Introduction I already made a topic of this nature
in the past, but I don’t think it accurately depicted my feelings on the matter. It wasn’t descriptive enough and, looking back, I wasn’t doing it with an explanatory mindset anyway. So I figured I’d revisit my little rant and make my problem with RPGs in Blockland clearer. This time, I’ll be writing a few longer sections rather than eleven small ones. Do keep in mind this is addressing multiplayer RPGs only. Any sort of neat singleplayer RPGs I have no opinion on as I’ve yet to see them executed poorly or properly.
In my opinion, the perfect gamemode modification to any game will completely change the game and make you truly feel like you’re playing that type of game instead. I understand that in Blockland, the ability to do so is somewhat limited, but it is certainly still achievable. My guess on why this isn’t done is that developers either don’t know how to do this properly, or they simply don’t develop their gamemode enough to achieve this. Either case is a shame, and a loss to the entire community.
This refers to RPG modifications exclusively; however some points can be applied interchangeably for any sort of gamemode.
Player Interaction Many RPGs fail to explore player interaction at all, and some even discourage it, and I don’t understand why. It’s just bad game design. When developing in a multiplayer environment, you need to account for multiple players. You can’t develop a game that many people will play at once the same way as a game that’s played singleplayer. That should be common sense.
One major way of curbing interaction is
local chat. This is asinine. I can understand why you’d have it, I mean, lots of successful MMORPGs have had this and they’re fine. Global chat in those would be absolutely insane. A lot of the time, when MMORPGs have global chat at all, it’s absolutely atrocious. But this is because these have thousands or millions of players. Blockland servers typically only have around
ten to thirty at best (Note this is from my personal observation on the ordinary popular server). Local chat can make a player feel extremely alone if your RPG is expansive enough to keep them entertained. Whenever I see this in an RPG, my first impulse is to press escape and disconnect. Don’t do this. It’s
baaaaaad.
There are plenty of ways you can promote player interaction, too. These aren’t even unheard-of concepts; nearly all online RPGs I’ve seen have some form of this kind of thing. Clans, parties, empires; any way of grouping players together in an alliance is wonderful for promoting interaction. Of course, if your RPG doesn’t have much (or any) combat, these have to be reconsidered. If your RPG is centered on building, for example, you may have groups so that more than one player can own a single lot.
Another thing to consider when making an RPG involving large amounts of combat is that players may want to engage in combat together, especially when the RPG contains any of the aforementioned grouping systems. There are quite a few ways to go about this. Some of the most obvious include things like buffs, healing others, and any other sort of method of protecting
others. Another method you may take is to make your enemy AI extra-smart to account for multiple players. This is a bit trickier, of course, and I’m willing to forgive RPGs that don’t do this.
Sometimes you just gotta punch a guy. There’s no way you can deny that, you just see that joker walkin’ down the street and think to yourself, “man how i wanna knock that guy’s block off”. Having PvP isn’t necessarily needed, but it can be pretty great if it’s in there and done right. It doesn’t have to be free PvP if your RPG doesn’t support that kind of thing well, it can be an arena or any designated area for players to just have at each other. This is even better if you have those grouping systems, because then you get people having war! Wouldn’t that be just great? To open up Blockland, join a server, and go to war on a whim even though it’s not necessary? I think that’d be great.
Entertainment Obviously people want to have fun when they play games. You don’t need me to tell you that. But people get bored of doing the same thing. In Blockland, people get away with this because it’s still a fresh breath of air compared to most other things available. Not to imply this makes it okay by any definition of the word, it’s awful when the entire basis of an
RPG is just
one element. It’s like if someone asked you for Chex Mix and you give them only those weird wavy loaves of stale bread. nnnnnngross. don’t gimmie that, i don’t want that, what do you think you’re doing?
It’s not that difficult to provide
at least more than one element in your RPG. Quests? Dungeons? Exploring? Treasure? Eagles? Moose? Why is there only the basic leveling system and maybe some husks of other activities? Come on, you’ve gotten this far, don’t give up on us now. It’s a shame to see lost potential so often, but it seems almost inevitable at this point. Every time a promising project comes up, it either falls short or ends development early. Terrible.
There’s not too much more I can say about this subject matter, but I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my point across quite as well as I could’ve. Just make sure your players have plenty to do. There’s not much of a way to condense that.
Immersion (including GUI) To preface this, the reason why the “including GUI” appendage is there is because I wanted to get the attention of people having an opinion on that specifically as it’s something I’d be willing to expand on individually.
