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Me and my friends want to make an RPG or MMORPG. We are elite graphic artists and some of them know programming really good. So we wanna make an rpg that is a mix between diablo 2, arcanum, and elder scrolls 3 morrowind. We are opened to suggestions. We are from Romania. Hope we will succed. We are now working on some graphics and on the story. I hope it will be shoking. We are all freelancers, we don't work for any company. We will open up a site in a few weeks to show what we have acomplished. Wish us luck guys. We've chosen GameBanshee announcme the game beacouse it is one of the most popular rpg sites in wthe world, if not the most popular. Suggestions pls! Thank you!

I suggest you either put this thread in Gamebanshee Classifieds or in Game Discussion

How do i do that? I'm new here!

It fits fine in here, don't worry.

As for suggestions, it'll be hard with so little information available about the game. If we knew more about the story we would be able to offer opinions on it, but with nothing to start off with making suggestions would be hard.

Perheps you can find some good suggestions in this thread..

Well some of my friends, want to make a fantasy rpgi would like to make something like BattleCruiser Milenium. We will see.

Story: well that's what we are thinking off now. I guess if it will be like Battlecruiser we wont be able to post here no more not beeing an rpg. Anyway we will open our own site in a few weeks. I'm so glad. Well it's our 3 project. So have to do it right! Hope nice cash will come from this. But we don't do it only for the cash, we do it for games, to revolutionize games.

Calling a character 'mysterious', 'shadowy' or 'enigmatic' conveniently avoids the need to explain his background, motivations, etc etc.
If you want your players to dislike a particular character then say that they kick puppies, or drown kittens.

I'm moving this thread...

...to the Game Discussion Forum.

wow... i'm not the only one!!!!!

well, my friend and i are also trying to make an RPG. The thing is we don't know didly squat about game programming, so we decided to just make the storyline first and worry about the game-making later.

So i'm not sure if you want to, but if you want my friend and i could make the story, and you could make the game?

well, here is the storyline my friend and i were looking over. Just read through it and tell me how you like it




There is earth but what earth doesn't know is that there is 7 element planets thunder, water, ground, ice, fire, forest and light that are keeping it in balance.

But while earth existed we had many wars. This made a large supply of dark energy which created the dark element planet. Each element planet had a orb which held its power. Now in the year 3004 the dark element planet is attacking the fire planet. They are looking for its orb. The light planet sent all there soldiers there but that made the light planet defenceless and weak. But now we go to the main character of our story *name*. *name* is a kid from the light planet. They live in a temple that keeps them youthful forever. If they were ever to leave the temple, they were said to die, except for one... The Chosen One. *name* was the chosen one and had left the temple in search of hope. He didn't know about the dark planet, and was just roaming. He didn't know anything about life and was discovering life itself. One day he roamed into the temple of the Prince of Light. The Prince knew of *name* and his destiney. So the Prince went along his side of the Profecies and gave *name* the orb of light and told him of the Dark Planet. *name* understood his role and was confident in achieving it. The Prince told *name* how to destroy the Dark Planet. He must go to each planet and take the orb that balanced it. He must to it fast, for the planet will implode for the imbalance. Once he had all th orbs he would go to the dark planet destroy the orb that controlled it.(now the player takes control and can do what ever he wants. He could join the Planet of Darkness or help every thing else)

The character growth will be like Fable I hope

So what do you think

Just good luck from me, I tried and general arrogance and pride on my partners faults led to a huge dissapointment on my part in the project. I got talked into getting involved for my creativity as the writer and advisor and my partners were all still just struggling to learn what they were doing with it. I tossed together about a dozen rough drafts of different stories and ideas and all of them were summarily tossed aside because "thats not what we want, we can't do that" and when I asked them to show me what they could do before writing anything more, I got "then you'll just be sitting while we work!". If they knew their limits and what they were capable of, rather than struggling to absorb as much knowledge of what to do as they could once gathering a team I might have had something to do besides watch and wait. They thought they knew what they were doing and when they tried, everything failed miserably and they found they needed more education in it while I just waited for them.

Communication though, is extremely important. Not just talking with each other about what your doing either, see to it what your saying to each other makes sense. A programmer tends to become so good at what they do that explaining what it is they are doing comes out at gibberish to others who know nothing about their job and if your graphics artists don't know their limits with the programmer, your artwork won't fit into the engine the programmer makes. Set a limit for yourself, have regular meetings to discuss things on your project, and if things end up too difficult within your limits, choose new limits that are easier to meet. A team of 3-6 people working on a game while dealing with their lives is in a very different position than a team of the same number of people doing the game as their daily job, not to mention thats still a small team of developers for modern games. Make reasonable goals, and see to it they ARE reasonable for what your team is capable of. Attempting to create a game up to par with todays hits for 5 people needing to deal with jobs or school could take you a decade to accomplish.

[QUOTE=Ideal Maxima]well, my friend and i are also trying to make an RPG. The thing is we don't know didly squat about game programming, so we decided to just make the storyline first and worry about the game-making later.

So i'm not sure if you want to, but if you want my friend and i could make the story, and you could make the game? [/QUOTE]

At the overwhelming risk of spamming and being snide....
Thats a fairly large stumbling block when your trying to make a game.

BTW @Warlord:
What are you guys using to code? C? Java?
(Just curious about the scope of the project)

[QUOTE=Ekental]At the overwhelming risk of spamming and being snide....
Thats a fairly large stumbling block when your trying to make a game.

BTW @Warlord:
What are you guys using to code? C? Java?
(Just curious about the scope of the project)[/QUOTE]


i'm not trying to spam, i just wanted to get my idea through to someone, and since he was making a game, and didn't have a storyline yet, i thought i could get my story through

My bright idea is that you leave clichés like 'the Chosen', 'the One' and 'Orbs' out of your game. Their superpower is to diminish the originality-level and bring it to below zero.

