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.
You see a thread of whining and disappointment because that is what you expect to see. You are seeing things that are not there.
I agree with the OP. Tab target combat really is boring and requires very little skill in most incarnations. I will admit that Vanguard combat was fun despite the tab targetting nature of it. I think it had to do with how mobile everyone was, the timing required to use the powerful skills, defensive/multiple targgeting and the outside the box skill design. Games like WoW just bored me to death though, combat is just like the OP describes.
When I was in SWTOR beta and people asked me what I thought about the game, I would respond with "The story is really cool. The combat sucks though."
I like the idea of Sandbox games but the reason why i can't get into EVE is that the combat sucks. It's actually more boring than WoW, which is saying something.
AoC had it's issues but I still have an active account for it due to the combat system. I wasn't a huge fan of how the combo system worked but I really really liked how the game targetted what was in front of you and your swings hit what was in front of you. Absolutely brilliant. I am excited for Secret World to see what Funcom will do with the combat.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now! I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
So the joke is on us? YOU REALLY ARE happy with the way combat is!... and WoW really wasn't bad at all, and that game that game out this week, whatever it was called, has some superb combat eh?
So the joke is on us? YOU REALLY ARE happy with the way combat is!... and WoW really wasn't bad at all, and that game that game out this week, whatever it was called, has some superb combat eh?
I like how combat is in some games and not others. Is that really so hard to understand? WoW is one of the "others", as are quite a few "WoW-clones".
My point is more that if a game is 90% combat, then discussion of the game shouldn't treat combat as a minor afterthought. For example, go to the SWTOR forums on this site right now. There are threads about subscription numbers, threads about storyline, threads linking to reviews, threads about graphics, threads about class balance, and all sorts of other things. I had to go all the way to the third page to find a thread that, from the title, was clearly about some aspect of combat in the game. Now, this could be a matter of people discussing what they think is interesting today, and that's fine.
But what about the supposed reviews of the game? One thread summarized a podcast, and couldn't be bothered to mention that the game even has combat. Someone linked to user reviews on metacritic, most of which say exactly nothing about combat. Someone linked to a review on ausgamers, which doesn't even mention that SWTOR has combat until the thirteenth paragraph, and spends a total of three paragraphs out of 28 talking about combat. If you're going to spend most of your time in the game in combat, then why is it treated as a minor detail and no more important than voiceovers?
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.
It is not bad if that spell rapes 3 other mobs and only 1 is immune to it. You do not engage in combat one at a time. Instead, you have a frenzy of monsters in your face where your group knows to pick out that immune monster so the wizard can handle the rest.
See there? There is no SPEC. WoW has totally brainwashed you into this SPEC crap. One spell doesn't work? GO USE ANOTHER SPELL! You know how you solve the SPEC problem you're having? Get rid of talent trees, make all spells available but have some pre-reqs. Throw skill points into whatever skills you want or think is interesting. Now you can have your fire spell, your death spell, your heals, whatever you want and at the same time have to still consider how many points to spend in skills because you can't have everything. This method allows you to get whatever you want, without pidgeon holing yourself into a "SPEC". Talent trees destroy customization by pidgeon holing you into your fire spec, ice spec, tank spec, making half your spell/skill arsenal non-optimal.
I guess they did away with skill trees because people flustered at the sight of customization and would just like someone to tell them the best "SPEC".
So the joke is on us? YOU REALLY ARE happy with the way combat is!... and WoW really wasn't bad at all, and that game that game out this week, whatever it was called, has some superb combat eh?
I like how combat is in some games and not others. Is that really so hard to understand? WoW is one of the "others", as are quite a few "WoW-clones".
My point is more that if a game is 90% combat, then discussion of the game shouldn't treat combat as a minor afterthought. For example, go to the SWTOR forums on this site right now. There are threads about subscription numbers, threads about storyline, threads linking to reviews, threads about graphics, threads about class balance, and all sorts of other things. I had to go all the way to the third page to find a thread that, from the title, was clearly about some aspect of combat in the game. Now, this could be a matter of people discussing what they think is interesting today, and that's fine.
