What do you dislike about RPG Maker games?

[HopesGaming]

A lot of the comments are basically about preferences.
Some like the RPG elements such as battle, grind and exploring. While others simply want a fap (or story without the grind).
This sums up the comments so far pretty good.

But the dislike does not come from preference.
It comes from misusing the engine.

Rpgmaker is for RPG games. Exploring, combat, lots of side content, items and what else comes with the RPG tag.
But too many devs use the engine as it was a VN engine.

There are no (or minimal) reasonings for a pure VN that justify it to be on an RPG engine.
It's basically walking from point A to point B. Trigger scene and repeat. The world is vast and empty. The graphics are usually bad as many use the old RPG engine for some reasons (especially for the text). Functionalities are lacking, such as easy save and skip button (something novice unity users that do pure VN also tend to mess up) and the list goes on.
All of this and you ask yourself - this is a pure VN why not make it in a VN engine? Ren'py is free and is extremely easy to use. 1 day to learn to make a VN. But they don't and hence the dislike starts.

Which is unfortunate because there is a ton of really high quality and great rpgmaker games from devs that actually utilize the engine properly. But those games tend to be ignored by some due to the previous misuses.

 

[FoxLust]

Pretty much everything i dont like rpgmaker style.

 

[freedom.call]

I managed to play one, it was easy because there were little stars showing the way. All that walking annoys me.

Another one I tried I fell into a manhole after two minutes and was attacked by zombies, in a mom-son game. Come on!
Never again.

 

[Whyllow]

For me, it;s a pain in the ass to get RPGM games running. I think I had one or two on m previous machine, and I recall having downloaded all different version's players. Not gonna do THAT again.

There's enough to keep me occupied in engines that I can run, though, so I won't complain about it on threads for RPGM games.

 

[J II D]

Only thing that i mind with the RPG games is the surplus of female protagonist rape games...

Otherwise..
I rather play a good RPGM game, than the 100th RenPy game with the same characters, story and lazy design.

 

[pj1983]

As others have already said, there are way too many devs using RPGMaker to make VN's. So many, in fact, that it's hard to sift through the garbage to find the true RPG's.

Two other secondary issues:
1) Very few RPGMaker games are published with a MacOS version, which I prefer. If a game is worth it, I'll boot into Windows and play it there, but it's annoying. With Ren'py, I can easily take a Windows distro and recompile it for Mac, so I tend to try out more Ren'py projects than RPGMaker projects.

2) RPGMaker games are bloated. They're seriously 5x the size of a Ren'py game for the same amount of content. Again, if the game is worth it, I'll keep it around. But when my hard drive is filling up and I need to start trimming the fat, its the RPGMaker games that are the first to go.

 

[Hadley]

Pretty much everything. If I want to play a RPG I play Skyrim, New Vegas, KCD or the Witcher. I play these type of Games for some nice Romance Stories and just want a somewhat linear Story with some choices. And in the few RPGM Games I tried the walking around is just terrible and has no purpose!

 

[Pretentious Goblin]

Honestly, it kind of feels like the poor man's engine for making H-games. End result is usually unappealing compared to a Ren'Py game or even Unity. I don't think it's the 16-bit RPG format itself; I have a much better image of Wolf RPG Editor, which seems very similar. I guess I just feel that way about RPGM because of all the low-quality, low-effort games I've played and by now it just reeks of cheapness. It's the Comic Sans of game engines, you don't know why but seeing it used unironically just makes you cringe.

That said, there are exceptions and a skilled modder can make RPGM almost unrecognizeable. Research into Corruption being a good example. Or you can do it right, avoid overuse of stock assets and game mechanics and have good-quallity art like A Zombie's Life.

 

[Faisallore]

The reasons why i hate most rpgm games are:

- a lot of them force you to run around with the arrow keys
- the resolution is most of the time pretty low
- the menu system is annoying to handle
- the menu sounds are disgusting
- most rpgm games are a grindy pain in the ass
- i had to many rpgm games that were so badly programmed that they lagged all the time and i'm not playing on a potato
- not beeing able to roll back

-The menu sounds are disgusting....

