Went to E3, played a close to fully functional RPG Maker 3 in english for many hours (probably too many), met Dave Silveira (Ascii Dave), met the new project manager and a ton of other people. I'm going to give a bigger review of RM 3 but here's a quick general impression.


RPG Maker 3 is RPG Maker 1 in 3D with some new features, a few removed features, no character sprite editing or importing, a new robust story telling system and an amazing environment creation tool. Grahphics are beautiful and the 'BLUR' has been completely removed.

Rather than a sequel of RM 2, it's more of a very nice 3D update of RM1, with a lot of great additions and a couple of hiccups. I'll have much more later today.





Start screen split into 4 categories:

- The World
- Character and Items
- Story and Rules
- Data Management


The World
Creating Towns, Dungeons and Fields, and laying Events down in those places.


Character and Items
Creating people, party characters, enemies, enemy parties, and classes.


Story and Rules
Creating title screen, creating start point, creating storyteller cut scenes (new feature) and play testing.


Data Management
Loading games from a memory card and accessing every single Event in the game to Edit or do what you want with.




Here are some Features:


PART I

Can add secondary effects to magic and weapon attacks, like poison, defense up, hp drain, etc.

Characters have 4 colors, also changes uniform art

Character graphic for text can be one of 4 sizes and placed in right, left, or center of screen.
Character graphic for text can be picture, silhouette, and silhouette with a question mark.

Character graphic for text can be 1 of 8 different art styles, ranging from normal, classy, anime, silly, childlike, Xenogears style, and 2 other serious styles. Every character has a graphic (but not every character color).

You can create up to 100 characters

88 character graphics

Special effect text that appears on screen includes Game over, to be continued, Fin, some Japanese text, and a few more, in various fonts.

Set special Backgrounds for when characters are speaking, to add effect.

Screen can fade out in red as well as black and white.

In story teller, 17 items you can make appear on the screen and you have it rotate and move in a variety of ways.

You can change the speed text appears on screen during messages from fast to slow.

You can change the size of text from regular size, very big, and huge. (across the whole screen.

Change the height of the ceiling in dungeons.

For sound effects, there are 49 Play sound effects, 26 system sound effects, and 21 special Melodies, like for Game Over, Victory, battle, etc. You cannot adjust the pitch or length of any of these, like in RM1.

You can change the walking sound if it annoys you.






PART II


46 BG Music tracks, you can’t speed up or slow them down either.

You can have backgrounds with the photo of a monster appear, cool for cinematic effects.

You walk with the left analog, you hold (triangle) to run.

When creating a world map (outdoor) you can load from a large number of already created, beautiful looking maps, which you can edit in any way you want.

Creating Backgrounds
Creating a map from scratch is incredibly easy and fun. You pick a terrain, you pick a shape (circle, square, line or free hand) and you draw just as you would in MS Paint. For instance, choose the water terrain, select a circle, and draw a circle on the map. You now have a circular body of water. If you want a river in the shape of an S, select Free hand and draw an S or any shape you want, and voila, you have your Snake River. This is by far the strongest aspect of RM 3. You can draw a 2D picture of trees next to a volcano with some grass surrounding it, and mountains in the background, and POW !!!, the game turns your 2D picture into a breathtaking 3D landscape. The possibilities here are unlimited. On your landscape, you can then set the climate, the season, the type of rain, the time of day, the amount of trees, the elevation of the land, and whether magic can be used in that area.


PART III

During battle, Characters and enemies are fully animated and everyone has 3 different attack animations.

There are a number of preset magic effects, but you can’t create any new ones.

49 monsters, ranging from small, medium, and large. Many of them have 3 different colors, some have only one color.

You can set monster attack preferences, but you can’t fine tune them by exact percentages.

You can give a monster up to sixteen different magic/ skill attacks to utilize in battle, in addition to a regular attack.

There are Variables to be used with events. They’re also used as Switches, since there are no Switches anymore.

There are 40 different types of sample towns, each with 4 different looks, so that’s a lot. There 19 sample dungeons, and 15 fields (overworld maps). You can edit all of the graphics of all these samples in any way you want.

You can use events to change the climate, vegetation and elevation of your land at any time.

When creating NPCs, in addition to giving them 4 movement paths, you can also give them 8 normal actions and 19 actions while talking. This is very cool actually (with one possible slight problem). So you can have an NPC walking around randomly, and he might be searching for something, so he’ll be putting his hands to his eyes like he’s looking for something far away. Or you’ll have NPC looking worried, excited, happy, hopeful, angry or fidgety. When talking to an NPC, you can have him bow to you first and do 18 other different actions.

Event pages are called ‘Modes’ now, and now bigger page numbers have default priority over lower page numbers if no condition is set.
You can set 4 conditions per page (Mode).



