Combat really isn't the main show. It was progression in the WoW era. Granted combat was the most used vehicle. Buy peoole aren't fighting just to fight. It was for levels n loot.
To hold this opinion you'd need to believe that all it takes to produce a successful MMORPG is a good progression system.
Yet here we are a decade later, and no games did as well as WOW, yet certainly in all the attempts each of their progression systems came closer to WOW than their combat systems. Really in most cases the progression systems were as good or better than WOW.
If progression was the main show, then those games with good progression would've surpassed WOW. They didn't. Progression wasn't the main show.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Combat really isn't the main show. It was progression in the WoW era. Granted combat was the most used vehicle. Buy peoole aren't fighting just to fight. It was for levels n loot.
To hold this opinion you'd need to believe that all it takes to produce a successful MMORPG is a good progression system.
Yet here we are a decade later, and no games did as well as WOW, yet certainly in all the attempts each of their progression systems came closer to WOW than their combat systems. Really in most cases the progression systems were as good or better than WOW.
If progression was the main show, then those games with good progression would've surpassed WOW. They didn't. Progression wasn't the main show.
WoW's success is more than just the game. WoW is unique in that it came with a huge online audience in battlenet from the same IP, Diablo, Starcraft. It was the first MMORPG with a modern interface. It's progression was streamlined with quest. It came about as high speed Internet came about.
There is nothing to write home about WoW's combat outside of its responsiveness feel.
Ultimately, most all computer games have combat systems because combat is easily abstracted and implemented. It is a simple method for resolving conflicts within a game environment. The elements in combat are easily abstracted as numeric values, and easy for a computer to deal with, and simpler for a programmer to implement.
Other forms of conflict resolution aren't as simple. How does a computer arbitrate a well-thought out legal argument in a courtroom? How about buying the loyalty of the orc guard to let you attack their superior? Or encouraging a dragon to look elsewhere for victims by offering it tribute? Tricking a caravan to go the long way around with a careful placement of illusions? Role-playing is analogous to talking, with the fall-back of physical combat.
Unfortunately, it isn't easy for a computer to evaluate situations, like talking, that aren't easily translated into numbers. When exactly does the orc guard's logic switch from "I am married to the Chieftan's sister, so I am loyal" to "That's a lot of money"? This type of response is easy for a human, but much more difficult for a computer.
One of the things I frequently comment on is really based on this. Computerized RP games haven't strayed from this truth. Too difficult, too costly, cut this feature. So, the industry and community hasn't benefited from the incremental advances and ideas of other games. Players are left with games that seem stale and 'clones' of other games, but nothing 'new'. The genre doesn't grow, doesn't expand, doesn't evolve, and is threatened with extinction (to keep with the evolution theme).
I really hope that some developer will take a chance and try something beyond the simple. I don't see that spark of innovation in any of the current products in development. Hopefully, there will be something encouraging in whatever time I have left.
An example of an innovation: Infocom's Zork had exceptional natural language processing, but what game has improved on that feature? Could any game developer incorporate as good a system today? Phones are beginning to deal with voice recognition. When will some one try to combine the two -- understanding spoken input and making complex decisions from that. In a computerized RP game.
Combat isn't actually more easily abstracted and implemented.
Play-fighting is a survival instinct, and therefore a very strong and nearly-universal trait (even dogs and cats and bears play-fight.) Our play-compulsion for other forms of play is less strong (and less universal), because it was less critical to our survival during the bulk of the time we were evolving these traits.
In the theoretical scenario where mankind as a whole had evolved to enjoyed play-city-building more than it enjoyed play-fighting, city-building games would be perceived as "more easily abstracted and implemented" because the majority of games would be city-building games.
It's just game focus. Because combat is often the primary system it gets implemented in great detail while the diplomacy-style decision-making you describe is in low detail. But if the same time was spent on diplomacy-style decisions (and the same interest level existed) then it'd be just as well-implemented as combat. There isn't anything fundamentally different with the decision-making.
We already have abstracted-and-quantified diplomacy in games all the time.
In Total War Warhammer any given faction's opinion of me is slowly shifting -- very few events immediately change mood by a significant amount.
If Faction A hates Faction B, and I declare war on Faction B, then that gives me a +10 mood buff.
But Faction A doesn't immediately jump +10 points. Instead, it slowly ramps up to the new higher value over many turns. (I haven't researched whether this is a global limit to the amount of increase/decrease per turn, or whether it's specific to each individual buff/debuff.)
Additionally, the +10 value itself decays over time (because 20 turns later, that time you declared war long ago is basically forgotten.)
Additionally, there are tons of little events rather than a few strong events. So every covert op or battle you fight or whatever against Faction A's enemies will earn you these buffs (or debuffs if they're allies) that are gradually shifting their opinion of you. (Which is why if you're actually fighting Faction A's enemies long-term it won't matter that your initial war declaration has decayed.)
But even that's just a simple system compared with what decision-making would be if it was the focus of the game. TW's focus has been RTS and Strategy gameplay (and holy crap is the strategy gameplay way better than back in Medieval 2 where I dropped the TW series due to its weak strategic play.)
But again, evolution is the fundamental driver of the games industry, and in the evolutionary short-term (the next 200+ years) players' preferences will not noticeably change.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Diplomacy is abstracted in a very rudimentary way in most cases. Personality, emotions, motives, and individual prerogatives based on personal/business/social circumstances are all things that are still severely lacking in most any diplomatic management game.
Instead, the common means is to take abstracted values from other game mechanics and weigh them. Like your Total Warhammer example banks on only a few variables dependent on your performance and a few secondary actions that influences a single meter.
Combat is itself considerably easier to emulate. Even getting more complex in the level of emulation does not mean getting excessively more complex on the background supporting it. More collision boxes and more free-form control of weapons so you can model physics based reactions more accurately. A lot of the fundamentals that are necessary for even "complex" combat modeling has existed for quite some time now. It is very simply an easier mechanic to build and utilize as an engaging mechanic, so it has become the go-to crutch of game design.
