8. Grinding
Hi! Barry Scott here asking whether you have problems with short game, AI that's too strong and a large open world. They're a challenge for some household developers but not for Cilit Grind. If there's one thing that single-player RPGs don't need it's grinding. Sure, if you're a MMO developer and need to justify charging your customers per month, why not have them spending hours killing monsters just to reach the next level. If you're going to be playing a MMO you don't want content that will only last a few days or weeks, you want to be playing for a few months so grinding is understandable. Where grinding however is not only unacceptable but downright insulting is a single player game. When I hand over my hard-earned cash for your game, I want to have enough content to satisfy me for more than a few hours, I don't want to have a 1 hour story but only experience it over 20 hours as I'm too busy ensuring my character is at a sufficient level to fight my enemies. If there's one thing that Square Enix did wrong with the Final Fantasy series, it was ensuring that at least half of the game was taken up with endless battles to ensure all your characters were up to the mark. Granted they made up for it with breath-taking graphics, enticing storylines and interesting character development. Well most of them did, I don't know what Final Fantasy X was all about but by god was it bad. If you're going to make a proper sequel to a game either go with the one the fans loved, as in VII, or ones with a decent story-line such as VIII and IX. The last thing I want whilst I'm grinding is having to deal with an emotionally stunted and love-struck girl who can't tell the difference between a real man and a dream. That's right Yuna, he wasn't real...shouldn't have made a sequel, should you have? It's not just Square Enix though, it seems the vast majority of single-player JRPGs demand that you spend a good year or two grinding your characters, some make up for it and some just tip the bucket over your head to make sure that your knee deep in muck. Thankfully western developers tend to leave the grinding, at least hard-core grinding to MMOs.