I need some help here- I always see these super dedicated groups like the morrowind/daggerfall enjoyers, fallout 1&2 people, witcher 1/2 people and many other dedicated smaller fanbases dogging on modern action RPGs for all kinds of reasons- I'm a game developer making an action adventure game with RPG elements in it right now and I'm hoping for some wisdom- what do modern games seem to just lack? what common pitfalls do you see in them that just suck? what would you focus on if you were making a game? are there any unique or near unique strengths/features/focuses you've seen in a game from the past that just hasn't been nailed since? I'd like to know.

>>3773928 (OP)
third person view is ass i don't want to play a computer game with a nintendo controller

>>3773928 (OP)
Have you considered that a lot of those fans fundamentally don't like the pivots their franchises/the genre as a whole have taken? It'd be like asking someone who only likes Fallout 3 and 4 how to make isometric turn-based RPGs.

>>3773928 (OP)
If you're a single person dev, this is a bad type of game to work on. Extreme amounts of work and different skillsets involved.
If you're some senior or even mid level designer, this should be roughly known to you or be learned with basic designer research.

It's also too broad of a question, involving multiple camera angles and ways of play. For example both Witcher 3 and Elden Ring are 3rd person, but play vastly differently and are structured differently.
First person combat is a bad camera to pick if you want good melee combat (or combat in general apart from shooting), but it's also the one where it's easiest to improve upon because almost all first person fantasy type games have shit combat and doesn't require as much animation work and such on the player character.
3rd person or even top down are better angles for good combat, but also involve a lot more work and will be held to the standards of other games, without a good team this is a bad idea.

But the most important thing which most people, including many devs, fail to understand is that execution and polish is lightyears more important than some unique or interesting idea. There's an infinite graveyard of games where people thought good or interesting ideas is enough, but it's badly polished and jank.

Also, this board is a very bad place to ask for design advice. Even if a few professional devs rarely post here.

>>3773928 (OP)
>what common pitfalls do you see in them that just suck?

Common problems:

1) The main character not being flexible/customizable enough in terms of personality because it is voiced instead of speaking by text only.

2) The factions and the characters are often flavorless because if you make them have taboo or offensive beliefs that contradict the current zeitgeist your own development team is going to be upset. Or even worse, the person who writes the story doesn't even want to write a story with said beliefs

>we have this warlord
>why, yes, he supports gender and racial equality, like every good warlord

3) The spectrum of choices not being radical enough. You want to save those elves? Cool. You want to sacrifice them to the blood gods to become more powerful. Also cool.

>>3773928 (OP)
Modern games are like common tier fan fiction. The kind of stuff that gets slop IP/franchise spinoff series on some streaming network. It's not like the old ones weren't goofy either, like old sword and sorcery movies were all goofy, but they were good. They were good because they gave people something they probably wanted but didn't have. The problem with most modern action slop is that nobody asked.

>>3773944
Racial and gender equality have always been good warlord strategies though.

>>3773928 (OP)
If you're working on a sequel try to stay as faithful to the original game as you possibly can. Bring back old features, even if they're bad, no one can complain about these since they'd have to admit they dislike something about their favorite game. The pre-concieved notions of the original fans will translate into sales. You may also be able to apply this kind of thinking if you're making a new IP of a familiar setting, but only for certain features here and there since you're game won't sell if it's not unique.

>>3773954
I don't know if they were good but they certainly were not common at all. Warlordism itself is a typical pre-industrial/underdeveloped country phenomenon and those types of country certainly usually don't/didn't practice gender and racial equality

>>3773944
>>why, yes, he supports gender and racial equality, like every good warlord
If you had said some raider boss you might have a point, but in war using rights, privileges, now allowing rape or whatever could often be used as a effectively tools of manipulation. Sometimes even as a pretext.

Warfare by default is political.

>>3773960
>now allowing rape

If you think not allowing rape is effective, imagine how effective it is to allow it

Just open an history book, my friend

You need to appeal to the majority. White Men. Give me a game where I can rape all the minorities and kill them. Preferably high fantasy

>>3773928 (OP)
>morrowind/daggerfall enjoyers, fallout 1&2 people, witcher 1/2 people and many other dedicated smaller fanbases dogging on modern action RPGs for all kinds of reasons
They probably like a game that's more about numbers than action.

