Goblin Squad Member
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You might end up terribly dissappointed; I hope you play anyway, and for this reason: The devs have stated that the abilty of a relatively new player to compete with old timers in at least some areas is a design goal.
I'll only end up terribly disappointed if the devs decide to use a gimmicky system like limiting characters to a set number of active abilities, which I don't expect them to do.
And yes, I'm confident they'll achieve their goal of having relatively new players be able to effectively compete with long-time established players without resorting to gimmicks or arbitrary restrictions.
Personaly, I'm hoping that PFO IS largely based upon PLAYER skill...but not at all on the speed or skill with which you handle the input controls.... I'm looking for something that tests a Players skill in tactical and strategic thinking... could care less about the active play stuff. I don't want the challenge to be making the input controls do what I want the character to do....I want the challenge to be about deciding what the character should do in the first place.
I generally agree, but I would like my ultimate game to also allow for players with relatively low skill at strategy and tactics to still be effective, if they're being well led.
I generally agree, but I would like my ultimate game to also allow for players with relatively low skill at strategy and tactics to still be effective, if they're being well led.
In order for gameplay in combat to be enjoyable, exciting, and most importantly *dangerous* the player's actions, reactions, and decisions must drive the outcome.
In any conflict between players in any game type there will be a winner and loser. If the loser feels they lost due to poor tactical decisions, bad reflexes, panic, poor teamwork, or other *factors in their control* they will have enjoyed the conflict irrespective of outcome.
If the loser feels they managed all of the factors under their control perfectly, and still lost they will be unhappy *with the game*. If the actions necessary to achieve a win are completely unrealistic (like 6 months of real time), that's a lost subscriber.
As such it's key for Goblinworks success to not only follow through on making the raw power gains of skill advancement heavily subject to diminishing returns, but also to incorporate a larger degree of skill than say, WoW, into player combat; in order to offset some of the bad feelings generated by consistently losing while playing at *the human player's* skill cap. If the skill cap is high players always blame themselves for a loss. When it's low they immediately cry on forums, scream nerf, hurl insults, etc.
Bad players will always be able to succeed at PvP by forming zergs.
If I lose playing splitscreen Halo vs a buddy in my living room, I guess I need more practice at Halo.
If Nihimon the ranger kills me and my buddy with auto/standard attacks while picking a flower and playing a loot with his toes, that is bad gameplay. Regardless of how much further up the skill training trees he is, or that he may be dual-wielding THE GODSLAYER OF HPS +7.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would find myself a very sad panda if the UI had no expandable layers of control, so that i was limited to only a few abilities. The way i like to organize my UI is very keyboard dependent, and only having access to less than 10 abilities would quickly frustrate i think.
There were in the early posts of this thread several references to 40 buttons available for WoW and the like, but its worth pointing out that it is highly unlikely that any one player is going to be actively managing that level of "button-ness" in combat or frankly in general. Personally my gameplay revolves around about 15, and i like to have many more in a convenient on screen location that i simply poke at once in a great long while. To my mind, and in total agreement with Nihimon, anything less would seem arbitrary and constraining.
If you don't like that much on screen, a customizable UI allows you to put up only what you want to see. We're not looking at playing a game that requires huge twitch skills (MMO latency problems being what they are; see this post for deails) and we aren't going to be playing a game aimed at themed content requiring or even allowing for rote button mashing. With those two as givens, I'm personally going to want to have however many abilities on screen and available at all times, "just in case" moments and for my own ease of playability.
As for the EVE way of skills, I recently just opened up the demo for the first time, and quickly found the system installed to be equal parts overwhelming and engaging. As a first impression, its extremely built out and complicated to approach. Engaging in that the system is simple enough to grasp, even if the results are often delayed by hours to days at a time. I believe this (and the offline training aspect) is in lieu of the fact that a wide variety of people are going to have a wide difference of gaming availability.
What I didn't like about the skills is the sheer volume of personal knowledge i had to bury into my poor skull in such a short period of time. A fully realized space game should be complicated and have a large volume of required knowledge, but when faced with a UI in desperate need of some streamlining, and a control scheme at the edges of clarity, this large quantity of skill based knowledge was a real barrier to entry.
In terms of In Game Skills, I'm happy to see a large volume as the players progress through it, much like EVE, however I think there should be some consideration to how those layers of complication interact with a player. At the beginning we're all going to limited, but I'd like to see perhaps the archetypes have a more moderated approach to guiding a player into the type of roll they think they're interested in. Of course mutli-classing should be available, and having some protections on breaking archetype should be in place, but those are considerations for the UI/Help Team.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Andius, sorry, but I don't have time to read the whole thing and try to process it right now.
I did notice this post where you were talking about the highly skilled Rogue being a great asset to his team. I'm curious why you don't see that as a compelling reason to avoid arbitrarily limiting the options a character has available at any given time. After all, if I'm going to be limited to the number of options I can utilize, I might as well forego the high intelligence and just maximize my dps.
Because when I say ability limitation I am talking purely about COMBAT abilities.
AKA you can have 5000 abilities related to things like crafting, lockpicking, social skills, (unless they are combat like my suggested battle cry and parley) item identification, etc.
You would only be limited in abilities you are going to be activating in the middle of a fight, in order to streamline things and make combat faster paced. So spellcasters would be limited on how many combat related spells they could have, fighters and barbarians would be limited on how many skills like great cleave they could use. But in the middle of a raging battle nobody is sitting there screaming "I CAN'T IDENTIFY THIS ITEM!" "OH GODS! I CAN'T PURIFY THIS WATER!!!" For some reason if you did have to sow yourself a bonnet as the arrows whistled around you, you probably could bring up your non-combat abilities and do so.
But you simply would not be working with a list of skills anywhere near THIS long of useable combat abilities. You have to pick as many slots as you have room for, and make a more streamlined and focused build. You could still have a list that long if you got the merit badges for them all. But you can only use X at a time in-combat.
I don't care if X is a modifiable number that you can raise with character traits and passive abilities. What I do care is that there is a limit because limiting it has A LOT of nice advantages.
1. Combat is more fast paced and intense. If you play a game like Guild Wars and compare it to a game like WoW it really because evident that the limitation in abilities allows the developers to speed up the pace of combat so things are happening faster because people aren't having to fumble around with dozens of abilities at the same time.
2. It puts less limitation on how many skills can be in the game. If a game allows you to use every skill at once they can only potentially give you, ~40-60. If a game limits how many skills you can have they can give you practically as many as they want to. This in the end allows MORE customization and unique character identity. You have more abilities to choose from and create your own build, rather than having the same ~40-60 skills as everyone else of your class.
3. It makes multi-classing non-broken. We know we are going to have the ability to train more than one archetype. We know we can do so AFTER reaching capstone in one archetype. How are we going to balance all the abilities from multiple classes? Ability limitation is simply the best way. You don't want a cleric having full access to all the barbarian abilities as well, or a rogue/ranger. If they are limited to the same X abilities they were as one class, in addition to only having one set of attributes to work with at a time... it makes multi-class characters far more balanced.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You might end up terribly dissappointed; I hope you play anyway, and for this reason: The devs have stated that the abilty of a relatively new player to compete with old timers in at least some areas is a design goal.I'll only end up terribly disappointed if the devs decide to use a gimmicky system like limiting characters to a set number of active abilities, which I don't expect them to do.
And yes, I'm confident they'll achieve their goal of having relatively new players be able to effectively compete with long-time established players without resorting to gimmicks or arbitrary restrictions.
Personaly, I'm hoping that PFO IS largely based upon PLAYER skill...but not at all on the speed or skill with which you handle the input controls.... I'm looking for something that tests a Players skill in tactical and strategic thinking... could care less about the active play stuff. I don't want the challenge to be making the input controls do what I want the character to do....I want the challenge to be about deciding what the character should do in the first place.I generally agree, but I would like my ultimate game to also allow for players with relatively low skill at strategy and tactics to still be effective, if they're being well led.
