I think it's important to base the structure of an RPG around the story it's trying to tell. Going through the examples you had in order:
- Hub and Spoke structures work well in Soulsborne games due to a combination of most of the storytelling being about what happened before the game began, so details of the past can be revealed to you in any order, but each bit of storytelling within a spoke requires progressing through earlier parts of that spoke
- A Linear Archepelago worked well in MARDEK because it wanted to tell a linear story while occasionally utilizing previous areas in a world where teleportation is possible
- Pokemon has a fantasy of "you can go explore and take down gyms as you find them" conflicting with a narrative need to play out evil team schemes in a linear order, so a Closed Open World provides enough exploration to feed into that fantasy while still directing the player to each plot beat in order
As for what makes an RPG interesting, here's some things I always like to see:
- A great and *varied* soundtrack - besides the obvious "good music is good," giving the player enough non-combat time to enjoy music besides the encounter theme(s) is important, and varying up boss themes (or random encounter themes, but this is much less common) depending on who you're fighting can tell you more about the enemy and give you something to look forward to.
- Varied enemy designs - there's a reason old Final Fantasy had big, detailed enemy sprites in combat that were way bigger than your characters! Granted, they also liked to re-color them, which kind of goes against this, but you get the idea. It's very satisfying to reach a new area, get into an encounter, and find three new creatures to just *stare* at and admire while coming up with a strategy.
- Gameplay twists - if we look at Final Fantasy 6, getting the airship to change how overworld travel works, getting magicite to change how you use each character, reaching the midpoint of the game to radically change what characters are available to you, and getting your fifth recruit after the midpoint to add the element of party building are all huge moments that completely change how the game is played. Other games play with promotions/evolutions, various methods of going on new routes in old areas, or entire gameplay systems.
1
Tobias 1104~10M
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Based on my own experiences, I'd be surprised if the story came first for any game. It's likely more a case of coming up with a way to play the game ("you collect monsters via turn-based battles!"), then trying to figure out how to structure that in a satisfying way, then adding a story on last. Like the story is wallpaper over the walls of the structure.
The Pokemon team likely didn't know what they were doing with gen 1, just as I didn't with MARDEK, so they just cobbled together a bunch of inspirations into something that mostly worked. They likely structured things the way they did to allow for a linear strength progression of opponents, as I did in MARDEK, and in Scarlet and Violet they made it more open world because that's what's trendy these days (maybe I should do a Roguelike Metroidvania like every other indie dev!).
Immersion is what I like most about games, and the music and creature/character designs fall under that category. They're probably what I focus on most too; maybe the whole reason I made games at all was to have something to compose music for. And my favourite part of Pokemon games is going in blind and discovering new Pokemon designs myself.
It's tricky with this side project I'm working on though because I want to minimise the amount of work it'll take to finish, which limits what I can do. I want all the characters to be humans so then I don't have to make or animate other models. And I feel the idea of 'human archetypes having silly social battles where they try and convince the other side to convert to theirs' is amusing enough to form at least a short game around... I'm just uncertain of how to do so in a way that's fun without getting tedious or repetitive.
It's also tough to write a linear story for it because your party can change so much and the characters you recruit aren't actual characters.
Hmm, I suppose an equivalent is something like the Final Fantasy Tactics games, where you only really have one or a few named characters with story roles and a bunch of faceless recruits, but they've got a story focused on that main character anyway. Maybe I'll think about how they went about it, do some brainstorming...
- Hub and Spoke structures work well in Soulsborne games due to a combination of most of the storytelling being about what happened before the game began, so details of the past can be revealed to you in any order, but each bit of storytelling within a spoke requires progressing through earlier parts of that spoke
- A Linear Archepelago worked well in MARDEK because it wanted to tell a linear story while occasionally utilizing previous areas in a world where teleportation is possible
- Pokemon has a fantasy of "you can go explore and take down gyms as you find them" conflicting with a narrative need to play out evil team schemes in a linear order, so a Closed Open World provides enough exploration to feed into that fantasy while still directing the player to each plot beat in order
As for what makes an RPG interesting, here's some things I always like to see:
- A great and *varied* soundtrack - besides the obvious "good music is good," giving the player enough non-combat time to enjoy music besides the encounter theme(s) is important, and varying up boss themes (or random encounter themes, but this is much less common) depending on who you're fighting can tell you more about the enemy and give you something to look forward to.
- Varied enemy designs - there's a reason old Final Fantasy had big, detailed enemy sprites in combat that were way bigger than your characters! Granted, they also liked to re-color them, which kind of goes against this, but you get the idea. It's very satisfying to reach a new area, get into an encounter, and find three new creatures to just *stare* at and admire while coming up with a strategy.
- Gameplay twists - if we look at Final Fantasy 6, getting the airship to change how overworld travel works, getting magicite to change how you use each character, reaching the midpoint of the game to radically change what characters are available to you, and getting your fifth recruit after the midpoint to add the element of party building are all huge moments that completely change how the game is played. Other games play with promotions/evolutions, various methods of going on new routes in old areas, or entire gameplay systems.
Based on my own experiences, I'd be surprised if the story came first for any game. It's likely more a case of coming up with a way to play the game ("you collect monsters via turn-based battles!"), then trying to figure out how to structure that in a satisfying way, then adding a story on last. Like the story is wallpaper over the walls of the structure.
The Pokemon team likely didn't know what they were doing with gen 1, just as I didn't with MARDEK, so they just cobbled together a bunch of inspirations into something that mostly worked. They likely structured things the way they did to allow for a linear strength progression of opponents, as I did in MARDEK, and in Scarlet and Violet they made it more open world because that's what's trendy these days (maybe I should do a Roguelike Metroidvania like every other indie dev!).
Immersion is what I like most about games, and the music and creature/character designs fall under that category. They're probably what I focus on most too; maybe the whole reason I made games at all was to have something to compose music for. And my favourite part of Pokemon games is going in blind and discovering new Pokemon designs myself.
It's tricky with this side project I'm working on though because I want to minimise the amount of work it'll take to finish, which limits what I can do. I want all the characters to be humans so then I don't have to make or animate other models. And I feel the idea of 'human archetypes having silly social battles where they try and convince the other side to convert to theirs' is amusing enough to form at least a short game around... I'm just uncertain of how to do so in a way that's fun without getting tedious or repetitive.
It's also tough to write a linear story for it because your party can change so much and the characters you recruit aren't actual characters.
Hmm, I suppose an equivalent is something like the Final Fantasy Tactics games, where you only really have one or a few named characters with story roles and a bunch of faceless recruits, but they've got a story focused on that main character anyway. Maybe I'll think about how they went about it, do some brainstorming...