The prime subject of my deviation was Fallout 2 (mostly in anticipation for Fallout 3). In relation to BYOND, Fallout 2 is also a tile-based RPG that could probably be reasonably recreated within BYOND's scope. Fallout 2 is a 10-year-old game that nonetheless holds up quite well today. That said, there was many lessons to be learned from playing that game that a game designer can appreciate. I thought I'd post up a quick summary of some of those lessons:
- A good role playing game mechanic endeavors to keep the game challenging for the player from start to finish.
Developing your RPG to be hard at first and then easy later may give the player a feeling of accumulating power, but it also kills the sense of flow - a player who is not meaningfully challenged is a bored player.
It's boredom that is the ultimate cause of the dreaded "grind." Eliminating the grind has less to do with what you make the players do (and/or for how long) and more to do with keeping them involved in activities that entertain them. Keep the flow theory satisfied and you may find your complaints about the grind to be significantly reduced. - One must be careful in balancing their RPG mechanics to be of equal worth per player investment.
Fallout 2 had a number of issues with their skill system, such as the redundancy of the Doctor and First Aid skills and a massive difference in overall influence between perk effectiveness. The SPECIAL system, while it definitely has its upsides, was not as special as nostalgia told me, and these were ultimately matters of further refinement.
How much refinement is too much refinement? It's hard to say. The main things a player wants out of a selection of character skills and perks are probably a feeling of power and uniqueness on the outside while a meaningful game interaction at the core. - Isometric perspectives may look good, but they introduce a slew of interface problems that need to be resolved.
In Fallout 2, this manifested in many ways. You could not see enemies hidden by walls unless you went into targeting mode. You had to pixel hunt to find items obscured by things that could be clicked through (like corpses) and if that item was behind an unclickable object it was pretty much lost forever. Certain doors were very difficult to open because they were not coded to stay visible as the player approached. - A good story can drive a player to complete a game despite its faults.
In the end, it was Fallout 2's post-apocalyptic scenario, well handled through excellent storytelling while maintaining a relatively open-ended flow, that allowed me to tolerate all its many faults to the very end.
