Let's be honest: RPGs in general haven't exactly blazed new trails when it comes to original narratives or gameplay. If I had a nickel for every game that featured a young, unwitting hero and his rag-tag band of multi-skilled friends who band together despite their differences to combat an all-powerful evil that threatens to take over and/or destroy the world, I'd probably have enough to buy another uninspired RPG. It's a vicious cycle, and one that's worked extremely well for the past 20 years. Why stop now?


GameSpy's second guide to building and marketing games is sure to help developers keep their role-playing adventures stale and uninteresting. It's hard work keeping RPGs predictable and trite -- here's how.



RPG Name Generator


Before deciding if your game will be a fairly accessible yet annoyingly quirky JRPG or a freakishly complex CRPG featuring more stats and numbers than a mathematician's thesis, you need to settle on a title.


The following name generator has helped several renowned developers like Square Enix and BioWare come up with memorable titles. And it's okay if the title doesn't really make sense. Actually, that's preferable.





The Hero of [Insert Home Town Here] -- Creating the Protagonist






One way Japanese RPGs stand apart from their western counterparts is character design. First and foremost is the hairstyle of the characters. If you're going the Japanese route, your protagonist's haircut is arguably the most important decision you have to make. Luckily, you only have to choose between two: spiky, and very spiky.


Next, it's important to make the main character as effeminate as possible, so much so that players may not even be able to construe their sex after finishing the game. The Japanese love girly-men, so keep these features in mind: pouting lips, rosy complexion, fair skin, and a svelte, not-too-muscular body. Your protagonist should look like he was getting a manicure, pedicure, facial, mud bath, and quick tan at a day spa right before his gruff uncle barged in to inform him that the key to saving the world was now in his perfectly groomed hands.


Finally, pick a medieval weapon for him or her and make it 10 times bigger. Better yet, imbue it with some sort of elemental power: a gigantic mace is great for clobbering imps, but make that gigantic mace home to the disembodied spirit of the fire deity Flameus and you're set.




Whether you love that a developer offers the player endless choice when it comes to dictating nearly every physical facet of the main character, or look at it as simple indecision directing a game's feature set ("Damn it, Lou -- I can't decide whether the main character should be a bald space marine or a fully-haired space marine! Maybe we could just spend an extra six months of development time crafting an enormous amount of customization options so we don't have to bother creating our own memorable original character?"), western RPGs love to put character creation in the players' hands.


When designing that extensive character creation set, remember one important rule: Quantity is better than quality. So what if the graphics are a little rough and the art style is derivative and ugly? Gamers will disregard all that if they can stretch a character's forehead five inches away from their face, give them fleshy jowls that sag like 83-year-old man sac, and push their eyes so close together they resemble a cyclops.


To summarize:





"Threadbare Oldstory Joined The Party!" -- Designing a Supporting Cast






A supporting cast should be both familiar -- drawing on fantasy standbys like thieves, magicians, and warriors -- and unique. The group should also be thrown together in what seems a haphazard manner over the span of the game's first 10 hours; no one wants to play as a group of individuals who all went to the same high school together before Zelgord the Ruiner collected the four stones of power and threatened to destroy the world because his mommy didn't hug him enough when he was a little Ruiner.


Variety is the spice of life, as well as derivative RPGs. Feel free to give your cast random, strange characteristics to make them seem fresh and new. So when that smarmy game reviewer is playing your game and pondering why it seems so familiar you can fool him into thinking he's playing something truly original by making the black mage an actual black man who suffers from narcolepsy and sometimes falls asleep during battles.


ProTip: JRPGs by law require a princess to be a party member, albeit secretly. You might figure out she's royalty five minutes after you meet her, but don't spoil the surprise for the rest of the party; she'll tell them herself during a climactic moment somewhere in the last third of the game.


Here's a mix-and-match costume guide to ensure she dresses the part.






Western developers borrow a lot from their friends across the Pacific. While they infuse traditional RPG elements into all manner of other genres ("Look -- I can get experience points from strafing a soldier and blowing his head off and then level up my iron sights!"), creating a cast of characters to play second fiddle to the monstrosity the player designs is pretty by-the-book. It comes down to filling in standard roles: a bad-ass loner with a dark past, a morally ambiguous father figure, and an oddball alien who tags along because he could learn much about your species in doing so.