Seems this is the only thing i agreed lol

 

[Glib_Gentleman]

Sound balance. It may be just my personal issue, but in every RPGM I can't seem adjust the volume of music and sounds without system sound mixer, even on 20% they're damn loud, every other game, movie and music seems fine. I think the issue is on me somehow, but hey, it also annoys so I mentioned.

Sound balance is definitely one of the reasons I dislike RPGMaker games.

I can have my song playlist playing at a perfect volume, Steam games at a perfect volume, Youtube videos at a perfect volume, and I launch an RPGMaker game and it just blows my eardrums out. I have to individually adjust the volume of the game in the system sound mixer, by a LOT. I can drag down the volume to 2% (while everything else is at 30 or 40%) and it is still too damn loud.

Couple that with the menu sounds. I don't think all the menu beeps and blips are terrible, but they get annoying instantly when their volume is so loud - even louder than the music.


However, my main reasons for disliking RPGMaker games are as follows:

1) The resolution. I get it. They are pixel games. 320 x 240 makes sense. But the scaling in RPGMaker sucks. On a high-resolution monitor, I can't play the games in the original resolution because I want to be able to SEE them. So now I've got a few options:

Use Resizer software to change the window size - not a perfect solution, since you need to scale up pixel art by whole numbers - 2x larger, 4x larger, 6x larger, etc to keep it from turning into a blurry mess. If the dev has kept the default 4:3 ratio, this still results in black bars on the sides of the screen. So, now I can SEE everything and it looks OK . . . until I start trying to play, and find that the game now runs like shit and screen-tearing is constant, because RPGMaker was never designed to run at higher resolutions.

Use the Windows magnifier tool. This solves the performance problem, but the pixels now look like blurry shit, and I lose the ability to multi-task on my PC.

2) Performance. Related to the above, even at the native resolution of RPGMaker, the games tend to run terribly. I've got a monster of a PC made for dual-monitor graphics work and high-end PC gaming, and between the RPGMaker engine and devs not knowing how to optimize their code and scripts / using too many at once, I get terrible performance out of RPGMaker games.

3) The art. I like pixel art. Hell, the game I'm making is all pixel art.

But I am SO tired of the default RPGMaker tilesets and sprites. The squat, chibi-style sprites that are the same style we saw in Final Fantasy 4 nearly 30 years ago. The super limited animation frames.

All of that can be done well, and is by some RPGMaker devs, but I crave for some Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore, or even better sprites like we see in so many pixel games these days.

I could go on and on, by those are the 3 big ones for me.

 

[Meowtch]

To expand on some things touched on here:

File Size: A lot of RPGMaker games are much larger relative to their content compared to other "engines." Even waiting a minute can be very annoying when you can enjoy something else instantly.

Viruses: Although there are many ways to vet games and check for viruses, opening an .exe downloaded from small corner of the internet is always a risky proposition.

 

[Silver]

I don't mind as long as the map is small, but some people use very large maps, complicated maps and no legend or hint or whatsoever. So you have to waste a lot of time to find out where to go, where is the location etc.. It doesn't contribute anything to the gameplay at all. on top of that RPG maker doesn't allow to go back, saving the game involves multiple clicks. I think renpy is the best engine for visual novels. cheating on it is quite easy too.

 

[redsling]

That they look terrible but I cant seem to play most of them on my shitty laptop. I be getting 10fps

 

[Felicityskye]

I don't mind as long as the map is small, but some people use very large maps, complicated maps and no legend or hint or whatsoever. So you have to waste a lot of time to find out where to go, where is the location etc.. It doesn't contribute anything to the gameplay at all. on top of that RPG maker doesn't allow to go back, saving the game involves multiple clicks. I think renpy is the best engine for visual novels. cheating on it is quite easy too.