Personally I'd be in favor of some degree of limitation. Though it dosns't have to be as immersion breaking or illogical as skill equiping. Many skills could very logically be tied into equipment. IE backstabbing into daggers, Arcane into say staffs of some kind (possibly allow ritual daggers for people who like that flavor, but ritual daggers be unable to backstab or mellee effectively). People can carry out multiple types, but assuming a reasonable time to draw/swap weapons (3-10 seconds maybe, enough that it isn't swapped mid swing but long enough that it dosn't feel like a chore), plus the risk/reward factor added from carrying around an unequiped weapon (IE risk of losing it on death) etc... You can have a non imersion breaking, but logically limiting system that simultaniously reduces the 300 skills all rapid fire, but also not mysteriously swapping out your knowlege at random immersion breaker.
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Goblin Squad Member
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1. Combat is more fast paced and intense. If you play a game like Guild Wars and compare it to a game like WoW it really because evident that the limitation in abilities allows the developers to speed up the pace of combat so things are happening faster because people aren't having to fumble around with dozens of abilities at the same time.
i don't think this is necessarily accurate, in MMOs the underlying technical architecture probably has more to do with the pace than anything else. By example: WoW could have gone with a less than 1 second global cooldown on all abilities, but they believed that would give people with higher bandwidth an unfair advantage (at the time of launch, high-speed broadband was significantly less in demand than now). So now at 7+ years we see that "arbitrary" limit of 1 second resulting in the opinion that the game play is slow. The very nature of PvP limits the number of abilities that can be utilized, but i just don't see any good coming of forcing someone into a narrow gate of options. Some clever gameplay can develop when devs allow for more options as well, rather than the "streamlined and focused build" you speak of.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The 'limitation' doesn't have to be 8 skills. It could be 10. Or 12. Or 10 and one oh s**t button. The skills don't have to be equipment specific; however some should be-remember the weapons themselves don't even have to take up a slot. And then once you've chosen your active combat abilities from your total skills menu there could be a customizable UI where you could select as many classifiable utility skills as you wish. Choosing a build for each challenge you face from the skills you've earned can be an art unto itself once you have many possible combinations.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Andius, I think I see what you're talking about.
If the Combat abilities are naturally limited, and used in combinations in order to achieve greater complexity, I am marginally accepting of that.
An example of this would be like the Warden in LOTRO. I generally have only a few combat abilities, but I can use them in a specified order and get a much more powerful and complex attack as a result.
If, however, Combat abilities are inherently more complex in each instance - like the attack abilities in virtually every major MMO any of us have ever played (WoW, EQ2, LOTRO, Vanguard, Rift, SWTOR, etc.) - and I'm only allowed to equip a subset at a time, that is wholly unacceptable to me.
Consider the Hunter in LOTRO. Just to list a few attacks, I have: Swift Stroke, Blindside, Scourging Blow, Low Cut, Agile Rejoinder, Dazing Blow, Penetrating Shot, Rain of Arrows, Merciful Shot, Blood Arrow, Quick Shot, Barbed Arrow, Swift Bow, Split Shot, Bard's Arrow, Heart Seeker. That's 16 different attacks, not including special abilities I use in combat to increase my Focus, etc. If I have skills like that, but I'm only allowed to equip a handful at a time, I'm going to feel gimped.
Further, if I've multi-classed, and I have access to 20 or 30 different useful things I can do in combat, but I'm only allowed to equip a dozen or so at a time, I'm going to be extremely disappointed.
Please note, I'm not objecting to things like having to switch from a sword to a bow to use my bow skills. I'm objecting to not being able to switch to my bow and use my bow skills. And by "my bow skills", I mean everything I know how to do with my bow.
The idea that sometimes I know how to shoot two arrows at once, and sometimes I know how to shoot a flaming arrow, and sometimes I know how to do both, and sometimes I don't know how to do either - that idea just seems really silly to me.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There were in the early posts of this thread several references to 40 buttons available for WoW and the like, but its worth pointing out that it is highly unlikely that any one player is going to be actively managing that level of "button-ness" in combat or frankly in general. Personally my gameplay revolves around about 15, and i like to have many more in a convenient on screen location that i simply poke at once in a great long while. To my mind, and in total agreement with Nihimon, anything less would seem arbitrary and constraining.
I know on TOR I used 1-12 on my naga, the two extra buttons, and on my keyboards I used
qwert
asdfg
zxcv
and of course Tab and space
That Tab, space, and wasd are all movement/targeting of course. I assume you know what left and right mouseclick were for and mouse wheel is always my Teamspeak Hotkey.
That left 24 buttons for my "most frequently used abilities" and the rest I left to bar-clicking rathering than fumbling around with shift/control. Not like I used them enough to memorize their hotkeys anyway.
Simply put, the combat system mainly felt cumbersome and un-engaging in comparison to Guild Wars. And I have a decently expensive 17 button mouse designed to make said tasks easier. Most of the abilities were meant to work more with other skilltrees from my advanced class other than mine.
Between consumables, items with activated abilities, and skills all 4 of my 12 button hotbars were pretty crowded. I mean it's not like I couldn't compete... everyone else was fumbling with the same crap and I was pretty good with my core abilities. But nothing other than those core abilities added anything. I really felt my character wouldn't have been any less engaging without them.
Personally I would WAY rather have a system where I am limited to a small number of skills that I'll be using frequently rather than a bunch of situational nonsense and abilities with cooldowns in excess of five minutes. You use them so darn infrequently you often forget you had them!
I would WAY rather have a system where by the time I reach level 20, I'm sitting on top of 500 abilities and I can go into those 500 abilities and pick 8-16 or even 24 of them that are EXACTLY what I want. The theme-park combat system is outdated and quite frankly vastly inferior. It's time for the industry to evolve.
PS. If I could have a crowd chant anything in-front of GW's offices it would be "Not ANOTHER game with WoW cut/paste style combat!!!"
Personaly, I'm hoping that PFO IS largely based upon PLAYER skill...but not at all on the speed or skill with which you handle the input controls.... I'm looking for something that tests a Players skill in tactical and strategic thinking... could care less about the active play stuff. I don't want the challenge to be making the input controls...
You'll probably be disappointed then. Your hopes would necessitate a turn-based combat system, and one of the developers has already stated that PFO will not make use of a turn-based system for obvious reasons. Unless they severely restrict movement while in combat (which I doubt), it most certainly will involve one's reflexes, quickness, and twitch.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personally I would WAY rather have a system where I am limited to a small number of skills that I'll be using frequently rather than a bunch of situational nonsense and abilities with cooldowns in excess of five minutes.
Hopefully, you won't be forced to train a bunch of Skills you're not interested in.
Please don't take your preference, though, and try to force it on everyone else.
I use a Nostromo and am quite comfortable using it to target, move, and activate 44 hot-bar abilities as well as another 22 UI actions (bags, map, guild panel, selecting party members, etc.)
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Goblin Squad Member
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I know on TOR I used 1-12 on my naga, the two extra buttons, and on my keyboards I usedqwert
asdfg
zxcvand of course Tab and space
That Tab, space, and wasd are all movement/targeting of course. I assume you know what left and right mouseclick were for and mouse wheel is always my Teamspeak Hotkey.
That left 24 buttons for my "most frequently used abilities" and the rest I left to bar-clicking rathering than fumbling around with shift/control. Not like I used them enough to memorize their hotkeys anyway.
Simply put, the combat system mainly felt cumbersome and un-engaging in comparison to Guild Wars. And I have a decently expensive 17 button mouse designed to make said tasks easier. Most of the abilities were meant to work more with other skilltrees from my advanced class other than mine.