Or, you can eschew a party system altogether and task players with taking their level 1 avatar from obscurity to surprise hero (or anti-hero) all by themselves.



Real-Time or Turn-Based -- Goals for the Battle System




No choice here, really -- it's gotta be turn-based, or some variation thereof. You could push a more active variation that allows enemies to attack while you fumble through pages and pages of attack skills, items, and magic spells, but don't get too creative; gamers aren't paying for good gameplay, just what they've fooled themselves into thinking is a good story full of complex, interesting characters.




Critics and consumers alike can't seem to get enough of RPG/shooter fusions like Borderlands and Mass Effect; running around shooting stuff in real-time while still being tethered by the arbitrary rules of the RPG genre is immensely satisfying. After all, an alien's head really shouldn't explode when I fire an FMJ 5.56mm round into it unless my corresponding "Rifle," "Critical Hit Chance," and "Luck" skills are high enough, right?



Off the Beaten Path -- Side Quests




Side quests in JRPGs should either be painstakingly difficult (fighting a secret boss that has 99,999,999,999 hit points but otherwise looks just like the first boss) or extremely frustrating (punching 500 eagles in the face in three minutes while your controls are reversed due to a curse by the understandably upset mama eagle).


Make sure the completionist catnip is only really doable right before the last boss fight, and by completing them you've essentially overpowered your party, relegating the final boss to an ugly speed bump on the road to the melodramatic conclusion.




The main selling point of western RPGs is freedom, so be sure to completely overwhelm the player with side quests right after the requisite hour-long tutorial tells them what their real goal should be.


In Fallout 3 the main mission is to find the avatar's father James, but the second the player emerges from Vault 101 they can kill raiders at a nearby school, go shopping at a supermarket, get lost in the labyrinthine DC subway system, help an annoying woman write a book full of questionable information, kill mutants... basically, you want to give the player every reason not to keep up with the main quest since, if you're doing a western RPG, that aspect should be the weakest.



Who's the Bad Guy? -- Finalizing the Final Boss




Stay true to the past and make sure your final boss is A) related to your main character, B) someone who everyone thought was a good guy, or C) completely unknown until the last hour of the game. Any mix of the three works great, too. Surprise players with the knowledge that the main character has a twin brother in the last dungeon, and then divulge he's been pulling the strings all along. Gamers love nothing more than a surprise bad guy, and to look back in helpless impotence at all they did to stop that other rube who was only pretending to be the head honcho. Hindsight in JRPGs isn't "20/20," it's "I'm stupid/what a waste of time."




Basically you can follow the same guidelines as Japanese RPGs, just make it anti-climactic and boring. Hold back the good stuff for the inevitable sequel that you've already started working on, and be sure to overtly hint that it's coming during the final cut-scene.



Making Gold -- Advertising Your RPG


Your RPG is finished. *Cue whimsical victory music that gets old after an hour* Now what? Hopefully the crack marketing team has been dreaming up great ways to advertise your game and make it stand out from the pack even though it really doesn't... at all.


For print ads that will be viewed by gamers sitting on their toilets at home, display the game's token "hot chick" party member. If your ad can give a nerd an erection while he's taking a dump, the battle is half over. Commercials should treat viewers to a montage of CG/real-time cut-scenes that show off the whiz-bang graphics and outrageous action. Leave out the actual gameplay; it's a commercial, so being misleading is not only acceptable but expected.


It's also important to add quotes from well-known gaming sites and magazines to the ads. Nothing says "BUY ME!" to gamers more than letting them know Fletch "The Gaming Guru" Klevins of GameSTAR magazine gave "Penultimate Overture" three smiley faces, a gold star, and a thumbs up, saying, "Penultimate Overture's undeniable perfection made me foam at the mouth with joy... I got hard."



New Game+ -- Post-Release


All your hard work replicating time-tested formulas, maintaining arcane, arbitrary rules, and crafting elaborate, action-packed cut-scenes to complement rote gameplay has paid off. In its first month of release your game sold 194,000 units -- just below a year-old Wii game, two SKUs of a yearly sports franchise, and the latest FPS "Revenge of Peace." Combine the worldwide sales and it's on pace to break the one million mark within months. Your decision to cut some finished side-quests, locations, and awesome weapons and sell them as DLC turned out to be a brilliant move, ensuring a healthy profit margin moving forward as you start development on the sequel.


Congratulations, you spoony bard -- you've successfully built and marketed an RPG.