The Video Game Revue

What Makes a Great Console RPG

I've ranted a bit about some of the design issues facing PC RPGs recently, so I thought I'd swing the camera around and take a look at console RPGs. The simple fact of the matter with console RPGs is that the majority of them fall flat. In my opinion, it takes an exceptionally good production effort to make a great console RPG. Perhaps this is because console RPGs tend to be lengthy and somewhat repetitve in nature, so any flaw in the game is bound to be experienced by the player many times over. In order to create a successful console RPG, it's vital that every aspect of the game be finely crafted.

I know console RPGs inside and out. They're my favourite genre of video game, I've been playing them for about 15 years now, and I'm about to give you the skinny on what to put into one. For those of you who aren't actually in a position to make a console RPG, you can turn this rant on its side and get something of a checklist of what to look for in a console RPG from a critic's perspective.

Because a lot of what there is to say about what goes into a great console RPG is obvious, I'm going to divide sections of this article into "the obvious" and "the not-so-obvious." The not-so-obvious bits highlight aspects of console RPG production that I feel are somewhat underappreciated or a little more difficult to get a handle on.

Artwork - The Obvious

Artwork is the most important element of a console RPG. Console RPGs are not strategy wargames where players will forgive the crappy visuals because the gameplay is good. Console RPG development is for producers with massive budgets to spend on artwork, since you will need illustrators, designers, animators, modellers, and other such talent working around the clock to make your game as pretty as it can possibly be.

What you are ultimately trying to create here is an immersive, escapist fantasy universe, so your game needs to be a beautiful place that your audience will want to escape to. While it's generally true that video games require more artistic development than technical developent (ie. programmers) to be successful, it is especially true of RPGs. Don't fret much over the technical capabilities of your game engine; good artists can make up for the short-comings of a dated game engine, within reason. That having been said, artists will do the best work given a good game engine to work with.

Artwork - The Not-So-Obvious

Make sure your project has a gutsy and innovative artistic director who doesn't always make "safe" decisions. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and often a game with striking visuals is more interesting than a game with pretty visuals. A lot of RPGs these days have relatively uniform anime artwork styles, so it's possible for a game with a daring concept and an original artistic style to really stand out.

You need a top notch musical score to accompany your game. Let me make this perfectly clear: you don't want it--you need it. A console RPG's soundtrack is arguably as important as the visuals, which is to say that it's as important as any other aspect of the game. The music that the player hears will go a hell of a long way towards establishing mood and drawing an emotional reaction, and although a lot of players don't think that they're paying close attention to the music during the game, players are invariably influenced by the music whether they realise it or not. The music that you have in-game should be good enough that you would listen to it on its own; if it's not up to that standard of quality, then you're crippling your RPG project.

Story & Writing - The Obvious

Console RPGs generally follow a manga-like template in terms of writing: they have character-driven stories that tend to also focus on setting while developing the plot in concentrated spurts. If you're going for this kind of a setup, your characters need to be very interesting and likeable. "Interesting" does not translate into "weird;" a bizarre character with no depth is only marginally better than a plain character with no depth. Depth is what really matters, so make your characters mature and give them real feelings--a sense of humour, a calling in life, emotional baggage, and other such dramatic characteristics. Originality counts, but you'll find that characters with a lot of depth to them end up being original whether you plan for it or not. Hire some good writers who understand these kinds of things, and make it clear that you're not merely trying to assemble colourful characters for a children's story but are actually in search of meaningful drama. It may even help to think of your RPG as being adapted from an existing piece of work such as a novel or screenplay, even if it isn't.

Console RPG fans generally like long story sequences, but use them in moderation. Console RPG fans generally also like exploration and fights, so making them sit through hours of story scenes without giving them a chance to experience the world of your RPG project first-hand is not always a good idea. Also--and I can't stress this enough--make your plot sequences consequential. Don't interrupt the player to have a scene where the protagonist and his best friend stop to chat about the weather and how fun it is to be outside. Ideally, every cinematic sequence should advance the plot of the game, and character development should occur through more subtle and less corny devices than demonstrating how the characters interact during moments of idle small-talk. Develop the characters as the plot progresses and don't burden the player with too many inconsequential factoids.

Story & Writing - The Not-So-Obvious

It's very common for RPG writing to focus on character and setting while neglecting plot. Personally, I would like to see less of this. I know that it's difficult to develop a plotline for an interactive experience such as a game, because a scripted plot is usually linear and fun game experiences are usually not. But to me one of the most exciting things about RPGs is that they tell stories, and I want those stories to be told well.

You can get away with shoddy continuity in an RPG project, but you shouldn't abuse this fact. It's common for characters in an RPG to band together into a party without much of a reason for doing so, and it's similarly common for RPG characters to venture off to a certain destination without much justification. RPG gamers will naturally tend to turn a blind eye to these oversights, but these things still have an effect. If your RPG goes the extra mile and provides good, dramatic reasons for the in-game characters to behave as they do, the player will take notice and be left with an overall feeling of how good your RPG's story is--provided that that story is interesting, of course. It is more important for your RPG to have excellent artwork, characters, and setting than it is for it to have a rational plot, but it is specifically because a rational plot is one of those details that is commonly overlooked in RPGs that you can score big points on it with your project.