YMMV, however. I ran a high level healer, and I had all my abilities mapped, memorized, and I used most of them several times per game session, and over half in every combat. While TOR ultimately wasn't my game (or it isn't yet, it might get there eventually), I really liked the UI and the way the game *looked*.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Player skill is largely the domain of limited scale FPS style games, where one's reflexes and ability make fine tuned mouse adjustments at a high rate of frequency. MMOs require more of a Player Preparation (or Player Intent is better perhaps) style gameplay.. by that i mean you have to know what skill goes with which situation ahead of time, and then engage the appropriate sequence with appropriate modifications as need arises. FPS games can accommodate a limited gate of abilities, because only 1-3 are most relevant due to the high demand on time for the player (meaning the action is "faster"). In a "slower" gameplay setting you naturally have to abstract lots of Player Skill into Player Intent, since the inherent limiting factor 9 times out of 10 is latency and its impact on play. As such, there is almost a requirement for something to demand that players attentions, and in themeparks this usually falls to ever more complicated hoops to jump through and scripts to follow. In a sandbox, its going to be player driven more often than not once the game populates, and as such you can't ever predict what another player is going to do, so there will be a lot of dynamic interactions.
I've seen a ton of references to "WoW Cut/paste" style combat (particularly in the negative) but what i really don't get is what about that combat draws such negative reviews. Is it the themepark scripting people don't like? Is it a pushing a button on an action bar to get a simulated effect? I never really got a clear idea in the other threads where this topic also tended to dominate. I get a lot of people dislike WoW and its "clones" (still not sure how that's being defined as well), but what i don't get is which parts in specific cause such fervent dislike?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Personaly, I'm hoping that PFO IS largely based upon PLAYER skill...but not at all on the speed or skill with which you handle the input controls.... I'm looking for something that tests a Players skill in tactical and strategic thinking... could care less about the active play stuff. I don't want the challenge to be making the input controls...You'll probably be disappointed then. Your hopes would necessitate a turn-based combat system, and one of the developers has already stated that PFO will not make use of a turn-based system for obvious reasons. Unless they severely restrict movement while in combat (which I doubt), it most certainly will involve one's reflexes, quickness, and twitch.
Actualy, I believe that's directly in contrast to what they said. Unless I'm mistaken, they said that due to latency issues, they would NOT be doing the fast paced, twitch based, FPS style "active combat" mechanics that some folks here seem to be clamoring for.
They won't be doing "Turn Based" either... which is not neccesary for what I described... they just need to have things on a reasonable enough timer... the exact length of the timer determines the pacing of combat, and how large of an impact working the inputs (keyboard/mouse) becomes and that in part determines how practical it is to make a tacticaly deep system.
For example, if they had something like a 3-5 second "pseudo round time" for most actions...that would be sufficient that your average person wasn't really wrestling with keyboard inputs ...and still allow enough time for tactical thinking.
I think you are the one who is going to end up being disappointed if you are looking for primarly "twitch based" combat here.
Edit: Here is the quote I was referencing
http://paizo.com/forums/dmtz4sl2&page=3?What-will-combat-be-like
"I would say that one of the dead-ends that has been thoroughly explored and found wanting is the idea of open world sandbox play with lots of PvP that requires player skill and fast-twitch responses. Sounds great (to some folks), but in practice its not commercially viable.
First, if you want those kinds of games, the FPS market is waiting for you. They do it better than Goblinworks would ever be able to......
....So don't expect it in Pathfinder Online."
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Goblin Squad Member
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Here's an analogy that may make some sense as to the direction I'd like to see the game go.
Imagine that the input device for your combat controls is a guitar.
Two characters meet in a PvP encounter.
One player knows how to play the guitar. The other doesn't.
Maybe there's a basic attack for just playing the top string open, and a basic defense for playing the bottom string open. The player without any guitar experience can manage that, no problem. So that player is capable of participating.
But there's a whole range of actions your character could do assuming you knew how to play chords, slides, pull-offs, hammer-ons, rhythm and melodies. The experienced guitar player gets to use all those abilities (at least that subset enabled by the character's skill and gear, and the player's actual guitar playing ability).
That vast array of options makes that character much more likely to deal damage, set up combos, dodge attacks, and recover from hits than the character who just makes a basic attack and a basic defense.
Now the experienced guitar player may be a poor PvP player. He/she might be distracted. He/she might be trying to do all sorts of complicated things and failing (this is why casinos still offer 21 as a regular game; most people who think they can count a blackjack deck really can't). The inexperienced guitar player who just plays "attack" and "block" over and over could very conceivably win that fight.
The game design part of this is deciding how much advantage you get for deviating from basic attack and basic defense. One option might be "virtually nothing", so you exert yourself to look cool and your character to act with all sorts of flash and sizzle, but accomplish nothing more than you would have just making basic attacks and defenses. The other option could be overwhelming advantage - you are just slapping your opponent silly and they're not able to lay a glove on you.
Most players would prefer something in the middle. Something where the player with some skill gets some advantage, but not so much that it's an "automatic win".
In reality, what happens is that new players start out wishing for equality, but as they gain experience they start wanting their work to be reflected in their outcomes. Eventually they think there's a serious problem with the game if their awesomesauce doesn't give them a significant edge. Of course, the more edge the design gives them, the less fun everyone else has who ends up fighting those people, so there's a tradeoff point where the "happiness" of the good players overwhelms the "happiness" of the bad players. Staying on the right side of that equation is what separates great game design from the pack.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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3-5 seconds would seem an eternity to me, as I already get grumpy with the 1 sec global of WoW. part of my dislike is based in the high demand for many abilities that all have a slightly unpredictable sequence. its basically mash the highest priority ability every time the global is done cycling. not in anyway an ideal set up for my style... I'd like to be able to have more interaction with the environment for one, and yet i know a simulated turn based system would feel constraining. If each encounter were dominated by 6-10 abilities and i had on-screen access to however many others i deemed interesting, then i would call that a win.
edit: damn... if i'm gonna get ninja'd, it might as well be The Man with the Plan
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Goblin Squad Member
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3-5 seconds would seem an eternity to me, as I already get grumpy with the 1 sec global of WoW. part of my dislike is based in the high demand for many abilities that all have a slightly unpredictable sequence. its basically mash the highest priority ability every time the global is done cycling. not in anyway an ideal set up for my style... I'd like to be able to have more interaction with the environment for one, and yet i know a simulated turn based system would feel constraining. If each encounter were dominated by 6-10 abilities and i had on-screen access to however many others i deemed interesting, then i would call that a win.
edit: damn... if i'm gonna get ninja'd, it might as well be The Man with the Plan
LOL...Yeah, I know what you mean about being ninja'd. My main point is, judging from what they said in the past, I don't think it's going to be excessively "twitchy". What pacing they'll end up remains to be seen.... but I strongly suspect we won't have to be wrestling with the interface in order to mash buttons as quickly as possible....that sort of stuff works well for console based virtual fighter games like Mortal Combat....a PvP based sand-box MMORPG...not so much, as far as I'm concerned.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've seen a ton of references to "WoW Cut/paste" style combat (particularly in the negative) but what i really don't get is what about that combat draws such negative reviews. Is it the themepark scripting people don't like? Is it a pushing a button on an action bar to get a simulated effect? I never really got a clear idea in the other threads where this topic also tended to dominate. I get a lot of people dislike WoW and its "clones" (still not sure how that's being defined as well), but what i don't get is which parts in specific cause such fervent dislike?
First. Quite simply put, If I wanted to be playing WoW, I WOULD be playing WoW. That is why I dropped my TOR sub soon after hitting 50, and why I dropped my LotRO sub before it. After you finish the storyline it's WoW with Star Wars skin and a crappy space mini-game I could beat blindfolded. My scoundrel's big RP quote was "I've faced everything in these skies except a challenge worthy of my skills!"