But what about the supposed reviews of the game? One thread summarized a podcast, and couldn't be bothered to mention that the game even has combat. Someone linked to user reviews on metacritic, most of which say exactly nothing about combat. Someone linked to a review on ausgamers, which doesn't even mention that SWTOR has combat until the thirteenth paragraph, and spends a total of three paragraphs out of 28 talking about combat. If you're going to spend most of your time in the game in combat, then why is it treated as a minor detail and no more important than voiceovers?
I found it hard to understand that you claimed that you weren't disappointed after making that long post.
SWTOR- Maybe because you are wrong to think that the game is made up of 90% combat? I guess it depends on how you play. If you follow your class mission and some side mission there is maybe 50%? of your time spent in combat. It's fast and short for most of the encounters. There is a substantial amount of time spend traveling and in NPC convos (assuming you don't skip them).
My point was your short sighted view of "WoW clones" clouds your judgement of what is different or innovative. I'm just sick of people slapping a label on cover of a book and then discarding it.
So the joke is on us? YOU REALLY ARE happy with the way combat is!... and WoW really wasn't bad at all, and that game that game out this week, whatever it was called, has some superb combat eh?
I like how combat is in some games and not others. Is that really so hard to understand? WoW is one of the "others", as are quite a few "WoW-clones".
My point is more that if a game is 90% combat, then discussion of the game shouldn't treat combat as a minor afterthought. For example, go to the SWTOR forums on this site right now. There are threads about subscription numbers, threads about storyline, threads linking to reviews, threads about graphics, threads about class balance, and all sorts of other things. I had to go all the way to the third page to find a thread that, from the title, was clearly about some aspect of combat in the game. Now, this could be a matter of people discussing what they think is interesting today, and that's fine.
But what about the supposed reviews of the game? One thread summarized a podcast, and couldn't be bothered to mention that the game even has combat. Someone linked to user reviews on metacritic, most of which say exactly nothing about combat. Someone linked to a review on ausgamers, which doesn't even mention that SWTOR has combat until the thirteenth paragraph, and spends a total of three paragraphs out of 28 talking about combat. If you're going to spend most of your time in the game in combat, then why is it treated as a minor detail and no more important than voiceovers?
I found it hard to understand that you claimed that you weren't disappointed after making that long post.
SWTOR- Maybe because you are wrong to think that the game is made up of 90% combat? I guess it depends on how you play. If you follow your class mission and some side mission there is maybe 50%? of your time spent in combat. It's fast and short for most of the encounters. There is a substantial amount of time spend traveling and in NPC convos (assuming you don't skip them).
My point was your short sighted view of "WoW clones" clouds your judgement of what is different or innovative. I'm just sick of people slapping a label on cover of a book and then discarding it.
Honestly, I don't understand why Bioware even made SWTOR a MMO. Should've been a single player game. It pretty much is a rehash of Mass Effect 1 and 2 with an MMO component as the afterthought.
Guess they just wanted a piece of that MMO pie too. At the heart of it, that's what it is right? It's about the story, so why would I pay a subscription for a story game when single player games that I buy one time and am done with can do the same thing?
If I were interested in the Star Wars IP, I would just buy the game, play it for the free month I get with the box, get the stories I want out of it, and be done with it.
What I'm trying to get at here is that after all that story telling and voice over stuff, there is no meat to SWTOR to justify it as an MMO and justify that monthly subscription.
Maybe I'm just jaded by the MMO genre and nothing feels special anymore. MMOs were special back when I was a kid, but that's probably just because I was ignorant and didn't know anything about MMOs at the time. Ignorance is bliss right? Haha.
I like it. And I like Fighting Games and RTS and 3rd person action games. I like pinball too haha.
Agreed. Although I'm on the fence about pinball (prefer the 80s/90s pinball games like ST:Next Generation or Adams Family which worked a lot more gameplay into them.)
MMORPG combat is a good hybrid between the pure turn-based RPGs of the past and well...realtime combat.
RPGs by definition (my definition at least) are extremely light on twitch elements. They're about some long-term strategic decisions (your character build) and many short-term tactical decisions (ability use in combat.) The better MMORPG combat (WOW, TOR, and to a lesser degree RIFT and CoX) all deliver exactly that.
