Home Base

[Silenity]

Ahh. Nothing like starting an RPG by being woken up by your single mother who doesn't even have her own room, venturing off after 4 minutes of dialogue, and never to retuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurn.

We see it all the time. >_<

I'm thinking of making a home base for my characters.

A place where they can rest, play minigames, and progress just as they do.

As they complete quests and defeat enemies more unlockables and upgrades would be available to them to customize and decorate their home to their liking.

Should they be able to move their base? Similar to secret bases in Pokemon. 

Through the use of variables the base would be able to change locations.

Teleports to base or moving base?

Should the base be similar to giant airships from Final Fantasy?

Where the player could just take it around with them or should the player have access to teleport crystals that would bring them to their base?

Should there be teleports to all the towns with something like a Lodestone Network?

Or should they just do it the ole fashioned way of walking back to their base? Perhaps defeats the purpose.

How should inns and the like be worked if they can just rest for free at their base?

Should the party not have a base at first and instead be required to pay for one?

Should there be personal shops within the base? Perhaps selling unique items not normally found in the normal game world?

Thoughts, improvements, and feedback appreciated!

 

[odinnightowl]

My thoughts on this would be a tad complex.  How about have a special store/building located in the towns which is set to "teleport" you to the base. So the base sits in a sort of extra dimension. I would also make the player have to earn it so when they earn it or buy it they get a key to it that opens said special door. When they first get it they have access to 2 rooms ( main room and bedroom), later in the game after getting far enough in they would be able to buy the first expansion slot from the item shop. the way this would work is the base already has the rooms but to open the doors to them the door will do a key item check if they have the item it opens the door if not well it stays locked.

As for what the inns would do well they can be removed from towns but added as "tents" out in the world so the player has a different place to rest and heal- these would of course cost something.

Contents of the base i think should be the following:

Bedroom

Main room - this has the doors branching off to the rest of the house

Crafting room- as it is call this can be where you go to craft items if you have a crafting system

Weapon room- Have a shop which can be set to have weapons which change over time as the player progresses

Armor room- same as weapon room but for armor

Item shop- same as the last 2 but for items and perhaps random special items

Mystery shop- this room would have a random assortment of stuff , merchant a cloaked and hooded guy.

Game room - toss in a mini game or 4 , perhaps the mystery shop could sell a game.

Training room- like the arena from final fantasy X , practice battles

Quantum room- special room, can't get till either right before the final boss or after beating the game. This room grants the player the ability to rebattle any boss and perhaps activate special abilities.

While i thought of this on the spot it makes me wanna use this idea.

 

[Wavelength]

Well he probably didn't retuuuuurn because Unmotivated Villain X burned his beloved peasant village to the ground!!

In seriousness, you're right, and I think the "home base" feature would be a good addition for a majority of games.

As far as having a movable/teleport to-able/flying/static base, figure out what works out best for your game.  Do you want to the player to be able to rest or shop from anywhere in the world (maybe not from dungeons)?  Do you want them to have quick access to towns across the map, or do you want it to be a trek?  What works best for your game?  (Definitely don't make it just one non-changeable point in the world though - like you said, that will usually defeat the purpose).  Alternatively, you could go for something like Disgaea where you are at your home base by default, and you take stand-alone adventures out to other parts of the world by selecting them from your home base.

I would recommend starting the team off with a home base (if not at the beginning, then early in the game), but requiring them to "upgrade" (buy) most of the features.  An improved bed and bath give you higher restoration (maybe the default ones only restores you to 60% of your max HP/MP respectively).  An item counter will attract a traveling merchant to sell you things; further improvements to the item counter might improve the quality of items or bias the type of items they sell.  A battle simulator will let you practice random battles, and benches nearby would attract fans to throw you money and items when you win those battles.

 

[Banquo]

I know it sounds lovely to have a place to come back to, but it doesn't makes a lot of sense if the player travels far and wide. Imo a game only profits from a base if it is somehow involved in the story itself, or is close to the events of the story. For example: The Assassins Creed games.

Even if it adds a lot of comfortability to return to a save zone, if the characters aren't supposed to enjoy this, the player shouldn't either.

Except of course the magic in your world allows you to teleport.

 

[Sol Fury]

Banquo makes the same point I was going to make - it depends on the plot of the game. If you're telling a story about a journey, having a fixed HQ does not make all that much sense - though you could go the Final Fantasy route and have your boat / airship offer some kind of functions like a base.

