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It's the combat, stupid
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,507
When I quit WoW several years ago, there were a lot of things I disliked about the game. It took too long to travel. It was too much of a pain to get a group. Level and gear differences meant that there was hardly anyone you could reasonably group with. The loot system encourages ninja looting. People have to do a particular instance many times just to get a particular piece of loot. Dungeons insist that you spend too much time playing in a single sitting. PVP is severely unbalanced by differences in level and gear. It takes too long to refill health and mana between battles. The servers crashed way too much, and were badly laggy much of the rest of the time. That's a partial list; there were quite a few others.
And yet, last night I realized that even if every single one of those things were fixed, I still wouldn't like the game. Those were all side issues, and not the real reason I didn't like the game.
The real problem is the combat. If a game is mostly built around combat, and the combat is boring, then the game will be boring. Games that mostly aren't about combat can get away with poor combat (or not having combat at all!), but if combat is the core of a game, it had better be good.
Now, there are a lot of games that have combat along the lines of WoW. You stand there and a mob stands there, and you both auto-attack each other. You use a skill occasionally. The mob uses a skill occasionally. But mostly, you have to stand there and wait a minute or two to wear down the mob's lifeline and kill it. Maybe you're spamming some particular attack skill rather than auto-attack, but that doesn't make that much of a difference.
Last night, it occurred to me to ask, how could anyone conceivably think that was interesting? You spend most of your time standing there waiting for the battle to end--so that you can start another battle and stand there waiting for it to end, too. WoW hardly invented that style of combat, and a large fraction of the games on this site do basically the same thing. I've played quite a few games with combat along those lines. And I haven't liked a single one of them. Not one. Ever.
Neither is this the way that combat has been done forever. Can you name a game that released before 1995 and has combat along the same lines? I can't come up with a single one. There were first person shooters, one-on-one fighting games, side-scrolling platform games, overhead view adventure games, and a lot of others. But none of this, stand there trading hits and wait a minute or two for the bad guy to die stuff, unless perhaps it was completely turn-based.
For most of the online games that I've liked, it's pretty trivial to explain why the combat is not at all similar to WoW. Infantry and Spiral Knights had a heavy emphasis on dodging by getting out of the way in real-time. Wizard 101 is completely turn-based. Puzzle Pirates has combat closer to Tetris than WoW. A Tale in the Desert doesn't have combat at all. I won't give a complete list, but it suffices to say that Guild Wars and Champions Online are the only online games I've liked with combat even superficially similar to that of WoW.
Now, WoW isn't even the worst case of this. In Anarchy Online, you could get up and leave the room in the middle of combat, come back to see that the battle was still going, and it didn't matter a bit that you had left. Runescape's combat was even worse, as it took away the "and then use a skill occasionally" part, leaving nothing other than waiting for the bad guy to die.
Most of the things that we talk about in comparing games are comparably minor issues--including most of the cited innovations. Switching classes? Hybrids? Cut scenes? Auction houses? Voiceovers? Mounts? Group sizes? Guilds? That's all just tinkering around the edges. If the combat is bad, then so is the game, and getting everything else right doesn't matter, with an exemption only for games that aren't mostly about combat.
Now, there have been some games that tried to do combat differently. In addition to some that I've listed above, one could throw on Age of Conan, Atlantica, Pirates of the Burning Sea, TERA, and quite a few others. Some games that tried to innovate did a better job of it than others, and it takes more than just innovation to make a good game. But games that do something differently with combat at least have a chance at being good, which is more than can be said for this week's big release.
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I like it. And I like Fighting Games and RTS and 3rd person action games. I like pinball too haha.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
Maybe you didn't notice, but MMO combat for the most games is turn-based. And no, it doesn't take minutes in the current state of games.
The reason MMOs adopted turn-based combat in the beginning is because the network connections back then were not up to the task of handling real-time combat for so many clients at a time.
That reason is of course today mostly obsolete and that's why we see more and more MMO games coming out with real-time combat, such as Darkfall, TERA and Mortal Online.
However, many have accustomed and grown to like the turn-based combat, because it is generally pretty laid back to perform. You can play the game with just your mouse if you want to, while drinking coffee with your other hand.
But just wait. Many more MMOs will come with a real-time combat and you can choose which one to play.