Just give them a stat screen with superficial complexity. Name stamina "ENDURANCE" and give it a description that tickles their imagination.

>>3773967
Do you think that's really the case- or do people just like knowing they have an impact on the numbers that really matter to the gameplay?

>>3773936
I have considered this- I've just also noticed many of those fans- say in the fallout series- despite changing from iso to third/first person hybrid still enjoyed new vegas and some spurn FO3/4- it tells me there might be something deeper than just how wildly different 1/2 are from 3/4, of course there are large differences, but I'm thinking of the more nuanced things that will let them enjoy a game like FO:NV despite those big changes.

>>3773955
>try to stay as faithful to the original game as you possibly can. Bring back old features, even if they're bad
This is retarded advice. Objectively bad.
The only relevant thing to say here is that player perception is what matters (not reality) and you should never do bad things simply because old games did it.
You isolate the elements which are the most important to include and a few easy to implement token things to have, then you try to make them evoke the emotional reaction you want while focusing on quality.
Even people that think they're rational and level headed are subject to bias an emotions way more than they think and are even aware of. Because newsflash, people are not robots.

>The pre-concieved notions of the original fans will translate into sales
It doesn't. It's not that simple at all.

>>3773940
Previous experience in mid size studios, worked on 3 shipped titles, the game is spec'd to my scope and a 4 year dev cycle for me. You'd be surprised how simple questions like "what don't people like about this" can be super effective- yeah, there are really visible answers that you can see just by doing some basic research, but simple answers to simple questions motivate designers to provide equally simple solutions. "
p1: "Why didn't the players like us changing characters for the second act?"
p2: "They just don't know them yet."
p3: "Oh, okay- let's just add more of their backstory into act 1."
now the players are still enjoying act 1, just getting more backstory for act 2's protagonist- and all is well. Unless the reason they don't like the protag from act 2 is because they just don't like their design or feel it's too similar to act 1's. It's a jumble.
I did ask obvious questions, and I know it's easy to say this place sucks for opinions- but I just don't think that. No one goes on the internet to a place like this to talk shit or praise their most loved/loathed games because they aren't worth listening to. I'd rather ask here than in other places, where the hostility isn't earned. At least here I know the person telling me to kill myself truly believes that Tear Ring Saga is the greatest game ever made and nothing else compares. That's interesting to me.

>>3773944
1. Flexibility- that's interesting. Do you think you'd rather cut all of the main character's voice lines just for the sake of more options for dialogue? Does it feel "more expressive" to not hear them in your eyes?

2. Flavorlessness- luckily, I'm alone. And I don't care if I offend anyone with what I write. "Bad guy is actually bad." the whole room gasps. I don't know if that's actually true though. I feel if we just avoid doing the whole bad guy's story has one of the big 3 traumas so he's actually an anti hero bullshit the audience will accept them being genuinely bad with evil intent. I don't know why writers are so addicted to making villains... not actually villainous. Maybe because in basic writing class in college they're told to "subvert expectations of common narratives" but that advice was old by the time 2003 came around and now the common narrative is that the villain is sympathetic. What's the best way to present Evil that is believable without making them a sympathy case do you think?

>>3773973
What do you think is a good system that came around in a sequel that was absent from the previous game in the series, any stand out to you?

>>3773935
Do you mean third person for action games? you'd prefer first? or do you just mean for rpgs in general you prefer top down or isometric or other views as a whole?

>>3773969
What sort of numbers do you have in your game?

>>3773991
Pokemon style some elements are super effective against others system but in a real-time action context. so we have things like attack, defense, special attack special defense, evasiveness- then on top of that you have weapon types which augment those in different ways, and spells which grant better defenses or bolster offensive stats. then of course, health and stamina and healing items and spells.

>>3773995
With one playable character?

>>3773997
3 base options- a heavy hitter tank with little mana options, a sly quick fighter with okay mana and okay defense, and a energy wielder who has bad defense but loads of mana for many elemental abilities.

you pick your element after picking one of the three, then you have ability trees based off that combo.

>>3773975
>what don't people like about this" can be super effective-
You're also getting data from a very small sample pool of a very niche group of people where only a few people will answer.