Trust me, you want criticism early in the process, not afterwards.

For the most part you go extremes on projects like these. In other words, either you go extremely cliche, or else you try to stuff as much originality in it as possible. Halfway means a bland, boring game, with just enough originality that people think you're onto a new idea, but not enough to break free, and just enough cliches to make someone want to puke. An example? There was nothing exceedingly NEW about world of warcraft. No, I'm serious, it's all been done before, some of it by Blizzard themselves. But they IMPROVED on stuff, and they stuck with what worked (not fixing what ain't broken and all that). WoW is an example of extreme cliche that works. Then there was the original Fallout, which went in the exact opposite direction of most RPGs. Most RPGs up to that time were AD&D swords 'nd sorcery hack&slash. Fallout introduced a post-apocalyptic RPG with a cool storyline, tons of unique weapons like taser guns and sniper rifles, all packaged in a retro-50s style. It's the prime example of the packed-with-originality that works. Now for an example of a game that didn't quite make either extreme and ended in the dread middle zone: Spellforce. It's a game that tried something new: blending RPG with RTS. But it didn't quite make it. The gameplay was boring, the controls clunky, and worst of all, it managed to incorporate the worst parts of both types of games.

If you're going full-bore cliche, then by all means go full-bore. Don't feel bad about using "the One" or "the Chosen", and storylines involving finding the "five powerful Spheres of the Elements" and bringing them together to summon the Ultimate Boss so you can have a climactic final battle to Save The World. People watch sappy soap operas, despite their cliche-ness, for a reason; the same reason people still play cliche-stuffed games: it can be fun! But don't do it halfway, if you're going to go cliche then go all the way.

On the flip side if you're not allowing yourself to fall into the cliche pitfalls, then be very carefull. At all costs avoid storylines that would make the player character the savior of the known universe, or anything so grand. Try to make the journey one of self-discovery (although that one is quickly also becoming cliche, but it's not quite as stale as the "save the world" line).

Here are a small list of my own personal pet peeves:

- Irritatingly powerful "ULTIMATE GIGANTIC SWORD OF DOOM!" that serves no purpose other than to be the ultimate weapon of all time in the game. Powerful weapons should exist but should be rare and damn it should be difficult to get.
- Rolling in dough. True, by the endgame, in any game, you should be fairly wealthy, but in Morrowind you could be halfway through the game and be rolling in so much money that you almost couldn't spend it all. That's bad; it ruins the game.
- ULTIMATE SPELL OF DEATH DESTRUCTION AND DOOM
- W&Ws (Warriors and Wizards). I hate the idea that in many, many, MANY games, there are two and ONLY two good character types: the warrior and the wizard. All the others suck and can't be played, or even if you did play them you'd never be quite as powerful as a warrior or a wizard. I find that irritating and stupid, but nobody seems to want to care. Case in point: World of Warcraft. Despite the fact that Blizzard has tried mightily to balance all classes, the warrior and the mage are still the two most powerful classes in that game. They did quite well in bringing many other classes very close to unseating the twin kings, but in the end, W&W wins out. I don't suggest toning down W&W, but try giving other classes enough power so that they're on the same level.

Totally agree with Opal. No villain would want to destroy the whole world these days, as they too realize the world is also theirs and their family's.

You could/should (and that is extremely hard) try to somehow keep the enemy forces small. Lord of the Rings has way too much Orcs! It's a logistical nightmare to feed them all.
Or even worse: Shoot-'em-up-style. One-man armies. Avoid them! Unless you can come up with some great graphics (Doom3, Halflife 2), nowadays, a one-man army cannot survive three minutes of gaming because of it's boringness.

However, if you do it right, it can be fun to slaughter hundreds of enemies by yourself, but I'll tell you, it's extremely hard to make it that way. If you make the enemy too simple, they'll eventually just be extremely annoying (Morrowind birds)...
The object of the Morrowind game wasn't killing enemies, and running through levels. So that was good...

(..) Blabla, this is going nowhere. I have to cut it here... Writer's block...

As some of you may know (thought propably those who know have already forgot) I'm also making a RPG game. So here is some ideas I have:

1) In my opinion you can make very powerfull weapons/armors/other items, just remember to make enemies that are so hard to kill even with those uber-powerfull items.

2) If you try to make something more than just hack 'n slash -game, dailogies are very important. It's quite boring when 99% of NPC's say the same thing all the time. Give every NPC own personality, own answers, etc. IMO this makes game more interesting.

3) Tons of items. Again, IMO the game get boring when you have found every item you can. When there is tons of items, this won't happen too early.

4) Quests must be more complicated than just "Kill bad guy, get reward" or "Find item, get reward". Fallout and BG series are good examples of how the quests should be done.

5) Every PC's action should affect to world. Ie. if you kill the leader of bandits, the remaining bandits will hunt you untill you have killed every one of them. Or if you kill the king, everyone from that city/land will hunt you, but rival king could take you to his protection and give you rewards.

6) The most important thing: The freedom of the choice. Player should be able to avoid doing things that (s)he doesn't want to do, without getting every NPC attacking against him/her.

This is what I can think of now, but I could post more if you want

It's important that player's can actually choose their side. This means you have two about-equal sized sides, and the player can choose where he goes...

[QUOTE=ik911]It's important that player's can actually choose their side. This means you have two about-equal sized sides, and the player can choose where he goes...[/QUOTE]

Yup, that's also very important. It's quite annoying when you "can" be evil, but if oyu are, you can't beat the game or it comes ten times harder to do.

a multiplayer rpg must have lots of races and classes, also how about building your own fortress which you then defend with npc guards, mercenarys and clan or guild members against established npc citys