This game obviously won't be WoW. Based on confirmed features we already know the world works quite differently than WoW does. So it is not a WoW clone. My defintion of WoW clone (Or more accurately theme-park since WoW itself is a clone of earlier theme-parks.) is a game where the objective is to level up to max and then grind through tiers of gear to get a higher gear rating, either via raids or PVP rewards. There is limited to no sandbox content, and it uses WoW Cut/Paste combat.
WoW Cut/Paste combat is tab targeting with auto aim. You have skillbars filled with abilities of which you buy a few more every few levels. In the end you generally have 4-6 skillbars. Then you have some form of talent tree in which you put points or fill slots with specific traits that augment your effectiveness in different areas and sometimes give new active abilities such as my scoundrel sawbone's "Emergency Med-Pack", or restro-druid "tree form." WoW, ToR, and LotRO... prettymuch 90% of the Free to Play and major budget MMOs on the market are all perfect examples of this worn out and tired combat style.
The problem with this style combat is as I already described. You end up with a bunch of skills that are moderately to barely useful to your specific build. For instance as a scrapper (A fairly melee oriented smuggler character type) you still had access to "Take Cover" a skill which allows you to roll behind cover to get more ranged defense and ranged abilities. That build was about shooting your opponent from stealth at point blank from behind then finishing them with a mix of attack abilities mainly consisting of melee range abilities like sucker punch, dirty kick, blaster whip, and back blast.
Or my sawbones had an ability (the name of which I forgot because I pulled it off my skillbar) that consumed a condition I got primarily from using my big cast over time heal, blaster whip, and the ticks of my heal over time. It required 15 energy had a 1 or 1.5 second induction and healed for a moderate amount. At a high level of sawbones I got emergency medpack that consumed the SAME condition took 0 energy, was an instant cast, healed almost as much, and gave that condition back to me if my target was below 30% health allowing me to spam it during desperate situations.
Once I got Emergency Medpack I NEVER needed that skill again. Its a kind of handy skill if you are a scrapper or dirty fighter needing some quick cheap healing. But as a full healer I had quicker and cheaper healing at my disposal. I believe I determined the only possible useful scenario for that skill is if someone was dying, they needed 300 or 500 or however many more points of healing it was. They didn't need it sooner than 1 second, but they did need it before the two seconds an Underworld Medicine would take to give MORE healing and grant upper hand again. If you can predict whether or not you will need 300-500 more healing after 1 second but before 2, and get to that ability in time, hats off to you because you can predict damage better than I can!!! For me... it would have been nice to replace it with a skill I WOULD use.
Beyond that. It really would have been nice to streamline things more. As a full healer I had 8 healing abilities counting rez and condition removal.
1. Underworld Medicine (Main heal- gives upper hand)
2. Kolto Pack (Thats the name of the useless skill described above)
3. Slow Release Medpack (Heal over time, instant cast, stacks twice, and one cast refreshes both stacks if they are both active. Each tick has 30% chance to trigger upper hand.)
4. Emergency Medpack (Super sexy ability described above.)
5. Diagnostic Scan (Does TERRIBLY bad healing, channeled, no casting cost, can restore some energy with the right specs making it useful enough to not throw out. I know how to manage energy so I rarely ever use this.)
6. Kolto Cloud (AoE heal over time with super high energy cost, which sounds pretty useless until you realize it is instant cast and the heal over time sticks on on the players it hits even if they move away from the player it was targeted on after it hits.)
7. Triage (With right specs it heals a small amount and purges a few conditions)
8. Heart Trigger Patch (Our in-combat rez)
What kind of damage dealing abilities did I need to be aware of as a healer? Not including skills that don't do damage like flash grenade and pugnacity?
1. Blaster whip. Grants upper hand which makes it great to get some free healing in if you are getting attacked in melee. Especially as it is the only instant with a 100% chance to grant upper hand.
2. Dirty kick. Stuns the target and for me increased my speed for a few seconds after the stun was applied.
3. Vital shot. Your main damage skill as a healer. Good for throwing in some high damage per energy pop-shots if everyone is doing good on health and you have spare energy.
4. Flurry of bolts. Good for throwing in pop-shots if you DON'T have energy to spare.
5. Backblast. Great for helping finish a target quickly. Usually follows a dirty kick.
6. Shoot first. If you are healing for another stealth class it's always good to take advantage of this skill for some heavy damage as you pop out of stealth.
7. Quick blast. Good for throwing in pop-shots if you have A LOT of energy to spare.
8. XS Flyby. Good for cleaning up adds if you get the time. Sawbones are great at dropping it since they should have low induction times and this skill has a long induction.
9. Thermal grenade. Good for tossing into a crowd, especially if its a crowd of enemy players trying to take an objective.
10. Tendon blast. Medium range skill that deals some damage and cripples your target to slow their movement speed. The uses for this as a healer should be obvious.
11. Burst. On the off chance you are using cover this is nice for taking pop-shots.
12. Sabotage. On the off chance you are using cover this is a nice bomb you can stick to an enemy.
13. Barrage. A channeled ability that consumes upper hand. Sprays a cone of damage. While it's kind of useful for firing into groups, it consumes upper hand which is probably better spent on healing.
Perhaps more I have forgotten.
So as a healer. I have 13 damage skills NOT INCLUDING no-damage utilities I can remember, and I can guarantee you there aren't more than 8 healing skills INCLUDING no healing utilities unless some have been added recently.
THAT is why I don't like this system. In Guild wars I had 8 skills to worry about, every single one of them a healing skill. Every single one saw use on a frequent basis. I had a VAST array of healing skills to pick from too, as well as damage prevention skills I could have gone with, or even damage skills had I wanted them. In this game 95% of my skill usage is 5 skills because I rarely used my rez, one of my 8 healing skills was useless, and one of them was just a "Oh crap I used too much energy" bail-out skill. I have access to THIRTEEN damage skills at minimum, and unknown number of utilities that account for about 5 percent of my skill use. I gladly would give prettymuch all of them except dirty kick up for one to two more good healing skills that I actually would use on a frequent basis like the Guild Wars "Heal Party" that heals all nearby party members for some burst healing, a skill like "Healing Hands" that attaches a bit of healing to all damage received for awhile or a more cheaper or more powerful heal over time that wasn't instant cast.
A highly customized character with a wider range or abilities in your chosen role is preferable than "Here is a big slop of abilities most of which you will rarely use. Take these points and decide which ones you don't want to suck!"
Beyond that more options allow for really inventive builds. It's almost like building a deck in MTG. "Oh man, this ability really combos well with that ability!" You can use up your slots trying to build a really cool combo that does one or two things, or just fill them with a lot of abilities you know you will get good usage out of. I know I was WAY more excited about my builds in Guild Wars than my builds in TOR which was practically designed to only allow a few good builds per class, unlike Guild Wars where the number of good builds was seemingly limitless.
Games like WoW tend to do that give us... less options, and more raw power. As opposed to games like Guild Wars that tend to give us, 0 increase in power after very early on, and TONS of options.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Andius, that kind of streamlining would only really be possible if there were very clearly defined classes.
PFO will allow multi-classing, so that's not really going to be possible.
I expect PFO to give me the option of learning lots of skills, with the understanding that it's my responsibility to choose which ones I use in combat.
Again, it's fine if you want to streamline your character, but please don't try to force everyone into the cookie-cutter that you fit in.
Here's an analogy that may make some sense as to the direction I'd like to see the game go.
Imagine that the input device for your combat controls is a guitar.
Two characters meet in a PvP encounter.
One player knows how to play the guitar. The other doesn't.
Maybe there's a basic attack for just playing the top string open, and a basic defense for playing the bottom string open. The player without any guitar experience can manage that, no problem. So that player is capable of participating.
But there's a whole range of actions your character could do assuming you knew how to play chords, slides, pull-offs, hammer-ons, rhythm and melodies. The experienced guitar player gets to use all those abilities (at least that subset enabled by the character's skill and gear, and the player's actual guitar playing ability).