The common failing (especially in solo questing) is using a static difficulty for everyone. It's always too easy for skilled players, and may actually be too difficult for the least skilled players. Meanwhile games like CoX have shown that a difficulty selector is perfect (when paired with rewards and advancement rate which favors harder difficulties.)
When you can set a difficulty to be perfect for you (and the rewards encourage you to do so) you reach a situation where the smart tactical use of your abilities is supremely important to surviving fights, which is exactly what a good tactical combat system needs to create: important decision-making.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
SWTOR- Maybe because you are wrong to think that the game is made up of 90% combat? I guess it depends on how you play. If you follow your class mission and some side mission there is maybe 50%? of your time spent in combat. It's fast and short for most of the encounters. There is a substantial amount of time spend traveling and in NPC convos (assuming you don't skip them).
This is not a thread about SWTOR. That is why it is posted in the pub, and not the SWTOR forums. I mentioned 14 games in the original post, and SWTOR isn't even one of them. The reason I posted this thread yesterday is that the night before, it finally dawned on me why I hadn't liked WoW and some other games that were too close to it. That it happened to be release day for SWTOR is just a fluke.
If SWTOR is only 50% combat, then what's the other 50%? Traveling so that you can go do combat somewhere else? Gathering quests that will give some meaning to your combat? Watching cutscenes that will tell you go to somewhere to do some combat? Crafting stuff to make you stronger in combat? Trying to get a group together so that you can do combat as a group rather than solo?
When I play Uncharted Waters Online, I can spend maybe 95% of my time neither in combat nor preparing for combat nor traveling to get to combat nor anything else even related to combat. The ship combat is merely all right and the land combat is awful, but what makes that acceptable is that I don't have to do much of either. Could you seriously play SWTOR and go far into the game while mostly avoiding or fleeing from combat?
But let's take your figure that combat is "only" 50% of SWTOR. Is that really just an afterthought? Is that not a major part of the game that should be a heavy focus of any explanation of the game? Is 50% not enough for whether the combat is good or not to be a huge factor in determining whether the game is any good?
I realize this audience probably won't want to hear this because it's mostly the RTS/PVP crowd, but RPGs are about your characters physical abilities and traits and you are the brains that drive him/her. They are not supposed to be twitch games. And they are (more or less) turn based.
In the first D&D rules, everything got one action per turn. They had initiative roles to see who acted in what order. Then they added weapon speed, which meant you could go an entire turn without the ability to swing your weapon or move(roughly analgous to cooldowns). Along about the time of Doom, some person thinking only about money and not what was best for the genre, came up with the idea of trying to merge RTS and RPG games. This in my not so humble opinion was the worst day in the history of MMORPGS. RPGs are supposed to be cooperative not competitive.
A true turn based game is the best way to determine who really knows how best to build a character. There is little to no impact to your character due to video lag or latency.
This is not a thread about SWTOR. That is why it is posted in the pub, and not the SWTOR forums. I mentioned 14 games in the original post, and SWTOR isn't even one of them. The reason I posted this thread yesterday is that the night before, it finally dawned on me why I hadn't liked WoW and some other games that were too close to it. That it happened to be release day for SWTOR is just a fluke.
If SWTOR is only 50% combat, then what's the other 50%? Traveling so that you can go do combat somewhere else? Gathering quests that will give some meaning to your combat? Watching cutscenes that will tell you go to somewhere to do some combat? Crafting stuff to make you stronger in combat? Trying to get a group together so that you can do combat as a group rather than solo?
When I play Uncharted Waters Online, I can spend maybe 95% of my time neither in combat nor preparing for combat nor traveling to get to combat nor anything else even related to combat. The ship combat is merely all right and the land combat is awful, but what makes that acceptable is that I don't have to do much of either. Could you seriously play SWTOR and go far into the game while mostly avoiding or fleeing from combat?
But let's take your figure that combat is "only" 50% of SWTOR. Is that really just an afterthought? Is that not a major part of the game that should be a heavy focus of any explanation of the game? Is 50% not enough for whether the combat is good or not to be a huge factor in determining whether the game is any good?
