DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

author=LockeZ
IMO, if you're going to make a game about pessimism, the pessimism should be completely justified and everything you do in the entire game should fail, up through and including the ending.

Final Fantasy 13 was sort of like this, except not at all in a comical way. The overarching theme of FF13 was one of predestination - you are being forced into performing horrible acts against humanity against your will, and if you stop you'll turn into a shambling stone monster forced to relive your greatest moment of regret over and over for all eternity, and even if you kill yourself someone else will just be chosen to do it instead. There's no escape. But you spend the game fighting to find one anyway. If you did something like this with an ending that actually made sense, it could be an excellent game.

I'd be careful about what sort of things you subject the player to though, even if it does fit the theme of the game. Thematically coherent doesn't necessarily equal fun.

Aside from that though, it's not as if failure is a necessary consequence of pessimism. If you're doomed to fail no matter what, then a lack of hope isn't pessimism, but realism. Real pessimism is about having more doubts and anxieties than are justified by reality. Real hopelessness would be another theme entirely.

A hopelessness themed game would probably be more depressing, whereas a pessimism themed game would be more frustrating, because you'd spend so much time second-guessing yourself.

author=PhantomLimb
I never found Harry Potter, Hunger Games, (insert literally any young adult fiction here) main characters interesting because they are essentially flawless.

I disagree. The protagonists of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are far from flawless. Hell, a huge portion of Harry's actions throughout the series are completely quixotic and cause more problems than they solve due to his lack of introspection, poor planning abilities, and mistrust of authority. A character's flaws don't have to be like Tyrion's dwarfism, things that set them apart from the vast majority of the human race.

That's not to say that I'm arguing that the protagonists of Harry Potter or the Hunger games have flaws and therefore are good characters. Creating flawed characters isn't the goal, creating interestingly human characters is. Tyrion isn't an awesome character because he does cool stuff despite being a dwarf, he's an awesome character because he's a compellingly written individual, and the facts that he's short, ugly, and a disappointment to his father are all elements which shape his personality.

You can use private messages on this site. I'm here often enough that I should get them quickly. I'll give you my email if you need to send anything with larger files.

My last couple of games have been pretty long, so I think I'll squeeze in another short one or two. John Han the Business Man next.

author=LockeZ
I wasn't saying anything about story and I'm not sure where you even got that from...? I was just trying to say that if you add a different type of gameplay, you end up with a different type of game.

I was responding to

author=LockeZ
The kind of game that I want to make, and that most non-sandbox RPG designers want to make, is a game about fighting, planning out strategies for fighting, preparing your characters for fighting, and strengthening your party by fighting.

If that's the kind of game you want to make, then by all means the towns should be devised accordingly, if you feel you have a reason to include towns at all. I just don't think that it's accurate that this is the kind of game that "most non-sandbox RPG designers want to make." I gave myself as an example of someone for whom those sorts of gameplay concerns occupy a position of importance several rungs down from other elements of game design.

author=LockeZ
But the other part was "Almost none of the Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or Suikoden games do anything extra in towns that's interesting enough to take the place of upgrading my characters. Triple Triad and Tetra Master, the card games in FF8 and FF9, are the only examples that were good enough to really fully take over. And most people don't want to create an entire second game that takes place in towns like what you get from Triple Triad. It creates a very different kind of RPG. One that's largely about the minigame."

Some of the games in these series have crappy towns, but the way I view the games, I wouldn't agree with the position that "almost none of them do anything interesting enough to take the place of upgrading the characters." To me, wandering around in a well devised town, interacting with people, exploring the setting and such is already much more interesting than something like upgrading characters by buying equipment and items, unless you have a really unusually genius party setup system. If I were forced to cut out either the option to upgrade your characters in towns in Final Fantasy VIII, including Triple Triad with all its gameplay advantages, or the ability to wander around talking to NPCs and picking up background information about the setting, I'd have more fun playing the version with the character upgrading including Triple Triad cut out. I'd prefer that the game have both, but as far as I'm concerned, stuff like wandering around Balamb Garden talking to people is just as much the point of the game as, say, clearing aliens off an abandoned spaceship.

Embric of Wulfhammer's Castle is an RPGMaker game which delivers the sort of thing I like to see in towns, if not necessarily in visual set design terms, then at least in terms of exploratory activity, and practically nothing else, for the entire game, and I found it extremely fun. Combat is practically nonexistent, so while you do get the opportunity to level up the main character and get her new, more powerful equipment, it's almost meaningless in gameplay terms, and functions more like trophies to remind the player of the fun things they did by which they got their hands on the equipment or experience points.

It's not that I can't enjoy a game where towns don't fill these functions. Final Fantasy Tactics, which reduces towns to a small menu of gameplay-relevant locations you can visit, is one of my favorite games of all time. But I care enough about these sorts of basic town functions that I think it's possible to make a very fun game by focusing on these elements and nothing else.