It´s not easy for game designers, as they have to create the games for people without gaming experince as well as for people that may be more intelligent and have more experience with the genre than themselves.

Lets start with a really critical point. It´s easy for me and I will find many friends here with words like, great game needs great gameplay, but the sense of this article is to talk about game mechanics. A critical point when creating an RPG, one that really can cost you half of the players (the one half or the other one...) is the discussion between a single main character and a party. Both have been sucessfully demonstrated in various titles, but for some it´s only a true RPG if they control the classic party, others disagree and say that it´s only an RPG if the slip into the role of a single character. Although I like both, my opinion is that slipping into a single character is exactly the sense of role-playing, it´s essence. Controlling a party makes it more like a tactical or strategy game than an RRG. Combat, for example, becomes mass-battles. Real time combat games, it also detracts as a party disables any real action. The player becomes a viewer that can only make specific guidelines for the characters to act, but he can not be any of the characters. Especially strange is that there are games you can win although your character (read: you) has died and only his friends go on (like in Dungeon Siege).

In Restricted Area, there aren´t any classes. Classes are fine, but we want to try something different. You can select one of four existing characters which all play their own part in one big story - it´s like being the actor of a movie character, with the exception that you can decide what you do yourself. The interesting thing is that you meet the other characters during the game, and will have different tasks and a different view on the story, depending on which character you play. You will talk to the other (now non-) player characters and sometimes even fight with them side by side. Well, lets hope this interesting idea really works. :)