I'm Josh Bycer, thanks for checking out Game Wisdom! I’m a Game Design author and analyst who has interviewed video game developers for more than 10 years about game design, development, publishing, and a host of important gaming industry issues.
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If Nintendo and TPC Ruin Gaming For Us Older Fans, We Should Boycott Nintendo, The Switch 2 And The New Pokemon Games Until They Stop Making Crappy Games And Selling Us Crappy Games For $60...
What this lawsuit has already caused is mistrust of Nintendo and lawyers to advise game studios and developers to check out which game mechanics Nintendo owns patents and and then either request a written license for them or avoid using those same mechanics in their own games to make sure that they don't get into trouble. Of course, this is a challenging and limiting factor for the gaming industry, but if enough imagination, creativity, ingenuity and originality are used, there will certainly be new ways to implement future video games. So all hope is not lost in these uncertain times and there is still some wiggle room. For example, in the article I read today, it was said that patents for game mechanics developed in the 70s and 80s are already so old that their patents have already expired.
i do find it funny that nintendo only bullies these games that do their thing better than they ever could, for a soulless company they sure are insecure.
If I could take a moment of your time to get a thought; Ive been working on building an RPG for the better part of 2 decades on and off, with multiple iterations (TTRPG, TTwar game, card game, and most recently as a video games) The concept Im using for the class system could be best described as "Hyper Classing" at it's core the game will be a classless start with player working on developing stats to access basic skills/spells/abilities instead of leveling as a specific class. As certain stat benchmarks are reached, and depending on race/region/deity, players will be able to take initial "Foundational" classes. As they become more proficient in that class and increase their stat points, they can gain access to higher tiers of classes which blur the lines of the traditional archetypes by combine/building on specific elements of the previous classes. Examples; Pyromancer requires Elementalist and Monk Priest requires Acolyte and Cleric Hunter requires Fighter and Ranger Dusk Blade requires Assassin and Psychic Hexatrix requires Dusk Blade and Witch Doctor Barbarian requires Witch Doctor and Fighter Artificer requires Runic Sage and Squire Magnetrope requires Geomancer and Monk and many many many other comibinations
It sounds like a similar concept of something like the original Wizardry, but replacing "stock classes" with everyone being classless at the start. With this idea, are the higher tier combos better than their lower tier full class. IE: is a hunter a better fighter and ranger or simply combines the talents of the two?
The original guild wars had the best class system ever IMO. The skill tree options + multiclassing means you could be whatever you wanted in a very refined way. My necro/hunter was the most fun I ever had playing a game.
yeah I think knowing how to introduce core mechanics, building on that fundamental, and then understanding what new ideas you'll explore and abilities you'll learn to keep the interest curve high. That's going to be vital for any game regardless of its difficulty.
Nihon Falcom is one of the few developers whose work I seek out. Tokyo Xanadu goes more toward Persona. I got almost to the end, didn't manage to get a relationship to the level I wanted, took a break, and took so long to get back that I eventually uninstalled. I found it decent overall. I just don't mix well with games that want me on their schedule.
" I just don't mix well with games that want me on their schedule." This is why I was not a fan of state of decay or any game that has real world timers. One game I did like but couldn't play it because of it was Entity Researchers, as your ability to find new characters was based on the real-world timer.
I have only played a couple RPG games thus far and I really enjoyed their story so I keep coming back to the genre. having said that I have had a hard time understanding and doing well with the RPG battle system. I just started playing the remake of final fantasy tactics and lots of what I heard is that the game is pretty easy and has a good story but I did not feel like I had a good handle on the RPG elements and statistics of it. The classes involved in the game seemed multiple and I did not think it was very clear as to why I would want one character to be one class or another. I appreciate your breakdown of the purpose of a class and I do think I understand it better now, I will get back to the game as soon as I'm able to and I will do my best to stick with it 👍🏽
Lots of good points but I dont believe its as complicated as some people think. Look at the seemingly overnight success of The First Descendant, a game that came out of nowhere for most people. Compare TFD to Concord who used the strategy of putting lipstick on a pig.
"Rise, warrior!" This game made all the right calls when it came to making it more immediately fun and more accessible than the first one. Great job devs, I love it! It could still be smoother but the biggest concerns ppl had will be helped by the first patch. I found a way around those pesky reapers, Josh. : D
Even if the character design was good, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League showed genre fatigue is real. If it was a Guardians of the Galaxy adventure game or a 20 hour action game it would have had a chance. My goodness, this Steam Page is a mess, failing basic graphic design.
Might it relate to experience? For example, the last thing a beginning visual arts student should have is a strong sense of taste and style, since they lack the experience and practice to form their tastes from experience. Visual Arts schools deliberately discourage young students from drawing with a strong sense of taste and style, instead getting them to focus on drawing things accurately as they appear in the real world. At the same time, they teach students art history, exposing them to the widest range of artistic styles, movements, tastes, and even philosophies throughout history. But at the same time, after students graduate and become entrenched in the field, they are generally supposed to develop a very strong sense of taste, style, and philosophy about the nature of art which makes their work very distinguishably their own: that's the case with all the most successful fine artists and illustrators. In a similar sense, a virgin who has never dated anyone should not have a very concrete idea of what type of person they want to date and marry, since they lack the experience. They don't know what they truly want (what they think they want might not be what they actually want) and should develop more experience while keeping their minds open. At the same time, by the time they make a decision to marry someone, they should absolutely know to a great degree precisely what they like and don't like, since they are about to make a lifelong commitment to a person. While I would be very worried if someone brand new to game design is so stubborn and strongly opinionated in exactly what they like and dislike and want and don't want in their designs, at the same time I would also be worried if someone very experienced who has been working 20 years in the field designing games, e.g., still hasn't reached that point since it suggests to me that despite all this experience, they still haven't developed a strong sense of taste and style of their own. The way I've generally looked at it is that being very strongly and stubbornly opinionated weights someone's success towards extreme success or extreme failure. Being very open-minded tends to weight people towards neither extreme, so it tends to be well-suited for inexperienced people who are trying find to make a modicum of success. But once they start to really figure out exactly what suits their personal preferences, and they are starting to become increasingly successful expressing those preferences in their designs, that's when I think it suits them to start shifting gears and even closing their minds to a degree so that they can start to become true visionary designers with a very discernible style of their own.
