Why is the RPG Maker name so hated?

[Hamilcar]

Hi Fellas,

I wanted to explore your ideas around this. I've seen a 50/50% sided battle going on between the gamer and non gamer communities:

1. A lot of people seeing the game being made in RPG Maker would just downright say it is terrible for a variety of reasons: Not using original graphics and staying with the default RTP.
2. Not using original Music.
3. Mechanics are wrong.
4. Not enough depth or complexity.
5. Difficulty not balanced.
6. Gameplay issues, bugs and whatnot.

1. The other side of the army would defend those games that were commercial for a variety of reasons: The graphics are not important as I am willing to overlook if the game is well crafted
2. The story is very well written.
3. They have engaging mechanics.
4. There is a fair amount of content to go through.
5. There are crafting systems or allocation points systems.
6. They use WASD or MOUSE as well as Keyboard.

So what I am saying is, for example, games like To the Moon, Last Dream and the like have been both very acclaimed and praised as well as seen as very generic, awful, "Not even worth the $10" games, with lack of talent due to their lack of original assets and other custom things or mechanics.

What do you take in consideration when you make a commercial game? Why would you hate so much on the RTP resources, if the game is done right in every other way?

Thanks!

 

[Zane]

The RTP isn't that bad at all it's how people make use of it. Unfortunatley, you have people who abuse everything about the engine and don't try to learn. Instead it's more of a "Well if I push Game A out I could sell it for X amount of money. I'll be a rich game dev!" Thus you have trash all over the internet, steam being the worst because a lot of hard core critics and trolls hang around there. It's funny too because i've played a few games that had amazing visuals but it was almost non-playable because the rest of the game itself was executed horribly.

As for your question, I don't "hate the RTP" I just wish the artists put a little more thought into ace's tilesets before pushing it out on the market.

 

[Andar]

when steam opened greenlight (and in the case of several other distribution ways), a lot of people with zero experience in game development tried to use that option to spread their idea of their games (which were often incomplete, not to mention bug-ridden) and reacted with hate-posts when someone told them that their game is bad.


That was such a big internet war, that it created a lot of wrong assumptions - but fortunately the communities can learn, and several good RPG-maker-games now have made it into steam, proving that the problems were with the inexperienced developers and not with the engine itself.


But that learning process is not yet complete...

 

[shayoko]

its really simple any adult should be able to understand this


-humans are despicable selfish grimy creatures that wont be satisfied no matter what you do.


-they don't accept other peoples opinion thus want them to like and agree with everything they believe in.


-they judge people they meet for the first time based on their appearance


-they want EVERYTHING in the world to be free even tho that makes the concept of currency pointless.


-they believe in a higher being which can,has and will continue to do = or much worse things then any human could hope to achieve and yet praise this existence as holy,all forgiving and perfect...


The Human race does not make sense,thats the answer

 

[Sharm]

To me the RTP is like a song that gets played to many times on the radio.  It was a very pretty song once, but now I'm just sick of it.  I'm the sort of person who tries to fix the problem instead of complaining that someone should change it so I'm working on providing options and I try to support anyone who's trying to make a game without the RTP.  It bugs me when people just sit and complain though, especially the ones that complain about the price and lack of original graphics in the same breath.

 

[Uzuki]

Frankly, those people that keep ****ting on the RTP are idiots. These are the group of people who bag on a game if it's not running 300 FPS and not using 8000 resolution. I ignore these type of people because they don't care about the game. They just want something shiny. I don't have a problem with the RTP. It's good for being something FREE and it gives you the basics for learning the system. If you plan on going commercial then yes, it's probably best to use your own assists then the RTP, but that doesn't mean get rid of it entirely.

When steam had the greenlight thing going there was ALOT of crap being filtered. This unfortunately tarnished the RM community name when people wanted to make crap work and sell it for real cash. This still stays with us to this day. There are PLENTY of resources that you can use free and commercially.

 

[Arin]

<snip>


And RPG Maker is terrible. It's a good stepping stone towards making better-quality games, but if the best "quality" game that you can put out is something like Star-Stealing Prince, Legionwood, or any other famous RM games, then of the real-world, you're just slightly below average. Most people would rather spend $60 on something with limited functionality than something that costs $1500 that allows you to do anything, mostly because people want things handed to them on a silver platter. That's just the way the world works.


I hate the RTP. I absolutely despise the RTP. But I still use it as placeholders because it's there for me to, you guessed it, placehold something. That's ALL it's supposed to do.


Also bugs are in every game. You have lockups on your consoles all of the time because something didn't initialize right or an improper rule was broken. Why do you have to say that for RPG Maker?


RPG Maker has a pretty small programming language with certainly a lot of functions, but, when compared to something like C or Java, makes Ruby look like an ant in comparison to a lion.


Also, find me ONE review of "To the Moon" that says it was a **** game, because I haven't found it yet. "To the Moon" is not even supposed to be an RPG in it's own right; it's more of a Visual Novel, which goes to show the power of the RPG Maker Engine.

 

[Ratty524]

The problem is that too many commercial developers that use RPG Maker don't even bother to give their game an identity. What makes those AAA big name franchise distinguish themselves so easily from commercial RPG Maker games is that they actually LOOK different. That's a huge selling point, because honestly, the RTP is another person's idea of how a game should look and feel, being recycled over, and over, and over again. Who wants to play that? In that regard, I wouldn't dismiss anyone who makes it gets turned off by RTP graphics and makes it known.

