have both cheap spamable and expensive situational black magic though). A buff that is used almost every battle no longer boosts your stat, it's a chore the players goes trough to get their stats to the "normal" level. Hard hitting enemies who are always crippled with status effects will be seen as cripples by default.

I can give no specific advice on how to do this though for your game in particular.

Enemies are also more fun if they are different from each other. A JRPG series you can look at is the Dragon Quest series, that series, starting from third title, does make many enemies distinct from each other. Not just distinct as in they use different skills, but also distinct as in you are encouraged to use different tactics. This aspect becomes less noticeable in the newer titles though.

I will add that since the goal is making the gameplay more fun, there's no rule saying you can't make it more fun while sticking to the generic gameplay. Actually doing it will be tricky, but so will making the gameplay more fun while adding things.

I've started the DLC in Bloodborne and Ludwig is down. I beat him the third try, but I was down to low health and panic rolling at least twice, so me winning the third try was a lot of luck. Still, so far the DLC is not that bad for being a Souls like game. I do know it will get worse though.

Yes, the world is sort of there already. While there are a non trivial amount of bigots left, it's also so that being inclusive is now a PR thing. As I covered in an earlier post, it can be a PR disaster if you screw it up, but barring that, chance is good PR outweighs the loss of sales due to losing the bigots.

Speaking of PR, there is one other issue I feel like I want to bring up. People can and will praise or criticize games they have no intention of ever consuming. This goes especially for emotional issues such as being inclusive. Those people's opinions are in practice less worth than that of customers and potential customers and can sometimes even be ignored. For say 20 years ago, this used to be a case of "critics love/hate it, but the customers hate/love it", but in today's age of social media, this can go further than that. If you do aim for being inclusive with your game and you get praise/criticism for it, it can be worth double-checking who does the praising and who does the criticizing. Sometimes there's a huge disconnect between the critic and the actual core audience.

author=Blind
But, just fishing for some opinions here. Do you think the average gamer feels that including LGBT relationships in games is inherently too "political"? Or are we past that?

I'm going to quote you horrible out of order because it will be easier that way.

To my best of understanding, no it's not considered inherently too political. However, this depends not only on the audience, but also on you, namely how your handle LGBT characters and relationships.

author=Blind
I've had to devote a lot more of my energy to thinking about what might create the most "likability" and broad appeal with gamers...
It could be entirely in my mind, but I certainly feel more pressure to compromise... in order to make any real profit from what I'm doing.

Imagine two guys who donate $1.000 to homeless people. One does it to help homeless people while the second one expects good publicity that will make him back ten times as much money. The second one will appear far less noble than the first guy if you know this motive. This applies to you as well, the more it looks like you're including LGBT relationships just because you think that is what will fly, the less that decision will be appreciated by a large percentage of the audience. There's quite a dilemma here.

author=Blind
...and how to balance that with maintaining my original vision.
...how do you balance wanting to write authentic or subversive characters with having marketability?

You need to maintain your original vision, or rather, it needs to look like you're doing that. The LGBT characters/relationships need to fit into your game without disrupting it.

If they don't and you include them anyway, it's hard to get around the fact that you included them for other reasons than the good of your game. Heck, you actually included them at the expense of your game. First of, that means that the complaints about it being "too political" is starting to look somewhat justified, you harmed the game for a purpose that does seem on the political side. Second, you are actually sending the message that LGBT characters harms the story.

author=Blind
But on the other hand, I can understand why some minorities want their representation to be more bold and unapologetic in games.

You can not be apologetic about your LGBT relationships. If you are, you're sending the message "Sorry, I know LGBT relationships is a bad thing, but I had to include it" and I don't see who this will appeal to, much less how it can be considered a positive message.

It is however questionable if you have to be extra unapologetic about it or bold. You can for example make a character who is just very appealing, but also happens to be say homosexual. There's nothing bold about that, but it's a perfectly viable character. In real life, you can be a transsexual and politically active, but you're more interested in dealing with economical issues like taxes than LGBT questions. I'm not at all sure that it really helps LGBT people if all LGBT characters need to have their sexuality put on the front page, nor am I sure it necessarily helps your game.

Also keep in mind that it's not only the minorities themselves who may as for representation, even people who don't themselves belong to the minority in question may ask for them being represented. Out of those people, some are genuinely interested in helping a cause while others are more interested in virtue signaling. The latest group of people, the virtue signalers that is, are unlikely to actually support your game. They are also the most likely to praise and demand any kind of representation, even that whish doesn't fit into your game.

author=Blind
It's probably no secret that BR has some gay characters (the artwork gives it away, lol), and some people have already private-messaged me saying they really appreciate seeing that. But in general, I've refrained from going full-on in talking about it in any game profile descriptions or the upcoming Kickstarter. In an ideal world, I don't want to have to make a big thing of it, because the sexuality of the characters is not really what most defines them.

I'm not a marketing expert, but chance is that how much you want to shine a spotligt on the fact that some of the characters are gay depends on how much of your game is about them being gay.

Let's make up an example. You have a game where the main character is a human who got raised by dragons. Recently, there has been rumors about dragons committing atrocities, regular monstrous dragon things you hear in fairy tales. The main character, being a human, decides to set out and investigate. The main character is also homosexual.

Lets say you make a blog about how the dragons will give the main character a lot of equipment that looks mundane so the main character can work without drawing unwanted attention, but is also highly magical to give him an advantage. You get a lot of people interested in the dragon story.

Next you make a couple of blogs about how the main character is homosexual. Chance is, the people who originally got interested in your game will start to wonder why you're putting this much fanfare into a homosexual character. Wasn't the story about dragons being presumable falsely accused of committing atrocities? Now they may start worrying the dragon story was just an excuse to get the adventure going and will be dropped soon and that you will rob the main character of his cool equipment already at dungeon one or two, that in favor of a more generic JRPG adventure where you can easier focus on the male to male relationship.

Communicate clearly what is good about your game. What is the major selling point about your game needs to be marketed as the major selling point, else you risk missing the audience that would truly be interested in whatever your game is about. Granted, this depends on how marketable your game's major selling point really is in the first place.

In short, there is no guarantee whatsoever that making a big deal of the gay characters will help your game. Depending on various factors like what your game is about and how you conduct your marketing of the gay characters, you may boost your sale a little, but you can also harm it if you misstep.

I can say one thing trough, if you receive complaints about the gay characters after making a big deal about them, it's not a good idea to accuse your customers of being bigots. This goes especially if nobody complained before you made a big deal about the gay characters which implies that the issue is not really the gay characters themselves and that the bigot accusation is unjustified.