>p1: "Why didn't the players like us changing characters for the second act?"
Useless question, especially for the reasons mentioned prior. In many cases people also answer incorrectly. People will very often answer X but the real reason is actually Y, simply because they lack the relevant knowledge, context or analytical eye for it. I've seen even senior designers make this mistake.
The most useful questions focuses on the players perception and experience. Even then it's mainly just a pulse check, usually in response to something you did like a playtest or something.

>At least here I know the person telling me to kill myself truly believes that Tear Ring Saga is the greatest game ever made and nothing else compares. That's interesting to me.
Most people here are outright delusional, irrational and narrow-minded, while also being very very bad at verbalizing themselves. Not to mention being overly defensive.
They will pretend to have played a game just to say they think it sucks because it's woke for having a gay character in it, even though said character betrays you and you kill them for it and said character is painted as a bad person. To then make their hate seem more plausible they can make up more stuff they claim to dislike while also justifying themselves.

4chan is the most useless place possible for useful data.

>>3773973
You're objectively wrong and willfully ignorant of modern economics.

>>3774002
Since you don't like that people here can be outright delusional- I'm curious, is there a game you've played where the flexibility of the narrative or fullness of gameplay makes it so that the fanbase isn't so divisive? What do you think a game dev could do- on a realistic scale to hope to make the average player feel welcome and an experienced player not feel spurned or bored enough that they just hate it outright?

>>3774000
Reconsider if you even need to gimp and restrict gameplay with "RPG elements"

>>3774023
I will not.

>>3774005
>You're objectively wrong and willfully ignorant of modern economics.
You're the utterly and completely ignorant one here. Actually believing
>The pre-concieved notions of the original fans will translate into sales
Is something an ignorant self-important player would think. Which is evidently clear from the rest of that post that places extreme importance on things like staying super faithful to the point of replicating bad game design, just to please a small niche of a niche of oldfags.
You're not a game dev, have no insight in the business or understanding of how sales of games actually work.
You also very clearly have no interest in learning.

>>3774011
>Since you don't like that people here can be outright delusional- I'm curious, is there a game you've played where the flexibility of the narrative or fullness of gameplay makes it so that the fanbase isn't so divisive?
Why are you asking useless questions which don't even have anything to do with OP. You some junior that just found out about basic market research and data gathering. Even your wording reeks of it, with buzzwords with no meaning to them like "fullness of gameplay". That's at best something a bad community manager would use.
And no, those questions have nothing to do with what makes something divisive or not and that's a very complex topic that varies greatly depending on context.

>on a realistic scale to hope to make the average player feel welcome and an experienced player not feel spurned or bored enough that they just hate it outright?
This is also a bad question that is unfocused and asking the wrong things with more buzzwords not even used by actual designers.
Even just the "average player feel welcome" is actually 3 separate topics which again highly depend on context, while also heavily depending on the target audience (hint: "everyone" is never a good answer). A lot of this is just UX.

The most important thing is knowing what game you're making that isn't a generic pitch.

>>3774238
This is actually super helpful- the average internet user on sites like this are more interested in attacking the concepts at hand rather than let their opinion be known. This is a textbook example. Here a valid example is for both of those.
Halo 3: ODST has little flexibility of narrative, but high fullness of gameplay. Today, people don't argue over if ODST was good or bad or attack people who like it- it threads the needle with a compact narrative in an established universe with gameplay that shakes up the usual for the franchise. It's fullness of gameplay, and non-spartan based narrative, sacrificing things like dual wielding for no reason other than "it makes sense" somehow duck the usual "fuck this stupid shit why take away dual wielding which has been loved since Halo 2?" by just being genuine.

and the second question.
To make an average player feel welcome and have an experienced player not feel bored or spurned, you can add features like gameplay that adjusts to player success both scaling down and up the challenge of encounters, Resident Evil 4 and 5 do this, if you fail an encounter too many times less enemies will spawn the next time you try it- an average player who might fail at a difficult task will benefit from this- but an experienced one will still be able to enjoy the original difficulty.
Or another example- creating rewards that invite exploration works for both groups- do you want this area to feel less empty? add some shit to explore- maybe you'll find something. Want to push it further? give the player better mobility options so monotony doesn't set in. A paraglider in BOTW, or ladders and such in Death Stranding accomplish this- with basic exploration needing to be juiced up a bit to make people want to traverse the terrain, but not feel like you're just walking around on a map where you just- know what could be around the corner. To me WoW and RDR2 always felt fun to explore, while the first 3 Assassin's Creed games just don/t.