No, no, no. That's not what turn-based means. Auto attack does not mean turn-based.
Chess is a turn-based game. Final Fantasy was turn-based. Civilization was turn-based. Pokemon was turn-based. If it's not your turn, then you have to sit and wait indefinitely for whoevers turn it is to make their move. WoW isn't like that at all. If you get up and leave, the game keeps going without you, and both your character and the enemy character keep hacking away.
If Internet connections couldn't handle real-time combat back then, then how did Infantry launch with it way back in 2000? Even that was kind of a follow-up to Subspace, which launched way back in 1997? It ran and it worked, even on dialup connections.
I stop'd reading there.
To long to travel? as of when I last played (2 years ago) I could reach any corner of the world in less then 15 minutes....whaddya want? fast travel directly to the location?
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Well, thats what I like about Vanguard: the combat system is highly dynamic, you have to consider many variables at the same time, and finding the optimal sequence of abilities is kind of an artform. Well ok depending upon class - Clerics for example dont have that many pure combat abilities in the first place, nearly zip damage anyway, and thus mostly focus on getting their dynamic buffs up ASAP because thats the major part of their damage - buffing others. So no mystery there really.
So from combat alone the game is already big fun.
I was btw highly amused when I saw WoW newbies play a Vanguard mage : they didnt moved at all. In Vanguard, you can move during combat and spellcasting, and you have to, especially on a mage. Cant get hit on a mage, hehe.
Err, he was obviously talking about an earlier stage of the game. Even if one just would read the part you quoted its already written there ...
In GW, there is a minigame called dragon arena. I had an absolute blast playing that game. total of 4 skills to use, (range shot insta-kill, touch skill knockdown, speed boost, and rez) it all balanced down to how you used the skills, and luring the enemy to waste their skills first. It was essentially dodgeball with a twist. The combat, though simple, was engaging and fun because you had to be actively moving and changing directions, while watching the positions of all the enemies nearby making sure you don't get flanked, watching their skills so you could catch them not paying attention (the best time to shoot someone is when they were in the process of casting their own shot because they aren't moving)
Anyhow, I wish there was as much fun in standard combat, as there is in Dragon Arena.
All of my posts are either intelligent, thought provoking, funny, satirical, sarcastic or intentionally disrespectful. Take your pick.
I get banned in the forums for games I love, so lets see if I do better in the forums for games I hate.
I enjoy the serenity of not caring what your opinion is.
I don't hate much, but I hate Apple© with a passion. If Steve Jobs was alive, I would punch him in the face.
The main reason I had to leave fallen earth, adore the concept but the combat just really was a deal breaker. That said, I found wow's combat to be perhaps one of the funnest out of many similar type combat games. Atlantica online was perhaps my favorite due to it being turn-based and requiring a fair bit of strategy in pvp.
I'm sorry you didn't like the game, OP. I played the game for 4 years straight and loved it, thought it was extremely fun. I also enjoyed the combat. I guess everyone doesn't. I hope you stop having such high expectations, and that you can actually enjoy a game one day. Good luck though.
Argh
A lot of these systems have fun PvP combat for me simply because motion is involved, despite the fact that you're ultimately tab-selecting enemies and mashing out attacks from numerical hotkeys. The first pseudo-turn based game I can think of is Tales of Phantasia, which was released in 1995 so it doesn't technically fit your requirement for a pre-1995 game. I think the reason these types of games didn't show up beforehand were mainly due to technical limitations, not because developers got lazy. There was not much more you COULD do in an RPG on a NES than turn based combat.
One of the things I loved about the old MMO Faxion was that PvP featured extremely fast paced combat with enough interesting spells to give players a wide variety of powerful options in all elements of combat. This was a video I made showing a few basic "openings" in combat, which of course could change dramatically based on player class and whatever patch the game happened to be in. Though ultimately having to mash through lists of hotkeys was a requirement, being able to incorporate elements of physical distance, mindgames and a surprise factor made the combat feel rewarding.
Of course, the devs ended up blowing off their core playerbase and eventually neglected the game to the point where it got shut down, but that's a story for another day. :-P
PvE on the other hand is another story. Too often I find that what we call "traditional MMOs" feature boss fights which resemble this sad excuse for a battle. I don't understand how anyone could want to play a game where the "challenge" comes from standing in place and repeatedly activating a macro every few seconds for eight minutes straight. It doesn't even resemble a fight, I don't know how even the best roleplayers could pretend that there's some sort of action going on.
