Better Mechanics in MMOs
Even in World of Warcraft, many core MMORPG mechanics are dreadful. Watch health bars, click heal. Fireball, fireball, scorch, fireblast, if not dead, Frost Nova and repeat. Point at mob, spam aggro-generating attack. Click the other special button if it lights up.
World of Warcraft is making some baby steps. The warrior’s Intervene ability (scroll down) is a model for what tanking should move towards: instead of AI-exploiting taunts that don’t work in PvP, the game provides ways for the plate-covered warrior to insert himself between the big, bad dragon and the robe-wearing, squishy mage. The shaman’s Shamanistic Rage talent (bottom middle talent) gives the shaman mana for smacking things: finally, a healing mechanic that encourages getting into the fight.
Age of Conan is making much larger strides, as described in this interview. Cone-based heals mean healers have to get into the thick of battle (used successfully with City of Heroes’ area of effect heals). For damage dealers, scroll down to the bit about “spellweaving”: casting a spell will, they claim, be more than simply pressing your hotkey over and over. Of course, Age of Conan’s ambition and far-from-release status make me wonder if it’ll ever see the light of day. At least someone’s thinking beyond tanks, nukers, and healbots.
My most-hated MMO mechanic is definitely heal-botting. What’s yours?
October 25th, 2006 at 3:46 am
Forced teaming.
If I’m feeling antisocial, it shouldn’t matter. I should be able to face anything in the entire game alone. Might not be easy, and it makes sense to scale things based on the number of people (I wouldn’t expect a single person to be able to manage against the challenges 8 people could face, nor would I expect 8 people to stay interested with something that a single person could)
City of Heroes is pretty good about that in the low levels. You can stay solo for a pretty good long time. Granted, there are still advantages to finding teams, but you don’t have to. Until you start hitting the archvillains, and then you’re stuck.
October 25th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
I don’t mind some content requiring teams, as long as there’s always interesting content for me to do solo. MMOs are already made up of several different games in one, oriented towards different play styles. (PvP, raiding, PvE, tradeskills, writing interface addons, trolling in the forums….)
WoW does a pretty great job of managing all of those games, and you can easily solo to 60, even though you won’t be able to see all the content. People complain there’s not much to do solo after hitting 60, so maybe there’s only so long you can maintain the dichotomy. I don’t know– I’m still not 60.
November 1st, 2006 at 1:58 am
The holy trinity of healer/tank/damage-dealer. It’s an easy way to slice the pie, but probably not the best.
CoH broke it up a bit:
Damage mitigation through aggro management (Tankers)
Damage mitigation through control (Controllers)
Damage mitigation through buffs and debuffs (Defenders and Controllers)
Damage mitigation through heals (Defenders and Controllers)
Damage dealing (Blasters and Scrappers*)
Because there’s so much overlap, you don’t always NEED every archetype to be represented. If you’ve got two Controllers, you probably don’t need a tank. If you’ve got three Defenders, you can probably afford to fill the rest of the team with damage dealers.
This was a lot nicer than hearing a constant flow of “need healer and tank for rfk” in WoW.
*In an interesting twist, if you have enough Defenders, everyone can become a damage-dealer through buffs and debuffs. This works because everything stacks. Some of the most potent teams are all-Defender teams, because they can make themselves gods and dramatically weaken their enemies.
November 1st, 2006 at 5:44 pm
The holy trinity is one example of many of Everquest’s design decisions that make everything difficult for today’s clones. Sure, it seems easy to just rip everything off, but then you’re stuck trying to find 10 different classes to fill those 3 slots.
CoH definitely did stir things up pretty nicely. Where’d that designer go?