LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

We all like our areas to look interesting, to feel real, to be at least recognizably semi-realistic. Right? That's our natural inclination as RPG world designers - appearance takes top priority.

Except what about when it doesn't?

Platformer and adventure games have had to deal with this conundrum since the dawn of time. Almost universally they build their areas in favor of gameplay at the expense of aesthetics and believability. While some designers manage to pull off both, it's extremely rare to find a successful adventure game in which the developer sacrificed ease of gameplay in favor of ease on the eyes. Platformer games are full of inexplicable spikes, levers, weirdly-placed walls, random barriers, inexplicably long and windy corridors with no side rooms, objects that serve no purpose but to get in your way, and - of course - the feature the whole genre is named after, mid-air platforms.

Yet in RPGs, these types of map features are all frowned upon as gross-looking. They detract from the game. People playing RPGs have a different expectation of their environments.

I can't really blame them, especially if the game uses random battles and lacks puzzles. The environment isn't really part of the gameplay at all in that case. And if the game has some areas with puzzles but others without puzzles, the difference between the two can be especially offputting. But trying to make puzzles without abandoning all sense of realism is a daunting task. Complex puzzles don't often occur naturally in the real world. And if you try to make a puzzle fit in perfectly with an area's normal realistic graphics, it often becomes very unclear what's a puzzle and what's just scenery, which leaves the game feeling unintuitive.

How do you guys prefer designers to handle this in RPGs that have a handful areas with puzzles, like the Suikoden or Final Fantasy games? What about in RPGs that are centered around having tons of puzzles in every dungeon, like the Wild ARMs series or Lufia 2? Do you have less tolerance for bad graphics on account of puzzles in RPGs than you do in adventure games?

LightningLord2 brought up a decent idea that I'd like to expand on. If you have one character that can take a lot more hits than the others, but has no way to provoke enemies into attacking him any more often, it's still possible that he can be quite useful. He can be useful by his ability to heal the rest of the party.

In my RM2K3 game (shut up craze) I actually managed to pull this off by giving one character White Wind. If you haven't played many Final Fantasy games, White Wind is a spell that heals your entire party for an amount equal to the caster's current HP. So if you're almost dead, it's almost useless, but if you're at nearly full health while the rest of the party is almost dead, then it's glorious. The character can get White Wind near the end of the game, but gets a weaker version called Pale Wind (that heals half as much) pretty early on.

While the character in question doesn't actually have the highest HP or the highest defense, he DOES have a single-target healing spell that also grants regen status to the target, so a typical strategy is to have him use that to heal himself as soon as possible, and then keep using Pale Wind throughout the battle to heal everyone else. Giving him regen status is four times as good as giving anyone else regen status. Eventually you can get an auto-regen accessory to synergize him even better.

Ultimately this type of character is almost always the last person to die. Not because he has high survivability, but because the player makes the hell sure he is always healed. If you wanted use this type of character but put him in more danger, you could make White Wind heal everyone else, but not heal the caster. It could even hurt the caster, costing HP instead of MP. Then he wouldn't literally be taunting enemies, but he'd still be taking damage in place of your party members, in an indirect sort of way.

Another way a healing-tank character could work is if the character has a revive spell. Especially if it's an area revive spell, this could be extremely powerful. However, its utility is greatly diminished in games that rely on the player's party using a lot of buff spells, unless the buffs persist through death.

Yeah, that's kind of my point, the linearity of the game has no effect on whether I feel like my actions are my own. What matters is that I performed them myself and saw the results.

In FF6, when you fight to save Doma, you control Cyan running through the courtyard and hunting down each soldier and challenging the enemy commander, those are actions you as the player input and direct the character to do. The dialogue is all done in cut scenes and maybe a few actions are, but for the most part you are told "save the king!" and then you have to walk to the king and find him dying, and then you have to walk to your living quarters and find your wife and son dead.

In FF13, by contrast, when you travel through any given area, you are just given a yellow dot on your map that you have to travel to. When you get to it, a cut scene occurs, and you get another yellow dot. The cut scenes are entirely automated - the only time you have control of the characters is when exploring enemy-filled dungeons. And you aren't told what's at the yellow dot. You often aren't given any sort of goal or reason to get there other than "we have to keep moving, and there's only one path." If I were told that Sazh's son is held captive in Nautilus and I have to save him, I would scour through the park looking for him and feel like I had a purpose. When I found him, I would feel like I'd accomplished something. But instead, he just shows up. The fact that I found him doesn't feel like it's something I did, because I didn't know I was doing it until after it was done. I didn't accomplish anything. Sure, Sazh did, but I didn't. And that doesn't even address the fact that a third of the game's cut scenes are flashbacks. Don't get me wrong, the flashbacks are a much better method of storytelling in this case than if the game had been presented linearly. The game starts where the fighting starts, while countless flashbacks span the two weeks prior to the start of the game. I wouldn't want the game to start at the beginning of the story. But I wish more of the flashbacks were somehow playable. I feel like it's just telling a story about these characters, instead of involving me in the story.

tl;dr: the difference is that when a character does something, it can be in a cut scene, it can be totally linear, but I want to lead the character to do it. Even if I only have one option, I want to be told "Press the A button to save the king!" instead of just watching the character save him without my input.

I'm starting an RMXP project, in theory. Having spent more than six years on my last project, it's a bit overwhelming to start a new one. I just open up the editor, and there's no game there to work on, so I close it.

This has been my state of affairs for months now.

But hey, a week or two ago, I solved the two biggest bugs in the battle system, and made my first three maps. Woo, I guess. Atoa's custom battle system is great, but it's got kind of a lot of bugs, and I don't look forward to making all of my own custom animated battlers. I need a better fucking pixel editor. Or an artist. But both are fictional entities, I think.

At this point, my plan is that I want to concentrate purely on gameplay this time around, so... I'm going to reuse the same story from my last game. This ensures that I'll have a well-thought-out and original story but keeps me from having to spend time writing anything. That's good, right? Or is that awful?

MS Paint stick figures in black and white.

Go.