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Weapon Skill System.
Megilindir
Member UncommonPosts: 223
Can anybody explain to me how MMORPG's are starting to evolve this way?
Did community demand anything tasteless like this? Where did they get the idea that we want a skill system that only bunch of buttons available during years of playtime?How did it evolve like this?
This system is killing all the taste and hopes i had or have for any game out there.Happened in GW2.Now they started to mention it on EQN.
They should not be doing this.I can understand any other aspect's evoultion of a MMO (like the breating-living world thing which is a BIG LIE and a great way of insulting us by manipulating the word and implementing some other ) but i cannot, would not and ever be able to get the idea behind a sticky-life time skill system.Can anybody explain me the genius behind this system because its linear as hell and tasteless, boring like a rot bread in the fridge.
beLIEve
Comments
For starters, I find your characterization of rot bread completely inaccurate. If anything, a clean fridge is boring and rotten bread in my fridge is bizarre (what's bread doing in the fridge?), unexpected (how did the bread actually rot if it was in the fridge? Just how long did it spend in there?!), and disgusting (we should clean this out of here asap!) But not boring.
Second, having your abilities driven by your weapon choices can be a very fun and workable system. I enjoyed GW2's system, apart from some of the shortcomings the game had (it wasn't designed for long-form progression, and ability design felt a bit overly-driven by PVP.) It could've used a little iteration for the abilities to feel a little more rewarding of skill, but as it stood it was already one of the more dynamic ability systems we've seen in MMORPGs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Its for consoles... or what they believe console action games are capable of.
Weapon skills are shallow as fuck. It was shallow in guild wars 2, its going to be shallow in everquest next. How do we go from 100+ skills on hot bars, to 8 and you expect me to believe its more tactical because i can destroy the fucking arena.
Im sorry, give me 100+ skills and the need to choose the right one for the situation inbetween rotations any day over a shallow selection of weapon skills and thematic movement powers.
Quotations Those Who make peaceful resolutions impossible, make violent resolutions inevitable. John F. Kennedy
Life... is the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come - Lester Freeman
Lie to no one. If there 's somebody close to you, you'll ruin it with a lie. If they're a stranger, who the fuck are they you gotta lie to them? - Willy Nelson
You do realize that game depth isn't measured by ability count right?
You could take away all of a TF2 Soldier's abilities except the rocket launcher and he'd be a deeper playstyle than most MMORPG classes (1 ability vs. 30+ abilities)
So the concern isn't whether depth can be achieved with fewer abilities -- it definitely can -- but that SOE's track record is marred by things like EQ2 where the ability design was typical sort of mindlessly-spam-designed abilities that's resulted in shallow MMORPGs over the years. So the chance of EQN's combat being deep is rather low.
But more gamers should demand actual depth from games, rather than reward designers who just mindlessly spam complexity. Chess manages to achieve plenty of actual game depth with 10 or 11 abilities (9 unit types + Castling + En Passant), and in a videogame you have the potential to achieve even greater depth with fewer abilities!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
you DO realize that a handfull of skills ARE boring tho, right?
the poster is completely correct by what he sais.
if you want 8 button games, i suggest to stick with arcade or some shit like that. or buy a console ^^
if you think chess is ANYWHERE close to what we will get with EQ, that is your problem.
chess is a 1 on 1 game. is that what you want from mmos? seriously? if not, why compare em
lets play mmos with one skill according to your logic, imagine the potential that one skill could have!
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
I'm honestly not understanding what you're argument is here. At first I thought I knew what you meant, having played GW2, but then I realized that other than the skills being tied to a specific weapon, it's not any different than any other MMO. Think about WoW, when you have a ranged weapon equipped you are able to access one set up skills determined by your class and level, and then when you have a melee weapon equipped you are able to access another set of skills determined by your class and level.
I believe the only difference with GW2 is that every single weapon has its own set of skills instead of just the different weapon types. So pistols and rifles have their own sets of different skills, and daggers and swords have their own sets. The skills are even completely different based on the class.
Actually.... are we sure there is any difference except that the skills disappear and are replaced on your skill bar automatically when you swap weapons?
I'm not really defending this type of skill system, but I can't see any difference.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
You have no idea what you are talking about.
Quotations Those Who make peaceful resolutions impossible, make violent resolutions inevitable. John F. Kennedy
Life... is the shit that happens while you wait for moments that never come - Lester Freeman
Lie to no one. If there 's somebody close to you, you'll ruin it with a lie. If they're a stranger, who the fuck are they you gotta lie to them? - Willy Nelson
Haha, for once you can't blame WoW!!!
