Not really. I mean it can limit some people, if their PC isn't powerful enough. But to be honest most gamers now have a powerful enough PC to go bat **** crazy with everything. So it can be limiting, but not really?
I know what you mean, but in that case (if your game can only be played optimally in a gamer's pc), you would be reducing your potential audience (or limiting your target audience) to gamers, who of course have a powerful cpu. What about the casual players or any other people that might be interested in your game but don't have a high clock cpu?
Anyway, events really do cause considerable lag compared to other things. This is mostly because they are refreshed every refresh even if they don't need to be refreshed, and there are a lot of background things happening on events, even on blank ones. I have no problems separating maps into smaller ones though. Why? Because by default, we can only see 544x416 pixels on the screen anyway. I do actually sometimes prefer just making the default sized maps. Though if ur planning a big game, you might hit the map limit (999 I think)
So it is limiting you but you don't mind. Creating a mildly coherent city map in small 17x13 pieces/maps is a at best a pain and usually not possible depending on your idea/vision, and also completely prevents you from doing a city overview scene and other things that woud need the city/place to be in one map.
RPG Maker games can be very intensive if you make a lot of events and use a lot of animations for everything.
That depends on what you call "a lot", but yes. Sometimes you just need to use events and animations, like when you want your game to have an action battle system to fight "on the map", and then you're limited to tiny skirmishes instead of more amusing battles/situations. Or the original example of a city, like, not a village, a city, which should be crowded with people doing their stuff and minding their own business.
If the engine lags on enormous maps with lots of events, then maybe it is better to simply make lots of smaller maps. I think most players would certainly appreciate that more, because overly big maps can be a pain to explore. The lag might also not necessarily be due to size of the map, but by how you've executed the events. Too many parallel process events on one map and you got a lag. And maybe half of those parallel process events can be replaced by something else.
Again, it depends on what you think of as "enormous". Map size limit is 500x500, so assuming that as enormous, yes, I agree that that size is a pain to explore. But what about 150x150, 100x100? That is not that big for a city, and populating one with that dimensions takes a good amount of events, and then you face the dilemma of your target audience and the cpu requirements for your game vs your vision/idea. I assume we all want our games to be played by as many people as possible and for it to be as close to our original vision as possible.
I think people usually just adapt their idea to fit the limitations of the tool, thus limiting their original vision. But I believe that it should be the other way around.