But, as we've stated, clarified, corrected, and restated many times now. There is no mandate that such needs to be the sole truth of RPGs or any games.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Minecraft is not defined by combat, if it were a mmorpg though would it be? That's doubtful, even if the combat was better, there are other aspects to the game that outshine combat, such as endless exploration, crafting and building.
Minecraft is not defined by combat, if it were a mmorpg though would it be? That's doubtful, even if the combat was better, there are other aspects to the game that outshine combat, such as endless exploration, crafting and building.
Minecraft isn't an RPG. So when it's an MMO it's not an MMORPG. It's something else (MMO Sandbox?)
(I'm assuming Minecraft can be an MMO; it does seem like there are servers out there with 100+ players in the same world, based on quick searching.)
Stats-driven combat, progression, and story (the three design pillars of RPGs) are sparse or nonexistent in Minecraft. That's why it's not considered an RPG.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That's the same mistake you've made multiple times over now. It bears the same correction already made.
Stats-driven combat is not an integral mechanic of RPGs. Stat-driven challenges certainly are a common if not integral component, but those come in many forms well beyond combat fulfilling the same role of character skill challenges based upon their stats and provided abilities.
Also semantically Minecraft qualifies as an "RPG-lite" type game as it has character progression mechanics that is used as a means to improve character ability through spending levels to enchant gear, which improves their core stats.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
WoW's success is more than just the game. WoW is unique in that it came with a huge online audience in battlenet from the same IP, Diablo, Starcraft. It was the first MMORPG with a modern interface. It's progression was streamlined with quest. It came about as high speed Internet came about.
There is nothing to write home about WoW's combat outside of its responsiveness feel.
Do you ever bother to think through your opinions?
SW:TOR had a dramatically more popular IP than WOW had when it released.
SW:TOR had a modern interface.
SW:TOR had progression streamlined with quests that had voice-acting and cutscenes.
SW:TOR had dramatically more high-speed internet availability.
SWTOR wasn't a flop, but if we ignore combat (gameplay; the actual meat and bones of any game) then it should've surpassed WOW by a long-shot.
It didn't.
Turns out combat matters.
I've posted in several threads citing WOW's deeper rotations and challenging people to provide an example of deeper combat (while noting that combat rotations are only one factor to combat depth, and WOW actually goes further than that.) Only 1 class (Lancer, FFXIV) has ever been posted which was shown to really be as deep as WOW rotations (and most of the rest of that game's rotations are pretty shallow.) None of the SWTOR classes ever came up even though they're okay rotations, but the real failure point of SWTOR's combat depth was in the lack of mob abilities and mob variety (mobs weren't a source of dynamic problems that you had to solve; they were static and you just did the same rotation against them all the time...which isn't true of WOW.)
Again, just think things through before posting:
Games have released with superior IPs to Warcraft, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games have released with modern interfaces, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games have released with progression streamlined with quests, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games have released with dramatically more high-speed internet availability, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games haven't released with superior combat to WOW. Combat depth is the sum of depth from rotations, monsters, environment, and other factors. So far only 1 class in all the non-WOW games has been posted which clearly attains WOW's rotation depth. Rotation depth isn't necessarily the full story, but I've also never seen anyone post evidence of those other factors being deeper than WOW (which would be required for a weak-rotation game to actually have deeper combat than WOW.) But I still welcome evidence to the contrary here -- hard evidence only (ie links to guides), rather than baseless opinions of how WOW's combat is "nothing to write home about"
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
First off, you completely disregard what Vermillion actually mentioned about multiple key factors (timing on release, change in interfaces, change in quest mechanics, etc). These details have a lot of influence on how WoW came to dominance and there are multiple extended factors that cements it.
Perhaps the foremost point of these being the timing of the release. WoW had no strong competition outside of longer standing MMOs that were not pulling in new players. WoW also had a much lower barrier to entry in terms of challenge to grasp and play because of the interface and quest changes to streamline the user experience. By the time SWTOR came out, WoW had several revisions and was already up to the Cataclysm expansion. What this means is that SWTOR was throwing it's weight as largely a copycat (with deeper narrative) against a giant that had already stolen the bulk of the community interested in playing the type of game SWTOR is/was. Users aren't a limitless commodity and MMOs (traditionally) have a slower turnaround between when a player starts a game and when they are done with it. On top of that, playing a game that gives the same basic experience as the one you just burnt yourself out on is not a decision many players make.
The higher speed internet availability of SWTOR means jack squat, because by that point WoW and every other MMO had it too. The reason it was pivotal for WoW was because of new users coming into the field.
SWTOR cloning a modern interface similarly doesn't mean much, because WoW already established a "modern interface" prior to it and refined it since then prior to SWTORs launch.
The combat was a rather small component in the grand scheme of things as to why SWTOR was not as interesting as WoW. There is much more ado about the fact that ten million people had already effectively played the game for ten years by playing WoW. That's not an insult to SWTOR, but the fact that so much of the core gameplay followed fundamentally the same type of tracks left a situation where players that had just left their past MMO were looking for something new to experience, the only component of SWTOR that was going to deliver it was the story lines.
And that right there is what crippled SWTOR. Not some bogus nonsense about combat. We've already proven in the past that WoW's combat rotations aren't even that deep or interesting (as they are fundamentally just an optimized sequencing standard actions). By the by, most mobs in WoW do nothing to break up the banality of standard combat rotation spam. So not sure where you got that idea from.
To break down the points again;
Games have released with superior IPs to WoW, and failed because they didn't deliver interesting content to support the IP.
Games have released with modern interfaces, but with negligible change in value.
Games have released with streamlined quests, and repeated the same content process as WoW.
Games have released since internet connectivity has increased, but WoW has maintained some level of relevancy the entire time with media blitzes and expansions timed to compete with most major title releases.
Games have released with superior combat to WoW, but combat mechanics ultimately rest on a lot of subjective preferences as to what system is the best. While the objective measures such as how well the game mechanics play together and the amount of strategic value/depth they offer is important, it's a subject you seem fond of avoiding as it'd immediately cast a good amount of titles like even the original Guild Wars into being potentially superior in terms of combat mechanics compared to WoW.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Another shooter junkie trying to make mmorpgs into shooters. Doesn't overwatch satisfy you enough?
...who?
