What a good cRPG needs

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• Lots of different builds to choose from. Those can even be purely stat-related differences, but there must be different options.
• Character looks are important. Damn right. Give us many heads, bodies etc to choose from. It would be nice to choose the height (like short, medium, tall) as well. And the haircut, well, at least the length.
• Voices. Well, I understand that it takes some time and effort to record them, but if there are lots of tiny little vocal shows on the part of your characters, they should be nice to the ear. Without leaving any character build unrepresented. If there aren't really many options, it's better to include balanced ones than even very flashy highly specialised ones.
• Learning. The ability to acquire skills, feats or whatever the system uses just because you are willing to sit your classes or read your books instead of mincing meat all the time.
• Mental stats, if we are at it. There's more to mental stats than casting attributes. Dialogue is one example, at least to give the player some delusion that you give a damn about his paladin's 14+ INT
• More and more dialogue. More and more dialogue options. Stats, skills, feats, alignments, sex, race etc are good checkpoints.
• Flexibility. We've had enough of linear story progression.
• Randomise it as far as you can without doing too much harm to quality. Random loot in so much as it's not quest items or similar. Random enemies, random subtypes of enemy types - like Finessed fighters, dual-wielders, two-handers, classic sword and shield. Perhaps some random effects on enemy weapons, especially arrows. Those are a lot of fun.
• A base. Some big stronghold which you can lord over, or a small hideout where you can flee and lick your wounds.
• Recognition of obvious things by NPCs. A level 20 character is almost a demigod, especially if there are tales of his deeds. Plus, a level 20 goodie is way different to a level 20 evil one, from the point of view of your average peasant. Like an angel and a daemon. Also, it's ridiculous when a character wearing tens of thousands of GP is referred to as badly dressed commoner by some petty merchant or noble. Plus, seeing a fireball cast in the same room you are is an experience you're not going to forget quickly. It does affect the way you speak to the caster. Heheh. And you typically respect people who restore you to full HP in one word or touch almost just passing by. And if you're a typical 10 CON commoner, level 2 CLW restores the max HP you can lose. Level 4 for a typical aristocrat. Well, and someone who can send whole your army on the wall with bare hands (an advanced monk) commands some attention as well. Actually, even a "mere" 16-18 CHA (3E) does make a great difference in reality.
• Good party interaction. I dream of decent random talks with party members.
• Relatively stable source of GP and XP. This may mean caravan guarding, arena fighting, spying missions, bounty hunting, whatever.
• Well, just more random assorted heroism. In deeds and in rewards, too. Yeah, give me the princess Plus, it should be way mare challenging to maintain a lawful or a good alignment. Nothing like killing commoners and gettinw away with it because no one saw you - it still affects YOU.
• Image and day-to-day relations with people. Right. Being kind, bothering to help, being around, buying drinks, tending to the sick, whatever. Especially if you're a level 20 paladin with lots of WIS and CHA plus total disease immunity on holidays in a little hamlet or stationed in a city garrison, you almost should be punished for not thinking about the seek people in the local infirmary. If you're a good-aligned priest, your place after the battle is healing first than looting. Neglecting such things is what makes you maybe not evil, but surely not good enough.
• Well-thought difficulty. Number-wise too hard spots are simply annoying. No fancy tactics, nothing. Just a total immunity to magic most forms of damage and 25/+5 resistance to the rest That's boring. And did I mention annoying? Dead-hard battles becoming ridiculously easy once you've discovered some only way of hurting your opponent are also unwelcome. Etc etc.
• Good map. Especially the mini-map. It must all be easily seen.
• Some distinguishable details in corridors, dungeons, city quarters and the like. Recalling which damned house it was is no fun.
• Reasonability and logical consistence. What enemy can do and is humanly possible, a character should be able to do, too. And vice-versa. Hiring experts - like a mid-level rogue to open a specific door for you, should also be an option - for the sake of common sense. Or a bunch of hirelings to put down a tough enemy. Especially a magic-resistant one if you're a wussy wizard The other way round - if there's a wizard guild in the city and they don't have a ready weapon with your desired enchantment, why not go there and get them do that for you on a masterwork item?
• With all those stats, actually make some checks. Lots of checks. Just to make me not sit and whine about some skill I shouldn't have taken because it's never used. Or a weapon feat for some normally commonplace kind of weapon that actually is not around (short swords in IWD2 above +1, for example, until you get in Kuldahar and its shops)

 

Very good post, in my opinion, and I agree with what you're saying. I just think it's good to point out that these steady sources of income and quests that don't dry out aren't completely boring like the thieves guild in BG2. I gave up and let it die because I didn't feel like showing up once I did the two intresting quests.

 

And yet Diablo II was so freaking successful.

I'd go for the cRPG of mindless and addictive fun instead of some mind-bogglingly complex, "intelligent" game. Not everything has to be super-realistic-and-complicated. Sometimes you just want to play.

I remember one of the advertisements for one of my favorite games:

I hope that says it all. A game that you can pick up quickly enough to play with your friends or by yourself on a rainy day, but with enough potential to keep you entertained until the next great game comes along.