It's about data, like it always is. The saw fluff abilities, fluff talents and wanted to eliminate waste. Everyone calls it dumbing down, but it's really just minimalism applied to video games. Do you really need a 5 point talent in a skill tree that increases damage by 1% per point? Do you really need a separate button to apply a 4 second debuff? And the list is a mile long.
You can always go play PoE if you want to click completely boring and arbitrary skills when you level. Yay, I dinged! I'll place another point in +HP and that'll be it for now! Just 13 more levels before I reach that keystone ability. Fun fun.
Simultaneous skills available at one time does not decide the quality of the game.
EQN has 40 internal classes, each with many different skills. How you combine these skills into your preferred playstyle and current target is what determines the outcome, and this can be exceedingly intricate and deep.
Think of your preferred game, with 120+ buttons on the screen at one time. If you had to ONLY select 8 of those skills to play in a raid, which of those would you pick? With that question, you start to see how deep this system could be.
Another point: Look at your combat games, or games like "The last of Us". How many buttons are in your controller, and how many actions can you do? Does that limit how FUN the game is?
TL;DR: Amount of skills available at a time does not take away from how deep or fun a game can be.
I have mixed feelings about limiting your ability choices based on weapons or the size of the hot bar.
On the one hand, in the games I've played that gave me dozens of abilities, rarely are more than 6-8 frequently used. The rest are either useless, redundant or extremely situational. So cutting them out wouldn't take much away.
On the other hand, why create artificial limits just for the sake of doing it. If my class has 30 abilities, let me use any of them when I see fit or don't give them to me at all.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
No. There is a reason to limit the number of skills you can use. It makes the meta-game (i.e. skill build) more interesting.
If you can only bring 6, out of 30, you need to choose carefully, and consider the synergy of the skills. That leads to interesting choices.
I do not find having my choices artificially limited interesting.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I feel this is pendulum issue ... complexity of choices increases, then the UI gets simplified, then complexity starts to creep up again.
And lots of people find experimenting with builds in D3 (picking out 6 skills out of many) interesting and engaging. In fact, even up till now, more than a year after the game is released, there are still people trying out new builds, and variations.
People have different preferences. Some like it. You don't. What can you say?
Complexity does not equate fun. I would much rather have 5 awesome, and distinct skills, then 50 generic ones and boring ones.
Well we can run through a list of games which clearly aren't boring (despite an emphasis on simple-yet-deep design), by pointing out that Street Fighter (~15 abilities), LoL (~7 abilities), Tribes (~4 abilities), Chess (~10 abilities) and TF2 (~4 abilities) all remained interesting for very long periods of time. But you'd get sidetracked on them being PVP, so you'd fail to understand that deep, dynamic ability design is literally the polar opposite of "boring".
So we'll have to look to games like Civilization, Tetris, Tetris Attack, Bejeweled Blitz, or Ninja Gaiden Black for examples of singleplayer games with few abilities (few different ways to interact with the game), but substantial depth which keeps the game interesting a long time.
Nobody ever measured Bejeweled's puzzle game quality based on the fact that literally the only thing you can do is highlight two blocks and switch them.
Instead, players measure games based on how long they remain interesting to master. That's what game depth is: the length it takes to master the strategic, tactical, and twitch elements of a game. It has nothing to do with how many abilities a game has, so games should have a number of abilities designed based on what people are comfortable with (because too many abilities just makes the game a pain to interact with, without necessarily improving game depth.)
Could a 1-ability MMO work? Sure, I think so with the right ability -- I mean you could essentially take Bejeweled's 1 ability and make another Puzzle Pirates MMO and I'd be all over that for a good long while. Honestly PP's Bilging game basically is Bejeweled, and both that and Rigging (also 1-ability) were my two favorite puzzles of PP, which I spent hours and hours mastering.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Artificial limits are pretty much required for things to be interesting at all.
Whether or not you enjoy Chess, you'd find it less interesting if the artificial movement limits of pieces were removed (and on Turn 1 White goes first and moves their pawn directly onto Black's king, due to no artificial movement limitations, winning the game automatically.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'm talking about game depth, which measures how long it takes to master a game. Games which achieve the greatest amount of depth with the simplest core mechanics will be the most engaging games.
A game is not made better by spamming complexity blindly at it. A game is only better when it's deep, because depth means it will take time to master the game, which is the fundamental point behind most games.
