Turn-Based RPG

How would you make Turn-Based games interesting for millennials? You know companies like SquareEnix changed their games and turned away from this because they know it won't sell for the new generation of players.

xdd le millennials maymay again


fug me lol

Pokemon is turn based and still sells a shitload of copies. I don't think turn based combat itself is the problem.

Kill yourself OP

>millennials
>new generation
Millennials are in their mid 30s now user. Suikoden II was targeted at millennials.

Are you asking how turn based games should retain this consumer base or how they should attract new players in that age range? Or are you talking about something else entirely?

Millennial here. It isn't a millennial issue it's a shit taste problem. How is setsuna by the way?

>for millennials
What the fuck are you talking about?

You do realize that millennials are like 20-35, right? The age demographic that most likely grew up with turn based RPGs?

turn-based rpgs sell. There's a very dedicated, albeit niche, audience for it.

rip off persona and throw in minorities, but still use really bad white voice actors

Millennial has just become a catchall phrase for "people who are younger than me that i feel disdain for"

Oh shut the fuck up OP, you're a millennial too.

>How would you make Turn-Based games interesting for millennials?
OP, only millennials could put up with that outdated shit.

Puzzle & Dragons is turn-based, and that seems to be just fine. Maybe you should think about what kind of game "millennials" want, and then what the best way of giving that game to them, rather than just deciding that people must play a certain playstyle and what bells and whistles you can add to appeal to them.

As a 27-year old man who drifted away from turn-based games at an early age, here's my opinion:

Make them abstract.

Turn-based battles? Boring. The last thing I want to see slowed down to a plodding, repetitive crawl is combat.

Turn-based conversations? Now we're getting somewhere. Turn-based speeches. The courtroom. The podium. The stage. Acting. Can you remember your lines? How well can you improvise? Have you memorized the choreography for the fight?

It would have to be different enough from the "Tolkien fantasy RPG" archetype to catch my interest, otherwise I believe she is dead, sir.

I liked how Paper Mario did it. I want something to do during the attack. Maybe pick the attack, and then I take over and control the character to attack with him. That way there would be a skill component to it too. Enemies could have weak points you could aim for. You could have a limited time to do the attacks. I don't think there's ever been a game to do that.

all of those ideas just make combat drawn out

Turn-based rpg combat is drawn out anyway. It would make it more fun imo. Something like 5 second to do as much damage as possible in 5 seconds for normal attack, and 10 seconds for special attacks. I don't know though, it might be too drawn out. I'd have to try it first.

No it isn't. You can't just put all turn based RPGs in the same boat. Wizardry is a lot faster than Final Fantasy

Well I've never played wizrdry, so I'll check it out. The only turn-based rpgs I've played are Chrono Trigger, Paper Mario, and Shining Force.

Sounds like you've only played a few entry level console RPGs. I would recommend avoiding wizardry until you're more experienced with the genre. Might and Magic is an easier entry point into the dungeon crawler subgenre.

wouldn't*

milleny here, played through FFXII which is slower than any turn based RPG. it isn't a millennial thing. this new generation though that's growing up with ipads and shit at age 4? yeah they're fucked, they will never enjoy a turnbased game or Chess or any of the truly good shit.

Will do.

wizardry 8 with faster enemy rounds

Yeah, it's not gonna look good when I'm 50 and up and these kids that got raised on f2p phone games are the main demographic.

I've had an idea where enemies are on a 3x3 grid and enemy positioning is an important part of the gameplay
>melee guys can only attack the front row
>certain abilities can push/pull enemies
>certain enemies "behave" to move to a favorable position
>some enemies are "big" and take up more than one space on the grid
just a few examples

Chess is the best competitive game out there, period. It's a shame most people aren't bothered about it anymore (at least 15-20 and below).

Sounds like Bard's Tale 4

>playing Chess when you could be playing Shogi or Go

C'mon son

huh

You make the party building elements interesting. Remember when Final Fantasy had job and you can mix and match different jobs, secondary abilities and shit? Yeah, I lived for that. Want to try out a standard Fighter, Thief, Wmage, Bmage? cool. How about all red mages with 2x casting of summon? cool. How about all berserkers just for fun. Yeah ok.