The thread has been about the fact that combat doesn't actually have to be the mainstay of every MMO. Don't recall anyone saying to turn it all into a shooting gallery.
I mean I guess Axe has been adamantly claiming that the only way to make a good game is to make it all about combat, but we've got plenty of info on how that idea is wrong already.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
WoW's success is more than just the game. WoW is unique in that it came with a huge online audience in battlenet from the same IP, Diablo, Starcraft. It was the first MMORPG with a modern interface. It's progression was streamlined with quest. It came about as high speed Internet came about.
There is nothing to write home about WoW's combat outside of its responsiveness feel.
Do you ever bother to think through your opinions?
SW:TOR had a dramatically more popular IP than WOW had when it released.
SW:TOR had a modern interface.
SW:TOR had progression streamlined with quests that had voice-acting and cutscenes.
SW:TOR had dramatically more high-speed internet availability.
SWTOR wasn't a flop, but if we ignore combat (gameplay; the actual meat and bones of any game) then it should've surpassed WOW by a long-shot.
It didn't.
Turns out combat matters.
I've posted in several threads citing WOW's deeper rotations and challenging people to provide an example of deeper combat (while noting that combat rotations are only one factor to combat depth, and WOW actually goes further than that.) Only 1 class (Lancer, FFXIV) has ever been posted which was shown to really be as deep as WOW rotations (and most of the rest of that game's rotations are pretty shallow.) None of the SWTOR classes ever came up even though they're okay rotations, but the real failure point of SWTOR's combat depth was in the lack of mob abilities and mob variety (mobs weren't a source of dynamic problems that you had to solve; they were static and you just did the same rotation against them all the time...which isn't true of WOW.)
Again, just think things through before posting:
Games have released with superior IPs to Warcraft, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games have released with modern interfaces, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games have released with progression streamlined with quests, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games have released with dramatically more high-speed internet availability, and failed to surpass WOW.
Games haven't released with superior combat to WOW. Combat depth is the sum of depth from rotations, monsters, environment, and other factors. So far only 1 class in all the non-WOW games has been posted which clearly attains WOW's rotation depth. Rotation depth isn't necessarily the full story, but I've also never seen anyone post evidence of those other factors being deeper than WOW (which would be required for a weak-rotation game to actually have deeper combat than WOW.) But I still welcome evidence to the contrary here -- hard evidence only (ie links to guides), rather than baseless opinions of how WOW's combat is "nothing to write home about"
STWOR is a copy cat. As I mention the timing of the release and it's the first MMORPG of the main stream audience.
Combat in WoW is nothing to write home about. But that's opinion. Out of date is what a lot of people call WOW's combat. Rotations to me are poor combat. Meaning combat is redundant to pushing buttons in order.
Another shooter junkie trying to make mmorpgs into shooters. Doesn't overwatch satisfy you enough?
Where's this comment even come from? It's like you haven't played any videogame RPGs of the past ~35 years (where virtually all of them are combat-focused, and therefore virtually all of them are strongly defined by whether that combat is enjoyable.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
STWOR is a copy cat. As I mention the timing of the release and it's the first MMORPG of the main stream audience.
Combat in WoW is nothing to write home about. But that's opinion. Out of date is what a lot of people call WOW's combat. Rotations to me are poor combat. Meaning combat is redundant to pushing buttons in order.
Unluckily for you, name-calling and poorly-formed opinions don't change the hard facts of the matter.
When gamers want to insult Blizzard, they claim Blizzard's designs merely "copy" what came before them. When gamers want to insult non-Blizzard, they claim the other designs merely "copy" what came before them. The reality is that most genre growth is gradual improvement or combination of existing genres. Building upon existing ideas is completely unavoidable.
The only value to the "timing" you mentioned is that a market was growing. Do you want to release your MMORPG into a market with just ~60% US internet penetration, or one with over 77% penetration?
Your flimsy opinion about WOW's combat quality bounces harmlessly off the objective facts surrounding how it produces more interesting decisions than typical MMORPG combat. I laid out how all the other factors you brought up were basically equal or better with SWTOR's release, but that combat quality was the one thing nobody ever surpassed (at least not in a way that resonated throughout the entire product; one-off FFXIV Lancer rotations are great, but they don't represent the typical experience of playing the game.)
Every game has a rotation. There is always a "best possible decision" in any given moment, and when you string them together that's a rotation. The entire point with posting WOW's rotation complexity is to show how it's objectively less repetitive (objectively less "redundant", as you put it) than other MMORPGs.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Retention. Well built, well rounded games hold peoples attentions longer.
Why bother? Great single player games make lots of money & last for a few weeks. May be MMO should learn from that. Oh yeah, they did ... that is why 80% of the players leave in the first 30 days for f2p MMOs.
There are two primary reasons to care about retention
1) For the love of the art itself.
You yourself have admitted on many occasions that you only care about having fun. It is what games are made for. For the same amount of development time, wouldn't you rather build a game that provides fun for years instead of days?
2) Financial
The longer people are playing your game, the more money you are likely to get out of them, be it via subscriptions or cash shops, DLCs or expansions. If the majority of your players are leaving within a few days / weeks, you have very little time to squeeze money out of them.
In addition, even though I know you personally play MMOs as solo games, they are multiplayer games. They are designed to be played with friends. Word of mouth generates sales. Well built, well rounded games get good reviews which generates sales. Its why games like Skyrim and GTA5 are still topping sales lists years after their release.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
WoW's success is more than just the game. WoW is unique in that it came with a huge online audience in battlenet from the same IP, Diablo, Starcraft. It was the first MMORPG with a modern interface. It's progression was streamlined with quest. It came about as high speed Internet came about.
There is nothing to write home about WoW's combat outside of its responsiveness feel.
Do you ever bother to think through your opinions?
SW:TOR had a dramatically more popular IP than WOW had when it released.
SW:TOR had a modern interface.
SW:TOR had progression streamlined with quests that had voice-acting and cutscenes.
SW:TOR had dramatically more high-speed internet availability.
SWTOR wasn't a flop, but if we ignore combat (gameplay; the actual meat and bones of any game) then it should've surpassed WOW by a long-shot.
It didn't.
Turns out combat matters.
