OK, let me amend my original proposals based on your guys' comments.

#1 -- Perhaps I simply need both. Casual gamers make up such a large portion of the market, I may need to have some kind of bonus for players opting to play the "hard way" without quest pointers. I still want to provide some way to play the game "as it was meant to be played" and a reward for doing so. Casual players generally don't care about that 100% flawless run and can simply enable quest assistance and mini-maps. Thoughts on that?

#2 -- I should have mentioned this originally. I definitely do not support huge wastelands where there is nothing to be found. Scenery is nice, but I would virtually never build a location strictly for the sight-seers. When I say I want a big world, I mean that I want tons for the player to do. I want caves with chests, unique enemies, hidden unique items, etc. I do not want land just for the sake of land. I like MrMorley's idea in that the player can receive fair warning regarding the danger of a given region through subtle cues.

#3 -- Yeah, I would keep numbers on the player. Stats on weapons and whatnot is just too important as several of you have highlighted. And heck, I like it that way anyway. I would focus on keeping the enemies obscure.

#4 -- Everyone seems to be in agreement on this. It's an RPG. It needs a good story. The player needs to feel a part of the story and at least feel motivated to push that story along (even if he/she ultimately had no real power to change its course). I believe the key here is to get the player excited about what's going on.

#5 -- This would obviously be lower on the priority list than the other goals. Scripting parts of the world to radically change as time progresses would indeed be very taxing on all developers involved. I guess it just depends on the type of world you are trying to build.

About #1 - What's to stop people from playing it through with quest pointers and then playing it through again "the hard way" once they know what to do?

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Original post by TheBuzzSaw OK, let me amend my original proposals based on your guys' comments. #1 -- Perhaps I simply need both. Casual gamers make up such a large portion of the market, I may need to have some kind of bonus for players opting to play the "hard way" without quest pointers. I still want to provide some way to play the game "as it was meant to be played" and a reward for doing so. Casual players generally don't care about that 100% flawless run and can simply enable quest assistance and mini-maps. Thoughts on that?

Yeah, both could be a good idea. Maybe just have the helpers on a lower difficulty level and reward the higher level with a higher XP multiplier (or similar)?

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Original post by TheBuzzSaw #2 -- I should have mentioned this originally. I definitely do not support huge wastelands where there is nothing to be found. Scenery is nice, but I would virtually never build a location strictly for the sight-seers. When I say I want a big world, I mean that I want tons for the player to do. I want caves with chests, unique enemies, hidden unique items, etc. I do not want land just for the sake of land. I like MrMorley's idea in that the player can receive fair warning regarding the danger of a given region through subtle cues.

I've never played it, but I've heard that Daggerfall (or maybe its predecessor) suffered from that. A massive land-mass to explore, but basically all of the villages were exactly the same.

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Original post by Storyyeller About #1 - What's to stop people from playing it through with quest pointers and then playing it through again "the hard way" once they know what to do?

Nothing. In my opinion, it's just one of those things not worth stressing over. The option would just be there for those who want it. I can only hope that the game is big enough to where the player forgets where a few things are. Plus, it's not like these things would be brutally hidden. As far as anything that is hidden out in the wild, I am really considering have some parts of the world be hand-crafted while others are dynamically generated.

Even if I pulled the guide system entirely, what's to stop them from using GameFAQs? Ultimately, I cannot control the player. I can only build the best experience I can.

I was thinking about this last year too, and decided that RPGs would be greatly improved if you took out stats and leveling up and forced the player to actually be good at the game instead of just letting them grind through it or rely on stat boosts or whatever.

Wrote an engine for said game. Yet to actually MAKE said game, though.

The thing about leveling is that it gives the users a great way to choose their own difficulty levels. If you want an easy game, grind, if you want more of a challenge, don't grind. Plus, it gives the players a sense of physical development. The final boss battle should feel more "epic", in a sense, than the first boss battle, and that requires both the boss and the character(s) to be stronger.