I just enjoy being able to build a party and see how well it pans out in practice.

It also helps to have a robust item system so I can itemize. Nothing like equipping your entire party with fire absorb equipment and using your Bmage's fire magic as an emergency heal.

Shogi's good, but Go's way less deep than chess. It's a ton of fun but the game theory's way more simplistic. Not necessarily bad but it's not to the same level where you'll never truly git gud.

if you've ever played any jap dungeon crawler like etrian oddyssey, smt etc you've gotten a taste of wizardry
it's the grandaddy of rpgs and every single jrpg has it's roots in the wizardry series
it's been done before
the most innovative thing for turn based combat games to do is to get it off the grid or seperate battle screens

you're 35+ no wife, virgin and still plays video games and watches chinese cartoons

Project X Zone does something like that I believe.

This guy gets it. Old RPGs used to be about team building and resource management. Those factors along with fast paced and deadly combat (Phantasy Star IV) are the key to any good turn based RPG.

If you want a slightly more accessible Wizardry to start out with, try 8. It's fucking awesome. You make a full party when the game starts, but on a first play I recommend customizing only the first main character and choosing the others from a list so you don't fuck yourself over too much. It has all the gameplay of other Wizardry games but it's in 3D and has a sense of adventure unlike most of the others.

Action Commands / Timed Hits like paper mario games (I know there are some other games like dragoon that do this but paper mario easiest example)

Rolling health bars like earthbound.

Undertale has that thingy it does.

Just, anything to where the player has to or is able to do some execution beyond issuing orders.

If he wants a sense of adventure, Might and Magic 6 is what he wants. There really is nothing else on the market like that game. Same with Wizardry 8.

that niche wasn't large enough to save I am Setsuna
but honestly what fucked up that game was that i was digital, niche audiences love collector shit, Square just being retards at marketing as always

> Millennials hate turn based
>> Persona, Etrian Odyssey, Bravely Default, Mario & Luigi, Pokémon

Turn FF7 into kingdom hearts....ohwait...

Make turns revolve around an interesting minigame or puzzle while retaining classic rpg elements? Gems of War is a perfect example of this. Or basically anything other/more than "scroll through a list and pick your freaking ability"...

How well do EO games sell anyways?

RPGs are about immersion, most people can't feel immersed in an RPG with turn based combat
they want to BE the character, not tell them what to do

but this however works for Pokemon, and other monster collecting games because you're playing as a monster trainer, your job is to tell the monster what to do, so you're immersed in the game

>RPGs are about immersion
they never were

>There really is nothing else on the market like that game.

This hurts. I wish I was a game dev just so we would have more like MM6.

you do know what RPG stands for right?

Sounds like Radiant Historia.

Deffinitely not immersion playing game
RPGs have roots in wargames which are turn based.

>it's a pedantic idiots bicker over the definition of "rpg" thread
pack it in boys

D&D isn't action combat. Nearly all RPGs stem at some point from either wargaming or pen and paper RPGs that involve dice rolling.

I recently decided to give up turn-based JRPGs altogether. They're just too similar. After playing several Final Fantasies, Dragon Quests, Bravely Default, Breath of Fire, etc., it was starting to feel like the same game over and over.

If you want continued interest, you need to innovate.

Unrestricted RPG>>Time-based RPG(e.g. FF4-6)>>>>>>>>>>>>Tic-tac-toe>>>Turn-based RPG

The only turn based RPG I ever liked as Trails In The Sky because it had a cool turn system and a positioning mechanic that diversified a lot of fights, and it had a shit load of content, super fucking long.

Play western ones. There was a lot of inovation in the late '90s/early 2000s that has gone ignored by devs today. Japs only made wiz1-5 clones

that's really true with any genre when you play them for to long

Well enough for them to make 7 games.

Find ways to make them fun. All of the Mario RPGs are fun, if only because they utilize player timing for attacking and defending. Paper Mario focused on this aspect by making the numbers smaller and the inputs more complex, while M&L choreographed enemy attacks to a degree where subtle differences in attack animations result in a different character being attacked.

