| HoloDust said: Yeah, going with tabletop design is probably easiest way to test and develop everything, if it's classic dice based RPG and, especially if it's narrative based, actually make a story through gameplay (Disco Elysium came out of tabletop campaign, for example). Personally, I see action-RPGs as quite different genre. Let's say bow skill - chance to hit in RPG is based on your character skill and various modifiers (range, cover, wind, target speed, target size...). In Action-RPG, your chance to hit should rely in large part on player skill, while still being sufficiently influenced by character skill (i.e., the higher the skill the less swinging of bow, or shot spread being smaller, or something like that). Action-adventures with pseudo RPG mechanisms of modern era wouldn't have skill influence directly accuracy of your shot, instead giving you some equivalent of feat as you progress (and as such are more of a feat trees than skill trees), AC:Odyssey being good example of this. So I 'd say, choosing which type of RPG one wants to make is quite important early decision as well. |
Sorry for the late reply, I couldn’t post before.
TL;DR
I understand why you see action-RPG as a different genre and I only partially agree with you (although action-adventure games with RPG mechanics are definitely different). Also, I mostly disagree that the type of RPG, or the genre in general, should be an early decision to make, specially in the case of inexperienced developers, because that can lead to mindless imitation and lack of real design, resulting in mediocre products. What it’s definitely important is to have a base concept or experience that you want to trasmit (and then find the genre that best fit it).
Apart from these points, my post is mostly trying to expand on my first answer to the questions posted by the OP.
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This may be a subtle difference, but I think what really matters when starting to plan the development of a game, rather than the (sub)genre, is the concept you want to express or the kind of experience you want the player to have when playing your game. And that concept or experience may be intrinsically more suitable for certain genres, but not necessarily so. In the end, a genre is much more like a vehicle than a destination, and what you actually need is to choose the right vehicle that gets you to the right destination: if you want to visit some nearby friend, you might go walking, driving a car, riding a bike..., but never pick a plane or ship; if what you want is to spend some holiday time in an exotic island, however, a plane or ship are the way to go; and, if you want to go to space, you have no choice but to use a spacescraft.
So you definitely must know where you’re going and why you’re going to that place, but you don’t have to immediately decide how to get there, because just knowing the 'where' and the 'why' can naturally lead you to choose one vehicle or another. Consequently, I’d recommend not to give too much importance to the (sub)genre itself and just do what better fits the concept or experience that you want to transmit. In fact, I’d say that starting a video game by choosing the genre can turn into a very bad idea in the case of inexperienced developers, because there’s a high risk of falling into the trap of merely imitating what they’ve seen in other games instead of actually understanding why those work in the first place, resulting in a mediocre list of mindlessly ticked boxes.
About the action-RPG not being a true RPG, it depends: if the skills, stats, equipment, etc. of a character are decisive and definitely necessary to progress, and the action part is just there to (try to) enhance it or make it more dynamic (or to sell more), then I would still consider that an RPG, just combined with some action elements. On the other hand, if the skill of the player is what mostly determines the outcome of the combat and the RPG stuff is just there to offer some variety or provide a certain degree of customization, then that in my opinion is an action(-adventure) game with RPG elements. In the end, the lines that separate different genres or subgenres can become quite blurry, and many games usually mix them in a way that makes it hard to discern where one ends and the other begins. But, as I said previously, if you design the progression system before adding any other elements, you will probably end up with an RPG regardless of whether the combat style is action-oriented or not.
I’ll go a little more in-depth into that and give a simplified example of the thought process of designing a progression system (in the hope that it is somewhat valuable for the OP). So let’s say that we want to create a game and we already got to the conclusion that, among several options that we previously pondered with careful consideration, a level up system is what better fits our game. In that case, we’d probably want to decide if there is a limit level that the character(s) can reach and, if so, which that ceiling is. Choosing one number or another has important consequences, because a small one means that we have less room to make interesting things happen (and therefore break the sense of progression), but a large one could make our game feel sluggish or turn it into a grinding fest (and therefore break the sense of progression). We might then want to pick a value that is neither too small nor too large, but... which value is that? 50? 70? 100? Hard to say without context, so how much experience do our characters need to be maxed out? And how smooth or steep is the overall experience curve? Every new level should (generally) be harder to reach than the previous one, but if we make the difference between them either too small or too big, the sense of progression could be hampered one way or another.
Apart from that, how many characters are there in our game anyway? Only one? A limited, predetermined number of them? A big roster to choose from? Are they all mandatory, optional or a mix of both? For those optional, how would picking one or another, or when, affect the whole progression of the game? And, for those mandatory, are they all available from the beginning or spread out throughout the game? The latter case has the potential to be a lot more rewarding, but also trickier to pull off, specially if they don't share the same experience curve. Which, by the way, do they? Do all characters level up at the same rate? If they do, the progression could become a bit monotonous, so how do we spice things up a bit? And, if they don't, that means that their progress is different, so how do we make sure that all of them feel equally gratifying and that their unmatching progressions complement each other nicely? And what happens when they level up, anyway? A mere raise in stats is not interesting enough (unless we find a way to make it immediately and sufficiently noticeable every single time it happens), but more substantial upgrades may be less satisfying to obtain and not feel as much of a reward if they are given too often. So how do we keep the illusion of progress intact even at the times when there is nothing particularly remarkable going on, or what can we do to eliminate or reduce those times? In general, how is the whole level up system paced?