SWTOR has basically the same focus on tactical decisionmaking that made WOW combat fun (so if you didn't like WOW combat you won't like SWTOR combat.)
While you can't pin an exact breakdown due to player variations, I'd say TOR is:
~10% travel/exploration
~15% management (economy, character advancement)
~25% conversations
~50% combat
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by Quizzical 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.
I think Chronicles of spellborn did a nice attemp to be intresting with combat but game failed misrable.
Im more fan of manual combat, auto attack sucks major in my book.
Manual combat with strafe dodge and all kinds of attacks also physics like an arrow need to be aimed little higher becouse of gravity should matter and terraine conditions of the weather it all should matter then you get intresting fights the opponents in this case the mob should have same abillitys with hide strafe jump rollover so we get exciting fights.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
Originally posted by Quizzical Originally posted by DannyGlover 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.
You see a thread of whining and disappointment because that is what you expect to see. You are seeing things that are not there. I never said you were whining. I'm not attacking you. I guess I'd just like to know if your original post had any other insight than your combat preferences?
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.
Whether an MMORPG that is mostly about combat is good or not depends greatly on whether the combat is good or not. Yet when reviewing games, the combat often gets only a brief mention, and instead, various fluff gets most of the attention. An in-depth discussion of how a game does combat differently from normal, whether minor points or huge innovations, is usually by far the most important part of a review of an MMORPG. And yet, it often gets only a brief mention.
Ah I see. Well I respectfully disagree. Any mmo I am interested in, I almost always have a very good idea what the combat is like before it releases. I can always find plenty of articles about combat regarding any upcoming mmo. I just haven't felt this lack of comprehensive info.
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.
I agree with the OP - combat mechanics are vital to the enjoyment of a combat-centric game. I think there are all sorts of little ways to make it better, from fun looking animations, to reactionaries and positional attacks. Even within the familiar framework of MMO combat, you can have a system where the player has a move that can only be performed after a parry. That move stuns the opponent for 2 seconds, just long enough for the player to get behind them, and perform a backstab. And you can make it look like a really flashy combo when pulled off successfully... lot more fun than just using the same unconditional moves over and over, animated to look like you're just wacking away at a piniata..
This isn't even about getting all innovative. It's just matter of devs thinking, yeah, maybe combat should be at least a little more engaging and cool looking, rather than just doing the bare formulaic minimum.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
I agree with the OP - combat mechanics are vital to the enjoyment of a combat-centric game. I think there are all sorts of little ways to make it better, from fun looking animations, to reactionaries and positional attacks. Even within the familiar framework of MMO combat, you can have a system where the player has a move that can only be performed after a parry. That move stuns the opponent for 2 seconds, just long enough for the player to get behind them, and perform a backstab. And you can make it look like a really flashy combo when pulled off successfully... lot more fun than just using the same unconditional moves over and over, animated to look like you're just wacking away at a piniata..
This isn't even about getting all innovative. It's just matter of devs thinking, yeah, maybe combat should be at least a little more engaging and cool looking, rather than just doing the bare formulaic minimum.
Pretty sure Vanguard has that exact move for their rogue classes that you are describing. I know basically all its melee classes (even clerics) had moves that could only be used after a block,parry, or dodge. Each class had a few of these moves for either two or all three of the types of evasion.
I agree with the OP - combat mechanics are vital to the enjoyment of a combat-centric game. I think there are all sorts of little ways to make it better, from fun looking animations, to reactionaries and positional attacks. Even within the familiar framework of MMO combat, you can have a system where the player has a move that can only be performed after a parry. That move stuns the opponent for 2 seconds, just long enough for the player to get behind them, and perform a backstab. And you can make it look like a really flashy combo when pulled off successfully... lot more fun than just using the same unconditional moves over and over, animated to look like you're just wacking away at a piniata..
This isn't even about getting all innovative. It's just matter of devs thinking, yeah, maybe combat should be at least a little more engaging and cool looking, rather than just doing the bare formulaic minimum.