[snip]
You're ignoring the social aspect
When WoW was released it was "vastly superior" to the rest of the competition - be it combat, graphics, gameplay, questing, stories - in the eyes of "average" games (I don't want to go into discussion about whether it was or not).
This superiority, combined with excellent marketing, allowed WoW to gather a playerbase that was and still is vastly superior to other MMOs. It had a good couple of years before serious competition came along - years in which friendships built up, guilds got established, word of mouth spread etc.
This has meant that all MMOs released since WoW have not only had to have superior features to WoW in order to attract WoW players, they've also needed to be good enough to convince entire guilds or friendship groups to move, otherwise players risk losing touch with friends. That's a very tough sell, one which often fails.
From personal experience, literally every single WoW player I've ever met, either in real life or in game, says that they have played superior MMOs to WoW but always end up going back to WoW because that is where their friends are. In fact, more often than not, it is the casual gamers that keep on returning to WoW to play with friends. These people have no interest in deep combat rotations, they don't raid or care about endgame. They like the world and they like playing with friends.
In addition, every single WoW player I've personally met who played endgame in both WoW and LotRO (first 3-4 years) told me that LotRO was deeper and harder. I've explained combat rotations in LotRO to you before, but I can't provide links because all old sites that had the indepth stuff are gone now (because lotro now is dumbed down and trivially easy).
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
STWOR is a copy cat. As I mention the timing of the release and it's the first MMORPG of the main stream audience.
Combat in WoW is nothing to write home about. But that's opinion. Out of date is what a lot of people call WOW's combat. Rotations to me are poor combat. Meaning combat is redundant to pushing buttons in order.
Unluckily for you, name-calling and poorly-formed opinions don't change the hard facts of the matter.
When gamers want to insult Blizzard, they claim Blizzard's designs merely "copy" what came before them. When gamers want to insult non-Blizzard, they claim the other designs merely "copy" what came before them. The reality is that most genre growth is gradual improvement or combination of existing genres. Building upon existing ideas is completely unavoidable.
The only value to the "timing" you mentioned is that a market was growing. Do you want to release your MMORPG into a market with just ~60% US internet penetration, or one with over 77% penetration?
Your flimsy opinion about WOW's combat quality bounces harmlessly off the objective facts surrounding how it produces more interesting decisions than typical MMORPG combat. I laid out how all the other factors you brought up were basically equal or better with SWTOR's release, but that combat quality was the one thing nobody ever surpassed (at least not in a way that resonated throughout the entire product; one-off FFXIV Lancer rotations are great, but they don't represent the typical experience of playing the game.)
Every game has a rotation. There is always a "best possible decision" in any given moment, and when you string them together that's a rotation. The entire point with posting WOW's rotation complexity is to show how it's objectively less repetitive (objectively less "redundant", as you put it) than other MMORPGs.
Repetition of a flawed argument doesn't make it any less flawed. It also bears repetition of the corrections.
There is a difference between evolving out of pre-existing mechanics and coasting on the design of another.
Timing means quite a lot when the initial growth captures the bulk of a new market and then continues to pull in future prospects.
Your flimsy argument about WoW's combat quality still rests on entirely subjective argument, not objective. The only resource you've ever offered is a link to the warlock's combat rotation, which if anyone cares to read it is ultimately just a short repeated cycle of certain abilities to build for another ability. It's not a complex game, and even sub-standard rotations work just fine in it for at-level content.
Every game has a optimal combat patter or "rotation", but not every game is so reliant on following such specific combat patterns ad nauseam. You may wish to call it less repetitive, but do not mistake an arbitrary unsupported statement as objective reality when others (as was mentioned by another and myself previously) have given examples of more interesting and involved combat in other MMOs.
You use the phrase "objective" way too often when you really mean "subjective".
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
When WoW was released it was "vastly superior" to the rest of the competition - be it combat, graphics, gameplay, questing, stories - in the eyes of "average" games (I don't want to go into discussion about whether it was or not).
This superiority, combined with excellent marketing, allowed WoW to gather a playerbase that was and still is vastly superior to other MMOs. It had a good couple of years before serious competition came along - years in which friendships built up, guilds got established, word of mouth spread etc.
This has meant that all MMOs released since WoW have not only had to have superior features to WoW in order to attract WoW players, they've also needed to be good enough to convince entire guilds or friendship groups to move, otherwise players risk losing touch with friends. That's a very tough sell, one which often fails.
From personal experience, literally every single WoW player I've ever met, either in real life or in game, says that they have played superior MMOs to WoW but always end up going back to WoW because that is where their friends are. In fact, more often than not, it is the casual gamers that keep on returning to WoW to play with friends. These people have no interest in deep combat rotations, they don't raid or care about endgame. They like the world and they like playing with friends.
In addition, every single WoW player I've personally met who played endgame in both WoW and LotRO (first 3-4 years) told me that LotRO was deeper and harder. I've explained combat rotations in LotRO to you before, but I can't provide links because all old sites that had the indepth stuff are gone now (because lotro now is dumbed down and trivially easy).
The problem is when you analyze these games objectively as a measure of how many failure points their systems offer (and thus how much skill mastery is rewarded,) and realize that "superior MMOs" is more about the other games being newer and shinier than whether they actually offer superior gameplay. Subjective opinions of things inherently decay over time -- things you were excited about when you first experienced will eventually become old and boring -- whereas the underlying traits of a system are unchanging.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Unluckily for you, name-calling and poorly-formed opinions don't change the hard facts of the matter.
When gamers want to insult Blizzard, they claim Blizzard's designs merely "copy" what came before them. When gamers want to insult non-Blizzard, they claim the other designs merely "copy" what came before them. The reality is that most genre growth is gradual improvement or combination of existing genres. Building upon existing ideas is completely unavoidable.
If you want to use inspired by fine. Nobody is insulting WoW. I give it credit that it was good game at its time. Fresh and playable. The problem with your evolution statement is that in reality there are very few genre that play like reskinned versions. This was coming from a diverse genre that unified at the commercial crossroads.