On a similar note, how often should we test the players? If we don’t do it enough, the sense of progression can wither away, but if we do it too frequently we can break the pace. Also, is the difficulty of those tests dynamically linked to the level of the player or is it fixed? If it’s dynamic, to what extent and how do we make it feel natural? Is the difficulty in the rest of the game dynamic too? How do we maintain the sense of progression if the whole game improves along with the player? What’s more, why do we even need an explicit level up system if we’re just going to change the level of everything in order to adapt it to that of the player? On the other hand, if the difficulty of our game is fixed, how do we make sure that as many players as possible experience the game in the way we intended? If it’s easy to fall too much behind the level of our tests or blow past it, then our level up system needs to be better balanced.
And so on.
I need to point out that many of the features that we take for granted when playing a video game shouldn’t be taken for granted if we aim to create one: even the stuff that seems the most basic and obvious should be scrutinized in the context of the specific game that we’re developing. The questions above are just a sample; when actually making a game as complex as an RPG, many more should arise, as the more general ones usually lead to several others that are more specific. And each and every one of those questions should be followed by the most important one, which is "why?" What does that specific feature actually bring to our game and what does it add to the concept or experience that we want to transmit? If we can’t justify its presence with at least one compelling reason, or that reason is simply that there are other similar games which do the same thing in the same way, then it’s quite likely that that feature should be reworked for our purposes or that it shouldn’t be there at all.
Also, please notice how none of the questions above tackles any mechanic other that the level up system. Sure, we’ve mentioned characters, but only in relation to that system and the way their presence or time of inclusion may affect it. And we’ve also talked about testing the progression, but we’ve never jumped into any specifics: we may or may not design a combat system to achieve that, and, if we go that route, at this stage we still don’t know (or care) if the combat will be action-oriented or turn-based. And, of course, that doesn’t affect the genre at all: it’s pretty clear so far that we’re talking about an RPG game, regardless of the combat style.
That clarity might get somewhat lost when we finally get to materialize the progression system or when we start designing other gameplay elements and integrating them into what we already have. That’s natural, and in every development cycle there needs to be some flexibility, because changes are always going to happen and the end result is almost never going to be what we planned at the beginning (sometimes for worse, some others for better), but it's also one of the reasons why the introduction of an action-oriented combat may often dilute the "purity" of the RPG experience.
The other reason is, of course, that turn-based combat is a more natural fit for "pure" RPG experiences due to how it works in synergy with them. However, action-oriented can also be integrated nicely without damaging the RPG roots. Auto-aiming on distant fights and "stickiness" on melee combat, for example, are two features that can be turned into character stats more or less easily if we wish to, and they could work well with the more traditional ones: more precise auto-aiming or a higher degree of "stickiness" could be compensated with something like lower attack, making different characters fulfill different roles. However, the values of those stats would still increase with every level, so even though there would be skill required to beat the enemies, the character progression would still be clearly noticeable during the fights and the player would need to adapt to those changes. (Whether doing this is a good idea or not depends on the particular game that we’re making, what it tries to achieve, how it is balanced, the way it is designed... But it's just an example anyway.)
In any case, what is (arguably) true is that turn-based combat is harder to design properly than its action-oriented counterpart: in not so few RPG games, it’s often the case that for every character there’s a strategy that we could consider more efficient than the rest, which means that it makes us win faster and more easily. That strategy is also usually more boring, but when players have to fight over and over again in order to progress in the game, at some point they will want to get through those portions as fast as possible regardless of how fun or boring it is, so if they notice that there is one action that they can repeatedly perform to win faster, they will just do it, because, even though there may be other more clever and interesting tactics that they could come up with if they tried, they are just not worth their time. So, in the end, if the combat in your game can be largely reduced to just smashing one key or button over and over, why not making it action-oriented instead?
As a clarification, action-oriented combat can have the same problem, but it’s easier to mask thanks to its more dynamic nature and the higher amount of visual flare that usually comes with it. In any case, that "single strategy" issue is just a part of one of the of the many aspects (balance) that must be tackled when designing the combat system (some others may include choosing between random or visible encounters, creating the different types of enemies and the combat synergies between them, deciding which powers or skills our character(s) will learn and in which order, etc.).
As an extra note about modern games and the presence of RPG elements in (*exaggeration*) every game in existance, the "problem" is that the roots of the genre are so versatile that they can fit almost everywhere with just a few tweaks and, at the same time, they have some intrinsic benefits that make them quite desirable for developers. In particular, having some sort of progression system in place, even if secondary, is a very straightforward way to continuously provide the players with a list of short-term goals that they can look forward to: better equipment, improved skills, higher stats... All of that, when done well, acts as a reward and serves as a motivation to keep playing either a little longer or in a different way (or both), while also giving the players a certain sense of accomplishment every time they reach their next target. It’s basically a regular dose of dopamine, and it helps increasing player engagement, which is something that companies value a lot these days (specially if the game has, or is planned to have, paid aditional content). Those RPG-like elements can, of course, be better or worse integrated in the whole experience, but that’s a totally different story.
I'm mostly a lurker now.