That vast array of options makes that character much more likely to deal damage, set up combos, dodge attacks, and recover from hits than the character who just makes a basic attack and a basic defense.
Now the experienced guitar player may be a poor PvP player. He/she might be distracted. He/she might be trying to do all sorts of complicated things and failing (this is why casinos still offer 21 as a regular game; most people who think they can count a blackjack deck really can't). The inexperienced guitar player who just plays "attack" and "block" over and over could very conceivably win that fight.
The game design part of this is deciding how much advantage you get for deviating from basic attack and basic defense. One option might be "virtually nothing", so you exert yourself to look cool and your character to act with all sorts of flash and sizzle, but accomplish nothing more than you would have just making basic attacks and defenses. The other option could be overwhelming advantage - you are just slapping your opponent silly and they're not able to lay a glove on you.
Most players would prefer something in the middle. Something where the player with some skill...
I hope the combat system has even half of the skill-cap of guitar playing, because then I'm looking at years at improving (my personal skill) in the game. Too often in MMO's the depth of the system is so shallow I have hit the cap of what is reasonable commensurate to my reflexes and muscle memory within 2 hours and some key mapping. A comparable accomplishment in a well designed fighting game or RTS could take weeks or months.
Also, I'm totally picturing this now for PFO boss battles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJTYp1tvd3Q
I've seen a ton of references to "WoW Cut/paste" style combat (particularly in the negative) but what i really don't get is what about that combat draws such negative reviews. Is it the themepark scripting people don't like? Is it a pushing a button on an action bar to get a simulated effect? I never really got a clear idea in the other threads where this topic also tended to dominate. I get a lot of people dislike WoW and its "clones" (still not sure how that's being defined as well), but what i don't get is which parts in specific cause such fervent dislike?
Combat since WoW has remained largely static and hasn't moved forward. A global cooldown combined with timing insensitive non-reactionary button pressing leads to the most effective patterns of button smashing being discovered and macro'd. Some of the more successful arena characters on Rift/WoW arenas run with 3-4 macros, and those are about the only keys they press.
Compared even to older systems like the one in DAoC, it's inferior. The DAoC system was highly flawed due to out of control AE CC abilities, but it was full of reactionary (chain off successful block/parry/dodge) combos, and there was no GCD. If an ability has a .3 second animation you could fire another ability in .3 seconds. So, as a result someone might have say, a reactionary chain on parry (DAoC let you queue commands). So, they see the parry go off and they hit 4-5-7 to begin the reactionary chain. The first part of the animation begins but then they block. Well well, they can stun off a block reactionary so they hit another key (cancelling the action queue) and stun the enemy player. Then they flank them to do a positional move for maximum damage. Mages and archers also did immense damage, but not while someone was punching them in the face, a nice trade off.
So, from where I sit the *player skill* required to optimally PvP in MMO's took a steep dive downwards from DAoC to WoW, and since then everyone has just copied WoW's crappy system of macro ability chains or practice fixed "rotations" to maximize damage.
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A system that could take a seasoned gamer months to master (like a really deep fighting game, or RTS) would be ideal. It doesn't haveto be as fast as Quake Live obviously, but having a skill cap high enough to have the types of disparities we see among say, guitar players, is a beautiful thing to any *real* gamer.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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In any conflict between players in any game type there will be a winner and loser.
Except in games which result in zero winners and/or zero losers. Iterated prisoner's dilemma, for example, produces either two winners or two losers when either player uses the best strategy currently known.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Andius
I'll agree the many tiers of abilities and the total mess that is TOR class design make for a pretty counter-engaging method. Learning abilities just to replace them with better ones later is a real drag. Its worthy of note that WoW itself is moving away from this method of skill implementation, and have generally gotten better at streamlining the focus as the years have gone on... give em one thing, Blizzard doesn't really let that game go to the weeds.
if i may be so bold as to reinterpret your post a little into likes and dislikes...
- You severely dislike the Themepark method.
- You generally dislike having a ton of non-relevant abilities to parse out of your gameplay. Relevance here being dictated by efficacy in the face of adversity.
- I'd also extrapolate that you're a generally dislike the Trinity of MMO design, healer/tank/dps, but correct me if i'm off base.
As we know, PFO will be a sandbox first, and include mini-themepark rides second. Also, the relevancy of abilities is a real tricky design problem, one that i think WoW has evolved into doing ok with, and that TOR completely fubar'd badly. The holy Trinity will also not exist in PFO according to my understanding, as there won't be a role we classically refer to as a Tank.
To me, all these things are class and combat design, not necessarily combat mechanics... pedantic perhaps but i guess that's just how i think.
@Marou You've pointed out a key thing in your review of DAoC in that there is a queu priority to their system. It FEELS like you're taking actions at every literal CD and that there isn't an inherent GCD, but what's really happening is that queu system has replaced the GCD in function. Maybe that's the evolution of MMOs mechanically speaking, who can know, but in the end the real difference is probably how the game feels to play, rather than how the game might differ from WoW.
and finally @ DeciusBrutus ... you lost me there about winners/losers. its been my assumption that any combat will effectively be a zero sum between combatants. barring escape from danger via fleeing that is...
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Here's an analogy that may make some sense as to the direction I'd like to see the game go.
Imagine that the input device for your combat controls is a guitar.
Two characters meet in a PvP encounter.
One player knows how to play the guitar. The other doesn't.
Maybe there's a basic attack for just playing the top string open, and a basic defense for playing the bottom string open. The player without any guitar experience can manage that, no problem. So that player is capable of participating.
But there's a whole range of actions your character could do assuming you knew how to play chords, slides, pull-offs, hammer-ons, rhythm and melodies. The experienced guitar player gets to use all those abilities (at least that subset enabled by the character's skill and gear, and the player's actual guitar playing ability).
If I understand this right, more developed characters will have access to abilities which vary widely in effectiveness based on the player's timing in executing them? Or do you expect there to be a significant player dexterity requirement to fully utilize an ability?
Frankly, I can't reconcile including a player dexterity requirement with previous claims that 'features which grant an advantage to trivial cheaters are discouraged'.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Andius, that kind of streamlining would only really be possible if there were very clearly defined classes.
PFO will allow multi-classing, so that's not really going to be possible.
I expect PFO to give me the option of learning lots of skills, with the understanding that it's my responsibility to choose which ones I use in combat.
Again, it's fine if you want to streamline your character, but please don't try to force everyone into the cookie-cutter that you fit in.
Please don't play the "Don't force everyone to play the game you want to card." First off, I'm not the only one coming from this position. And YOU are trying to force us to play the game the way YOU want to play as well.
Do that and multiclassing is less of an issue so long as any known ability can be set too, though 8 was too few for me I would go for 12 to 18(including consumables though I steer clear of those myself.) but allow the use of other abilities from menu out of combat.
I like that balance Andius, 8 permanent plus not more than 8 "consumables" hits the balance between too much and not enough.
The max slots system is a pretty nice addition that is being brought to MMO's.
There are a few like Sepherum and Marou and I think Decius that haven't really come out and said which side they support as far as max ability slots.
And then there are a couple like you and Gruffling decidedly in favor of the WoW system.
So first off, I am not selfishly trying to cater the game purely around my needs. I am part of a major position with multiple supporters. Second off I am not asking for a restriction on your style of gameplay. I am asking for one of two systems to be implemented which in all previous MMOs I am aware of are INCOMPATIBLE systems.
Allowing every character access to all skills within their class gives distinct advantage over characters who only use a select subset. Sure I mainly used my healing abilities but if I didn't throw in some damage to help my team make a quick kill here, or drop an XS flyby on the adds there, or ____ with my _____ skill that wasn't healing, I would have a decided disadvantage over a character who did. Versatility is an advantage no matter how useless those skills are 90% of the time. If they are useful .01% of the time having them is an advantage
You want a system that gives you unrestricted access to a wide array of abilities all at the same time and makes you good at some of them. I want a system that gives me narrow access to a FAR WIDER array of abilities all at the same time and makes me good at all of them.