There's so little thought and interactivity involved in this kind of mindless, button mashing PvE that we could easily just make a program to do the combat commands for us. The human interaction is just tacked on, we're simply intended to follow a script- there's no on-the-spot strategy or sense of physical interaction with the environment at all. Even some popular MMOs like FFXIV, WoW (with the exception of raid bosses) and EVE all have this style of PvE and frankly I don't see the appeal.
If nothing else, I feel like PvE combat at it's most basic level should at least allow us to pretend we're partaking in fantasy combat, not just pressing buttons to whittle down an enemy HP bar. There are ways to do this with and without fixed-target gameplay. While trying to stuff in a rarely used combat system from non-MMO titles can be interesting, I'd rather designers focus on actually choreographing fights.
I know what you mean by the whole combat bit. Although, you may not agree with me, I felt Ragnarok Online's combat was awesome. Esepcially when you head into a dungeon with a group. Going into dungeons like Nameless Abbey is awesome. Non-stop action and plowing, yet still required you to be there and paying attention. It was hard, but not boring like how WoW raiding works.
I felt Ragnarok Online did their class system best when it came to partying. You would have wizards destroy most of the stuff, but wizards alone aren't going to get you through the dungeons, because some of the stuff would be immune or just had high magic def so those monsters would eat the party up if you didn't have physical damage attackers too.
Nowadays, it is just tank, DPS, heals. What kind of DPS? Doesn't matter, DPS.
Not only do you just DPS, you don't have to think about what skills to use in WoW. There is a rotation. In dungeons in Ragnarok Online, you had to look at your enemy as they come flying in your face and respond quick, throw the right spells down, spell placement, spell timing, use the right skill against that said target. Do the wrong thing, you're dead. Placed that spell in the wrong spot? You're dead. Timed the spell too late or too early? You're dead. You HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION to get through. Most skills were viable, there wasn't one best spec. You also have to keep moving fast to keep the EXP gain up; it was a grinding game afterall, albeit a fun one as the action just doesn't stop in those dungeons. Get better at doing said things, and you're rewarded with faster EXP.
Here are videos of what a PARTY is. 2nd video @ 2:36 shows what happens if you do something wrong, things go bad fast. Tank went to go mob up some more ahead of group, group got flanked while tank was gone. You can still recover if people are paying attention and can res before the priest goes down too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLxhKXlN8AU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OHUOdH7duM
Hmm. I tried posting a list of EVERY SINGLE FREAKING MUD EVER CREATED but it told me that the post was too long and then my browser crashed. So instead I'll just say EVERY SINGLE FREAKING MUD EVER CREATED. Seriously, dude, where do you get off saying that real-time auto-attack/cooldown combat isn't a staple of gaming? We were doing that in massively multiplayer games before we even put graphics in them.
And it's strange that you went out of your way to state that "Final Fantasy is turn-based." Final Fantasy has used real-time combat (which they call the Active Time Battle system) since the 4th incarnation back in 1991. This thread is based on completely wrong information.
But see, even the players in that video don't look like they're interacting at all with the enemies. It looks like they're standing in place, bored and uninvolved, while spell effects explode in front of them and gradually whittle down enemy HP bars. At the end of the day there's not much strategy other than getting in range of a target and mashing the spell buttons in the right order. I would rather have a combat system be dynamic, involved, and mindlessly simplistic rather than one that's complex but has no sense of immersion.
As you can imagine I'm not a big fan of chess either.
Hahaha, you think thats all they were doing? Man... trust me, it gets hectic in that dungeon, there are other dungeons too that are even more hectic. I love the adrenaline of having to be on your toes and knowing monsters will rape you in every direction at any time instead of following a linear path of what we know of dungeons today. If you ever get the chance to get to play RO and play in those high level dungeons, you'll see what I mean. Quite a blast. I've played this game on and off since BETA!
Oh and the first video seems that way because they were all pros knowing what they were doing and they had a max level wizard in their party which helps TONS. 2nd video is a pretty decent party, you notice a mistake happening there. Most of the times, you're partied up with retards and shit hits the fan all the time.
