Post by Hiro the Half-Elf on Jun 23, 2012 11:19:45 GMT -5
As the thread title implies, take one game that you know well and describe how you would improve on it- either in a sequel or a remake or even in a mechanically similar game without the franchise.
I'll begin.
The game is Digimon World 2 for the Playstation. It's a combination of a roguelike dungeon-crawler, a turn-based party RPG, and naturally a monster collection/raising game.
It's a pretty decent game, or I wouldn't waste so much of my time playing it. However, here are some of my ideas for improving it, supposing I were making a sequel to it.
Here is a video of a battle from the game, to illustrate some of my points.
also, like, expand the roster twofold with all the Digimans that have come out in the last 12 years, but that's kind of secondary.
Anyways, you get the gist. I'd like to see well-thought-out ideas for improvement- and by all means, feel free to comment on, add to, or criticize other people's posts. It's much more interesting than everyone posting in their own little world.
I'll begin.
The game is Digimon World 2 for the Playstation. It's a combination of a roguelike dungeon-crawler, a turn-based party RPG, and naturally a monster collection/raising game.
It's a pretty decent game, or I wouldn't waste so much of my time playing it. However, here are some of my ideas for improving it, supposing I were making a sequel to it.
Here is a video of a battle from the game, to illustrate some of my points.
- Increased battle speed. The slow animations and pauses between actions add a lot of unnecessary slowdown to the game. While it's okay to have Digimon get knocked down by every attack, perhaps we could just move the camera along while they're getting up, yes? Likewise, I don't need two separate text popups on the screen (the attack type and the attack's name) before the attack actually starts happening. It would be enough to just show them at the same time as the animation play. It doesn't seem
- Quicker transitions from the field to battle. As you can see in the above video, it's about 10 seconds from when the enemy approaches the player on the field to when the player gets control of the battle. This is mostly a limitation on the Playstation's part, but the player should never be sitting around looking at a loading screen before a random battle.
- More than one battle background. For the love of god, every single battle in the game takes place in that same brown hallway, regardless of the dungeon design. The only time it differs is when you stand on an elemental floor, and then only the floor changes.
- Likewise, more than one battle BGM. You have no idea how long I have heard this. Even if a song is decent, if it plays everywhere in the game, especially with battles being as slow as they are, it's going to grate.
- More interesting dungeons. Like a lot of other Japanese console roguelikes (Mystery Dungeon, Baroque, etc), DW2 features the mostly-featureless (except for the traps!) rooms connected by hallways of Rogue and Nethack. This is all fine and dandy, but the rooms could be spiced up a lot. Taking a leaf from Brogue, add more room types- rope bridges over perilous chasms, for example, or rooms flooded by water (also, considering I'm going to have my way here, there's going to be an entire subclass of fully underwater dungeons. Deal with it). And taking a page from Dungeons of Dredmor, why not add some cosmetic furniture to the dungeon rooms? it certainly breaks up the monotony a little.
- Reduction of grinding. Each Digimon has a maximum level, at which point you have to fuse it to get a new digimon with better stats, more skills, and a higher max level. This is all well and good, but to get optimal gains from fusion, you have to set the resulting monster at level 1. It doesn't take tooooo long to grind them up again, but we can cut a good chunk of it out if we take a page from Persona 3 and 4 and give monsters resulting from fusions an EXP bonus based on the player's progress in the game. If, for example, you could get a level 1 fused monster to level 11 (the level at which they're able to evolve for the first time) just from your fusion bonus (Assuming you're late in the game), it would cut out a ton of grinding so you can get back to work on stuff that's at your level and not below it.
also, like, expand the roster twofold with all the Digimans that have come out in the last 12 years, but that's kind of secondary.
Anyways, you get the gist. I'd like to see well-thought-out ideas for improvement- and by all means, feel free to comment on, add to, or criticize other people's posts. It's much more interesting than everyone posting in their own little world.