Pretty sure Vanguard has that exact move for their rogue classes that you are describing. I know basically all its melee classes (even clerics) had moves that could only be used after a block,parry, or dodge. Each class had a few of these moves for either two or all three of the types of evasion.
Yeah, that is kind of my point - its not even a new idea, or "innovative" but a lot of other MMOs fail to even have this much. As for Vanguard, it just wasnt animated that impressively. Wish more MMOs would take that more seriously, too. It wont make boring combat fun, but can help, and too many MMOs just dont get creative with it at all.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Yeah, that is kind of my point - its not even a new idea, or "innovative" but a lot of other MMOs fail to even have this much. As for Vanguard, it just wasnt animated that impressively. Wish more MMOs would take that more seriously, too. It wont make boring combat fun, but can help, and too many MMOs just dont get creative with it at all.
Well, its a fairly dated game now and had more than its fair share of problems above and beyond combat animations. They would have been great addition and likely would have been added had the game not launched so poorly and then basically fallen by the wayside. Still, its combat was definitely less boring as far as player skill in PvE was concerned. Glad other people can appreciate that as well.
Yes combat is important. I just can not enjoy any melee class in most MMO's. Barring rogue types, they are just plain boring to me.
I would say that over 90% of the characters i make are ranged. At the very least you need to plan and use some tactics, other than run up and stand there.:)
But, i am not very good at reaction type games, guess thats why i suck at shooter games and most PVP, just do not like to get to fast or involved with combat in games.
Guess that is one of the main problems the Dev's run into when these games are drawn up. Just how do you make combat better? And still not make it where people like me can still play and have fun?
Heh other than make all classes ranged, not sure how i could make a combat system that did something besides make it a game of hit points. How do you make a game that is more fun in combat for some without reducing the fun or even the ability for others to play too?
The key to making combat interesting is that players should constantly have to make interesting gameplay decisions that matter. Using the same skills in the same order twenty fights in a row is not interesting gameplay.
For example, consider blocking in Champions Online. Some mobs will occasionally use some fairly nasty attacks that can really hurt if they hit you with their full force. If you see that coming, you can block, and take far less damage (1/3 damage with the basic block skill, with various upgrades that can reduce it to less than 1/5 damage in some cases). So there's the constant decision of, do I want to keep attacking, or do I want to stop to block? If you never block, then you'll end up dying needlessly a fair bit. If you constantly block, then you'll never do any damage.
It doesn't have to be quick reaction times, either. Consider how combat goes in Wizard 101. You can set up your card deck and put whatever cards you want in it. When it's your turn to attack, you pick from one of seven or so cards, chosen from your deck at random. Once you've played a card, it gets replaced by another on your next turn, but not put back in the deck. You can't just use the same skills in the same order every single time, as sometimes, you simply won't draw the right cards for it. This forces you to adapt--and puts a lot of emphasis on choosing the cards for your deck to maximize the chances that you'll have some good options available.
I rarely read anyone commenting on RO on these forums... unless it's me. I loved that game, and I have yet to find an MMO that can fill that hole. It's really hard to grasp the genius of RO's combat until you experience it.
Combat in MMOs these days have gotten far too "generic". By that, I mean every attack hurts every enemy the same i.e. a fire spell does just as much damage to a fire-based mob as any other. This is one of the reasons I could never get into WoW. Every fight was that same. I can't really speak for PvP, becuase I got into the game too late when world PvP was dead, and I never really liked the idea of battlegrounds. As for PvE, it just wasn't fun for me.
Combat in an MMO needs to be fun, because, for most games, it's a huge part of the experience. However, it can't feel like a chore either. Every MMO has grinding to an extent, so invariably there is going to be repetition. That's what I liked about RO's combat. It was pretty straight-forward at the core, but there were so many different combat situations that each senerio felt friesh. Many of the enemies had to be approached differently. I'm not saying that every game has to be like RO, but I feel that is an important element that is missing in almost every recent MMO.
I guess my point is that combat needs to be simple, yet diverse. If it's too complex, then every encounter is going to feel like a chore. But if it's over-simplfied, then it gets really boring really quickly.
Comments
You see a thread of whining and disappointment because that is what you expect to see. You are seeing things that are not there.
