How do you encourage players to vary their party in an RPG while rewarding and personalizing their experience with the ones they stick with
>>3843871Hot, steamy romances. But you can only cheat on your main romance with one of the other hotties if your main one is out of the party.
>>3843871How do you encourage users to vary their posts and threads rather than spamming the same one across multiple boards?
>>3843871The exhaustion mechanic. Introduce a B-party campaign.
>>3843871Sidequests that require certain party members to be in your party in order to complete + reasonable ways of efficiently leveling up party members who aren't in your main party.
>>3843908My favorite thing lately has been what Octopath has been doing (and other games have done, but not as many as I'd like) where you use multiple characters against the final boss. Superbosses and end-game content should be absolutely rife with this.Imagine playing Suikoden I and II but there are superbosses like Neclord and Luca Blight and others where you need to do the multiple team thing they had you do in the second game. You all know which fight I'm talking about.What about Final Fantasy IV After Years on GBA with using 3 parties for the superboss?What about Final Fantasy VI and the final boss fight there?They NEED to do more stuff of this nature so it forces you to eventually invest in all the characters and make everybody worth playing. It would add so much value to every game that did this.
Have party members come and go as the story progresses. Only have 2-4 party members at a time until the climax, where you get all of them. As an added bonus it makes the characters seem realer, since they aren't just mindless automatons following the protagonist and making the occasion comment the whole game.
>>3843871I liked the Golden Sun 2 system of being able to jump any member of your extended party from the reserve into the front mid-battle.
>>3844042Thats called the Dragon Quest 4 system
>>3843871I wouldn't know because switching my party around is one of the things I dislike the most from some RPGs; I want a small, ride-or-die team right from the start, to the point that in games like FFT and TO:LUCT I hire three generics as soon as I can and bench most named characters except for the MC and a few others.Objectively speaking, what helps a game that wants you to play with several characters is to make a small cast and let them gain experience even if they aren't always on battle. I enjoyed Breath of Fire IV because you play with a team of six characters with three on the active party, but it's easy to shuffle them with the other three in the middle of battle and you don't have to always keep them on the front to trigger events or advance the plot – you just play with the ones you like, have the best equipment currently or the ones with the best way to chain attacks. Plus, those small sections where you go and play with Fou-Lu feel like good breaks from the main party.My issue is juggling a bunch of characters you don't really care about or that don't add to the plot. I believe varying your playstyle can be done in better ways, like FFV's Job System (four characters growing in stats and skills depending on what you make them pick) or Valkyrie Profile (You only stick to Lenneth while exploring the world and the plot with temporal party members and different playthroughs). Even Saga Frontier's short chapters while letting you pick whoever depending on how much you know about recruiting them in a run does a better job.
>>3843871Make the game hard enough for character choice to matter and lenient with exp so you don't have to grind reserves to use them
>>3843871Replayability. >>3843887Lol fucking destroyedOP you're a faggot loser
>>3843871>How do you encourage players to vary their party in an RPG while rewarding and personalizing their experience with the ones they stick withLet them create a custom party.
>>3843871I think RPGs need to giving the player more characters than they can field and actually base the party on the needs of the story.
>>3844034after years was not on gbaPSP and wii only