DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

Is it against the spirit of the contest to stake out titles you're intending to review so other people will know that if they pick those ones, they're liable to be beaten to the punch?

If you're not offering compensation, you should at least be considering what you have to get artists interested in your project. Is there anything so great about it that people will just naturally want to get involved?

If you have something awesome in the works that a lot of people are totally interested in seeing come to fruition, maybe someone will want to be a part of it without monetary compensation (I haven't been here long enough to know how often this sort of thing goes on here,) but just turning up and saying "hey, I want someone to do this free art for me" is almost certainly not going to get any takers anywhere.

Edit: sorry about the two blank posts above, just ignore them. My computer borked while I was trying to edit my post and I ended up posting it repeatedly.

author=LockeZ
So Kalm's role was to not matter, and thus making it less boring wouldn't have helped its role? I'm not buying it. Why do you specifically need a town that doesn't matter?

If anything FF7 could have probably benefitted from just having fewer towns, rather than making its towns more interesting. This is probably true of a lot of other games too. Cut the cruft.

I mean, you're right about why Kalm matters: its only role in the story is to provide a stark contrast to Midgar, being a mostly prosperous town where only a few of the townspeople hate Shinra instead of all of them.

But look at how it fills that role. Everything that happens "in Kalm" actually happens in a flashback in Nibelheim, so to me it's like, shit, that flashback could happen literally anywhere, why do we need a whole town dedicated to it? And the moment the flashback starts you see a very clear picture of a town where Shinra is bringing prosperity rather than squalor; why do you need that outside of the flashback too? Plus you still have Upper Junon, Gold Saucer, Icicle Inn, and Costa del Sol doing the same thing. It's very redundant and pointless.

I would have combined Kalm and the Chocobo Ranch into one location, called the Chocobo Ranch.

The flashback could theoretically happen just about anywhere. They could have crunched it in before leaving Midgar, but since they're wanted men there, hiding out inside the city ramps the tension up too high. They could have it out in the middle of nowhere, on a field or something, but it kind of lacks realism for the characters to stand out in the middle of nowhere having this long discussion instead of relocating somewhere more comfortable. And they could have had it on the Chocobo Ranch, but I think having the discussion on a dinky little farm full of strutting yellow birds robs it of some of its gravity.

I think it probably would have been better if Kalm and the Chocobo Ranch had been merged, but instead of having an inexplicable ranch out in the middle of nowhere serving god only knows what customers, I'd stick the Chocobo Ranch in the town, right on the outskirts. This way the flashback setting keeps the right level of tension, while the town is made more interesting, and the chocobo ranch makes more sense since it's not stranded in the middle of nowhere (one thing we haven't really discussed so far in this topic is making the geographical context of the locations work for them, but this is an area where Final Fantasy VII, like most RPGs, doesn't put in much effort.)

author=Sooz
Thinking about this subject, I'm reminded of a rule of thumb for writing: If you're having eternal writer's block over a scene, that is probably a sign you don't need it.

I think the same can be applied to this subject. Do you really need a town? Sure, you need a place for the characters to rest, heal, get stuff. But does it need to be a town, rather than a clearing with a peddler and a campsite? Is there a purpose served by having the characters visit a permanent settlement instead of anything else?

Basically, instead of thinking that you need to put a town in because this is the part where towns go, think of what the true purpose of your "town" is, and whether that can be better served with something simpler.

I agree that it's better to avoid making boring towns. I think Kalm, to continue with an example, served its purpose well in adjusting the tension of the narrative to an appropriate level for that point in the story, but it could certainly have been given more content of interest. But honestly... I really don't like random campsites with peddlers. They just bug me, a lot, because I feel like the game is saying "I have no excuse for putting a town here, but it would be a pain if you couldn't rest or buy stuff, so here, have a pit stop." It does a number on my feeling of immersion. I'm sure that players who dislike them as much as I do are seriously in the minority, but if it were me, rather than going the "campsite and peddler" route, I would go out of my way to ensure that the situation where the player was in need of supplies and an inn while separated from any plot-justified place of human habitation simply wouldn't arise in the first place. Failing that, I'd make it, I dunno, a band of deserted soldiers roughing it in the wilderness because they'll face charges of treason if they make it back to civilization, or a secret polygamist hippie commune, or some other thing which has enough character of its own to make it seem like something other than a basic gameplay contrivance.

author=Isrieri

author=Desertopa
A town doesn't have to be dramatically constructed to give something to engage the player. Take the three examples LockeZ gave from Final Fantasy VII which failed to be constructed around an interesting centerpiece, Kalm, Gongaga, and North Corel. Kalm is just a waypoint which the player doesn't need to actually explore, but most of the time you're there is spent in a flashback where Cloud explains his history with Sephiroth. Gongaga (which is an interlude the player can skip entirely,) offers a hook for one of the game's central twists;

I don't see how that's an exception to what Craze is talking about. Those towns do have a memorable feature then: The purpose of their construction is to be the place where you get more of Clouds backstory or whatever. But just because they're offshoot villages that aren't necessarily important or even optional to visit doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't try to make them dynamic. From my experience with I and IV Final Fantasy tends to drop important cutscences that revolve around the characters in the towns, but fail to make the towns themselves interesting (VI was an exception rather than the rule). You just stop by, do what you have to do, and then you drop out and may never return (or want to return). There's no reason to stick around and talk to anyone or go exploring except for hidden goodies I guess. VI was different because it did the very things Craze and LockeZ are talking about.

I never said, nor did I mean to imply, that towns shouldn't have memorable features. The only thing I was disputing was that LockeZ's suggestion of constructing towns around visible set pieces should be followed in every instance. That's a matter of visual aesthetics, not of how much plot or character significance or interesting content the towns have.

Craze was the one who took issue with my comments, not I with his, although I think the meaning he's reading into them is not what I intended them to convey. If I were to take his statements literally, I'd definitely disagree that "towns are the bane of RPGs," but I don't get the impression that he actually means that towns are necessarily bad (if I'm wrong, of course, he's free to correct me,) they're just done badly with such frequency that they're not usually a credible source of entertainment.

Usually, when game designers get it into their heads to "reward exploration" in towns, they scatter around items for the player to find and/or add NPCs who say things which suggest some kind of life beyond the activities of the player character. But if the NPCs say things which suggest they've got matters of their own to deal with, and those matters are a lot less interesting than the basic plot progression of the game, then talking to them isn't going to be very rewarding. And inspecting every goddamn identical barrel in town to see which ones are hiding permanent stat-boosting apples, or elixirs, or pieces of armor, or whatever the hell people put in barrels in your game, is a chore, plain and simple. Presenting tokens in exchange for the work the player puts into looking at and talking to everything might feel like a way to "reward exploration," but it's not a likely consequence of trying to make towns as fun and interesting as possible.