What makes a good computer role play game? If I was to start out programming one now, what should I consider?

I have never made a RPG before but i heard that "Programming Role-Playing Games with DirectX " was not a bad book, may be u should try it.
Hope it helps!

...have you ever played any RPGs? Go do so. Then you''ll probably at least have a decent idea of what you want. ESPECIALLY some old ones.

Thanks for the suggestions. Can you recommend any good old ones, and what was good about them?

If you want some excellent 2D RPGs download a SNES emulator and try some of them, you also buy a SNES but most of the RPGs are now way too rare or expensive. Some good games for SNES were Chrono Trigger, Legend of Mana, Final Fantasy 3/6, Terranigma or even Zelda: Link to the Past. The best way to understand what a good RPG is, is to just play RPGs. Good or bad you'll learn something.

[edited by - Punx on July 4, 2002 4:13:39 AM]

I think that the most important is trying to make virtual world like real. That means there should be a lot of choices, many things to do. That will cause the role play. Also to allow player to have influance on world.
Other thing is GOOD story .

Red_Baron
Free Hand Engine

A good RPG has a lot of variety, a lot of choices, some of the important and some not very. It would never force a player to do anything to advance story, nor would it need to. Also, it should have many, many skills and abilities. Each should make some parts of the game easier, but none should ever be required. I would suggest no classes, but perhaps have a list of "Advantages" that could recreate classes. For example, perhapse one advantage is that the character is adept with a certain type of magic(summoning, enchantment, item creation, etc), another lets the character specialize in a specific class of weapons (axes, long swords, short swords/daggers, standard bludgening, etc) to do more damage, and allow 2 or 3 selections from that list so a player could chose to specialize in a weapon class, shields, and armor to be a stereotypical fighter, or all kinds of magic to be a cliche mage, or if they wanted they could specialize in weapons and item creation to be able to fight well and make magic items to use. The point is to make lots of choices, all of them playable. I suggest that for things like magic, I suggest allowing custom creation of spells by using some algorithm and maybe runes or something that can be combined in billions of ways to get a lot of different effects. Also, if done properly, even the designer wouldnt know many of combinations to start with, so magic would be truly rare and mysterious to start with (but it only works for an mmorpg where the world is persistant, so people can discover the combinations).

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quote:

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Original post by Punx
Some good games for SNES were Chrono Trigger, Legend of Mana , Final Fantasy 3/6, Terranigma or even Zelda: Link to the Past.

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Legend of Mana is a PS game. However there is a game called Secret of Mana on SNES.

The cRPG's I've most liked this far all have a good plot and interesting characters.


[edited by - rk on July 4, 2002 12:51:16 PM]

Out of all this Im getting the feeling that the some of the most important considerations include freedom of choice, variety, and a good story. To some extent though, I feel that story and freedom are at odds with one another.

What is more important, a strong story (such as in the FF series) or freedom of choice (such as the Bards Tale games)?

I'm not an expert game designer. I only have thought of making a RPG in my spare time a long time now. These are the important parts I noticed when reading or thinking about how to design my game:


The first question is: do you want to make a good RPG which you like most, which you had ever dreamed of? Or do you want to make a good selling, comercial RPG which will be played by many other people.

The path you should go is quite equal for both decisions, but there are some differences.

- Play as many RPGs as you can. I've played:
* Diablo I/II: hack and slay. This will give you some ideas about combat, the (very) large amount of items, and so on ...
* Might and magic: This will give you ideas about much freedom, a story which is very complex, but where you are not forced to follow the story, the bad graphic quality which doesn't really care, playing as a group of people...
* Ultima Online: also very much freedom, the interaction with other players, gaining skills and attribs without LVL up - system, ...
* Baldurs gate: (I haven't played that very much) very complex story, where you are forced to follow at least some parts of it, round based combat, ...
* and some other RPGs where I can't remember the title :-)

- After playing very much, think what things you have found in all the games you have played. For example:
* In nearly every game you need Mana for casting spells.
* Skills and attributes gained by
-> LVL up after you have enough experience
-> By doing anything which requires one skill
and so on. Think about every part and think about what system you liked best. Think about the reason why you like it best, and why you don't like the others. Think about the parts which were equal in nearly every game (mana for spells, money gained by killing monsters and making quests), and think about the reason why they are always the same. If you don't like any system you know for one part, then think about alternatives. For example I'm tired of the use of mana for casting spells. It's needed to have a maximum number of spells you can cast in a specific periode. I think that there are some alternatives to this. For example:
A spell doesn't take 1-2 seconds to cast, and you can't cast another spell shortly after that. It can take half a minute to cast, and you can't cast another spell for 5 minutes.

- If you have the feeling, that you can make the only REAL and TRUE RPG, think about this feeling, think about the reason why you have the oppinion that one of your ideas is better than another system used for RPGs in common. This is very important if you want to make the RPG for yourself.

- Read many articles about designing RPGs, postmortems of RPGs and so on. Reading this articles will give you some ideas about psychological aspects you should think of, when designing an RPG. I think the Diablo II postmortom (can be found on www.gamasutra.com) is one of the most usefull articles. I don't really like Diablo II, but it is built on psychological aspects. You gain rewards all the time, you know allways what you have to do next, there is allways action, ...
Reading articles is very important if you want to go a commercial path.


Hope this helps ...

[edited by - Lyr on July 5, 2002 8:15:50 AM]