Don't pinhole US into your style of play. I don't feel like WE should have to be told "You can use the few abilities the devs gave you that fit your playstyle and that you have almost no control over if you want. WE don't want you to be able to pick what those abilities are. WE want you to only have access to these 50 so that we can use all of them and have an advantage over you."
I would rather have 500 merit badges that I can swap around and will want to earn more to give me more customization options, than have 50 merit badges that give me access to 50 abilities that I need ALL of in order to run my build as effectively as someone else with all 50. Which one do you honestly think works better with merit badges? Which one is going to yield more content and adventure without making the PVP barrier higher?
Personally I think my earlier suggested compromise was great. Certain classes, traits, and races effect your available ability slots. If you want to play a human sorcerer and use your passive attributes to get yourself more ability slots you can have access to a very wide range of abilities. If you want to play a Half-Orc Barbarian and use your passive abilities to buff things like damage, attack speed, rage duration, or health you will have a very limited range of abilities. But the Half-Orc Barbarian will sure as hell be damn good at smashing things. Better than the human fighter who took some passives in getting a wider array of abilities.
Unless your system gives me a dozen or two healing abilities to choose from, without making me overpowered or making the number of abilities overly cumbersome for prettymuch everyone.... Then your system is restricting how I want to play the game
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'll toss in my two cents here: I like having a lot of abilities. I do *not* like having abilities that are lethal trap options, or are pretty much inferior to what you gain later. Do not give me Healing Skill 1, then give me Healing Skill 2, if one completely better than the other. If it procs faster, takes less energy, and heals more, then *replace* HS1 with HS2. I want all of my abilities to matter, but I don't want to be stuck holding onto a list of only 8 things I can do at any one time. In TOR, I could CC, single target DPS, AOE, and Heal. I was a significantly better healer, and I had a nice list of healing skills to use. But when the time came for me to do the rest of that, I still had the option to do so, as long as I had the wherewithal to actually do it.
There are a few like Sepherum and Marou and I think Decius that haven't really come out and said which side they support as far as max ability slots.
In a system where some abilities are ground targeted or otherwise manually aimed and you have active defensive abilities much of your attention is focused on avoiding and dealing damage efficiently. A good example of this would be Guild Wars 2 combat. Stick 30 situational skill bars on top of that and it turns ridiculous, it's too much.
By contrast in a system like WoW/TOR you are basically LOS humping (because it's the only way to avoid damage) and using skill rotations to maximize damage. The use of all situational abilities is the only differentiation of player skill even in the game. So, removing those 30 abilities would make it even more stupidly simple and less skillful than it already is.
So, I haven't committed one way or the other because I don't have a good enough idea of what the end system will look like. If it works like Ryan wants I think having a limited number of skills equipped at any time is perfectly logical and would work wonders towards balancing ancient characters against younger ones. If it's a copy of WoW-type combat, removing the excessive amount of abilities open eliminates the small amount of player skill in the gameplay system.
@Marou You've pointed out a key thing in your review of DAoC in that there is a queu priority to their system. It FEELS like you're taking actions at every literal CD and that there isn't an inherent GCD, but what's really happening is that queu system has replaced the GCD in function. Maybe that's the evolution of MMOs mechanically speaking, who can know, but in the end the real difference is probably how the game feels to play, rather than how the game might differ from WoW.
No, you literally could swap an action for maximum effectiveness instantly (.1 seconds). In addition, by it's nature there was no "optimum" dps rotation, since the optimum abilities to use would depend on what was currently going on in the individual engagement, positioning, as well as what else was going on in battlefield.
eg. It was objectively more skillful, it didn't just feel better. It actually felt clumsy and awkward, because of an ancient version of the net immerse engine. In spite of the ugliness and awkward factor player skill meant much more.
Also, I'm totally picturing this now for PFO boss battles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJTYp1tvd3Q
I had it pegged more as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtQx3OKQC9U(poor quality theater rip, sorry)
Or, the best NwN 2 mod ever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n0vmCqv5yo
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Goblin Squad Member
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Or, the best NwN 2 mod ever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n0vmCqv5yoAlso, I'm totally picturing this now for PFO boss battles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJTYp1tvd3Q
I had it pegged more as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtQx3OKQC9U(poor quality theater rip, sorry)
Much better! helps I had my sound turned down before I opened it. At least my ears are still intact
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Goblin Squad Member
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My views on this come from a creative-writing/story-structure perspective. Creativity and Limits go hand in hand. I always love the idea of more options, but dread the abyss of freedom that is all the options. Are the limits of human ingenuity, tech, and skill enough to make a compelling experience, or would limitations placed by game design be a better choice?
I'm not sure, but this is a time where I would suggest moderation and balance instead of extremes.
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Goblin Squad Member
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My views on this come from a creative-writing/story-structure perspective. Creativity and Limits go hand in hand. I always love the idea of more options, but dread the abyss of freedom that is all the options. Are the limits of human ingenuity, tech, and skill enough to make a compelling experience, or would limitations placed by game design be a better choice?
I'm not sure, but this is a time where I would suggest moderation and balance instead of extremes.
Well said!
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Goblin Squad Member
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Going from Ryans post, a combo system like DCUO with some improvements seems like it would fit very well into his idea.
You could have two sources of attacks:
1. Attacks:
-These range from weapon swings to low level magic spells from a wand/staff. These function with combos, made by right and left mouse clicks(or other buttons).
For instance with a longsword:
-A quick left click is a standard weapon swing.
-Two quick left clicks slashes down, then returns up.
-A long click(hold down longer) would be a strong swing
-Two long clicks would be a strong swing, then you spin around and swing again.
Or with a fire staff:
-A quick click shoots a flare
-Two quick clicks shoot a small volly
-A long click shoots a fireball with a small aoe radius
-A quick click, then a long click fires a small flare, then if you release the long click at the correct moment, you fire jet of flame at your target.
As you progress your skill with a particular weapon, you get access to more combos. You could have right and left click be for ranged, and melee attacks. every tree would get access to one, but every tree wouldn't have the same balance for both, so a bow would have just a few melee attacks, and a sword would have just a few ranged attacks.
To me, this is closest to a guitar analogy. You actually have to learn to weave your attacks together.
2. Abilities:
-These are primarily heals, power-ups, and any large damage abilities. A fighter would mostly stack abilities that power their attacks, while a wizard would have spells, and a cleric would have a few heals and buffs.
The two can work with each-other. DCUO has attacks build up energy for your abilities, the longer your combo chain the faster your energy builds. And some abilities can key off of effects that your attacks cause, like a stun, or interrupt.
I'll say it again. If you are opposed to the system and have never played a limited ability game, try DCUO, it's free and doesn't require any money to get through the leveling process. Just don't play flagged for PVP unless you like max level characters hindering your leveling process. They failed to make a small power gap by awarding descent power increases through completing feats and getting more skill points.
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Goblin Squad Member
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A couple of things.
There's usually a cool-down because the server can only increment the battlespace every few seconds. The smaller the increment, the less tolerant the game is of client latency. If you make it very small, you'll have lots of people who can't really play because nothing they do will seem to work - especially as the number of objects the server is transmitting updates for increases.
Some MMOs seem to have addressed this problem, but usually what you're seeing is either:
A: An illusion (there's a timer that's incrementing but the client seems more responsive to hide the fact that many of your keystrokes are never sent to the server. The client & the server thus are only rarely in 100% synch and both sides need to do cleanups and on-the-fly fixes to keep the simulation from going completely off the rails.)
B: They never got successful enough to be hurt by the fact that they aren't able to handle large player populations.