I'm actually quite impressed about how the 2nd video did, most were all pre-trans class vs the first video where they were all post trans. Transcending gives the class a lot more powerful skills and more stats hence why they went through that dungeon without a hiccup. It is pretty beast for that knight in 2nd video to tank before transcending. Less HP, less useful skills, less stats. Same with the whole group going through that without even any transcended DPS, especially the wizards.
I'm with you OP. Definitely sick of every game being hotkey based tab targeting combat system. At least in 2012 we get a few more options for a unique combat system (TERA, Defiance, Firefall,maybe Planetside 2, etc.) . I actually enjoyed Age of Conan's combat system because it was different (casters were still standard though), though it definitely could have been better.
Even minor improvements to the ultra generic/mindless combat systems in MMOs will be appreciated. I think I'm going to enjoy Guild Wars 2 even though it's a hotkey/tab target MMO because it has active dodging, ad-hoc skill combos, and you can physically stand in front of projectile paths to block them. Also removing the trinity system is going to be a huge help, since a good player should be able to fill all roles and have coordination with swapping between them on the fly with your teammates is probably going to be something necessary for competitive play.
I know a lot of people hate it when I say this, but standard MMO combat takes the least amount of "skill" to play than any other games (except a few true luck based card and board games). That's a combination of both the strategy and twitch department. Anyone with half a brain can copy a working strategy and gear system and utilitize it to it's full potential in most MMOs. Mastering a puzzle game, a RTS, a turn based strategy game, a shooter, or a fighting game requires either extremely good reflexes or a mastery of logic/strategy pertaining to that game or both. Mastering a MMO just requires you to spend enough time to meet the artificial gear requirements needed to be better than the other person or NPC MOB you go up against.
And that's what I say opitomizes bad combat in a game, where I watch it, with my limited knowledge of the game and don't understand a thing of what is going on. Too me it just looks like a bunch of sprites standing around, generating huge numbers and nothing else. People with extensive knowledge of the game just won't be able to appreciate the video like you do, because the combat doesn't lend itself to be openly understandable. This is also a problem with WoW's combat, beyond how it is mostly boiled down to skill rotations, in that only those that really get into it are the only ones that will understand what the heck is going on when show a random video of it.
I think a game with good combat is one where you can be shown some random bit of footage and even without prior knowledge of the game, at least understand something about what the player is doing and why they are doing it. Though that doesn't always mean that the game's combat will have depth. An MMORPG that can have both presentable combat, with a lot of depth, will be an MMORPG with amazing combat.
Squirrelz, that actually is not a very good thing. Immune to some debuffs and crowd control is reasonable. Nothing should be outright immune to a character's entire spec and form of damage, that's what caused people to require such fast entire character rewrites in World of Warcraft. Even the lastest edition of D&D got rid of red dragons being immune to fire and for creatures that are immune, you get powers that let you remove that or reduce it severely.
There will be something better.
http://www.arena.net/blog/guild-wars-2-year-end-development-update
"I like to say that GW2 controls like an MMO and has abilities like a MOBA (tools that you can use in diverse ways to adapt to changing situations), but its physical interactions are like an FPS (dodging projectiles, attacking from out of range, etc.). We are really happy with the way we were able to blend these three styles of play—and hopefully you will be too."
Oderint, dum metuant.
"whaddya want? fast travel directly to the location?"
Perhaps I want for you to read far enough into the thread to see that I explicitly said that the travel times were not the real problem.
Though my real view on traveling is that it should be very fast unless there's a good gameplay reason to make it slow. I'm playing Uncharted Waters Online right now, and it can take hours to get where you're going sometimes. But there are good gameplay reasons for it, in preserving different local prices for the same goods in different markets. WoW had no good reason to make combat slow. But this is irrelevant to the thread.
"Well, thats what I like about Vanguard: the combat system is highly dynamic, you have to consider many variables at the same time, and finding the optimal sequence of abilities is kind of an artform."
I didn't get that far into Vanguard, but at the low levels, the most notable difference between Vanguard's combat and WoW's was the lack of polish and the choppy frame rates. It could conceivably be different once you get higher level and more abilities, but it's extremely rare for a game to become more fun as you get higher level.
"I hope you stop having such high expectations, and that you can actually enjoy a game one day. Good luck though."