Gameplay - The Obvious

Don't make your RPG too difficult, because your average RPG fan these days will not suffer to be stuck at any point in the game for very long. A lot of them will be playing along with player's guides, and most of them will turn to FAQs and walkthroughs on the internet if they get stuck for even five minutes. You can help to avoid giving the player an excuse to refer to a walkthrough if you are able to make it clear that bonus items can be found and boss battles can be completed using techniques that the player is able to discover for himself.

On the other hand, don't make your RPG too easy either. If all the player has to do is keep pressing the X button to order every character to attack for each battle, then you've just turned your combat system into a mindless grind. Give the player some interesting decisions to make; for instance, give them some options that require choosing between an attack that does weak damage against multiple enemies or strong damage against one enemy. Make sure that the order in which enemies are defeated in combat makes a difference, strategy-wise. Give the enemies specific weaknesses that the player needs to figure out, and introduce new sets of enemies to learn about when the player enters a new location.

The theme of giving the player interesting decisions to make extends to party management as well. "Best Equip" menu options are fine, but there should also be some items with important trade-offs--weapons and armor that exploit elemental weaknesses, for instance. Allowing the player to toy around with party formations is a good idea, but don't make it overly complex if you're going to bother with it at all. Creating an interesting system for levelling up where the player has to choose amoung skills and abilities to develop is another good way to challenge players in terms of party configuration, but be careful not to make it easy for the player to screw it up.

Exploration is generally a major element of RPGs. Maps that fill themselves in automatically are a great feature to have. Also make sure that players aren't interrupted too frequently by random battles while exploring dungeons and the like. If combat is slow paced and/or takes several seconds to load, it can be extremely disruptive and frustrate a player who is trying to figure out the way forward. Fast-paced combat and less frequent random encounters help a great deal to alleviate this issue.

Don't ever make the player play the "hunt the magic button" game. The worst kind of RPG puzzle is where you have a town full of twenty or more NPCs and the player has to find one specific person to talk to in order to trigger the next story event and progress in the game. If the player needs to perform a specific action to advance in the game, they should either have directions (hints, at least) or easily be able to stumble across that action without extensive searching. Ideally, a player should be exploring extensive areas of the game because he wants to do it--not because it's required.

A key strategy for capturing the attention of more casual RPG gamers while still appealing to the hardcore crowd is to make complex aspects of the game optional. It shouldn't be too difficult for a casual player to mash their way through the game, but a player who masters more advanced tactics should be rewarded with bonuses. It's a bad idea to make one of the main story quests very difficult since players could get stuck and never end up playing through the rest of the game, but optional side quests are fair game for being made into especially tough challenges for the dedicated and hardcore players. A simple party configuration should be functional enough to beat the game with, but an advanced player should be able to push the envelope with clever configurations. Setting up the game this way provides a dual experience of being able to casually play the game for the characters and story, or really putting in an effort to master the game system as well.

Gameplay - The Not-So-Obvious

The issue of "grinding" in RPGs is a touchy one. Some players appreciate the sense of accomplishment that comes from performing "hard work" to reach a goal, and they like being able to satisfy such challenges without expending much mental energy. It doesn't hurt to make an RPG open-ended enough that players can find grinding-like challenges if they want, but I strongly suggest that if you are going to give players an explicit incentive to grind, you do it very sparingly. To me, the core aspects of an RPG game system are exploration, tactical combat, and party management, and none of these should involve monotonous repitition.

One aspect that separates a good RPG system from a truly great one is the presence of combos. A really interesting game system should be open-ended enough that by combining various abilities together, players can create compound abilities that are far more powerful. Some RPGs try to force this concept by having "combined attacks" in combat where two characters act in concert to perform a super move, but this is not quite the same idea. A good combo should seem almost unintentional--as though it were more of a design oversight than something hard-coded into the game. A serious problem arises, of course, if a really powerful combo arises that wasn't intended and ends up making the game too easy, but even this can be an exciting aspect of the game in itself if the combo is difficult to discover. Single-player console RPGs have the advantage that players don't generally worry about how "fair" moves are against the pre-programmed computer opponents, as long as the game is still reasonably challenging.

Summary

RPGs should be thought of as artistic enterprises first and foremost, but also as fun worlds to discover, engaging stories to be told, and game systems to master. A great RPG encompases all of these aspects through visual artwork, musical score, writing, and game design. A project of such massive scope can only be realised by a team of dedicated and passionate individuals with a lot of resources at their disposal--including a lot of time to develop the project. So if you're thinking of getting rich quick by contracting out for some pretty illustrations and slapping together a quick RPG engine, forget about it. The only right way to make an RPG is the hard way.

posted by Parappa @ 10:28 AM