Referring back to the introduction, the perfect gamemode would overhaul the main game to the extent that you actually feel like you’re playing another game inside of it. I personally find it nice when there are reminders placed inside that you’re still playing good ol’ Blockland though (in this case, probably building). Anyway, the game needs to pull you in. I almost never feel like I’m playing anything other than Blockland in seemingly unique servers, now that I think about it. This is really dependent on the player, however. Some people’s immersion may be broken more easily than others’, and by different things.
One big thing that can be done for immersion is GUI. When executed poorly, it can just be a nuisance, but when done well, it can really help with making the game feel like what it’s actually trying to be. A good bit of this would be credited to HUD. You’re always seeing it during play, and many play types have certain on-screen elements by design, most or all which help make the game more enjoyable. Using Skyrim as an example since it does this fairly well, the health, stamina, and magicka bars only show on the heads-up display when necessary. This means they aren’t invasive when you’re okay on that stat, but when it may require your attention, it’s right there in a place that won’t distract you, but is easy to just glance over at. In Blockland, this may be more difficult if you’re dealing with small screen resolutions, but it’s certainly still doable. Don’t go too far with HUD, just make it show information that the player may want to keep track of constantly. This is the purpose of HUD anyway. Then, for easy use of systems in your game, there would be non-HUD GUI that would be used for things like parties, crafting, inventory, et cetera. This is much more intuitive than slash-commands, and you should seriously consider this if you’re working on a serious RPG project. However, some people will rip their eyelashes off if they see required GUI. Alternative serverCmd interface is also good for people who want to miss out on such a wonderful thing. Of course, a lot of the times, these people are mostly annoyed when you can’t even join the server because you lack a client mod (see DRPG). Centhra’s Dueling managed to have client GUI that was pretty much (or entirely) required to play without disallowing them to join by just making them sit around until they get the idea that they need a client mod. Of course, this isn’t a viable solution in an RPG.
Now, for me, immersion in a Blockland gamemode is broken partly by terrible combat systems. Gamefandan’s Monster RPG
almost got this right. Combat should not be a ‘linear’ thing. Different enemies should fight differently, enemies need to be on differing levels of difficulty, enemies need to scale their difficulty to your experience, and the way you fight needs to be more innovative than “shoot shoot slice”. I don’t think Blockland’s vanilla combat system should really be used past the simple DMs and TDMs. Once you bring in RPG elements, it’s time to redo it a bit. DRPG took a wonderful step in this direction with charging bows. When I first shot a bow in it, I felt something inside me. Like when you hug someone you love or something like that. Work on combat please. If your gamemode is going to use it a lot, make sure it works.
Other things that may break immersion may be things like insane donator perks. Awful. GMod Tower is a decent example of donations done well; it offers mostly bragging rights and some extra goodies, but nothing that causes other people’s experience to be lessened. Terrible building may also cause me to suddenly realize this is a creation of a joker that doesn’t know how to make a game. Think about the way you design things in general. You have to know how your game will be viewed and played by other people. Psychology is a good thing to have a grasp of if you’re doing stuff like this.
Creativity This’ll be a short one since I don’t have an extremely strong opinion on it, but oftentimes there’s a lack of creativity in RPGs. No story I guess is understandable, that may be difficult, but at least put effort into your environment. Try an offer as many new things as possible. What makes your RPG so much more special than other ones?
GrindingURRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH Grinding is an atrocity. It is a crime against humanity. It’s like making all your players put their card in a hat, saying punishment for being drawn is eternal pinky toe skinning, then drawing a number of cards equal to the number of players. It’s awful. I hate it. Stop doing it. Stop basing your entire mod around it. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Don’t you love it when you have a sinus infection or something and you just can’t stop blowing your nose? Like, the mucus just keeps coming. Doesn’t stop. Just keep on blowing that nose. Yep. Use up that entire tissue box. good job nice going A+ you deserve a metal awesome. No, you don’t like that and you know it. This is a terrible comparison, but this is how I feel when I sit there for hours on end holding down my mouse button and occasionally walking to another 2x2 Round. Mmm. Sublime. Melts away the insides of my nose real nice. Why is this so hard to understand? Why is this so much to ask? The least you can do is provide more than the
meaningless tedium of grinding.
If your game requires people to grind, you’ve designed it wrong on a fundamental level. You might as well start all over. There is no excuse for this. It’s just lazy design choice. Quests are a great measure in preventing grinding if you do them well (using the Elder Scrolls series as an example again). Any sort of interesting quirk to mundane tasks can make them a lot more enjoyable. I cannot think of a single example of an RPG in Blockland I’ve played where grinding isn’t pretty much the entire game. It’s the worst thing you can do when designing any sort of thing people are supposed to enjoy. Earlier I said people enjoy these things because they’re still better compared to other things available? I think it’s about time we got a bar-raiser.
my apologies for any formatting issues, i wrote this in word and it doesn't transfer to BBCode too prettily