Except that if you read the thread, I list several games where I did like the combat--and there have been many more that I didn't list. There have been games where I liked the combat going all the way back to the 80's. The flagrantly awful combat along the lines of WoW is actually a relatively recent development, and a lot of games don't go in that direction.
"Although, you may not agree with me, I felt Ragnarok Online's combat was awesome."
I haven't played that particular game, so I have no idea if the combat there is any good.
"Final Fantasy has used real-time combat (which they call the Active Time Battle system) since the 4th incarnation back in 1991."
I didn't say Final Fantasy IV or VII or XI or XIV. I said Final Fantasy, with no number after it. You do, I hope, realize that there was a first game in the series. In spite of the curious name.
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What combat really needs is for players to be making interesting combat decisions much of the time. Standing there trading hits with auto-attack, knowing full well that that's all you're going to be doing for the next 30 seconds, is not an interesting combat decision.
Above, I commented that I liked the combat in Champions Online. CO doesn't have a deep combat system, really. But it does take the approach that, if the game only has five seconds worth of interesting decisions for you to make in a battle, then it will let the battle end in five seconds and you can move on. There's no need to take five seconds making your decisions, and then wait for two minutes for the game to play out the string for you.
Now, going faster isn't the only way to make combat interesting. I liked the ship combat in Pirates of the Burning Sea. There, you're constantly moving, and constantly trying to outmaneuver the other ships. Constantly adjusting your position so that you can land more volleys than the enemy is a lot better than standing there trading hits (which is what the terrible land combat in that game consists of).
I like the combat in Spiral Knights, too. Some battles can take a while, but you're constantly moving around dodging. Sometimes I'd get through an entire level without getting hit. Get reckless and you can die in about 10 seconds.
Going back a little further, I liked the combat in Europa Universalis II. A battle itself wasn't so much the interesting thing, but rather, the extensive maneuvering to get yourself into a war that you'll probably win was interesting. A player might spend half an hour preparing for a particular war, getting alliances set up and troops positioned, before actually declaring war.
Hmmm, maybe YOU didn't read the earlier part of this post, he said "several years ago" and I had said when I played 2 years ago, and I played for 2 years so we are talking 4-2 years ago...which would deffinitly be in his "several years ago" span.
Eitherway I have never known WoW to be difficult or time consuiming on any level, now when it first released back in 2004 or 2003? it might has been a bit diffrent, but within the last 4-5 years it has gone from really easy to boring.
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There is a point to this thread, and you've completely missed it. Try reading the second paragraph of the original post. Or, for that matter, try reading the title.
For the record, I quit WoW in May 2006, and at the time, getting from one flight point to another at the opposite end of the map would take around half an hour if you got lucky and the boats or zeppelins didn't glitch. If you got unlucky, then maybe add five or ten minutes for every time they glitch. But again, that's completely irrelevant to this thread. Remove the comment about travel time and the substance of the thread is exactly the same.
Yes, the combat in Vanguard does evolve more so than most themepark type mmorpgs. Of course this is subjective but I felt the combat did get more involved and interesting as you progress and I didn't feel this as strongly while playing WoW (vanilla). The combat is one of the ways Vanguard is alot more like original EQ. You really need to know which ability to use and when as well as what stance you should be in; at times, even changing weapons and stances mid combat to maintain your edge in the fight. Take a VG monk and go out and try to solo 4 and 5 dot named mobs! It's quite the thrill when you bring one down (especially the all caps bosses).
The thing is, if you take away the f2p wow clones, you'll see that most MMOs do their own unique spin on combat. In your original post, you named a ton of MMOs that do combat differently. How many more do you want? Does this post all boil down to your disappointment in TOR's combat? That would be unfortunate considering you took all that time just to complain about a personal preference.
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
No, he only like combat that is VERY different and turns a blind to small innovations or innovation that lacks polish to make it as good/fun as it can be.
Turn based literally means by turn. It's games where you wait for your opponent to make a move, then you make a move, then your enemy etc. Shining Force and Heroes of Might and Magic are perfect examples of turn based.
I don't know, but I wouldn't mind if MMO combat was more like ninety nine nights or sengoku. Isn't vindictus combat kinda different? I should really give it a try now that it's available in the EU.