CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

Anything the player learns or finds before the final dungeon can be used for at least one dungeon. That's usually enough for me. That's also about as long as I can stand to play without finding anything new. Once I'm "finished" building my party, the game should end after one dungeon as far as I'm concerned.

I cannot stand New Game Plus like that in Chrono Trigger. One-shooting enemies doesn't work for me. I have played Chrono Trigger twice, but none were New Game Plus and I'll never play New Game Plus no matter how many times I replay it. I am however open to taking with me my old builds if I can pit it against upgraded monsters like in the Diablo series Nightmare and Hell mode and Demon's Souls NG+. In other situations however, if a game is good enough for a second playtrough, then I play it again from the beginning.

I think it's not only a question of how unpredictable enemies are, but also in what way they are unpredictable. Let's say we have a boss which each turn stuns one of the characters. With a standard RPGM four member party, that means only three will be able to act on a given turn and if the target chosen is random the player can't predict which three it will be that are available. This makes that element very unpredictable, but how this plays out changes drastically depending on if the boss stuns a character at the beginning of a turn or at the end of a turn.

If the boss stuns a character at the end of the turn, the player will know which characters that can't be used for the current turn, but she/he can't know who will be targeted the next turn. However, if the boss stuns a character at the beginning of the turn, the player won't even know who can act for the current turn. I prefer to have it at the end of the turn.

Making it at the end of the turn means the player has to form four different strategies depending on who is stunned. Making it at the beginning of the turn means that the player have to form one strategy that accounts for all four outcomes. Of course, other circumstances can also force her/him to adapt. How healthy the characters are and whether or not the boss is about to launch it's strongest move will affect the strategy. Even so, have the stun happen at the end of the turn creates four different situations for every single situation there would have been without the stun gimmick.

Whenever you give monsters a skill and/or AI setting you should be conscious on how it affects the strategies the player has available. The options will add and remove strategy. For example, taking an enemy who only has a physical attack and giving it a spell as well will remove some options. Inflicting blindness, boosting party defense or debuffing enemy strength now only has a 50% chance of doing anything at all. In theory the player can now also inflict silence, boost party magic resistance and debuff enemy magic, but in practice you will rarely see players use strategies which only will do anything at all 50% of the time. This is however not necessarily a problem. There are still other strategies available. Sleep and paralysis for example doesn't give a damn about what kind of attack the enemy uses. Removing some strategies can mean that the player has to search for other strategies.

Consciously changing which strategies are useful and not useful between every enemy can force the player to adapt and ensure that not all encounters are the same. However, this requires that you don't leave a catch all strategy that will always work like the "kill it fast" strategy Anaryu described. Also, for the best result you both want to close of a lot of strategies and leave a lot of strategies available simultaneously. If you don't effectively close of a lot of strategies the player can pick two general purpose strategies and they will then work for 95%, or more, of the battles. One the other hand, if you don't leave a lot of strategies available you're not really letting the player formulate it's own strategy, the player can only use the strategy you devised or fail.

What I think would be even better is if enemies closes and opens up strategies depending on what move they use. That way, while the first turn against three dire wolves will always be the same, subsequent turns will be fought differently depending on what moves the enemy chooses. The stun gimmick I described earlier is one such scenario although that particular one may not be very appealing. In any case, my main goal is to find ways to accomplish exactly that.

Being able to customize those things are nice, but far from necessary. Under no circumstances do I think you should shoehorn those features in. If the game is set up so that it naturally leads to this kind of customization (WRPG like game) then go for it, but if you need to sacrifice from other aspects of the game to accommodate for aesthetic customization then it's not worth it.

It is also meaningless for me to be able to name the hero in a heavily character driven game like Final Fantasy games. In those cases I don't view them as my character and I consider it the game maker's job to choose a name. This applies equally to games with silent protagonists.

I would say that there's really only one kind of quest: do something.

Seriously though, you can easily simplify the number of different quests to a small number. I see that people disagree with how small the number would be, but nobody seems to disagree that there really isn't so many different quests. However, I don't think that's such a bad thing, just think of how many great games there are whose concept is "defeat the enemy."