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Original post by TheBuzzSaw #3 -- the game's technical details and numbers need to be hidden away -- While it is fun to analyze weapons using various numerical measurements (damage, speed, fire damage, chance to cause X, etc.), more of the world should be abstracted away. When observing enemies, seeing "200/200 HP" gives away too much regarding its vitality. If anything, the ability to see exact numbers should be a special ability or tool. It is much more interesting when opponents display "healthy, barely wounded, wounded, near-death, etc.". This forces the player to make an attempt to see how fast the target takes damage and retreat if necessary.

No it doesn't. It just forces me through an even more laborious process of noting down how much damage my items do.

Hiding numbers doesn't improve the game. I am capable of enjoying the game's fiction even with great big numbers attached to everything, just like I am capable of enjoying a story when I know full well it's just ink printed on wood pulped into a thin sheet.

What taking the numbers away does do is make it much harder to see what sort of influence your choices have on the game. By all means, use other ways of providing similar feedback, whether that is sound, text, animation, whatever. But merely stripping off the numbers improves nothing. Replacing the numbers with vague descriptions just makes it harder to reason about what is going on and how well you're doing. The gameplay is all about allowing you to make choices and to see how they change the pattern of play. Don't cripple that.

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Original post by MeshGearFox I was thinking about this last year too, and decided that RPGs would be greatly improved if you took out stats and leveling up and forced the player to actually be good at the game instead of just letting them grind through it or rely on stat boosts or whatever. Wrote an engine for said game. Yet to actually MAKE said game, though.

Sounds a lot like Zelda. Aside from Zelda II, Link never has XP, levels, or skills. His hearts are all physical items in the game. Ironically, many people do not consider Zelda to be any form of RPG. Personally, I would love a true RPG built in the spirit Zelda (no stats, etc.). I am a huge fan of loot-centric games where the items themselves almost serve as characters in the game because of how distinct and useful they are. (Add onto the fact that whenever Link finds one, he makes it the most glorious occasion ever. I love that song.)

3. I love to check the stats of my equipment. Playing a game without that would be pretty annoying. Although, your later posts seem to suggest that you just want to hide the enemies info now.

I really like having as much info about the enemy as possible. It allows for the creation of a much more tactical battle system. I loved FFX's and the Xenosaga series' battle systems. In both, you could scan the enemy for the health and they even showed you when the enemy intended to attack next. Xenosaga also showed you the enemies' weakness and possible drops. With so much info given to the user, the developers can make much smarter enemies because the player can make much smarter decisions.

In a more realtime system, I enjoy having health bars to I can see how effective my attacks are. If you just had that "health, wounded, near death" system, it would be tough to tell if I was too underleveled for the fight.

You might want to check out Monster Hunter. There are no health bars on the enemies in that game, and you can break/chop off parts of their bodies (which shows they are injured) and they will start limping when low on health. No health bars is really the only thing I don't like about the game.

4. I don't think an RPG story really needs to be flexible. Flexible stories are much harder to make interesting. There's nothing wrong with having a really good story that is completely laid out for you to just follow along.

5. I love interactive worlds. I hated the day/night cycles in OoT though. Just missing the castle gate as it changed from day to night sucked. When that happened, it was time to run in a circle for 5 minutes while you waited for dawn.

Any kind of periodic event tends to be annoying for the player. Running across the world to check if some vendor might be there, only to find that he's not there right now is just annoying.

But seeing the world change because of your actions through the game is pretty cool.

#3 -- I would keep numerical stats on your own loot. I was only referring to numbers outside your character. You can still go online and look up monster stats, but there should be less information (short of using an ability) when actually playing the game. Diablo II, for example, shows only health bars on enemies. I did not mean to imply that all numbers should be eradicated everywhere.

#4 -- We both agree. We just used different words. I specifically noted that a story does not have to have big forks or a dozen alternate endings. I'm just saying that there should be more than one way to push the story along. Maybe I need to elaborate on that more...

#5 -- Yeah, that's more what I'm aiming for. I agree that day/night cycles are incredibly obnoxious. I just feel that the world needs to be changing in some manner that improves the experience.