If you plan on avoiding gimmicks altogether, bother to balance the encounters in the game against the player's magic list and stats. Make enemies who have are vulnerable to a recently acquired skill. DQ4 did a neat thing in Chapter 2, where the party would get wiped fighting groups of 4 or 5 monsters unless the monsters were confused or put to sleep by the Cleric or Wizard in the party.

The problem with many turn-based games is that you're just tapping on the "attack" command, sometimes doing magic and sometimes using an item.

I may be wrong but I think that the setup like in the OP pic is inherently flawed. Enemies MUST attack randomly or else the whole system is broken.

Give CRPGs and older western stuff a go. Modern western is just Dragon's Dogma/KoA stuff, but Wizardry/Ultima/M&M/Arx Fatalis/Baldurs Gate/Icewind Dale are fucking great, better than Dragon Quest and FF (coming from a huge fan of JRPGs). JRPGs are a lighter way of telling a story with light combat to break it up, but CRPGs usually have much deeper combat (often borrowing D&D rulesets) and much deeper story/dialogue since they usually have branching conversations and much more detailed paragraphs of text.

I'd say just keep turn-based on handhelds, dunno why but I absolutely love playing older rpgs on my PSP more than I did on SNES and PS.

One of the fundamental issues with the game industry right now is the astronomical cost of production. Current gen art direction is obscenely expensive, and then advertising is fully half-or-more of a game's entire budget. All of this while major developers aren't simply trying to yield a profit - but a measurable increase in earnings over previous years.

The issue isn't the genre itself, though it could certainly use some critical examination of how to apply some fresh paint. More accurately, I suspect it's an issue of expectations regarding payout. A small studio with a talented writer could probably make a very compelling, cult-classic turn-based game which would yield a sizeable profit. But it wouldn't be "current gen" art direction in all likelihood, and they would need to be very savvy about how best to spend their time and money promoting it so they don't create an insurmountably expensive overhead.

>wizardry
>M&M
>dialogue heavy

What I meant is that they have the possibility of delving much more deeply into those things. Planescape Torment is dialogue heavy. Wizardry and M&M have deep combat. Games like Baldur's Gate have both to a slightly lesser degree. Dialogue-heavy JRPGs are usually just conversational fluff without meaningful choices. There are exceptions to both. Wizardry 8 had an interesting dialogue system (not that you'd know) where you question keywords and bribe to get information. Made each conversation a puzzle almost where you could fuck yourself over by bribing for what turns out to be useless info.

Chess will never be the best competitive game, because systems with a turn order always give the first player a direct advantage.

It's also hard to determine what makes something the "best" at being competitive. What if I said Starcraft Broodwar was better? What are the most important elements of a competitive game?

Make them fast paced and not slow or boring.

People fucking love FFVII and Chrono Trigger, and a lot of that has to do with the quality of the games themselves, but those games also had really fast and responsive battle systems.

SMT4

Okay but not something awful that was shit out in 3 months on a shoestring budget and on an actual console though.

I would respectfully disagree with you. It doesn't need to descend into an argument, I was just stating my opinion.

While I agree with you two, we probably won't see anything mainstream like the M&M series again; probably only shoddy indie attempts. It was my first PC series and while I love it and always will, inventory and stats are just a game of numbers with a gui over it and the overworld maps are incredibly small, but man exploring dungeons and all that lovely sprite and pre-rendered 3D art for buildings/house interiors are still fantastic.

>timed hits meme
timed hits are cancer

>you pushed the button too fast so your attack missed
>now you pushed it too slow so you take extra damage
fuck this shit.

>git gud
no fuck off. rhythm game mechanics should stay in rhythm games.

Ogre Battle does this minus the movement during battles.

What if they were like Super Mario RPG where you only deal extra damage and take less based on your timing. There's no downside to just letting the battle play out with minimal involvement.

I think the issue is probably fodder. Is there a turn based rpg that doesn't suffer from having a flurry of battles where you simply mash attack between a boss fight?

Every battle needs to be designed, I think. Interesting combinations of enemies, each slightly different, each offering some challenge and danger.

