SQUAREENIX'S PROFILE

author=KingArthur
1. 99.999% of RM users do not know how to properly encode a video, or even how video and audio streams and their containers are designed and implemented.
2. 99.999% of RM users do not understand the differences and significance between different video/audio codecs and video/audio containers.
3. The above two do not make sense to 99.999% of RM users.

'nuff said.

author=KingArthur
You realize PNG is a compressed image format, right?

author=LockeZ
I'll be honest. I loved the linearity of FF13. The only part I didn't like as much was Pulse, with all the missions, which I felt messed up what was up until then a brilliantly paced game with a wonderful lack of stupid distractions.

I realize I am basically the only person in the world who feels this way though.

Apparently open world gameplay is all the rage for some reason. I guess players like to feel like they're in control of the story or something? I dunno what the enchantment with it is, really. I find them generally worse-written, and with less compelling goals. Most of what I'm doing just doesn't feel that important - I think the writers actually go out of their way to make sure the optional things don't feel important, so that they really feel optional. And when stuff does feel important, it feels awkward to leave and go do something else.

Also even though I'm a "gameplay guy" I really do like games to tell as good a story as possible, and letting the player control tons of your plot points is just going to diminish that any way you look at it. You can limit the damage that heavy nonlinearity does to your narrative, but you can't prevent it. Not only because they might do things that aren't ideal plot threads, but also because the amount of work you have to do to create each piece of dialogue and make versions of it that are well-written and compelling and relevant to all possible plot scenarios goes up exponentially. (Even typical linear JRPGs can have this problem, to a lesser extent, if they let you backtrack to places you've been before.) However, if you have only a small number of options that the player is given, i.e. if your nonlinearity amounts to a series of multiple choice decisions and there's no real way to go backwards or sequence break, then I've found it can be really interesting to create ten or fifteen different versions of your story.

Ultimately JRPGs and WRPGs are almost like different genres. They share a lot of their combat mechanics, but they're played very differently, and players play them for very different reasons. One is about finding your own path and making choices, and the other is about undergoing a quest and going where it takes you. I think if you are making a sequel to a WRPG, your sequel needs to also be a WRPG. If the only issue is that people would recognize your main character, that's easy to solve - change his appearance. Maybe he wears a helmet to hide his identity, or his face has been burned. (Alternately, write scenarios in all the visitable places to account for visiting when they don't know you're alive. But this gets into the whole "your story suffers because you have to write too many possibilities" thing.)