DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=LockeZ
For example, every new set of buyable weapons in FF7 works is an extremely obvious choice, because they don't even appear until after you've already finished the challenge of acquiring enough gold to buy them. The items in treasure chests are also extremely obvious choices because the cost of exploring each dungeon fully and finding all the chests is completely negligible.

Well, in Final Fantasy VII, there were some tradeoffs with equipment in terms of materia slots, but the game isn't generally so challenging as to demand that you manage them carefully, at least until fairly late in the game. There's actually quite a bit of leeway for optimization late on in the game, but only the Emerald and Ruby Weapons really require you to approach it with any kind of attentiveness.

author=emmych
Also I feel this in the depths of my soul. If I have to see one more game that has orcs and elves and dwarves and/or wants to be ASoIaF I AM GOING TO SCREEEEEEAM

Really? I've seen loads of games with some combination of orcs, elves and dwarves, but I honestly haven't seen one that honestly seems like it wants to be ASoIaF. Maybe Tactics Ogre, but I never did get very far in that.

Well, here's a consideration to keep in mind-

A lot of the rules in the original game were regional, which allowed the game to introduce them after giving the player time to absorb the basic rules without being overwhelmed. If you're going to implement even more rules, and even more powerful cards, well... remember how much time a dedicated player could sink into Triple Triad in the original? Unless you want the game to come off as cluttered and confusing, you'd probably want to ease the player into it over an extended period. But this may run the risk of having Triple Triad take over the game, if the players are given enough incentive to play it, or have the players mostly ignore it and waste your effort, if they aren't.

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author=Feldschlacht IV
I'm with Locke on this one.

Being deceived within the narrative is fine, and expected. You mean the big bad is the player's father and not the general, like everyone in the village said? Plot twist! That's fine. Straight up lying to the player when it comes to gameplay mechanics is fucked up, however. "Scan told you the ice dragon is weak to fire? Nah, he actually absorbs it ya dumb hoe"

I think even this kind of deception could be good, provided the player doesn't actually face consequences for it. Like, scan tells you the dragon is weak to fire, it actually absorbs it, you go on to lose the fight, but the plot requires you to lose the fight and you didn't actually have the capacity to win anyway. Then the gameplay deception is further addressed in the story.

I think you can do interesting things by using gameplay deception to *reinforce* the story, as long as it doesn't impose anything frustrating on the player. I'll give an example which isn't actually an example; in Final Fantasy VII, there's a point early in the second disc where Elena of the Turks catches up with the party, and tries to hit Cloud. She warns him in advance that she's going to hit him, and the game tells you how to avoid it (making it essentially the game's shortest minigame.) The first couple times I played through this part of the game though, I got the timing wrong, and the result is that Cloud does nothing, just stands there and takes the hit, and collapses. And I came under the impression that this was actually the only result you could get, that the game was lying to you about being able to avoid the hit. And I thought that was actually pretty cool, because in context, there's a lot of reason for Cloud to feel guilty and depressed, and I assumed that given the chance to avoid the hit, he was deliberately choosing not to. Since you just wake up in a nearby house which has plot-relevant scenes to view, there's really no disadvantage gameplay-wise in taking the hit. The fact that it's avoidable was honestly kind of disappointing to me when I found out.

I'd personally like to implement a comical variation on this, where the player is given instructions for the rules to a minigame to resolve a situation, and the minigame never happens because one of your characters just goes ahead and resolves the situation in a much simpler and easier way, rendering the whole thing unnecessary.

author=LockeZ
I guess I just don't find the decision particularly interesting at all unless there's a reward. I'm very obviously not the target demographic for a relationship system in an RPG though. Being able to influence the plot in such a major way actually annoys me - I want the best story, and I would much rather trust the writer to decide what that is than make my own haphazard guesses.

As a player, I don't like it when games are too open-ended, since the writing tends to lose out when the writers have to spread their efforts too thin. But I think that some choice and variability can be a bonus, and as a writer, I tend to like to have some open-endedness to work with, because it lets me explore characters and events from more angles. When it comes to writing romances, the players might have their own opinions on which are best, but if I'm writing multiple possible relationships into a story, I'm going to like all of them, because each relationship is going to be my preferred way of expressing different aspects of the characters or story.