I am developing old school RPG - need your oppinion

Gorath said:

Because I think you should maximize the chance to actually finish the project I suggest you make it 1 character and only 1 dungeon. Make everything modular, so that it can be recycled.

When this is finished analyze the result and do what you consider best.

Click to expand...

That was sort of what we were going for , but I have considered change (hence the post here)

Problem is that you have to build solid foundation if you want to grow your project.

So if you want to build party based game. Even the "prototype" has to be party based.

Otherwise you will be writing the whole thing twice.

Party-based allows you to offer your player a wide variety of skills and abilities without having to jam it all onto a single toon. It's not reasonable to have a single character that can do magic, swing a sword, turn undead, and pick a lock.

If you give the player enough advancement to cover all those skills at once, the game gets broken by somebody that dumps it all into a single skill. If you protect your game mechanics with less advancement, the player can't possibly cover even a portion of the available skills which leads to frustration.

With a party, each toon can specialize while the player still gains access to most skills.

To me, "old skool" means an emphasis on fun character development, so putting hurdles in the way via single character can't possibly be the way to go.

there are better (and wealthier) developers out there making single character games, so for that reason alone I'd advise you to go party-based. There's a market that's pretty much starving, compared to the oversaturated single character market.

I'm not going to vote myself, as I feel both have merits and drawbacks. However, I'd like to point out; there are not very many party-based games these days. There are fewer old school ones. And currently, that's what I'm craving is a new party-based game (I have a horde of older ones, but I crave fresh raw bloody meat!).

As dte said, party based allows for each character to be specialized, though that doesn't mean you can't design a game where a character cannot learn everything, and has to find other ways to do things he otherwise can't do through skills.

Of course, single character allows you to really focus down on that character, and can help with immersion. Or a balance of the two, single PC with recruitable NPCs, such as in Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment, can achieve the same effect as a single PC while giving the options of a party game. But then, you need to develop the personalities of your NPCs, and make enough of them to give players an option.