That being said, I have a soft spot for Suikoden, which as a war story where you are leading an army, has you set up a base on very similar grounds to what is put forward in the first post. The great thing about the base there was how the base would grow as you recruited more characters - recruiting the right characters would add more options for your base. Skies of Arcadia was another great example of this concept, though this time outside the framework of a war story - in Skies, you're gathering members of your pirate crew to man your ship, and your pirate hideout.

Re. free healing at HQ - it is not necessarily a game-breaking thing. Inns in RPGs are usually trivially priced anyway, so there's convenience in using one near to the dungeon you're about to tackle VS warping to base and warping back. Plus - no reason that you have to warp right back to where you were. If (like Suikoden) you only warp to the towns, then you might still have to trek across the countryside to get to the dungon, and face a few monsters on the way.

On my own project, I've got a couple of the characters set up with HQs. My reasoning though wasn't so much the minigame aspect, but another great aspect of HQ settings - you can meet your party members wandering around the base, relaxing while they are not bull-rushing the latest horde of monsters. There's opportunity to throw in some random character building there - like having one character always drinking alone in a bar in honour of lost friends, or a pair of characters hanging out and playing off each other with some good-natured banter which you might not necessarily get in the main plot.

Ultimately, it is working out if the idea works for you, and if it fits with the kind of story you want to tell. The rest is all about taking the time to properly flesh things out and develop it to the nth degree.

 

[Schlangan]

As it was said before, it depends on what you want to do. In my case, the game is mission-based, so obviously they come back to the base after the mission using a spaceship. Nonetheless, the "base" will sometimes change as the main characters will be relocated to another planet for example. In that case, the concept of the base is natural. As for most common RPG when you explore, you can actually set up a base, but not necessarily reachable at any moment. Once again only the plot will define how realistic a base can be.

 

[NPC]

In the DS remake for FF3, there was an airship that you could rest in, buy things, receive mails and the usual jazz of flying around. That's a good example IMO.

 

[Sol Fury]

That was actually in the original, too - as far as I know, it was the first RPG to really have that function. It was a pretty good way to do an HQ in that game.

Another point that just occured to me - at what point do you get your HQs? Depending on the when, you might just get around the whole issue of "free healing", since in most games, staying at an inn is just a pittence anyway once you get a single encounter dropping more gold than a typical night at an inn costs.

 

[Silenity]

That was actually in the original, too - as far as I know, it was the first RPG to really have that function. It was a pretty good way to do an HQ in that game.

Another point that just occured to me - at what point do you get your HQs? Depending on the when, you might just get around the whole issue of "free healing", since in most games, staying at an inn is just a pittence anyway once you get a single encounter dropping more gold than a typical night at an inn costs.

Well I was planning on making inns cheap near the beginning of the game and get a bit more expensive towards the later stages.

Also, inns wont heal all hp/mp, status effects, etc. unless you choose like the best bedroom.

 

[Eschaton]

The "Home Base" feature in many RPGs - at this point in history - serves the function of a massive, overly-complex resource-management menu.  Pretty much everything you do at "home base" can be done in a GUI menu.  The default menu scene, even.  Even if your home base is simply a hub from which the rest of the game is accessible, it can be done from a simple GUI menu (think of the Mega Man games) and doesn't need to be a map/level.

However...comma...pause for effect...

It does serve a purpose in some games.  Mother Base in Peace Walker and MGSV, Skyhold in Dragon Age Inquisition, and the Normandy in Mass Effect do serve the purpose of fulfilling the core role-playing experience the developers wanted the player to have:  the fulfillment of a power fantasy.  You are Big Boss, you are the Inquisitor, you are the Commander.  Having your own fortress, country, or spaceship in which you can walk around and over which you can lord, managing resources that are yours, talking to redshirts that are loyal to you, all these experiences really help with the power fantasy the player gets to experience.

Does you game need a hub level/home base?  It depends on the role-playing experience you want your player to have.

 

[HumanNinjaToo]

If your home base is a place that you can walk around in, just make it accessible from the menu. When you leave the home base, have the player return to the entrance of whatever place they were at. Unless you're fulfilling the power fantasy that eschaton was talking about though, it would be much simpler to just have a 'homebase' menu.

 

[kerbonklin]

The whole "Home Base" or "Hub world" design has always been pretty popular, but it only works well if there are things to actively do there every visit (upgrading equipment, side-quests, leisure tasks, etc.) and if the game isn't one big straight track forward.

The most recent "Home Base" game would be Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, as a good example. The game's an open world and not an one-straight-track adventure, and after every mission you usually gather resources and money to buy new equipment/tools and Mother Base expansions to unlock more things to buy. As Eschaton already stated, you are playing as "Big Boss", a super strong leader-type character who's trying to work his way back up after being gone for 9 years.