In most games they are literally fodder that makes no difference. Especially in games that level scaling. There is literally zero point to a fight.

I think the best way to design the "minor" battles between each boss will be for them to give hints on the upcoming boss. Introduce some of its mechanics and skills. They you use them to plan, organise and make your party really efficient.

In all honesty though, I don't really recall a turn based RPG that wasn't FF8/10 or Breath of Fire 3. That's all I played.

no it's still cancer because not using it makes it feel like you aren't playing the game optimally. there's literally no skill involved with timed hits. there's no strategy or reaction. it's 100% trial and error muscle memory.

Need to improve on the formula X-COM, JA2, and Silent Storm used. The XCOM reboot and 2 moved in the completely opposite direction. And games where you stand in a line with no movement and attack are retarded and deserve to die.

I don't care if it's popular to people who play CoD but I guess you need to appeal to that audience to sell enough copies so I wouldn't even bother unless you use a modest budget and don't need to sell 50 million copies to break even.

I play piano, and the majority of that is based on muscle memory. Would you say playing classical piano is trial and error muscle memory? People practice guitar scales so they can eventually pull off complex sweep-picked solos. Muscle memory is an integral part of skill at higher levels (muscle memory is just as important in something like Counterstrike where you learn to quickaim and snap to headshots). Disregarding anything that requires repeat gameplay to perfect is fucking dumb.

Those games are both slow as shit.

>Would you say playing classical piano is trial and error muscle memory?
basically. I used to play an instrument so I'm not saying it's easy, but it's a stupid mechanic when applied to anything but music games. in games like fps and rts where you use muscle memory to perform tasks, there's still room for varience in your timing. even playing many types of actual music there's room for timing that's not right on the metronome. it's only games with timed hits, and fighting games for whatever reason, that demand frame perfect timing.

Etrian Odyssey does something like that, most random battles have enemies in groups that were designed to fuck you up instead of random mobs.

Suikoden's take on turn based combat is really fun. I wish other rpgs would try to copy it.

Millenial here, I grew up with this and Grandia. The fuck are you on about OP?

make these games more like Valkyria Chronicles

More animu pantsu shots?

If i'm going to be spending over half the game looking at people stare at each other, it better have some fucking awesome battle themes. I was a gigantic JRPG nut when I was a kid because humming along to the battle themes was just as fun as the battles themselves.

>2016
>millenials are 20-35

guess all the shit games made them age 10 years faster

Just google what millenial actually means, retard.

>15
>mid 30s

>let's just ignore the meaning of the word and give it a new one
>let's just gobble up all the shit we are fed

go on, faget

>let's just ignore the meaning of the word and give it a new one
That's what the people who think the word means someone born around 2000 are doing. The birth years of millennials are from like 1985 to 1995 or something.

That moment when Eroge nowadays have better gameplay than actual games. I digged pic-related even though a lot of people disliked the gameplay. I feel like the hybrid worked out really well and this wasn't even a proper game or JRPG.

But gameplaywise JRPGs in general can't compare to the western ones. They mostly tend to be more story/adventure focused(Or they don't even have that going for them) opposed to stuff like Heroes, Disciples, Kings Bounty, Age of Wonders and so on that take gameplay as the priority.

so you admit it's a bullshit definition
you should realize that OP was talking about the spoonfed generation of babbies whose first games were oversimplified crap from 2007+ like wow, oblivion and call of duty etc.

I admit that OP has no clue what he's talking about and so are you.

Just because you don't agree with the definition of a word doesn't mean you can change it. It makes you look like a retard.

A millenial is someone who grew up in the 2000s, you dipshit.

Reminder Turn based rpgs are retarded because who the fuck WAITS for their enemy to attack and walk back to their fucking position?

More like 2000s are their teen years.

Define "grew up". I wouldn't say people born in 1985 grew up in the 00s but that's the oldest cutoff for someone being a millennial.

I think of turn based RPGs as a toy, essentially, but that might just be cause I have chrono trigger and several FF games for my DS. My primary exposure to the genre is mobile gaming, which has definitely affected my view of it.