Your flimsy argument about WoW's combat quality still rests on entirely subjective argument, not objective. The only resource you've ever offered is a link to the warlock's combat rotation, which if anyone cares to read it is ultimately just a short repeated cycle of certain abilities to build for another ability. It's not a complex game, and even sub-standard rotations work just fine in it for at-level content.
Your whole argument is based on the superiority and fact of your opinion. We've gone down this road before. I don't really care how right you feel. My opinion of rotation is that means your combat is predictable and it's pretty true statement or the rotations wouldn't work.
Rotations are player things most of the time and not a developer. It means your combat is so stagnated that players can hit buttons in order to get the best results. Its not impressive to me. To me good combat comes in from it being situational based on opponent and variables that make me think beyond hitting keys 4-5-6-2-3-4 over and over.
The rest doesn't warrant a response beyond this sentence.
Hence again the point that the mechanical depth of combat tends to be displayed in many instances as deeper in games like even the original Guild Wars with the stacking effects and hybridization of most classes and skill sets.
A subjective opinion would be claiming that one game is superior because it's combat rotation has a lot of text explaining how repeatedly pressing this particular sequence is best. An objective opinion would be pointing out titles where changing up methods and having a combination of reflexive and sequenced actions lends to more varied combat, is deeper.
This also has nothing to say again on the point that RPGs are technically capable of providing similarly complex interactions across plenty of forms of play if a developer only cared to build the mechanics accordingly for it.
Different skills and special abilities tethered to harvesting, crafting, etc are entirely viable tools that sometimes pop up in a rather finite context. It's not by any means something that has to be relegated to second or third tier game design however if the focus of the game was to be considered something other than a single-mindedness about combat.
Something BCbully said that very well could be said to be lacking in detail is the fact that combat was only half the equation provided at best. Characters have a myriad of skills in D&D for conversational, environmental, survival, mental/puzzle, and technical/mechanical challenges on top of personal crafting, maintenance, and support. All these skills go into RPG campaigns a a variety of gameplay and experiences with a bulk of them being non-combat tools. It's similarly the reason not every play session is combat and instead can vary dramatically from simple conversation and diplomatic sessions to murder mystery sessions and base building.
Actual traditional RPGs contain a very wide variety of gameplay enabled by character skills and stats driven gameplay. It's only when things have to be dumbed down that you see a culling of options to focus on a specific set of mechanics. The limitations of technology and development is the source of combat focus, not the traditions of RPG gameplay that is way more open fundamentally.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
If you want to use inspired by fine. Nobody is insulting WoW. I give it credit that it was good game at its time. Fresh and playable. The problem with your evolution statement is that in reality there are very few genre that play like reskinned versions. This was coming from a diverse genre that unified at the commercial crossroads.
Your whole argument is based on the superiority and fact of your opinion. We've gone down this road before. I don't really care how right you feel. My opinion of rotation is that means your combat is predictable and it's pretty true statement or the rotations wouldn't work.
Rotations are player things most of the time and not a developer. It means your combat is so stagnated that players can hit buttons in order to get the best results. Its not impressive to me. To me good combat comes in from it being situational based on opponent and variables that make me think beyond hitting keys 4-5-6-2-3-4 over and over.
The rest doesn't warrant a response beyond this sentence.
Maybe you don't understand how genres work?
Genres are a broad set of traits for something.
Critically, this set of traits is static. When I tell you it's a rock song, you know vaguely what it sounds like -- and that it won't sound like rap or country.
This implies genres lack substantial innovation. The traits are static. They're not dynamically evolving traits. They're static.
Otherwise genres wouldn't function. I'd say "rock music" referring to an electronica song and you'd use it to describe rap, and the term would lose all meaning because it wouldn't refer to a static set of traits.
Pick any genre of anything and you're going to see predominantly "reskinned versions" of things. That doesn't mean zero innovation is happening, but fundamentally those things are all part of the same genre whose definition is more or less static, which fundamentally gates in potential innovation.
My argument is not built on opinion. It's built on the objective evidence showing how WOW's combat decision set provides more opportunity for imperfect play (and thus offers deeper gameplay) than other games whose combat is shallower. The reality of how WOW worked isn't an opinion. The reality is that MMORPGs have been made with the same advantages you say led to WOW's success, and haven't achieved WOW's success, and yet no MMORPGs were made with the advantage I say led to WOW's success, and so (unsurprisingly) no MMORPGs achieved WOW's success.
A rotation implies you're hitting different buttons. In game A you're hitting 1-1-1-1-2. In game B you're hitting 4-5-6-2-3-4. It requires more skill to master Game B's rotation than Game A.
You say you value situational based decisions. Do you understand that's literally what rotations are?
You hit 4 to fireball a target.
Now the situation is that the target is on fire, so you hit 5 to combust for extra damage.
Now the situation is that your insta-cast spell procced, so you hit 6 to cast that.
Now the situation is your fire vulnerability debuff expired, so you hit 2 to cast that...
Keep in mind (again) rotations aren't the full story of WOW's combat depth. After hitting 4 to set the boss on fire if he puts a pain zone under your feet your correct decision isn't to hit 5, but to move out of the fire. Monster factors, environmental factors, other players' decisions, and more will all influence what the 'perfect' decision is at any given moment, and they're all situational.
So if you're serious about valuing situational decision-making, perhaps you'd like to admit that you cannot provide evidence of a game with more nuance to its situational decisions than WOW?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you want to use inspired by fine. Nobody is insulting WoW. I give it credit that it was good game at its time. Fresh and playable. The problem with your evolution statement is that in reality there are very few genre that play like reskinned versions. This was coming from a diverse genre that unified at the commercial crossroads.
Your whole argument is based on the superiority and fact of your opinion. We've gone down this road before. I don't really care how right you feel. My opinion of rotation is that means your combat is predictable and it's pretty true statement or the rotations wouldn't work.
Rotations are player things most of the time and not a developer. It means your combat is so stagnated that players can hit buttons in order to get the best results. Its not impressive to me. To me good combat comes in from it being situational based on opponent and variables that make me think beyond hitting keys 4-5-6-2-3-4 over and over.
The rest doesn't warrant a response beyond this sentence.
Maybe you don't understand how genres work?
Genres are a broad set of traits for something.
