DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

Here's something else I think would be interesting. A stealth and dialogue based RPG without combat revolving around a spy protagonist. I mean, "spy movies" typically involve lots of action, with shooting, blowing stuff up, hand to hand combat and whatever, but honestly, what are spies supposed to do? Find shit out without getting found out. If they have combat training, it's generally only for the final extreme where things go completely pear shaped.

Arguably a game with story but no combat where you try to resolve the plot by talking to people and sneaking around should be considered an Adventure Game, but I'd rather avoid the classic "find the items which can be combined in an improbable way to resolve this puzzle" format, and stick mostly to using dialogue trees and tracking character relationships in order to forward the narrative.

author=RyaReisender
Dude, that's really hard because most things are at least in one game. But I often think that one thing is really only in one game that is very unknown or that didn't execute it very well which inspired me to a similar idea but more polished.
I mean your inspiration needs to come from somewhere. You don't just make genius ideas out of nothing.

Everyone gets their inspiration from somewhere, yeah, but that doesn't mean people are limited to copying things which have been done before with only slight variation. Taking inspiration from a story doesn't have to mean doing something that's mostly the same, it can also mean having your eyes opened to a way of doing something really different.

I'll give an example. Lots of video games feature antagonists who want to become gods. Find some source of power, use it to transform yourself, rule over the world with an iron fist. Mainstay villain plot. You could set this in a classic sword-and-sorcery setting, a steampunk or cyberpunk setting, or a setting populated entirely by sea sponges, but it's still essentially the same plot. But what if instead the conflict is driven by a character trying to turn someone else into a god? What if they were trying to turn the main character into a god? Imagine someone broken by some terrible experience, who has come to the certain conviction, not only that there is no benevolent god watching over the world, but that there needs to be in order to protect humanity from the sorts of atrocity they've witnessed. They don't want to fill the position themself, they want a proper moral paragon, someone who upholds justice and has the strength of character to witness the worst humanity can do and be uncorrupted by it. And the person they choose to fill this role is the main character. The themes and issues addressed by the story would be very different from the basic "antagonist wants to turn himself into a god" plot, even though the basic idea was inspired by that type of plot.

author=RyaReisender
Plus the unique ideas I had all were made into games in the first place by me, lol.
Well and many ideas are just battle systems that never existed before.
But why should I publish those ideas for free? I'm kind of scared someone steals them haha.
Hire me as game designer, then I'll develop some unique ideas never been in a game just for you. :-)

It goes without saying that you shouldn't just give away ideas you'd be upset if other people just picked up and used. But not everyone needs to use every interesting idea they have. Personally, I have way too many ideas to get possessive about most of them. Some people have more ideas than they have time or opportunity to develop them, and some people have more time and opportunity to make things than they have ideas. Since I fall into the former group, I don't mind sharing mine around some.

I certainly do not choose to let achievements inhibit my enjoyment. By all means I try to pay as little attention to them as possible. But there is nothing unusual about having your enjoyment affected by options you don't have to take. On the contrary, existing psychological research suggests this happens to nearly everyone. For example, study after study has indicated that people can be made to enjoy the same food item off a menu less simply by adding more menu items which they don't choose. It might sound selfish in the extreme for someone to suggest removing items from a menu because they don't want to see them, and it hurts their enjoyment at the restaurant, and yet, when the number of items on the menu gets too high, average levels of satisfaction reported by restaurantgoers actually start going down.

Human beings' ability to decide for themselves what to think about or not think about is extremely limited. "Just decide to ignore it" is a strategy that sounds effective for people who already don't understand why something would be bothersome, but it's very rarely effective in the real world who actually find things bothersome.

A mirror to the last topic, and a chance to stretch your creativity a bit. What are some game elements (mechanical, story based, etc.) which you don't recall ever seeing in a game, but think would be good? Ideally, try to stick to things which you think would be technically feasible to implement.

Here are a couple of mine.

First off, I'd like to see an RPG with combat which is entirely magic-based. Why hit someone with a sword when you can throw fireballs capable of melting rock? Hit Points don't make much sense in this context, so I'd replace them with Barrier Points, representing the forces standing between you and sudden obliteration. Instead of the classic swords-and-sorcery setting, I'd be interested in seeing a setting which is magic-centric in the way that our own society revolves around technology.

Second, I'd like to see a game where, instead of offering up stronger and stronger enemies as the story progresses, the difficulty curve is designed with deliberate spikes and valleys. Instead of making the random soldiers from Kingdom A inexplicably much stronger than the random soldiers from Kingdom B, give the player characters a chance to rampage like Godzilla for a bit and revel in how strong they've gotten. Then throw the ravening hellbeasts at them. It takes a lot of plot contrivance to justify making every single obstacle the player characters face more dangerous than the last, so a lot of games don't bother and just enforce it arbitrarily. I'd like to see a game which doesn't go this route, and instead offers opportunities both for the player to be challenged, and for the player to experience some catharsis against enemies which they hopelessly outmatch.