RPG Campaigns

Alot of these projects fail or take forever to complete which kind of suck cause really have alot of people did do alot of hard work into them, especially terrainners since they basically do the most detailed part.

I know personally how it feels like when your hard work is wasted, because I was in the UL team and currently in Wc3WoW. Teamwork is another factor as well, especially if you come from different timezones that are so seperate, it makes it even worser. The fact that alot of members of a project like this do get bored after awhile especially if they are given something that is so hard and annoying to do that they eventually do something else and not keep on their task.

Another factor is the content in an campaign which usually cause a project like this to fail. Such as awesome on-screen inventories, learning systems, spells, custom models are a few things to metion. Some go for alot in their first release, other do not. Content is also another thing which can cause projects to fail.

Those things I metion above, of course you'll need experienced people to make them as well, so average people below aren't usually recruited. Since alot of projects like these require a certain amount of experience for what they need as well.

Leaders in particullar need to have a certain amount of experience in team-leading and often 1-2 modding specialties. Which usually consists of terraining, triggering, spells, modeling, skinning and concepts etc. .

Team members often full in on things that leaders them selves can't do. So a good leader would only recruit people that can fill in his flaws or mod at the same level as the leader. Though this is not truely the case for all RPG Campaign projects.

Though this is all seen in my point of view... Some information might not be there or untrue. Therefore please point out what I've done wrong and I'll add/change it.
Now the question is: If an RPG Campaign was created, what would you expect from it?

-Av3n

1. It will never be completed
2. What is released will be inferrior to Wanderers of Sorceria

Well it is a game so its supposed to be fun, that is if your the player. And about cancelled projects, if ever the old staff quits, as long as there are still those who want to continue the work then why not continue it and recruit people that will help and fill-in the vacant positions. I know you just can't get those kind of professionals but it's worth a shot, it's a waste if the hardwork of people like you get nothing. Good Luck!

I personally would expect lots of quests ( since it's a RPG campaign). Though not the quests that just do "kill X, go to X, kill Y, go to Y, etc." Interesting quests, items, units etc. make the game interesting and fun.

"Kill X" quests can be a lot of fun if you add special conditions. Example:

"Kill 20 boars. However, do not kill any of the cougars along the way, they are endangered species. Also, don't lose more than 2 hunters, we're kinda short on men here."

Things like that make quests more interesting and challenging.

Also, an RPG campaign? I don't think it'd make it. A lot of RPG's fail because they have such insane and inane expectations, such as 350 items, a recipe system that makes over 100 items, a combining item system that can hold up to 120 items per slot...
And heroes. A lot of RPG's want 15+ classes all with their own learning tech tree, custom spells and abilities, learning systems, experience systems, etc.

And then there's the save/load systems which are either insanely complicated (50 character codes with case / number sensitivity) or easy to crack codes. And then you've got the people who play the damn things 24/7, so they load their code and have a level 353 Undead Archmage with all the best items in the game. That tends to shun new players away. (But that's Multiplayer RPGs I'm talking about)

To sum it up, most RPG makers are trying to make RPGs that are their own game (like Oblivion), but they don't seem to understand that making 350 items, recipe systems, 250 custom spells for your 20+ classes, 20 tech-learning trees, and an epic size terrain is a lot of work.

Nice summation, darkwulfv

I also attempted to make several megalomanic projects and then I decided to quit them all and start something simplier.

In wc3 I love shorter and more action-packed RPGs (like Warchasers). For long complex multiplayer seances I can use Neverwinter Nights 2 or Dungeon Siege 2. All large long RPGs I played tended to be boring and too limited by the engine.

talking about quest we could learn some form Dungeon Siege, if anyone had played it, i'm in love with those light beam quest and those stone quest, it is more like a mental challenge instead some killing marathon!

and talking about the creeps, it would be interesting if the creeps will flees around causing you to be really irritated (diablo did this pretty well) and you are forced to learn those movement speed reduction spell (normally this dms spells are useless in RPG)

im pretty interested in this topic lol, since it is related with what im working on~ there is much to be done!

2 bright spots in 15 hour long killing marathon :P But DS is very entertaining and enjoyable killing marathon.

@darkwulfv: Indeed, that actually sounds like an awesome quest. I guess I needed to be more specific as I meant how there are many maps in the objective is just "kill kill kill" and it takes just way too long and the like to do it.

And that's a one man project...

It just goes to show you that narrative and writing are almost always the single most important component in making a good campaign, much more so than art resources and under the hood technology.

Although to be fair to RCX, he has actually done some pretty nifty things in some of his maps.

Whatever you make will also suck compared to the joy and glory that is Rao's RPGs.

Totally agree. Not one single campaign I played was as good as WoS.

Its pretty true RDZ's RPG's are simple + effective. Plus RDZ doesn't make alot of things... well maybe he does not sure about this though.

Yeah alot of RPGs do have too much content that it does become incompleted. This thread has become interesting.

-Av3n

well it all depends, the main factor is what u do in the whole RPG, if all you did is just pure hack and slash then yeah, the RPG is more or less a failure... However if you are doing some quest and get stucked in the quest for too long, it fails too

it is pretty hard to define a good rpg...