Most RPGmaker titles are not visual novels, they are trying to be actual games. The major problem for RPGmaker is most devs do not know how to make a proper game.

I definitely prefer Renpy as the go to engine, but my current favorite project is Treasures of Nadia. NTL Media has definitely proved how great a RPGmaker game can be.

 

[fidless]

If you can port your game to renpy and play the same, you shouldn't make the game in RPGM in the first place

Making an actual game is another level of complexity compared to simple show pictures, show text games. In ANY engine.

That's why there are so many bad rpgm games. Constructing logic, how the player interacts with the world etc. etc. is very time consuming and complex compared to straightforward show picture>show message>maybe a couple branching choices.

And the conflict arises since RPGM supposed fashioned towards newbies, but making a good game requires a lot of experience.

RPGM itself is a great tool. Free plugins are like open 10.000+ $$$ store where you can pick anything for free to shape your game. Ask a professional codder how much would cost to code a weather system with different cycles, sounds, and effects. I bet more than 15$. The only issue is performance on low-end pc and outdated GUI. But I've seen worse on pretty successful games made in custom engines.

What I hate most is lazy devs not customizing their games and especially using default sprites and tiles.

Not to advertise, but you can check my game what RPGM can accomplish. And I can't say it's very complex to make such a game. I'm yet to hire a codder to fine-tune the game's behavior to make it play better.

There are quite a few amazing looking RPGM games, but they mostly SFW.

As for me, probably only 1 out of 10 will pick my interest. Seeing 0 customizations and default stuff is a big turn off.

Some don't even bother removing combat parameters in games without combat.

That level of laziness is unacceptable, so I kind of understand why so many people are turned off by RPGM games.

But as a game making engine for nonprofessionals, it's great.

 

[khumak]

I hate the interface and for every RPGmaker game I've ever played that includes any walking around on a map, the graphics are universally terrible. I would much rather just have a map where I could choose what location I want to go to with the whole "walking" part skipped. If the walking around part is important for some reason then I would rather see a 3D game based on Unity or Unreal with decent graphics.

RPG mechanics don't require RPGMaker. Mostly you just need a way to track stats and a random number generator. To my knowledge, every game engine includes those options. The only option that I consistently see in RPGMaker games that I don't see from other engines is a really crappy visual quality map that you can walk around on with crappy little stick figure characters. I don't see any value added there.

 

[Niteowl]

Tried a few RPGmaker about a year ago..... won't bother again

The thing is... most have endless, grindy sections, very little content or character development, and frankly if I want to mostly just play an rpg there are much better games in the mainstream....
For example, played a game with fantastic art (can't remember the name, by the same artist involved in Kingdom of Deception), but hours of grinding dumb RPG fights to get a couple of images once in a while? Thanks but no thanks

 

[TugaCel]

Too much text, running around talking with NPCs, not much action in most of the games, as someone said above, I come here mostly for the sexual content, if I want a proper and actual RPG, I go look somewhere else.

 

[Ds9Defiant1701]

Well if we talk about MMORPG its mainly the fight style that is too repetitive and the grinding that is much hard. I mean i love the story/roleplay part sometimes but the fighting sometimes its boring because too repetitive

 

[Lolzi]

So I'll put my two cents into this one because it's an ongoing issue.

1. Compatibility. Getting the RPGMaker games to run on my system is a chore to the nth degree. They're mostly geared for Windows systems. Ren'py works on just about anything with a processor and a display.

2. Generally 16bit graphics don't do it for me. I like something a bit richer and I think most others do as well... but the grinding? Nah I can do that all day.

Sadly I haven't found an RPGMaker game that has been worth the effort... even the Lust Demon game (which has 3DGC) crashes too much on my system. Unity, Unreal, HTML, Ren'py are all engines I can get behind but RPMG... gets an automatic bypass. I don't even consider them. Not to say that I won't consider them but they have to be something special.