Critically, this set of traits is static. When I tell you it's a rock song, you know vaguely what it sounds like -- and that it won't sound like rap or country.
This implies genres lack substantial innovation. The traits are static. They're not dynamically evolving traits. They're static.
Otherwise genres wouldn't function. I'd say "rock music" referring to an electronica song and you'd use it to describe rap, and the term would lose all meaning because it wouldn't refer to a static set of traits.
Pick any genre of anything and you're going to see predominantly "reskinned versions" of things. That doesn't mean zero innovation is happening, but fundamentally those things are all part of the same genre whose definition is more or less static, which fundamentally gates in potential innovation.
My argument is not built on opinion. It's built on the objective evidence showing how WOW's combat decision set provides more opportunity for imperfect play (and thus offers deeper gameplay) than other games whose combat is shallower. The reality of how WOW worked isn't an opinion. The reality is that MMORPGs have been made with the same advantages you say led to WOW's success, and haven't achieved WOW's success, and yet no MMORPGs were made with the advantage I say led to WOW's success, and so (unsurprisingly) no MMORPGs achieved WOW's success.
A rotation implies you're hitting different buttons. In game A you're hitting 1-1-1-1-2. In game B you're hitting 4-5-6-2-3-4. It requires more skill to master Game B's rotation than Game A.
You say you value situational based decisions. Do you understand that's literally what rotations are?
You hit 4 to fireball a target.
Now the situation is that the target is on fire, so you hit 5 to combust for extra damage.
Now the situation is that your insta-cast spell procced, so you hit 6 to cast that.
Now the situation is your fire vulnerability debuff expired, so you hit 2 to cast that...
Keep in mind (again) rotations aren't the full story of WOW's combat depth. After hitting 4 to set the boss on fire if he puts a pain zone under your feet your correct decision isn't to hit 5, but to move out of the fire. Monster factors, environmental factors, other players' decisions, and more will all influence what the 'perfect' decision is at any given moment, and they're all situational.
So if you're serious about valuing situational decision-making, perhaps you'd like to admit that you cannot provide evidence of a game with more nuance to its situational decisions than WOW?
Your argument of what a rotation is makes even the likes of Scarlet Blade sound complex if only because you were pushed to cycle abilities because of cool-downs. The reality is that a rotation is nothing more than a predictable sequence of actions. "Situational decision making" is in fact the opposite of that as situational actions are derived from each situation calling for a different response. A canned sequence of actions (rotations) is polarized to that because it breaks the rotation if every enemy you face requires a different method to success.
Beyond that all you've given is anecdote, which is fundamentally opinion.
As for the comment on genres, that's iffy at best. Genres have seen quite a lot of variance, evolution, and hybridization. An isometric turn-based RPG for example is all the same an RPG as a real time action or RPG shooter is. Sub-genres are created and fragment all the time as a consequence of experimentation on that end.
To be a copycat is wholly possible as a result of little to no innovation in a game's design. Even though you might call EQ2 similar to WoW, it's much less a copy than SWToR could have been claimed to be as SOE pushed for quite a lot of their own novelty, tech, and mechanics even though the core of the gameplay was still tab-target with quickbar.
And this line;
"The reality is that MMORPGs have been made with the same advantages you say led to WOW's success..."
Is simply false.
Have they had some advantages? Sure. Have they had an exceptionally well setup moment where there was no strong competition to fragment the userbase like WoW had? Not so much. It's a lot like Star Wars in this manner as SW was not really the best movie or plot (nor the first of it's kind by far), but it had(has) the best audience and cemented itself in place for generations to come.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Comments
Yet here we are a decade later, and no games did as well as WOW, yet certainly in all the attempts each of their progression systems came closer to WOW than their combat systems. Really in most cases the progression systems were as good or better than WOW.
If progression was the main show, then those games with good progression would've surpassed WOW. They didn't. Progression wasn't the main show.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Conversely your posts amount to calling things crap, failing to address any established points, and failing to establish points of your own.
In rational discourse your position is basically nonexistent while the position you're calling "crap" is well-established and logical.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There is nothing to write home about WoW's combat outside of its responsiveness feel.
Play-fighting is a survival instinct, and therefore a very strong and nearly-universal trait (even dogs and cats and bears play-fight.) Our play-compulsion for other forms of play is less strong (and less universal), because it was less critical to our survival during the bulk of the time we were evolving these traits.
In the theoretical scenario where mankind as a whole had evolved to enjoyed play-city-building more than it enjoyed play-fighting, city-building games would be perceived as "more easily abstracted and implemented" because the majority of games would be city-building games.
It's just game focus. Because combat is often the primary system it gets implemented in great detail while the diplomacy-style decision-making you describe is in low detail. But if the same time was spent on diplomacy-style decisions (and the same interest level existed) then it'd be just as well-implemented as combat. There isn't anything fundamentally different with the decision-making.
We already have abstracted-and-quantified diplomacy in games all the time.
- In Total War Warhammer any given faction's opinion of me is slowly shifting -- very few events immediately change mood by a significant amount.
- If Faction A hates Faction B, and I declare war on Faction B, then that gives me a +10 mood buff.
- But Faction A doesn't immediately jump +10 points. Instead, it slowly ramps up to the new higher value over many turns. (I haven't researched whether this is a global limit to the amount of increase/decrease per turn, or whether it's specific to each individual buff/debuff.)
- Additionally, the +10 value itself decays over time (because 20 turns later, that time you declared war long ago is basically forgotten.)
- Additionally, there are tons of little events rather than a few strong events. So every covert op or battle you fight or whatever against Faction A's enemies will earn you these buffs (or debuffs if they're allies) that are gradually shifting their opinion of you. (Which is why if you're actually fighting Faction A's enemies long-term it won't matter that your initial war declaration has decayed.)
But even that's just a simple system compared with what decision-making would be if it was the focus of the game. TW's focus has been RTS and Strategy gameplay (and holy crap is the strategy gameplay way better than back in Medieval 2 where I dropped the TW series due to its weak strategic play.)But again, evolution is the fundamental driver of the games industry, and in the evolutionary short-term (the next 200+ years) players' preferences will not noticeably change.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Instead, the common means is to take abstracted values from other game mechanics and weigh them. Like your Total Warhammer example banks on only a few variables dependent on your performance and a few secondary actions that influences a single meter.