This is one reason that so many games use the WoW-style combat system. It's proven to scale to the sizes they need, and its been validated by millions as being more than adequate as a game mechanic.
Some MMOs have tried to be different and have received a variety of pushback.
EVE's system has a fairly lengthy increment; I think it's 3 seconds. As a result of this you can't "fly your ship" - instead you indicate direction changes by clicking on the starscape and by using predefined maneuvers like orbits and "go to x" style commands.
This drives a lot of people away from the game. They came expecting a flight simulator, and instead they got a ferryboat simulator.
It also means that the choices you make are fairly important. You're going to send a lot fewer commands to the server during a fight in EVE than you will in Call of Duty, therefore each one carries a higher impact on the win/loss result. It's unforgiving of errors in judgement or lapses in concentration.
DCUO and Champions are built to have more "action" style combat systems, closer to a fighting game than WoW, but less intense than an FPS. They have fairly short increments and that allows players to react to what they see in time to make countermoves and to set up combos. These games were built for consoles and assumed a console-style controller; those controllers have fairly limited input options, which means that you need to have fairly limited choices as well.
The result was that many people who played WoW-style MMOs didn't like them. They were too reliant on players having physical dexterity as an attribute, and they generated the sense that while your character might have access to a wide range of abilities in practice you'd map 3-5 of them to buttons and just use those - rendering the value of the other things your character could do void.
There is a sense in the industry (though I doubt there's any hard research to support it) that one reason MMOs have had a more equitable gender balance than many other forms of videogames is that they don't rely on muscle memory and deeply ingrained habits developed from years spent playing FPSs since childhood (which many males have). So the closer you go towards "action" style combat, the more likely the conventional wisdom believes you'll come to losing half your target audience.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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So then, what we know of PFO so far, that is a sandbox, without that much instanced content, that could easily see large battles involving many players in a small space, that the increment for the battlespace can't be too short because if it is, then devs and players will encounter hardware and connectivity problems.
Would that be a good assumption?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan,
What latency do you plan on catering to? Most games i play on consider less than 100 ms 'good', 100-200ms is 'acceptable', and 200+ is bad, and where you start to notice a delay.
(Just for anyone that doesn't know 100ms latency is a 1/10th of a second delay between you and the server.)
It seems that any server based anywhere in the continental US, would result in a latency of less than 150 ms on the vast majority of internet connections, especially when you have fiber lines running data now. Where 150ms is a server based in Seattle and a user in Miami.
Just how low are you going to shoot for hardware specifications(server side) is something like a 3s update time what we might be seeing? This is one concern i have with a very limited launch, unless you plan on going far into debt for the first year or so of the game's life.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In reality, what happens is that new players start out wishing for equality, but as they gain experience they start wanting their work to be reflected in their outcomes. Eventually they think there's a serious problem with the game if their awesomesauce doesn't give them a significant edge. Of course, the more edge the design gives them, the less fun everyone else has who ends up fighting those people, so there's a tradeoff point where the "happiness" of the good players overwhelms the "happiness" of the bad players. Staying on the right side of that equation is what separates great game design from the pack.
I think the general idea of this quote is right, but the specific reward is not. Players do not need an actual PVP advantage to feel like their efforts are going something in a game. What they need to feel like is they are working toward a desirable end. Let me give a few examples:
1. Minecraft- How many hours of work do you think this represents? What does that player have to show for it?
2. Magic The Gathering- Does your average player build the most powerful 60 card deck possible and then just stop? Most players I know including myself have multiple decks. They build them because they enjoy being able to experiment around, create new things, try new ideas, and have varied experience. Not because having a lot of decks gives them an advantage. How many hours do you think building those decks represents? How much money do you think that represents?
3. Game Achievements- How many hours do people spend hunting down achievements on Xbox Live, Steam, BatteNet etc? What advantages do these yield for the player?
4. Guild Wars- After ascension and you get Droks armor somewhere around halfway through the game I think, your stats are finished going up, your armor doesn't get any better stat-wise(With the exception of runes and inscriptions which are already available at that point.) yet thousands of players invested hundreds of hours into getting the upper end armors that only LOOK different, completing more missions, gaining more skills, and working for new titles.
I realize at this point a lot of people are saying. "Then go play Minecraft, go play your Xbox, go play Guild Wars! That's not what MMO's are about!!!"
I personally love deep immersive persistent worlds with hundreds or thousands of players where you can explore, create things in a detailed crafting systems, find new items and skills, even shape the world as you see fit.
I would really like to play a game like that, with fast paced combat, that players can jump right into an get engaged without a huge stat disadvantage. These ideas are not mutually exclusive, it just hasn't been done before mainly because of narrow minded people who dominate the floor screaming: "Then go play Minecraft, go play your Xbox, go play Guild Wars! That's not what MMO's are about!!!"
They think its either good combat you can jump right into or a deep immersive world, you can't have both together.
I think if a company had the guts to release something like this, they might not out-do WoW in subscribers, but they would attract a rabidly loyal following from a niche in the market who as of yet has been ignored. And I think they might also find that many of the people who right now wouldn't touch an MMO with a ten foot pole, might be more willing to play a game like what I just described. I know I am sure as hell disenchanted with what the MMO market can currently offer me.
I personally would love to put hours into your MMO gaining achievements and titles, building cities, finding exciting new skills, and just interacting with people. If you give me the abilities to do those, I could literally care less if my attacks get any stronger or if I get a single more point of health between level 1, and level 20.
I agree 1000% Andius, me and my gaming circle (including my wife) have been saying the same thing for years. Games like Tera, Firefall, etc. prove action combat + large battles are not only possible, they are here now. Unfortunately they lack the depth and substance to make them attractive as anything more than a short term diversion.
So, I already have 500 hours in Skyrim and god knows how many in Minecraft...still waiting on an MMO that focuses on fun gameplay and immersion first, with timesinks thrown in only where they make the game more fundamentally fun.
Female gamers want features like owning homes, customizing their appearance, and personalized crafting. Male gamers want these too, just not as much. Smart games include enough female targeted features to entice female gamers and keep their male gamers from getting bored when their primary activities get tiresome.
If anything WoW-like games with 40 hotbars are much more dependent on muscle memory than an FPS where you change weapons with 1-5 and use the mouse and wasd as the primary control mechanism.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I agree 1000% Andius, me and my gaming circle (including my wife) have been saying the same thing for years. Games like Tera, Firefall, etc. prove action combat + large battles are not only possible, they are here now. Unfortunately they lack the depth and substance to make them attractive as anything more than a short term diversion.
So, I already have 500 hours in Skyrim and god knows how many in Minecraft...still waiting on an MMO that focuses on fun gameplay and immersion first, with timesinks thrown in only where they make the game more fundamentally fun.
Female gamers want features like owning homes, customizing their appearance, and personalized crafting. Male gamers want these too, just not as much. Smart games include enough female targeted features to entice female gamers and keep their male gamers from getting bored when their primary activities get tiresome.
If anything WoW-like games with 40 hotbars are much more dependent on muscle memory than an FPS where you change weapons with 1-5 and use the mouse and wasd as the primary control mechanism.
Please don't stereotype gamers' desires by sex. It's wrong factually and distasteful socially.
Please don't stereotype gamers' desires by sex. It's wrong factually and distasteful socially.
I've asked some of the female gamers I play with (guild, co-workers, family, etc) what they look for in MMO's over the years, it's not scientific, but it's not pulled out of my butt either. My wife is more similar to me, but she shied away from PvP-centric games with a passion until I made her try them with me, and she started to like it.