I agree with the OP. Tab target combat really is boring and requires very little skill in most incarnations. I will admit that Vanguard combat was fun despite the tab targetting nature of it. I think it had to do with how mobile everyone was, the timing required to use the powerful skills, defensive/multiple targgeting and the outside the box skill design. Games like WoW just bored me to death though, combat is just like the OP describes.
When I was in SWTOR beta and people asked me what I thought about the game, I would respond with "The story is really cool. The combat sucks though."
I like the idea of Sandbox games but the reason why i can't get into EVE is that the combat sucks. It's actually more boring than WoW, which is saying something.
AoC had it's issues but I still have an active account for it due to the combat system. I wasn't a huge fan of how the combo system worked but I really really liked how the game targetted what was in front of you and your swings hit what was in front of you. Absolutely brilliant. I am excited for Secret World to see what Funcom will do with the combat.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now!
I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
So the joke is on us? YOU REALLY ARE happy with the way combat is!... and WoW really wasn't bad at all, and that game that game out this week, whatever it was called, has some superb combat eh?
I like how combat is in some games and not others. Is that really so hard to understand? WoW is one of the "others", as are quite a few "WoW-clones".
My point is more that if a game is 90% combat, then discussion of the game shouldn't treat combat as a minor afterthought. For example, go to the SWTOR forums on this site right now. There are threads about subscription numbers, threads about storyline, threads linking to reviews, threads about graphics, threads about class balance, and all sorts of other things. I had to go all the way to the third page to find a thread that, from the title, was clearly about some aspect of combat in the game. Now, this could be a matter of people discussing what they think is interesting today, and that's fine.
But what about the supposed reviews of the game? One thread summarized a podcast, and couldn't be bothered to mention that the game even has combat. Someone linked to user reviews on metacritic, most of which say exactly nothing about combat. Someone linked to a review on ausgamers, which doesn't even mention that SWTOR has combat until the thirteenth paragraph, and spends a total of three paragraphs out of 28 talking about combat. If you're going to spend most of your time in the game in combat, then why is it treated as a minor detail and no more important than voiceovers?
It is not bad if that spell rapes 3 other mobs and only 1 is immune to it. You do not engage in combat one at a time. Instead, you have a frenzy of monsters in your face where your group knows to pick out that immune monster so the wizard can handle the rest.
See there? There is no SPEC. WoW has totally brainwashed you into this SPEC crap. One spell doesn't work? GO USE ANOTHER SPELL! You know how you solve the SPEC problem you're having? Get rid of talent trees, make all spells available but have some pre-reqs. Throw skill points into whatever skills you want or think is interesting. Now you can have your fire spell, your death spell, your heals, whatever you want and at the same time have to still consider how many points to spend in skills because you can't have everything. This method allows you to get whatever you want, without pidgeon holing yourself into a "SPEC". Talent trees destroy customization by pidgeon holing you into your fire spec, ice spec, tank spec, making half your spell/skill arsenal non-optimal.
I guess they did away with skill trees because people flustered at the sight of customization and would just like someone to tell them the best "SPEC".
TLDR; Skill trees >>>> Talent trees
I found it hard to understand that you claimed that you weren't disappointed after making that long post.
SWTOR- Maybe because you are wrong to think that the game is made up of 90% combat? I guess it depends on how you play. If you follow your class mission and some side mission there is maybe 50%? of your time spent in combat. It's fast and short for most of the encounters. There is a substantial amount of time spend traveling and in NPC convos (assuming you don't skip them).
My point was your short sighted view of "WoW clones" clouds your judgement of what is different or innovative. I'm just sick of people slapping a label on cover of a book and then discarding it.
Honestly, I don't understand why Bioware even made SWTOR a MMO. Should've been a single player game. It pretty much is a rehash of Mass Effect 1 and 2 with an MMO component as the afterthought.
Guess they just wanted a piece of that MMO pie too. At the heart of it, that's what it is right? It's about the story, so why would I pay a subscription for a story game when single player games that I buy one time and am done with can do the same thing?
