The goal is to have a fast, action oriented game.

* Quests and Quest Series should be Episodal. Each Episode should be designed to take between 15 minutes and 2 hours. The idea here is quantity -- the number of episodes. If you look at many games, you might spend 8 hours waiting for some needed mobile to spawn. The problem with that is that it rules out casual players (unless they get really lucky), and also if you have to go to the bathroom, eat, sleep or perform other basic things (maybe hold down a job to pay your fees), then you might miss the window when your mob is up. The goal is to instead of requiring one solid, eight hour period from a single player, to require eight hours total for that part of the quest, and to break it up into small pieces with limited (or no) competition.

* S-Rank items should require S-Rank effort. In PSO, you get S-Rank items for completing challenge mode and other quests/challenges quickly. It is challenging (hence the name) to play in this mode, and it is more challenging still to obtain an S-Rank item.

If you look at EQ2, the equivalent of S-Rank items is Fabled. The problem with Fabled is that most people farm it, the encounter ceases to be a challenge once the strategy is figured out. Sony likes huge encounters, with 70 or more people in them -- or at least they design for that -- and it these fights essentially boil down to each class doing one thing. Sure, there might be some strategy (it area effects every 30s, so call out at 25s so the people fighting it close get away before the ae goes off), but it isn't much. People do the areas and kill no named -- don't even finish the area -- and are given rewards.

When I talk about doing PSO-like, what I'm talking about is limiting the necessary controls to those on a Dreamcast or XBox controller. That means two analog sticks, a dpad, select, start, two analog triggers and two digital triggers. I am not saying "lets make it look like PSO," what I'm saying is lets look at what works and copy it. When you play PSO, you don't hear players complaining about the developers. When someone wipes a challenge, they don't go "omg the developers suck," they go "I can't believe I screwed that up." The difference is instead of the players complaining about the developers or the game, they typically are complaining about what they, themselves, screwed up.

When you look at an item in PSO or PSU, its more like Diablo than EQ2 -- the item has some base stats, and maybe a modifyier. It might have an aspect that lets it perform a special attack, etc. If you look at armor, there are a lot of strategies in a 4 slot frame in PSO -- if you go back to when I was playing the 100+ game on Dreamcast, my force had God/Battles. Alot of players thought I was crazy, but that with the doublesaber meant infinite TP -- it was a strategy, and a strategy that worked extremely well.

Now I am not saying "copy all of PSO," but if you look at PSO -- a Hunter, Ranger or Force all could lay waste to entire rooms without batting an eyelash -- they all were strong, but they were strong in different ways. A player who could use those strengths could be a great asset to any team.

From a UI standpoint, what I want to do is have four primary buttons and a single shift button. That would be the cluster of four buttons on the right side of the controller, plus the top (digital) trigger on that side. I want to use the DPAD and the top left trigger for the plus menu concept we talked about before / Gasaraki style UI -- what happens in Gasaraki is the suit makes suggestions based on circumstance. Essentially, what I would like to do is have DPAD (by itself) pick from hotkeys/voice bind menus, and then have the left top trigger switch to current context. I think that would be a very natural way of switching between the two functions.

Left DPAD for movement, and right DPAD for camera. Left trigger for previous unfriendly, right trigger for next unfriendly. Select and Start as bonus keys for whatever purpose (they are not easily pressed in the heat of battle, so they shouldn't be used for anything that requires that kind of a function). Also, pressing in on left stick (there's a button under it) for use targetted item and pressing in on right stick (again, there's a button there) for resetting the camera.

AFAIK, you can't read the big middle button on the controller, at least, it doesn't seem to set any bits.

The intent is also to keep you in better control over what is happening. In PSO, in certain situations, because you're close to an item or whatever, one of your primary buttons switches purposes. That is pretty confusing to me.

The big thing is...

The game needs to be fun, and needs to keep moving. It can't slow down, and it can't deteriorate into just standing there mashing a key, or worse pressing autoattack and then going AFK for 20 minutes.

(Eiji) I really dig this method.. not to mention, if we design for a console controller, then we have an advantage if we ever decide to port the game to the PS3 or Xbox360