I do have an idea of what I'm talking about. If the sound logic of my statements isn't enough, then the fact that I'm a professional game designer who's studied this stuff extensively and learned from several designers who know even more about it than I do (worked for several years under the lead designer of Civ2, Alpha Centauri.) But my extensive experience researching, designing, and implementing actual games shouldn't even have to be called into the discussion because at face value what I'm saying is just logical and observable throughout gaming. At least, having mentioned it, we can agree that I actually do have a rather good idea what I'm talking about.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Your talking about removing artificial limits not placing them, a better example would be going from the standard rules to each side having a pawn and king. I think your trying to equate the standard rules with artificial limits but the only way you can limit something is to have it be less than the standard. Not remove the standard.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Even standard rules are artificial limits. All game rules are artificial limits. That's what games are all about! A set of constraints (rules; artificial limits) under which interesting decisions are made!
Without them, when you play Chess with a young child they would slap all the pieces off the board and it would be considered a legitimate win -- at which point any interest in Chess would quickly end, because the game would cease to force interesting decisions upon the participants.
So we're not talking about whether historically game rules were added or subtracted, because it doesn't matter. All that matters is that the current game rules represent artificial limits on what you can do.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Lots of skills were killed by developers and gamers alike. When you have 10+ skills, every subsequent skill ends up being very or entirely useless, which means it doesn't get used. When a skill doesn't get used, both developers, and arguably moreso the gameplayers, start asking questions like "Why does this skill even exist?"
It makes no sense to have a skill that is useless in the game at all from a playing or designing perspective, and games have a finite depth to them before skills start to either become redundent or produce an apparant dicodomy in value. We are all better off having less skills that are ALWAYS useful as opposed to a crap ton of skills with only SOME of them useful
A Piano has 88 keys. By learning to play them in a precise order at the precise timing, you can make beautiful music.
Some people have upwards of 50+ keys.. and if they take the time to master the order and what not I applaud them. But one thing that typically happens is that the pertinent combat skills on those keys tend to get tied together into macros consisting of 4-5 keys anyway, and they simply get hit in rotation. So really.. other than stroking yourself at being skillful enough to 'play' your interface, whats the point of having all the toolbars?
The simple fact is that developers are always looking for ways to minimize the interface, as that then tends to help immersion. You focus on what you're doing, rather than which keys you are hitting. At the same time, by minimizing the interface, it makes it far easier for more people to easily master the use of skills. Then it just comes down to how well you can make builds and get the most out of your build as to how effective you are in combat. Thats where the skill gets shifted, not that you're sitting there focusing on the exact rotation that you looked up on elitist jerks, so you go large on the deeps meter, or omg.. you missed a gd keypress omgusuck.
There will always be a place for min/maxxers, there will always be a place for uberplayers, but the nice part about what they're setting up, is if you really think you're that good... you can come up with your own Frankenbuild... and if its really effective, you don't have a million players immediately copying you because most people will not have the specific gear you found, or even the specific character abilities to use, or maybe even have your class tiered up. Even then, they might just not like the way it plays for it to even be worth the trouble, even though it may be effective. This is the diversity EQN is going after. Whether they achieve it or not is another story.
Depth and complexity are easily mixed up.
Having a 100 skills to manage does not necessarily mean depth, but it will certainly mean complexity. What results in depth is how many viable choices there are to make at any given time. And like Axe said, a very, very small skill pool can do that to. Having a 100 fire and forget spells means nothing if the skills themselves have no depth to them, and to be frank, that is a big problem I see frequently occurring with a lot of mmos with dozens of skills to use.
I would rather have 1 skill with multiple uses than 3 skills with very specific uses. For 2 reasons
In Guild Wars 1 you can only bring 8 skills at once, but that game has a lot more depth to it than most, if not all mmos I have played.
Weapon skills are a must for games with classless systems, which are becoming ever so popular nowadays...and this is why.
Lets take WoW for example. Each class has a great variety of skills to use. When you see a warrior, based on your knowledge of the 50 spells and skills the warrior class has to use, you can strategically approach combat a certain way. This alone adds an extra dynamic to combat. The knowledge you have of other classes will impact how you perform against them.
In a game with no classes, weapon skills help retain this knowledge factor. So when you see a guy with a certain weapon you can expect a certain type of combat. without this dynamic, fighting someone would be chaos, and ultimately lead to button mashing until your opponent dies.