RPG Maker for XNA?

I often see a lot of people wishing that the Aurora Toolset with NeverWinter Nights allowed for commercial distribution because it is a very nice and well-organized toolset. Unfortunately, most of the teams that wish for this have rarely done much other than move the camera around and perhaps add a new map, maybe a NPC, and then got scared off by the license because they cannot sell a game they have not even made yet. If Bioware released their toolset for free or at a cost, would your team be able to make anything with it? Often people answer with an emphatic yes...but then go off to play the next big thing.

Believe me, we all have an opus. In fact, most of us have several opera (yes, that is the plural of opus often dilineated numerically in Latin) waiting to happen. The truth is that the vast majority of these never happen. If we look at successful people like Joss Whedon who gets to do a whole lot of what he wants because he has 1) gained enough money, 2) gained enough of a fanbase, and 3) enough contacts who count and start to think that his current and finished projects are the only things on his mind, we really need our heads checked. I'm sure Joss has a ton of projects, thoughts, ideas, and inspirations that have never even left his head. If they've made it to paper or conversations, they're still only floating around in the ephemera of his world. Those that have made it through a number of filters are put into pitches, and of those, there are only a few we actually get to hear about or see.

People who get really excited about their RPG idea often bank on the single idea. They also often hoard it away because they fear that others will steal it. The next invaluable reason that they fail is because they imagine their idea in the biggest technology possible with a team of experiences wordsmiths writing the stories, artists crafting full-motion video and amazing armor-changing and weapon-switching systems, dynamically generated conversation systems using the height of natural language techniques from the latest AI whitepapers in the computer science and linguistics world...and they will not settle for less.

Let me be really frank right now. Your game will never come to light. I wish I could say that it would, and I really hope that you prove me wrong (try it, I'll play it since I *LOVE* RPG's!); but I haven't been wrong about this yet. If you cannot prototype your idea in Aurora or in RPG Maker, then you most likely have no chance to craft it from the ground up in Torque, Unity, BlitzMax, or some other game engine. Especially if you have no programming talent (which means you will have a large learning curve) or artistic skills (which mean you have a large learning curve as well as natural talent). What do you have? A 500 page design document that will need to be revised by a real script doctor to not fall flat.

This, of course, does not mean that there are not valuable RPG projects out there, but I don't know of any that started with the words "RPG Maker is too limited for my vision." In fact, with games like Aveyond/2/soon 3, A Blurred Line, Three the Hard Way and a wealth of RGSS (Ruby for RPG Maker) scripts to change just about every little piece of your gameplay, it makes me extremely skeptical as to why RPG Maker is such a limiting factor. Perhaps it is the lack of full-motion video...though FMV does not an RPG make, no matter how cool the CGI is in each Final Fantasy from VII on.

But many, many, many new developers who get excited and start RPG's projects doom themselves to failure because they do not have the ability to overcome the gap between "designing" and actually prototyping, regardless of the engine. So they look for shortcuts and find themselves so entrenched in marketing mumbo-jumbo and their vision of the final product (without the intermediate steps to create the product in mind).