bot thread

>>3773928 (OP)
>action adventure game with RPG elements
get the mechanics set in stone asap. the picture you posted makes me worry you are completely confused about your genre and mechanics, because elden ring and skyrim are on opposite ends of the rpg genre and are about as mechanically different as you can get.

>>3773928 (OP)
I didn't read any other posts, but here is what I learned from game design
>creativity works better under a dictatorship
My ideas are fundamentally different from your ideas. I might think it's cool if the Thalmor defeat the Imperials, while Emil thinks it's better if they were defeated. In the end, we both compromise and end the game with something boring. Either one of our ideas was great and in reality, we shouldn't have asked for input. No one likes a stale ending.
>Work around your engine but still bring something unique to your next game
It's very self-explanatory. Unless you're a programming wizard, you should hone in your game's scope. If you're having difficulties making your idea work, it's better to drop it and keep marching forward.

The second half is to make the game unique. We already played Baldur's Gate and Fallout. Give players a cool gimmick that makes your game stand out. Just look at the Zelda franchise as an example of how each entry stands out due to a new gimmick they introduced.
>Aesthetics matter the most
If every screenshot of your game looks aesthetic, then people will buy it regardless of how crap it is. No one wants to play games filled with pink haired feminists. People want gasmasks and dirty clothes. As Chris Avellone says, if you want to give players a reason to do your quests, just make the end reward be cool armor.

>>3773928 (OP)
All 3 games in OP are as radically different as it's possible within this broad as hell "genre". It's not possible to just combine them or enhance to everyone's likings

Witcher is a moviegame series. Focusing on gameplay, freedom of choice and role-playing either doesn't matter or is downright damaging for series. Writing, dialogues, nice cutscenes and seeing cool characters interact with each other is what people "play" these games for.

Those same moviegame features are destructive for TES. It's why focusing on story, especially in TESIV, pissed off people so much. People famously spend hundreds of hours in Skyrim and never bother with main quest, which isnt even tracked or treated in game differently from other quests. Games should be as open ended and sandboxy as it is possible, fulfill fantasy adventurer life sim as best as they can. It's a joke honestly that shit like alternate start has to be a mod, instead of being something game is designed around like in Kenshi or M&B.

Soulslop is just combat. Nothing else matters. Other gameplay features, role-playing, simulationism or moviegame qualities are just a bloat and would dilute the experience. At best people are fond of background "lore" they can watch from a youtuber later.

>>3774258
I see you learned nothing. But not surprising considering you're not a professional dev or designer with even 2 years of experience. Or you're some clueless mobile dev. Most likely read one too many of all the really bad game design books out there (there are no good ones).
Regardless, enjoy wasting your time and producing nothing of value then. If you don't want to listen to reason that's your problem.

>>3773928 (OP)
90% of perceived role playing comes from cosmetics, so hire people to create hundreds of cool armor sets and weapons.

>>3774419
>>creativity works better under a dictatorship
>My ideas are fundamentally different from your ideas.
Wrong.
A game director, if that's what you're thinking of, should do 5 things.
>know what sort of game the team is making and focus on the broad strokes and end user experience
>delegate and leave the details to the experts under him, a game director won't be as good at something as a principal/lead/senior designer/artist/programmer
>be aware of what the team is working on
>listen to the feedback from senior and above devs
Or at the very least, not make a bunch of retarded decisions and stay out of the teams way. A vast majority of games fail, become bad, etc. due to some rockstar director thinking they always know best and make the dumbest decisions possible. Only thing worse than that is when the studio owners or publishers come with stupid ideas or demands.

And the way you avoid "my ideas are better than yours" are through pillars/goals the team, or at least upper management, agrees on. Because then it's not about personal preference, but how well things being added to the game or not match those pillars/goals.

