EpicWin Is Now Available On The AppStore
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1) The experience required to advance the first level seems quite high. In order to get people hooked, you should give them a quicker reward up front. As it stands it looks like it'll take me a couple of weeks to become a level 2 whatever.
2) The task scheduler needs to be more flexible - at a minimum, including days of the week in the interface, plus the ability to schedule a quest for 'every weekday'.
3) It would be nice to set a standing goal, which can grant experience every time it occurs. I might like to award myself 100 points every time I get positive feedback from a customer, for example - not something I can easily schedule in advance as a 'quest'.
People who have not followed their ancestors in game evolution would probably find RPGs strange and arbitrary.
What strikes you as unnatural about RPG's? Do you think there will be some kind of generational shift where their popularity will wane?
Moreover, there seems to be way too much stuff to collect. And if keeping the right stuff is important, it's not at all clear what the tradeoffs are.
The quests tend to be rather similar and are not much fun.
There's also too much grinding.
BTW, I also find RTS games to be strange... sure they are a natural progression beyond games like chess, but they are not as fundamental as chess. There's too much to learn and it's not obvious why people would find them fun.
Or, to rephrase, exactly how do you see games progressing within a genre if not by adding at least some complexity?
> Moreover, there seems to be way too much stuff to collect. And if keeping the right stuff is important, it's not at all clear what the tradeoffs are.
I'd like to know what kind of RPGs you're talking about here. In most good RPGs (e.g. the great days of Black Isle & al), packratting is very much optional. Packratting tends to be a characteristic of A-RPG more than "Western" (aka "true") RPGs.
> The quests tend to be rather similar and are not much fun.
> There's also too much grinding.
Same question as above, a good RPG is a crafted experience, and a well crafted experience is terrific. Would you per chance be talking about MMORPGs?
> but they are not as fundamental as chess. There's too much to learn and it's not obvious why people would find them fun.
Chess and go and other such games are simplifications of war from a general's point of view. They're played by people who want to battle strategically without shedding blood. RTS are "realifications" of those, standing closer to actual wars. That's why they're fun: you build yourself, you set up strategy and tactics, you try to understand your opponent's and react to that, ...
There are few things in culture that are natural or fundamental. Except for brief periods of "cultural purification" such as the Akhnaten period in Ancient Egypt and 20th century Western modernism, civilizations seem to have a tendency towards more complex artistic forms that will appear strange and arbitrary to an observer who doesn't understand the context.
For example, I can't follow Japanese Noh theatre, but it's not inherently any more "difficult" than some piece in London's West End -- both require a huge amount of cultural background to be understood.
You could incorporate it with a wishlist so that it alerts when you've got enough to go out and buy that Upper Playground tshirt while still making rent this month.