I was playing Knights of The old republic, the other day and I noticed that it had a number of very good functional elements, they had nothing to do with gameplay but they defintly add to the overall quality of the game. So I thought it might be helpful to all the other desginers out there to come up with list of functional elements the improve game quality. 1)Ability to save/load at basically any time 2)Save games organized chronoliclly. 3)Ability to replay the game cinematic from the menu 4)Giving NPC past and personalities that can be discoverd my convercing with them. As well as have NPC enganging in coversations with each. 5)Mini games that further fleshout the game world. ----------------------------------------------------- Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades Current Design project Chaos Factor Design Document

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Original post by TechnoGoth
1)Ability to save/load at basically any time
2)Save games organized chronoliclly.
3)Ability to replay the game cinematic from the menu
4)Giving NPC past and personalities that can be discoverd my convercing with them. As well as have NPC enganging in coversations with each.
5)Mini games that further fleshout the game world.

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Your saying these things should be in most games but many of them are far too specific for that.
- Tetris (or any of the other puzzle games) wouldn''t benefit from any of the above - although some might argue that being able to pause/save might be nice when you have to get off the bus.
- Racing games wouldn''t benefit from any of the above either.

So although I don''t think there are particular features that should be in most games but I do agree with your basic concept. Every genre of game probably has features that should be standard for that genre.



Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions (www.obscure.co.uk)
Game Development & Design consultant

1) this depends on the game. it can lead to "save, try something nearly impossible and fail, and repeat until you get lucky", which defeats the purpose of playing anyway.

2) this is useful i guess, but i''d rather be able to name the saved game (i.e. "just got to tatooine", "gonna fight boss #3", etc).

3) agreed (once it was seen in-game).

4) this only applies to RPGs. but, it was neat in that game (and nothing new, ultima 7 (and probably others) did this years and years ago).

5) eh, no mini-games is better than shitty mini-games. for example, it was a waste of time fighting the tie fighters in KoToR; no matter how long it took they didn''t actually damage my ship, but i still had to shoot all of them before i could get to the next planet. this should have been left out or made more challenging or something. pazaak was fun though.

just my opinion of course.