PART IIII

There are 84 different events in total.

You can change a character’s name at any time.

Decrease a character’s level or make him forget a spell at any time.

There are 54 character models, and you can use character models as enemies also.

When creating a party, you set the formation of the party the way they appear in battle on a tic tac toe graph. This is to make weak characters appear in the back or side and strong characters to be in front.

You can only see one character in your party at a time, but you can change who it is on the (start) menu. You can have 4 people max in your party.

You have almost 200 pre rendered backgrounds to use, for telling stories or during talking (or for title, game over screens).

You create characters before you place them on the map. You can create events before you place them and you can copy them to anywhere.

You can add sound effects to the Title Screen.

The title screen can appear in normal, black and white, or red tint.

There’s no timer. I tried to rig one and thought I came close, but it didn’t work. Still a chance of it being possible, but looks unlikely.



--Story teller
This is a new feature where you can call up a story telling mode at any point in the game. Lets say the commander of a recon crew is telling his troops the story of the pyramid they’re about to raid of a Black onyx stone. The screen would go black change and a pre rendered picture of the Pyramid would appear, with the commander’s character graphic and text telling the story. The music would fit the mood and you can outline the screen with some effects also. You can then have a model of the black onyx stone float on the screen as the commander is talking about it. Then the screen would switch back to where you are in the game, (or it could go longer). You edit the background, music, floating items, character text graphic, screen effects, and sound effects.




The 3 strongest features of this game is the deep, easy to use Environment Editor, the large amount of already made, great looking assets, and a very low learning curve (for RM players).

To put things in perspective, I went through 90% of the whole game without an instruction manual. For 3 days straight, to test the game, I had to create all the assets I needed and place them into a game so I could try everything out, without ever playing the game and without a memory card to save anything. That means every day, I had to start from scratch each time to build everything. The bottom line is, if you are very comfortable with RM 1, you will become VERY comfortable with this game in 1 to 3 days tops.


The weaknesses of this game is that, in the name of simplifying everything, they removed some of the customization, and the lack of a graphic editor/importer (which there was no option for anywhere in the game) means you'll really need to be more creative with your stories, since all the characters are fantasy characters. A timer should have been added also.


SCORE: 92%



If anyone has any more questions, feel free to ask.

Wow, I'm really liking this news! Thanks a lot, Intro, and welcome back to the Mag.

How's it going Ixzion, long time no chat bro. I miss you guys.

I'm doing alright. How's your job going?

Going pretty good. I'm closing to becoming a level designer for a 3D shooter. Just learning Maya right now.

The lack of customablity isn't necessarily a bad thing. Since we are all using the same set of tools, It forces designers to become more creative, and focus more on stories and the quality of the game. That's why there were so many good RPGM games. It also seeds the need to push the limit of what can be done. Anyway, I'm psyched for this upcoming release. I never really got much use of RPGM2, but 3 seems to be remedying most of 2's problems.

I'm definately going to get this when it comes out (this summer, right?).

GameFAQs has it listed as August, everything I've heard is July/august, so yeah, by this summer. Hopefully, it will actually be this summer, and not pushed back. However, I probably won't use it until after the pave contest #3 deadline.

august IS the pushed back date. (it was originally slated to be out in july). its now supposed to be out the 2nd, but the only thing for certain is august. August 2nd is just what they're considering now.

I just hope they don't push it back until December or something.

Well from what I've seen (which is only the screens and videos released so far), most of it is already translated, if not all of it. Makes me wonder what all they have left.

practically nothing, really. few things left to translate and tighten up, but it's damn close to being done. the late release is likely to advertise the game more and build up more hype.

As if it needed any more hype.

outside of the current RPGM community, it does.

Yeah. We need more people to survive on the net.

We could probably survive without the extra people, but it would be nice if the RPGM series became more popular and brought in more people. I sure wouldn't mind seeing all the games we'd wind up getting.

Which reminds me, are the Pav and the Mag going to appear in this one's manual?

dont know about the mag, but the pavilion will most likely be mentioned in some way on the packaging or manual. agetec owes us for not doing it in RPGM2.

...

There are a couple of differences in battles

Active Time Bar
Characters have Bars that fill up before they can attack.
A fast character can now attack repeatedly until another character's time bar fills up, (so 1 character can have 5 turns repeatedly before anyone else moves if he's fast enough.).

Battle Formation
There can edit what row and what side you place your characters and enemies in. There's Front, Middle and Behind, and there's left, right and middle. Where you place them is where they appear during battle. For your characters, you can change their battle placement at anytime before a battle.

I'm really excited about the ATB system. That's what I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm glad they did it.