Personally, not a big fan of RPGs, too unfocused.. action-adventures are better IMO. It would be interesting to have the player as one of maybe a dozen Heroes who do "quests". They either compete or cooperate. At some point in the game it becomes necessary to co-operate with other "hero characters", or to choose which path to take (when there are is a need for simultaneous action in several places, I will need to choose whether to attack the power-station or the witches lair). Ie. There is enough choice to make it feel as if you are playing an important role in the story.

Reminds me somehow of the Baldur''s Gate series.

That reminds me of Saga Frontier

-- Steve --

Reminds me that MMO games just need to have some extra thought put into the "evolving storyline" that we see in all of them. I think it would be interesting for games to have sort of a tide of large scale action. One where every so often the designers through in a large stem of events that last for a little while (say a month or so) that the players need to work together to solve, and then take another month or so off so that players can sort of spread out and do thier own thing. As it stands right now, most of the GM events, or storry happenings i tend to miss since they only last a couple of hours on one day. (though i''m not sure how exactly this would happen)

Anyone ever play a Game Cube game called Eternal Darkness? (Dunno if it was ever released for any other systems) It had a small release, not a lot of press, but got very good reviews... Anyway, it's an action-adventure game where the central character (in a present-day setting) reads through books to find out the reason for her grandfather (uncle? Some relative...) getting killed. Every time the player starts reading the book, the game displays what she's reading graphically. Then, you assume the role of the character in the book and play that out. Things you do in the book stories effects the other stories, and effects the world outside of the books. (There's also things like insanity effects that propegate from the book-character back to the main character, which is odd but works very well in this story.) It's a very well done game, and if you have a Cube, I suggest playing it...

However, Ketchaval, I'm not sure I get your "too unfocused" comment about RPGs... please elaborate.



Robert-- here's the problem: I've often thought that MMO games are bad because of lack of plot, evolving/intriguing storyline, inclusive events, etc. The problem is it is really hard to organize events that can and will involve everyone playing, with 10,000 players online at any given time, hundreds of thousands not online. Usually if they last a long time and can involve everybody, they're so general that they're uninteresting. And... there's no incentive to change it! Thousands of players are happy-- and happily pay their $12/mo. Who are we, the handful of players who want something more, to cause them to spend many hours and many dollars setting up storylines and events, when they wouldn't recover the money lost on our subscriptions? It may be something important in the future, when there are so many MMOGs out there that they need to do something to make them better than the rest... but for now, just give people a world and thousands of unrelated quests and they'll fork over the subscription fee.


-Desco-


[edited by - Desco on June 2, 2003 3:53:15 PM]

Reminds me a little of Romancing SaGa n(there are at least 3 I think...).

It is a pretty nice idea, would work pretty well... at least if you have the choice to kill off the other heroes >

I''ll refer back to my previous post on quests and say that games definately need some group quests, and some multi-group (guild) quests.

This sounds a lot like a troll or someone who just doesn''t know much about game design. It''s called an MMO, dude.

Edward Ropple:

It is not an MMO (although it takes some ideas and places them in a 1p context), since what I am describing would be a mixture of semi-freedom and linear narrative.

Something along the lines of Fable, possibly with a narrative structured like Black & White . Silver quests = rewards (and heroes can compete over them). Gold quest = major plot advancement.