 

Also, for point 2 - let appearance affect how people react to you. Maybe make clothes important (nobles would prefer to deal with people in clean clothes than those in muddy leather armour. You may also get robbed of those clothes in places where leather armour would be useful).
Of course, that could end up being cheesy - walking around with a wardrobe in your backpack. Maybe you could only change at your stronghold, and make wearing all types of clothes useful as not to keep dragging people back there just to get dressed.

Oaz - just because Diablo 2 was successful, it doesn't mean that everyone is going to like it. This is just Chevy's dream, and it would seem that he would prefer intelligent to mindless.

 

There is one problem about the dream coming true: it would prevail over real life. Real life would be reduced to mundane aspect of providing resource to support the perfect roleplaying of a perfect roleplaying game. It would consume. Like Matrix. Get unplugged, get food or sleep (or better enough coffee) and get plugged again.

I have caught myself thinking about how nice it would be to be a fantasy paladin *after* I came twenty. No kidding. Perhaps let them better neve reach the ideal of cRPG.

 

This list has me craving some PnP.

 

What you need is Fable. This game seems to promise it all, let's hope it manages to live up to its massive hype!

 

I do believe this is the first post by Chev' which I 99.5% agree with!(I would say 100% but if I did then I would find something I missed before...).

I would add a couple things to the list myself:

*Orcs : What I mean is orcish/ogrish/trollish...non-elven, non-human, non-dwarf player characters, goals adn motivations.
Natuk was a sharware cRPG in which you played a party of orcs, ogres and half-trolls out for revenge against your orcish emperor for nhaving tried and failed to have you executed(a mix up in records sent you to a remote outpost instead).
The game was(well...IS) full of humor and stuff which flies in the face of convention.

*Logical consistency in teh GAME MECHANICS themselves! Do not define both the physique/size ADN stamina of a character based on ONE attribute(like "Strength") and then base the magic system on expensing stamina as spells are cast(cough*GURPS*cough)! This leads to Mages competing with Warriors for "buffness" in addition to just being wonky!

*Represent the genre well: Do not base your magic system on the most unpopular books by a relatively unpopular author(cough*JackVance*cough), especially when said system involves such bizarre notions as "firing and forgeting" spells(as opposed to expensing some sort of enrgy pool be it stamina or "power" or both). Likewise do not create a "Space exploration cRPG" in which standard FTL spacecraft travel is lifted from concepts in a particular "Doctor Who" episode.

 

Agreed, mana is much more logical than some memorising spells. Sorcerers don't particularly suck in this regard, but mana is better, anyway. The system of obtaining Force powers and Force points in KotOR is a very good one.

That makes me wonder if I wrote everything all right

 

Arcanum is a very good RPG in this respect.

People do treat you differently depending on your clothes, your charisma, your beauty, how you answer to their introductions...

You can be loved in a particular town and hated in another, as you have a reputation AND an alignment. You can kill innocents without being seen and that will not affect your reputation, but it will affect your alignment.

I really like the way magic is treated in the game. The more spells you use, the more tired you get. If you are too tired when trying to cast a spell, you faint and your spell dissipates. I only miss the "casting gestures and cantrips" I got so used to watch in the BG series.

 

I kind of miss the mana system too, since it reminds me of the old Squaresoft games (Final Fantasy, for example), and any other game with the basic HP/MP system.

Still, using the Vancian system (memorize one spell, use it, re-memorize it) was a nice twist when I first started playing Baldur's Gate II. The main problem I found was that there wasn't a lot of flexibility, and that it was a bit hard to pick up at first.

Another magic system I found pretty cool was the Alchemy system, where you gather various components (e.g. oil, water, ash, limestone), and then have various spells. To cast a spell, you use up various components. You collect components throughout the game, and rare ones are needed for powerful spells, and common ones are needed for the lower-firepower spells. This was what was used for Secret of Evermore.

But I guess how you use magic (or any other system) is about preference.

 

A well balanced and still simple mana system is the one in Seiken Densetu 3 aka Secret of Mana 2. It is the simple squaresoft system but in this game it is much more balanced. In fact, the whole game's classes are balanced, not like D&D.

 

The one thing that really kills an RPG is repetitiveness(sp?). While Dungeon Siege had a good game engine at first glance, it died when you had to travel back to previous cities places etc. It was not as simple as guiding the cha/party to the edge of the map(there were none), you had to retrace every step.

Also don't make the mana or health regenerate while wondering around, it makes it too easy, run in, weaken enemy, run out, regain HP/MP, run in, repeat.

Another problem with most games which employ the mana system is that once the mana has been reduced, the casater is essentially useless until the mana is regained (eg. have to equip weapon, attack, inflict 2 damage, recieve 40, run etc.)

 

Methinks that travelling back to cities is a good thing - so long as things have changed. That was one of the things I really enjoyed in Ocarina of Time - travelling back after several years have passed. Could be very interesting to see such changes in an RPG.

As to retracing every step - horses could be useful in such a game