 

[Uzuki]

There's no need to call everyone idiots. And "RPG Maker is terrible"? If that's the case why are you using it? Not everyone has the time, money, and skills to use a $1500 engine. If you're going to spend that much cash on a gaming engine, you might as well quit your job and go all out. Sure when you compare it to AAA games then yeah it's not going to look the best. But most people don't make these games thinking they're going to make it big. It's a hobby, an artistic way of expression, or just something to do on a Sunday afternoon. No one here is trying to make it big.

 

[mlogan]

Arin, I don't understand. If you hate RPGM so terribly much, then WHY on earth are you here?

 

[Galenmereth]

No one here is trying to make it big.

But you definitely can. Granted, using the RTP, you'll probably not reach mass market appeal that easily, but the interesting thing is that the people most tired of the RTP are the people who make games using it. I have quite a few people who help me test my games, and they actually enjoy the visuals–it does help how well you use them, after all. So really, all that's stopping you from "making it big" is making a really, really good game. Within certain confines (max resolution, engine performance limitations and 2d), I can make the engine do mostly anything. I can completely customize everything about it. The reason you don't see many RPG Maker games "make it big" is because most people–like you mentioned earlier–use it as a hobby, and many people stay away from it because of the bad reputation some circles like to give it.

I hope I can manage to buck the trend a bit myself Dream big and all that.

 

[Ratty524]

Arin, I don't understand. If you hate RPGM so terribly much, then WHY on earth are you here?

Where did you get that she hates rpg maker? She's kind of just stating the fact that RPG Maker is terrible.

Well... Maybe I shouldn't use the word "terrible", but it's definitely inferior to most other well-rounded engines.

 

[mlogan]

Hmmm, well she thinks the program is terrible and states that she despises all of the material it comes with. So perhaps I drew inferences, but what's left to like about it if you think so poorly of those two things?

 

[Ratty524]

Hmmm, well she thinks the program is terrible and states that she despises all of the material it comes with. So perhaps I drew inferences, but what's left to like about it if you think so poorly of those two things?

As if the RTP is required to make a game with the engine...

 

[Galenmereth]

Well... Maybe I shouldn't use the word "terrible", but it's definitely inferior to most other well-rounded engines.

That depends though. As an RPG engine, it's superior for 2d development than mostly anything out there, because its scripting support is really good. What it severely lacks is multiplatform support, but last I heard, they're working on it. I have used Unity, UE3, GameMaker, and made my own engines; Ace is definitely not a bad 2d engine. It's compatible with almost any computer capable of running a Windows version, and performs well. Sure there are limitations with events and such, but that's only if you use it without understanding it.

And regarding what Arin said about Ruby being inferior to C; it's slower, but makes development easier because it takes a lot of the manual labor away from you, and it's much easier to read and much more efficient to work with–as a human being. You can, however, "talk" with C using Ruby; their relationship is quite symbiotic. Many people write DLL's and use them with RPG Maker's engines by utilizing this.

 

[Dalph]

I can't believe what I'm reading here, I rolled my eyes so much that they're now at the back of my head.

 

[Scythuz]

I can't believe what I'm reading here, I rolled my eyes so much that they're now at the back of my head.

Indeed >.<  Also everyone, Arin is a he.

 

[Uzuki]

Also when I said "Make it big", I meant with the engine itself. Not saying you can't make money from it, but you sure as hell aren't going to make millions with it.

 

[Galenmereth]

Also when I said "Make it big", I meant with the engine itself. Not saying you can't make money from it, but you sure as hell aren't going to make millions with it.

If I made $100 000 (not likely, but an example) off of an indie game, that would be "making it big" to me. Not an easy task for anyone, using any engine. But the definition of success is relative. Someone got rich making Flappy Bird using Cocoa2D... I get your point though; you can't make AAA games in RPG Maker. But you can't make AAA games without a team of at least fifty or so people these days. So if we're going by relative success here: Making it big for 1 person with a game isn't really so much dependent on the tools; 1 man with Unity, UE4 or RPG Maker has a hamstringed time budget no matter which way you cut it. The engine isn't the bottleneck; the team size is.

 

[Titanhex]

Anidar's statement is probably the simplest, most elegant point made in all this, and the one which should be considered the most.

Arin also has a rather valid point.

RPG Maker is what I call a "prototyping" engine. Great for creating iterations and finalizing the touches on a game, but subpar as the final product of a game.

It's faulted in several ways. First, it doesn't support multi-platform, which many game engines out there do. Even if they are working on it, they're late to the show and we still don't have that very important commercial feature.

It also has limited resolution size. Very limited. Sure, you can bump it up to 640 or so, but the rest of the graphics don't scale well with it unless you do manual changes or the functions are using width instead of a constant number. Ever run it in Full Screen? Yikes. And I think a lot of scripts you'll find are relying on constants.

This greatly limits it's commercial viability as a 2D engine. You're reaching a very small audience because of these limitations.

However, it is a powerful, easy to use engine. It can do a lot gameplay wise. And I mean a lot. RGSS is robust and powerful. Ruby is also gaining incredible viability in the programming world. Ever heard of Ruby on Rails? Well, it's actually a popular web programing language.

People bring up C and C# and Python without knowing enough about them. RPG Maker is coded in C. You don't code actual games in C though. You code the software in C. That's not how it works. I'm no genius, but I've read design books by professionals. Sounds to me like you code the base software in a language that has specific features, and then create the scripts from another language with features that support the game design. But that's left to true programmers who are probably in nice software developer jobs.

Tweaking the engine isn't that hard. You can break the limitation of RPG and go action-adventure, survival horror, exploration, space invader, anything 2D really. That's because it uses a universal game programming structure. The eventing is both simple to learn and powerful to use. It integrates very well with scripting too, unlocking additional potential.

So take it or leave it, that's what I know.