Gold Saucer Concept: Fortune Street/Itadaki Street

[ty_taurus]

I'm curious if anyone would be interested in a Fortune Street game mode over in the gold saucer.

If you're not familiar, the designer of the Dragon Quest series created a virtual board game series mostly exclusive to Japan called Itadaki Street, but was localized as Fortune Street here in the West when the game was released on the Wii. It's also appeared as a mini game in Kingdom Hearts if I recall and possibly some other places as well.

The game is similar in some ways to Monopoly where you take turns rolling dice to travel around a board, buying properties that are split into districts, and trying to become the richest player, but there are several differences:

- There are many different board shapes, and you get to choose the direction you want to go in at each crossroad, but you're committed to that direction until you make it to another crossroad. At different corners of the map, there is a space that will give you a card suit as you pass it (spade, club, heart, diamond), and when you collect all 4 and return to the starting space, the bank, you get your "pass go" money and have to collect the suits again.

- You don't need to own all properties in a district in order to build them, but owning all of a district increases the value of all those properties, but you can only build when you either land on that property again, or get an opportunity through an event of some sort. When you step on someone else's property, you also have the option to forcibly buy it from them by paying 5 times the fee.

- The game features a stock market where you can invest stock into different districts, which increases when other people invest in the same district, or when someone builds out a property on that district. This makes the game's pace feel exponential.

- The game can end if all other players go bankrupt, but that's not the only way to end the game. Each board has a goal to reach in terms of total wealth, and the first player to reach that wealth and return to the bank wins.

There are other differences as well, but those are the main things worth mentioning. Would that be a gold saucer game mode you'd be interested in?

[Atelier-Bagur]

I remember mentioning this. Dragon Quest X the other SE MMO, has a fun board game you can play with friends that net you lots of rewards including some gear rewards too if youre lucky.

It was one of the most fun things Ive ever done group wise in an MMO. They should totally bring it into Gold Saucer.

[ty_taurus]

I really just want to see some type of fun mini-game activities that feel like you can just go there with friends and play for as long as you want. We have a few examples of content that kind of fits that bill, but hasn't been very successful at drawing in players.

Chocobo Racing would be amazing if it felt more like a Final Fantasy Mario Kart, but the game suffers a lot from the game's server tick situation. A racing game needs to be responsive and snappy, and the server tick lag becomes very apparent in such an environment. They've also never really updated the content, like adding new tracks or anything. I do really want to see Blitzball in the future, but I fear it might fall into the same traps depending on how its executed.

Lord of Vermillion feels kind of slow and difficult to keep track of what's actually happening. It doesn't have a strong enough UI or interesting enough mechanics to really create a compelling RTS-like PVP experience.

I love Triple Triad, but it gets really tiring playing with and against the same decks over and over if you're going to try and play casually with your friends. I really want to see a random draft mode available for casual play outside of the saucer, or at least the option for each player to start with a random hand rather than playing the same hand over and over. A random hand that selects one card of each rank for each player.

Mahjong is perfect on paper, but it's not a popular game in the west, and is a very complicated game that requires a lot of knowledge and understanding in order to even know what you're doing. That extremely high requirement of knowledge just to get started is a huge obstacle that a lot of people aren't interested in getting over.

I think something like Fortune Street/Itadaki Street would be a lot more successful. It's a turn based board game, so server ticks aren't an issue, and it's very simple at face value with a an easy enough entry point to make it approachable for a lot of people, but also has the ability for players to develop strategies as well. My biggest concern would be play length, but you can make smaller boards than in the standalone games so that matches are much quicker, and set lower victory point thresholds, as well as give the player the option to customize that too.