I recently spoke to an original game designer Shamon/KeyWielder000, he thinks his game is superior because he has 40+ gamers that are never on simultaneously after 3 months of work. So I decided to forward to him a wake-up call from MY mind. Though it may have been harsh, he tried fronting by typing correctly AFTER I mentioned that he made many serious grammar problems.
He thinks NPC means No Computer Player. NCP?
Nevertheless, onto the actual meaning of this post.
Game designers out there, grinding games are NOT very attractive to good gamers. Maybe a newbie to BYOND will play it for about 2-5 weeks and them realize that it's a never ending loop. I'm going to give you what I think would stop grinding.
Storyline.First off if I log onto a game and have no clue what's going on in the world, it leads me to believe all I have to do is kill(usually only in RP games). So here's a "Versus List".
Deep vs vague, if you make it vague it's just about the same as having NO storyline at all. Give a deep explanation of what's happening even if it's 1000's of pages long.
Long vs short, well this one is iffy. If you make it too long it could bore the players before the prologue even ends. But if it's short and fast, it'll go by too quickly and player's might miss VALUABLE information needed later on.
Types of enemies. Now this plays a dazzling role in how grinding comes out. Perhaps you could make completely impossible enemies and completely easy ones. If a player has to avoid an impossible monster while fighting an easy one. He'll probably just avoid both and it'll stop how often he comes to kill.
Spawn times. THE MOST IMPORTANT PART! Now, you want a decent spawn time right? 30+ minutes sounds like too much. 20- is too little. Now try out Sigrogana Legend, people camp for monsters instead of RP'ing. Why? Because they must wait an hour before they can kill monsters and if they don't leap for the chance they'll have to wait ANOTHER hour.
But if it's too short like let's say...1 minute. They WILL grind, they WILL get bored, they WILL not RP.
Extra Things:
Characters. First off you want to make dynamic and static characters. You don't want characters constantly saying or doing the same things over and over unless it's a noticeable action or phrase. Here's some tips.
A good attractive idea is a plot-twist, like the main characters best friend or foe switching sides. It catches players off guard and keeps them reeled into the story until they find out. Which is probably a while later into the game.
Another good idea is impossible situations. For instance, Player A must save Player B in the kingdom in the north within 5 minutes, and it takes 3 minutes to get there. Player C spawns and must be saved and rescued in 2 minutes.
Perhaps forcing the player to lose so that a scene comes up. This could be good OR bad depending on how you do it, maybe even how often.
Be original for pete's sakes. No one wants a story that MIGHT as well be Suikoden 3's storyline or FF 10's story. We want a new one! That's about it for now.
ID:151861
 Dec 20 2008, 4:33 pm
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Lummox JR wrote: This is actually not entirely true. True enough, no one can argue that D&D influenced the RPG genre more than any other RPG. But, to be honest, people only copy very minor parts from it. Usually the "level up is character growth" part. What they failed to copy was actual content and stuff to do, because if they did, grinding would not exist at all. If you read some of the published adventure books for D&D, you'd see that an average D&D quest is actually very complex, none of them are "go kill 10 monsters/collect 10 items". Infact, the most simple quest I can find is still complex enough that it needs 10 A4 pages to explain it all. Some of the more complex quests are books with hundreds of pages (one of them is actually 800 pages long), and are actually more complex and indepth than some full RPGs are, and could probably be turned into an actual main storyline for such an RPG. But, what they all share in common is one thing. None of them need you to grind in any way, shape or form. You will never need to sit down and kill endless hordes of monsters, or collect countless items just to get strong enough to progress with the quest. The problem is not with D&D and how it influenced things. The problem is that people took elements of D&D, and simplified them, simplified them to the point where they lost any and all depth they may have previously had. Anyway, my advise is simple. If you want a game that is not a grinding game, you're going to have to give it more depth than just "kill/collect stuff". If you are making a game where the storyline, quests and any objectives revolve around entirely around killing/collecting stuff... You will invariably end up with a grinding game, regardless of how fancy looking you make it. | |
The concept of levels might be best done away with in a more modern, serious RPG, and replaced with generated quests--ones with a fairly rich random/procedural design. I grant this is very difficult to do well and to do exceptionally well it'd require people to keep coming up with new "pieces" of content and structure for such quests, but it's doable. A game that used this as the sole means of achievement could generate quests that are unique to each individual, giving out achievement badges for each one--and also, adding to NPCs' lore and the history of the world. You could be the talk of the tavern somewhere, even gain a reputation that precedes you.
Each mission/quest could be very different in style, with some focusing on combat and some being things like rescue or escort missions, or seeking out a lost artifact. The types of missions you're offered would depend on what you've achieved and the stats of your character; some offers might come based on reputation and meant for you specifically, while others might be offered only to people who've achieved some variation of X or Y. Going to a tavern or interacting with NPCs in some other way after a mission can spread the word about you, and even failures can be beneficial--like if you faced a dragon and lost the fight but got away with your life, that's valuable experience and could even be used as a combat modifier in your next dragon fight. So when the quest engine generates a scenario where the mayor's daughter was snatched by a dragon, and you're a guy who's known to have some experience with dragons and pretty good at stealth, you might be offered the mission where other players won't. And the generator would keep churning stuff out, so for any player there'd always be several quests to choose from.
Basically what I'm getting at is a leveling/experience system that's based solely on quests, and variety could actually be very helpful for that, but specializing wouldn't be bad either, so if you liked combat a lot you'd get a lot of combat missions offered to you. This also has the potential to create some truly rich worlds.
The best games generate stories--that is, things happen that you can't help but want to tell people about. In this concept, your actions in the game generate stories within the game world, which opens new paths for you to develop your character and your story.
Lummox JR