My 16 year old sister's 3 favorite games are GTA:IV, Sims, and Minecraft. My 23 year old sister's favorite games are Sims, Red Dead Redemption, and Smash Brothers. My 30 year old wife's favorite games are the co-op non MMO rpgs, like NwN, Baldur's Gate, etc.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Please don't stereotype gamers' desires by sex. It's wrong factually and distasteful socially.I've asked some of the female players I play with what they look for in MMO's over the years, it's not scientific, but it's not pulled out of my butt either. My wife is more similar to me, but she shied away from PvP-centric games with a passion until I made her try them with me, and she started to like it.
My 16 year old sister's 3 favorite games are GTA:IV, Sims, and Minecraft. My 23 year old sister's favorite games are Sims, Red Dead Redemption, and Smash Brothers. My 30 year old wife's favorite games are the co-op non MMO rpgs, like NwN, Baldur's Gate, etc.
So, from your observations, the variation within sexes is greater than the variation between them. From that, you drew the conclusion that there was a significant difference between sexes. Is that accurate?
So, from your observations, the variation within sexes is greater than the variation between them. From that, you drew the conclusion that there was a significant difference between sexes. Is that accurate?Please don't stereotype gamers' desires by sex. It's wrong factually and distasteful socially.I've asked some of the female players I play with what they look for in MMO's over the years, it's not scientific, but it's not pulled out of my butt either. My wife is more similar to me, but she shied away from PvP-centric games with a passion until I made her try them with me, and she started to like it.
My 16 year old sister's 3 favorite games are GTA:IV, Sims, and Minecraft. My 23 year old sister's favorite games are Sims, Red Dead Redemption, and Smash Brothers. My 30 year old wife's favorite games are the co-op non MMO rpgs, like NwN, Baldur's Gate, etc.
No, between family, my wife, and the 6 or so women in my guild that's been around since DAoC, and co-workers, every single one of them spends excruciating amounts of time customizing their avatar's appearance, and every one of them loves the Sims and activities like decorating houses.
Being someone who probably spends 3 minutes tops customizing my character's appearance, I can't fully relate. If I play minecraft with the women in my life I tend to build rail systems and redstone contraptions while they build elaborate houses and gardens.
Is this universal? Surely not, however the trend is too strong to deny. It's why World of Darkness is including fashion design elements. Sure, some male gamers will use them. It's not why they included them.
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Goblin Squad Member
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This is one reason that so many games use the WoW-style combat system. It's proven to scale to the sizes they need, and its been validated by millions as being more than adequate as a game mechanic.
That being said, as well as the rest of the things in that post which was a bit too large to fully quote. What can we expect to see from PFO?
Are we looking at 40-60 WoW style skills or are we looking to at least seem some significant adaptations in how the system works including possible limits to the number of active abilities/the ability to swap out skills GuildWars style and/or customize skill like the Diablo 3 rune system?
Getting handed 8 or so healing skills jumbled among a bunch of other junk and being told "This is what you have to work with. Hope you like it." is a major turn off to me. In light of the latest blog I know I'll 99% chance be buying/playing this game, so I won't even pretend it would cause me to leave, but I at least hope other options are explored.
Especially given the fact we are going to level multiple classes once we have played long enough.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In reality, what happens is that new players start out wishing for equality, but as they gain experience they start wanting their work to be reflected in their outcomes. Eventually they think there's a serious problem with the game if their awesomesauce doesn't give them a significant edge. Of course, the more edge the design gives them, the less fun everyone else has who ends up fighting those people, so there's a tradeoff point where the "happiness" of the good players overwhelms the "happiness" of the bad players. Staying on the right side of that equation is what separates great game design from the pack.
I would like to see PFO divorce the idea that you deserve to be more powerful simply because you played more. Your power should come from experience. This goes back to the chess analogy. All the pieces are the same, but the more you play the better you learn to use them. Same goes for guitar, everyone can make a loud noise, but making the loud noise sound good takes practice. This also means that if Player A(experienced) switches accounts with Player B(new), Player A should come out on top even with the new account, but at the same time Player B shouldn't take very long to get to an equal level of understanding.
Staying with the chess analogy. I would like to see the player start with a few pawns, and work <30 hours to get the full base set, and along the way they are learning the ins and outs of the game. Once they have all 16 pieces, they should stand a chance out in the world. As they progress further they get new styles of pieces to replace the ones they currently have. So you could have pawns that attack with acid, and rooks that attack with ice, and a queen that attacks with flame.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What latency do you plan on catering to? Most games i play on consider less than 100 ms 'good', 100-200ms is 'acceptable', and 200+ is bad, and where you start to notice a delay.
These numbers are mostly bogus. Unfortunately.
In the real world, barring a very small number of routers between client and server, with all systems optimized end to end, what you find is that any "latency" statistics are really averages, and (bizarrely) often those averages throw away packets that are lost completely (meaning that they drastically underreport the latency).
High-demand internet services likely to be DDOS'd (like MMOs) also tend to use a lot of fancy routing to help protect them, which means that the path between any client and the server could change on a moment by moment basis.
These were the sources of innumerable headaches when I worked at CCP, as customer service tried to untangle lag problems and determine if the problem was on the client side, in the network fabric, in the routers controlled by CCP, or on the server side. We never did come up with a practical way to monitor the logged in player network effectively. There's just a lot of intermittent unreproducible lag in the internet these days (and due to bufferbloat, it's getting worse).
The problem is that when you have several dozen clients in the same battlespace, their individual latencies don't overlap. The internet doesn't have a central timing system. So your 100ms latency, and my 100ms latency may happen sequentially, not in parallel. That's 200ms. Which, since we're talking round-trips, is now 400ms (half a second, effectively). And on a fairly regular basis, your latency spikes or my latency spikes, and if those spikes happen to correspond to the instant when a decision must be input, well, that sucks.
This is why most FPS games don't scale to more than 30-40 players. Beyond this point, you just can't manage hair-trigger responsiveness and player-skill aiming - the lag and latencies on the public internet make it likely that timing and synch issues, not player skill, will become the dominant factor in determining victory.
RyanD
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Goblin Squad Member
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Getting handed 8 or so healing skills jumbled among a bunch of other junk and being told "This is what you have to work with. Hope you like it." is a major turn off to me.
My hope is that instead what you'll find is that you end up with character abilities that represent a matrix of what you've chosen to train, what you've chosen to do, and what you want to focus your character on being good at.
Some characters might end up with a fairly narrow range of options, which they've honed to a high degree of expertise. Others could have a jungle of stuff gathered ad hoc without any master plan just based on circumstance and short-attention-span player interests.
The older a character is the more likely it is that the character will have gained some expertise in several different fields of activity. I don't see that as being overlapping though because you probably won't use those abilities interchangeably. The situation you find yourself in and the task you've set your character to achieve will likely reduce the options you'd be using to a fairly small subset.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Some characters might end up with a fairly narrow range of options, which they've honed to a high degree of expertise. Others could have a jungle of stuff gathered ad hoc without any master plan just based on circumstance and short-attention-span player interests.
When you say expertise, do you mean the character is able to do more damage per swing(as a combat comparison)? or that the player has a better understanding of the best combination of abilities to use for that weapon.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Some characters might end up with a fairly narrow range of options, which they've honed to a high degree of expertise. Others could have a jungle of stuff gathered ad hoc without any master plan just based on circumstance and short-attention-span player interests.When you say expertise, do you mean the character is able to do more damage per swing(as a combat comparison)? or that the player has a better understanding of the best combination of abilities to use for that weapon.
I assume that "Swinging a sword" is the type of option, and "Brash strike/precise strike/two weapon strike/two handed strike" are the result of expertise with swinging a sword.
The 'jumble of stuff' character might not be able to swing a sword as many different ways, but he can swing a sword at things that need slashed, throw a dagger at things that need stabbed, and cast spells at things that need to be magicked. The first character would be great at anything that was weak against swords, good against anything with no strengths or weaknesses and fair at anything that was strong versus swords. The second character would be good against anything with a weakness, fair against something with no weaknesses, and poor against anything hardened versus everything.