>>3773928 (OP)
Don't dev it, design, test it or fashion it with a controller in mind.
Consider keyboard and mouse controls seriously for qol. It will also give you much more freedom in terms of UI; free you from ugly squares and grids

>>3773928 (OP)
>I'm a game developer
A common rookie mistake

>>3773928 (OP)
Hello gamedev anon, I am a fan of gaming as a whole. Many genres and game eras.

The only advice I feel like giving you is that you should make a game for SOMEBODY, doesn't matter who. Have a clear, defined direction that's supposed to appeal to a group of people.

Make a game that either appeals to normies (BG3), women (BG3), autists (Knights of the Chalice), build autists (Pathfinder), 3D adventure seekers (TES), cinematic storyfags (TW3) etc...

KNOW WHO you're making the game for. And go all the way. Doesn't matter how weird or controversial your game may be, it will find it's loyal audience. Somebody will recognize it's spirit and your passion and the audience, the following WILL build.

I understand that this advice is more general, but I feel like the specifics don't matter as much. So long a you have a genuine inspired vision, your game will have what people call "soul" and WILL eventually have an audience if it's not totally bad or unfinished.

Good luck.

>>3774556
>soulslop is just combat
Kek, spoken like a true tasteless peasant.

>>3774569
Multiple years in the industry mostly for mid-size companies- happy with my position as a professional. No need to lose your mind over a thread on 4chan. I see why people like you aren't in my industry though- that whole "watch me shit in my own hand" mentality wouldn't fly in any of the companies I've worked for- and I've certainly never met anyone with your attitude who's done good work to get a project shipped. If you're upset, just find another thread to act like a 5th grader in.

>>3774329
Oh yeah, the game itself doesn't quite feel like any of them, And I wouldn't say it's anything like Skyrim. It's a big closer to something between a soulsborn game and something like spellbreak. I'm not really looking for notes on the game's design itself- I just want to learn from the design of already released games.

>>3774620
Ain't it just? In reality though- it's been a weird career path but I wouldn't say a bad one. It's odd having a billion retirement accounts, but hey what are you gonna do?

>>3773954
Warlords presided over monoethnic tribes. That made all other races their enemies.
For a warlord, the best employment for women is in producing more warriors. Therefore women were subjugated to this task.

>>3774575
A game director is fine and I agree that a good director just gives a vague goal and lets the creatives do their job. However, that's not what I was talking about. I'm saying that there should be no team discussion.

I'm told to create some quests for evil players. My idea would be something akin to a heist where the player has to kidnap the princess and hold her for ransom. However, the woman on the team sees this as offensive and since she's my "team member" she can override my decision. Instead, it will be a quest where you must beat up a bully or some boring inoffensive shit. It's common in modern AAA video games because the quest designers are entire teams.

You just need 1 team leader and he's the quest dictator. Everyone else is a programmer or artist. You can pretend all you want about team work, but creativity doesn't come from a team. It comes from 1 person. If you disagree, please post games which were made by democracies. Starfield? Dragon Age? It's all crap where a dozen people got to pick apart someone else's vision until nothing was left.

>>3773928 (OP)
I like both Souls games and classic RPGs. My main issue with most action RPGs is that often the RPG mechanics end up not being interesting because you can just abuse the combat system to get through anything.
What I like about Morrowind, Fallout, NWN, BG, Pillars of Eternity is that your character build legitimately limits you from doing certain things. This is very rare in games like The Witcher and Skyrim where you essentially can just walk in and out of any enemy's range and continuously hit them. Non-combat skillchecks are also rare if not nonexistent.
The souls games turn your character build in essentially a combat difficulty selection, which makes learning the RPG systems worthwhile so you can decide on what kind of action game experience you want. It's an interesting approach and works well if you have very good enemy and encounter design, but in my experience nobody has managed to even come close to recreating it.
I want more RPGs to have less direct, more abstract combat so that the RPG systems matter.

>>3773928 (OP)
I think the real reason people get attached to old games is because the budgetary constraints incidentally lead to a lot of esoteric, quirky design. It's really hard to replicate this though because, as other anons have said, a lot of this stuff just feels janky and bad and only reveal their merit with a lot of time investment. The reason people played long enough to become invested back then was because these games were technically impressive for the time, which kept players hooked, and there were just fewer competing options. You would have a very difficult time finding commercial success with a similar design.

