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Originally Posted by baofu
Story:
Multiple endings. The story can end in various ways and in the end thou asks thou self is this right? Is this the path I have chosen? There is no right and wrong just numerous ways to end the story. Like in FFT there should be an ending were Ramza becomes king or he accepts one of the stones and becomes a demon. In FFT II there should be chances where thou can chose to rescue or abandon. Kill and plunder or save and protect.
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While multiple endings would be cool, the problem with multiple endings (or multiple storylines in general) is that the amount of work required goes up exponentially with the number of branching plotlines. A normal 40-hour game provides 40 hours of gameplay. If it forks 20 hours in, it requires as much work as a 60-hour game, yet still only provides 40 hours of gameplay. If it forks more than once... well, ouch.
Multiple endings is still feasible, because endings require very little work relative to the game itself (it's mostly just a lot of cutscene rendering). However, it's tricky to write the plot in such a way that the ending can vary without the plot changing at all. If they could pull it off, it'd be cool, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the amount of additional work it would entail.
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Originally Posted by baofu
Classes:
I think it is all nice how characters have to be first squire or chemist then advance to w. mage, b. mage, knight or archer. Now this is drastic but what I like to change is that there are certain schools or training grounds or clans that characters have to join in order to advance to a certain class(job). I like to change chemist to alchemist and add the ability to create potion on by his self. Of course thou has to have the needed materials. Like medical herbs,… Anyway in order to advance to a new class a character has to pay a certain amount of gold or undergo a certain test or have the needed requirements or perhaps all of this together. So thou can not change classes so easily.
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That's an interesting class-change system. It sorta reminds me of FF5's in that you need to get to a certain point in the game to advance (no ninjas in Chapter 1... sorry), but it's a neat variation. I think you could do a lot with this, such as send the player off on sidequests to achieve materials for making certain class changes. It'd also allow the player to use some really powerful classes if he really wanted to, but require a lot of work to get them. Maybe instead of having character-specific special classes, anybody could become a holy knight (or something else) if they found the right materials, but they were rare enough that you wouldn't want to do this with more than one character or so.
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Originally Posted by baofu
Party size:
If anyone here has ever played Shining Force II he knows that if there are more than 8 members will not turn the game into Warcraft. In that particular game I don’t remember so good but I think there was about 9 to 12 members. This game was played on Sega. It is a very old and still one of the best games I ever played.
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Yeah, I was exaggerating a bit. Bahamut Lagoon gave you like 20 characters, and it was still more tactics-ish than Warcraft-ish. I was just trying to emphasize that the crux of the game should still be micromanagement (individual units) rather than macromanagement (whole armies).