- Joined
- Mar 13, 2012
- Messages
- 2,083
- Reaction score
- 1,674
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- English
Honestly, I'm just going to say that I don't care about making a 'fresh' or 'all new' gameplay. Granted, it's nice when a game has something that changes things up but a lot of the time devs get caught up in making their game 100% new and unique and just fail to make it fun and accessable.
For an RPG the story is paramount - that's a fact. Graphics, sound, gameplay - that's important to get right, but the story is why people are playing an RPG instead of, say, a shmup or racing game. They're there for the story, not the super enhanced everything else.
Again, it's nice to get new stuff in, but it's not the main dealio. As long as you can tell the story in a way that grabs interest and is interesting, even if it's a story about collecting the four mcguffins from over there to save the world, that's what counts the most.
That said, Quality of Life stuff is what I think is best to think about when changing up the old formula when it comes to gameplay. Taking old systems that work but are clunky and refining them so they're not a huge hassle anymore. Suikoden 1 and 2 showcase this idea very well. The first game is pretty clunky with inventory management and the war systems are very simply rock/paper/scissors. Then they took the base idea of the game and said "we can do this and this better" and refined the systems to make it easier on the player. Suikoden II is now considered the best of the series by most fans. It kept the charm of the first game but alleviated the issues of the first by having quality of life upgrades to the systems there-in - not making whole new systems.
Same with Dragon Quest - started the series with very limited character-only inventory space. They realised that that was annoying for the player, so they didn't scrap all the inventory system completely, they just limited the self-inventory to battles instead, but still allowed for holding a lot of items. Same with crafting - it still exists in the games, but it's been enhanced because it was a bother to use and they realised over time that sometimes you gotta change things to make them more accessable and easy for your players to deal with.
Being inspired by retro games is all well and good but if Square put out a game today that expected you to deal with 8 slot inventories and using the menu to open doors/search chests/etc they'd be getting laughed out of the house. Innovation is well and good, too, but you can go too far with it and sometimes it's best to use an updated older system that fits the game than push a boundary that ends up unbalancing the whole thing.
For an RPG the story is paramount - that's a fact. Graphics, sound, gameplay - that's important to get right, but the story is why people are playing an RPG instead of, say, a shmup or racing game. They're there for the story, not the super enhanced everything else.
Again, it's nice to get new stuff in, but it's not the main dealio. As long as you can tell the story in a way that grabs interest and is interesting, even if it's a story about collecting the four mcguffins from over there to save the world, that's what counts the most.
That said, Quality of Life stuff is what I think is best to think about when changing up the old formula when it comes to gameplay. Taking old systems that work but are clunky and refining them so they're not a huge hassle anymore. Suikoden 1 and 2 showcase this idea very well. The first game is pretty clunky with inventory management and the war systems are very simply rock/paper/scissors. Then they took the base idea of the game and said "we can do this and this better" and refined the systems to make it easier on the player. Suikoden II is now considered the best of the series by most fans. It kept the charm of the first game but alleviated the issues of the first by having quality of life upgrades to the systems there-in - not making whole new systems.
Same with Dragon Quest - started the series with very limited character-only inventory space. They realised that that was annoying for the player, so they didn't scrap all the inventory system completely, they just limited the self-inventory to battles instead, but still allowed for holding a lot of items. Same with crafting - it still exists in the games, but it's been enhanced because it was a bother to use and they realised over time that sometimes you gotta change things to make them more accessable and easy for your players to deal with.
Being inspired by retro games is all well and good but if Square put out a game today that expected you to deal with 8 slot inventories and using the menu to open doors/search chests/etc they'd be getting laughed out of the house. Innovation is well and good, too, but you can go too far with it and sometimes it's best to use an updated older system that fits the game than push a boundary that ends up unbalancing the whole thing.
