KAELAN'S PROFILE

author=Livewire
Which is why I want to take it to you guys- what really makes a game mature? Is it extreme content, or depth?

The problem is you're mixing up two definitions of the word.

First, there's mature games as in "Rated M". These are mature simply due to the arbitrary cultural choices of the country rating the game. A game that's mature rated in Australia might not be in the US. That's a mostly irrelevant definition that's often based on the taboos of groups of people who themselves tend to not even be the people playing the games in question.

Then there's mature in terms of content, which I generally view as any game that treats its player as an intelligent adult, rather than a child. What this actually means in terms of gameplay can vary.

It can simply mean the game has enough respect for you to not think you're scared of references to profanity, sex, violence or real-world themes. Or it could mean that the game has a story or themes that take some mental work to figure out, and the game assumes you're smart enough to do the work yourself rather than hand you explanations to everything (Xenogears and Dark Souls are pretty good examples of this). Or it has themes that only an adult is likely to properly understand.

You can also have games which have some mature elements added in, but which don't necessarily reflect on the whole nature of the entire game (i.e. the Valkyria Chronicles has an interesting take on racism which only an adult is likely to actually get - but it doesn't permeate the whole game and not getting it certainly doesn't prevent you from understanding the main storyline, which is fairly simple standard JRPG stuff).

In my game I'm taking an approach that's very close to what Temple of Elemental Evil does.

There is a fixed amount of enemies in the game, all in pre-placed locations and none of them ever respawn. Once you kill something, it's dead forever. And there are no random encounters.

On top of that, it uses a tweaked version of D&D3.5's experience formula, which automatically scales your XP gained per-character based on how the character's level compares to the level of what you just killed. Under-levelled characters automatically catch up fast (and the more under-levelled they are, the faster they will catch up) while over-levelled characters will tend to plateau in growth until they fight things that are actually challenging to them.

Those two things combined make it so not only do you not need to grind, you actually can't even if you wanted to. If a fight is too hard, the only thing you can do is leave and go find another area to explore or figure out a better strategy. You can't beat the game by just grinding until your numbers are big enough.

There are enough dungeon areas and optional content so that you can always skip hard fights and go fight things somewhere else to get a little stronger, but since in the end they still never respawn, even if you are doing optional content for the EXP, you're still always accomplishing something else while gaining that EXP (i.e. exploring a new area, completing a quest, finding loot you otherwise would never see, seeing optional story scenes, etc.), so it never feels like grinding. Even then, the content is still limited, so you still can't really grind however much you want.

And even if you do all the optional stuff, the EXP system will ensure you're never progressing very far from where I want you to be. And it's done without hard caps, which I think is really important.

I hate directly capping things, I feel it's a designer's way of saying: "You're not playing the game the way I want you to, so I'm going to punish you for it", which really isn't my job to be doing as a designer. My job is to just recognize that people will take the path of least resistance through the game, and make that path the most fun way to play the game.

If someone absolutely insists on circumventing or taking the most advantage of the mechanics somehow, then I'm fine with that too. It's my job to make sure you're having fun with the game; it's not really my business to be telling you what should and shouldn't be fun for you. If you want to kill every last living thing in the game, go ahead. You'll always get something out of it, though the rewards will taper off after a while. I think that's a good balance.