>>3773940
>First person combat is a bad camera to pick if you want good melee combat
Disagree. Mordhau, Chiv, Mount and Mount&Blade all have superb first person combat. The only game that struggles with it is M&B, but thats due the fact you have literal hundreds of troops on screen at once and also requires you command your troops.

>>3773967
>They probably like a game that's more about numbers than action.
No not really. I genuinely like the world building, the atmosphere, the open-endedness of the story with various factions that have hard limits on what you can and can't do (like joining opposing guilds or stat requirements for rank ups). The combat is a bit dated but it does have a nice line between player skill and character skill. Mount and Blade and KCD did it better but Morrowind is serviceable.
Morrowind feels really fucking good to play just by itself but when you add on something like TR/PC/SHOTN it pretty heavily outstrips every other title in the same category.
DFU is also a pretty neat, feature complete dungeon crawler with lots of RP ability. Its in its own category IMO but still fun.

Honestly, other than Dark Souls, most of the action-RPGs I've played didn't have good combat. Combat usually just felt like a way of adding friction to the experience. On the plus side, there were often games where the other aspects outweighed the negatives of combat. In the Witcher games, it was the storyline. In Skyrim and the newer Fallouts, it was the freedom and exploration. So basically, if the combat doesn't stand on its own, if it wouldn't be fun in a linear action game, then focus on the other parts of the game that can really hook the player's attention.

>>3775106
Doesn't matter if you disagree since you're factually wrong.
There's a reason why games like DMC and Ninja Gaiden don't use first person combat.

It severely restricts your vision (creating a long list of problems, from AI to ticket system to spatial awareness), depth perception suffers hard, mobility options are required to be far more limited, severely limits the kind of moves you can have, severely restricts the amount of engaged targets and forces the remaining ones into a cone, if you use the mouse as a primary way of input you severely limit the combat input, hit detection has to be made more inaccurate to compensate, enemy design is restricted, enemy movesets and speed is severely restricted, etc. etc. etc.
The list just keeps going and no matter how ignorant and in denial you are about all of this, you're factually wrong.
Some devs make first person combat because they like the idea of it and some players likes the idea of the first person combat. But there isn't a single game with genuinely good first person combat and it will never happen because of the severe limitations. And no I will not waste more time on an ignoramus like you. Someone with no knowledge or experience of 3C or combat design is irrelevant.

>>3779577
Dragon's Dogma had fun real time combat with companions, but it still wasn't enough to get me properly hooked. Then again I'm not into action or fighting games anyways.

I like combat that's sort of about making decisions, and weirdly enough Dark Souls even with its simplicity seems to fit that bill. Skyrim too. Fallout less so.

>>3774576
A keyboard is literally an ugly grid of squares
Its a soulless device made for wageslaving

>>3779762
This. Limitation breeds creativity, and keyboards allowed poorly designed games for far too long. Good riddance.

>>3779628
>I like combat that's sort of about making decisions
I feel like a lightbulb went off in my head when you said that. This is the concept that ties together most of the games I like, from turn-based RPGs to fast-paced shooters. Like, the challenge is finding ways to defeat the enemy, not just pressing the right buttons at the right times.

>>3773970
There's a lot of things relating to how much you can influence the gameworld through dialogue and (sometimes) gameplay which makes fnv standout from the stuff Bethesda makes
Being loyal to originals is okay, so is changing things up, if you can make something that is better than what people liked before
Ive played fo1+2 and genuinely feel a mod called fallout Sonora is more like fnv, and elements from 1+2 might get more faithful representation in fo3 if you think about it
>>3773980
First. More dialogue and no voice lines mean you can roleplay as someone who is saying something you've written in a specific tone of voice which hasn't been pre determined (aka, I might say something in shock despite you not thinking it might require such a reaction)
Second. Make his reasons to do evil have some meaning or atpeast be a well thought out plan instead of being moustache twirling bad guy. You'll beat 90% of what's out there
>>3774882
You're better off reading the design docs of the games that have been released whose elements you wanna capture. Interviews, etc where docs havent been made public