Combat is itself considerably easier to emulate. Even getting more complex in the level of emulation does not mean getting excessively more complex on the background supporting it. More collision boxes and more free-form control of weapons so you can model physics based reactions more accurately. A lot of the fundamentals that are necessary for even "complex" combat modeling has existed for quite some time now. It is very simply an easier mechanic to build and utilize as an engaging mechanic, so it has become the go-to crutch of game design.
But, as we've stated, clarified, corrected, and restated many times now. There is no mandate that such needs to be the sole truth of RPGs or any games.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
(I'm assuming Minecraft can be an MMO; it does seem like there are servers out there with 100+ players in the same world, based on quick searching.)
Stats-driven combat, progression, and story (the three design pillars of RPGs) are sparse or nonexistent in Minecraft. That's why it's not considered an RPG.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Stats-driven combat is not an integral mechanic of RPGs. Stat-driven challenges certainly are a common if not integral component, but those come in many forms well beyond combat fulfilling the same role of character skill challenges based upon their stats and provided abilities.
Also semantically Minecraft qualifies as an "RPG-lite" type game as it has character progression mechanics that is used as a means to improve character ability through spending levels to enchant gear, which improves their core stats.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
- SW:TOR had a dramatically more popular IP than WOW had when it released.
- SW:TOR had a modern interface.
- SW:TOR had progression streamlined with quests that had voice-acting and cutscenes.
- SW:TOR had dramatically more high-speed internet availability.
SWTOR wasn't a flop, but if we ignore combat (gameplay; the actual meat and bones of any game) then it should've surpassed WOW by a long-shot.It didn't.
Turns out combat matters.
I've posted in several threads citing WOW's deeper rotations and challenging people to provide an example of deeper combat (while noting that combat rotations are only one factor to combat depth, and WOW actually goes further than that.) Only 1 class (Lancer, FFXIV) has ever been posted which was shown to really be as deep as WOW rotations (and most of the rest of that game's rotations are pretty shallow.) None of the SWTOR classes ever came up even though they're okay rotations, but the real failure point of SWTOR's combat depth was in the lack of mob abilities and mob variety (mobs weren't a source of dynamic problems that you had to solve; they were static and you just did the same rotation against them all the time...which isn't true of WOW.)
Again, just think things through before posting:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The combat was a rather small component in the grand scheme of things as to why SWTOR was not as interesting as WoW. There is much more ado about the fact that ten million people had already effectively played the game for ten years by playing WoW. That's not an insult to SWTOR, but the fact that so much of the core gameplay followed fundamentally the same type of tracks left a situation where players that had just left their past MMO were looking for something new to experience, the only component of SWTOR that was going to deliver it was the story lines.
And that right there is what crippled SWTOR. Not some bogus nonsense about combat. We've already proven in the past that WoW's combat rotations aren't even that deep or interesting (as they are fundamentally just an optimized sequencing standard actions). By the by, most mobs in WoW do nothing to break up the banality of standard combat rotation spam. So not sure where you got that idea from.
To break down the points again;
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
The thread has been about the fact that combat doesn't actually have to be the mainstay of every MMO. Don't recall anyone saying to turn it all into a shooting gallery.
I mean I guess Axe has been adamantly claiming that the only way to make a good game is to make it all about combat, but we've got plenty of info on how that idea is wrong already.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
Combat in WoW is nothing to write home about. But that's opinion. Out of date is what a lot of people call WOW's combat. Rotations to me are poor combat. Meaning combat is redundant to pushing buttons in order.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
1) For the love of the art itself.
You yourself have admitted on many occasions that you only care about having fun. It is what games are made for. For the same amount of development time, wouldn't you rather build a game that provides fun for years instead of days?
2) Financial
The longer people are playing your game, the more money you are likely to get out of them, be it via subscriptions or cash shops, DLCs or expansions. If the majority of your players are leaving within a few days / weeks, you have very little time to squeeze money out of them.
In addition, even though I know you personally play MMOs as solo games, they are multiplayer games. They are designed to be played with friends. Word of mouth generates sales. Well built, well rounded games get good reviews which generates sales. Its why games like Skyrim and GTA5 are still topping sales lists years after their release.
When WoW was released it was "vastly superior" to the rest of the competition - be it combat, graphics, gameplay, questing, stories - in the eyes of "average" games (I don't want to go into discussion about whether it was or not).
This superiority, combined with excellent marketing, allowed WoW to gather a playerbase that was and still is vastly superior to other MMOs. It had a good couple of years before serious competition came along - years in which friendships built up, guilds got established, word of mouth spread etc.
This has meant that all MMOs released since WoW have not only had to have superior features to WoW in order to attract WoW players, they've also needed to be good enough to convince entire guilds or friendship groups to move, otherwise players risk losing touch with friends. That's a very tough sell, one which often fails.
From personal experience, literally every single WoW player I've ever met, either in real life or in game, says that they have played superior MMOs to WoW but always end up going back to WoW because that is where their friends are. In fact, more often than not, it is the casual gamers that keep on returning to WoW to play with friends. These people have no interest in deep combat rotations, they don't raid or care about endgame. They like the world and they like playing with friends.
In addition, every single WoW player I've personally met who played endgame in both WoW and LotRO (first 3-4 years) told me that LotRO was deeper and harder. I've explained combat rotations in LotRO to you before, but I can't provide links because all old sites that had the indepth stuff are gone now (because lotro now is dumbed down and trivially easy).
- There is a difference between evolving out of pre-existing mechanics and coasting on the design of another.
- Timing means quite a lot when the initial growth captures the bulk of a new market and then continues to pull in future prospects.
- Your flimsy argument about WoW's combat quality still rests on entirely subjective argument, not objective. The only resource you've ever offered is a link to the warlock's combat rotation, which if anyone cares to read it is ultimately just a short repeated cycle of certain abilities to build for another ability. It's not a complex game, and even sub-standard rotations work just fine in it for at-level content.
- Every game has a optimal combat patter or "rotation", but not every game is so reliant on following such specific combat patterns ad nauseam. You may wish to call it less repetitive, but do not mistake an arbitrary unsupported statement as objective reality when others (as was mentioned by another and myself previously) have given examples of more interesting and involved combat in other MMOs.
You use the phrase "objective" way too often when you really mean "subjective"."The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If you want to use inspired by fine. Nobody is insulting WoW. I give it credit that it was good game at its time. Fresh and playable. The problem with your evolution statement is that in reality there are very few genre that play like reskinned versions. This was coming from a diverse genre that unified at the commercial crossroads.
Your whole argument is based on the superiority and fact of your opinion. We've gone down this road before. I don't really care how right you feel. My opinion of rotation is that means your combat is predictable and it's pretty true statement or the rotations wouldn't work.
Rotations are player things most of the time and not a developer. It means your combat is so stagnated that players can hit buttons in order to get the best results. Its not impressive to me. To me good combat comes in from it being situational based on opponent and variables that make me think beyond hitting keys 4-5-6-2-3-4 over and over.
The rest doesn't warrant a response beyond this sentence.
A subjective opinion would be claiming that one game is superior because it's combat rotation has a lot of text explaining how repeatedly pressing this particular sequence is best. An objective opinion would be pointing out titles where changing up methods and having a combination of reflexive and sequenced actions lends to more varied combat, is deeper.
This also has nothing to say again on the point that RPGs are technically capable of providing similarly complex interactions across plenty of forms of play if a developer only cared to build the mechanics accordingly for it.
Different skills and special abilities tethered to harvesting, crafting, etc are entirely viable tools that sometimes pop up in a rather finite context. It's not by any means something that has to be relegated to second or third tier game design however if the focus of the game was to be considered something other than a single-mindedness about combat.
Something BCbully said that very well could be said to be lacking in detail is the fact that combat was only half the equation provided at best. Characters have a myriad of skills in D&D for conversational, environmental, survival, mental/puzzle, and technical/mechanical challenges on top of personal crafting, maintenance, and support. All these skills go into RPG campaigns a a variety of gameplay and experiences with a bulk of them being non-combat tools. It's similarly the reason not every play session is combat and instead can vary dramatically from simple conversation and diplomatic sessions to murder mystery sessions and base building.
Actual traditional RPGs contain a very wide variety of gameplay enabled by character skills and stats driven gameplay. It's only when things have to be dumbed down that you see a culling of options to focus on a specific set of mechanics. The limitations of technology and development is the source of combat focus, not the traditions of RPG gameplay that is way more open fundamentally.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin
- Genres are a broad set of traits for something.
- Critically, this set of traits is static. When I tell you it's a rock song, you know vaguely what it sounds like -- and that it won't sound like rap or country.
- This implies genres lack substantial innovation. The traits are static. They're not dynamically evolving traits. They're static.
- Otherwise genres wouldn't function. I'd say "rock music" referring to an electronica song and you'd use it to describe rap, and the term would lose all meaning because it wouldn't refer to a static set of traits.
Pick any genre of anything and you're going to see predominantly "reskinned versions" of things. That doesn't mean zero innovation is happening, but fundamentally those things are all part of the same genre whose definition is more or less static, which fundamentally gates in potential innovation.My argument is not built on opinion. It's built on the objective evidence showing how WOW's combat decision set provides more opportunity for imperfect play (and thus offers deeper gameplay) than other games whose combat is shallower. The reality of how WOW worked isn't an opinion. The reality is that MMORPGs have been made with the same advantages you say led to WOW's success, and haven't achieved WOW's success, and yet no MMORPGs were made with the advantage I say led to WOW's success, and so (unsurprisingly) no MMORPGs achieved WOW's success.
A rotation implies you're hitting different buttons. In game A you're hitting 1-1-1-1-2. In game B you're hitting 4-5-6-2-3-4. It requires more skill to master Game B's rotation than Game A.
You say you value situational based decisions. Do you understand that's literally what rotations are?
- You hit 4 to fireball a target.
- Now the situation is that the target is on fire, so you hit 5 to combust for extra damage.
- Now the situation is that your insta-cast spell procced, so you hit 6 to cast that.
- Now the situation is your fire vulnerability debuff expired, so you hit 2 to cast that...
Keep in mind (again) rotations aren't the full story of WOW's combat depth. After hitting 4 to set the boss on fire if he puts a pain zone under your feet your correct decision isn't to hit 5, but to move out of the fire. Monster factors, environmental factors, other players' decisions, and more will all influence what the 'perfect' decision is at any given moment, and they're all situational.So if you're serious about valuing situational decision-making, perhaps you'd like to admit that you cannot provide evidence of a game with more nuance to its situational decisions than WOW?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Your argument of what a rotation is makes even the likes of Scarlet Blade sound complex if only because you were pushed to cycle abilities because of cool-downs. The reality is that a rotation is nothing more than a predictable sequence of actions. "Situational decision making" is in fact the opposite of that as situational actions are derived from each situation calling for a different response. A canned sequence of actions (rotations) is polarized to that because it breaks the rotation if every enemy you face requires a different method to success.
Beyond that all you've given is anecdote, which is fundamentally opinion.
As for the comment on genres, that's iffy at best. Genres have seen quite a lot of variance, evolution, and hybridization. An isometric turn-based RPG for example is all the same an RPG as a real time action or RPG shooter is. Sub-genres are created and fragment all the time as a consequence of experimentation on that end.
To be a copycat is wholly possible as a result of little to no innovation in a game's design. Even though you might call EQ2 similar to WoW, it's much less a copy than SWToR could have been claimed to be as SOE pushed for quite a lot of their own novelty, tech, and mechanics even though the core of the gameplay was still tab-target with quickbar.
And this line;
"The reality is that MMORPGs have been made with the same advantages you say led to WOW's success..."
Is simply false.
Have they had some advantages? Sure. Have they had an exceptionally well setup moment where there was no strong competition to fragment the userbase like WoW had? Not so much. It's a lot like Star Wars in this manner as SW was not really the best movie or plot (nor the first of it's kind by far), but it had(has) the best audience and cemented itself in place for generations to come.
"The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners." - Thomas B. Macaulay
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel J. Boorstin