If I were interested in the Star Wars IP, I would just buy the game, play it for the free month I get with the box, get the stories I want out of it, and be done with it.
What I'm trying to get at here is that after all that story telling and voice over stuff, there is no meat to SWTOR to justify it as an MMO and justify that monthly subscription.
Maybe I'm just jaded by the MMO genre and nothing feels special anymore. MMOs were special back when I was a kid, but that's probably just because I was ignorant and didn't know anything about MMOs at the time. Ignorance is bliss right? Haha.
Agreed. Although I'm on the fence about pinball (prefer the 80s/90s pinball games like ST:Next Generation or Adams Family which worked a lot more gameplay into them.)
MMORPG combat is a good hybrid between the pure turn-based RPGs of the past and well...realtime combat.
RPGs by definition (my definition at least) are extremely light on twitch elements. They're about some long-term strategic decisions (your character build) and many short-term tactical decisions (ability use in combat.) The better MMORPG combat (WOW, TOR, and to a lesser degree RIFT and CoX) all deliver exactly that.
The common failing (especially in solo questing) is using a static difficulty for everyone. It's always too easy for skilled players, and may actually be too difficult for the least skilled players. Meanwhile games like CoX have shown that a difficulty selector is perfect (when paired with rewards and advancement rate which favors harder difficulties.)
When you can set a difficulty to be perfect for you (and the rewards encourage you to do so) you reach a situation where the smart tactical use of your abilities is supremely important to surviving fights, which is exactly what a good tactical combat system needs to create: important decision-making.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
This is not a thread about SWTOR. That is why it is posted in the pub, and not the SWTOR forums. I mentioned 14 games in the original post, and SWTOR isn't even one of them. The reason I posted this thread yesterday is that the night before, it finally dawned on me why I hadn't liked WoW and some other games that were too close to it. That it happened to be release day for SWTOR is just a fluke.
If SWTOR is only 50% combat, then what's the other 50%? Traveling so that you can go do combat somewhere else? Gathering quests that will give some meaning to your combat? Watching cutscenes that will tell you go to somewhere to do some combat? Crafting stuff to make you stronger in combat? Trying to get a group together so that you can do combat as a group rather than solo?
When I play Uncharted Waters Online, I can spend maybe 95% of my time neither in combat nor preparing for combat nor traveling to get to combat nor anything else even related to combat. The ship combat is merely all right and the land combat is awful, but what makes that acceptable is that I don't have to do much of either. Could you seriously play SWTOR and go far into the game while mostly avoiding or fleeing from combat?
But let's take your figure that combat is "only" 50% of SWTOR. Is that really just an afterthought? Is that not a major part of the game that should be a heavy focus of any explanation of the game? Is 50% not enough for whether the combat is good or not to be a huge factor in determining whether the game is any good?
I realize this audience probably won't want to hear this because it's mostly the RTS/PVP crowd, but RPGs are about your characters physical abilities and traits and you are the brains that drive him/her. They are not supposed to be twitch games. And they are (more or less) turn based.
In the first D&D rules, everything got one action per turn. They had initiative roles to see who acted in what order. Then they added weapon speed, which meant you could go an entire turn without the ability to swing your weapon or move(roughly analgous to cooldowns). Along about the time of Doom, some person thinking only about money and not what was best for the genre, came up with the idea of trying to merge RTS and RPG games. This in my not so humble opinion was the worst day in the history of MMORPGS. RPGs are supposed to be cooperative not competitive.
A true turn based game is the best way to determine who really knows how best to build a character. There is little to no impact to your character due to video lag or latency.
SWTOR has basically the same focus on tactical decisionmaking that made WOW combat fun (so if you didn't like WOW combat you won't like SWTOR combat.)
While you can't pin an exact breakdown due to player variations, I'd say TOR is:
~10% travel/exploration
~15% management (economy, character advancement)
~25% conversations
~50% combat
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I think Chronicles of spellborn did a nice attemp to be intresting with combat but game failed misrable.
Im more fan of manual combat, auto attack sucks major in my book.
Manual combat with strafe dodge and all kinds of attacks also physics like an arrow need to be aimed little higher becouse of gravity should matter and terraine conditions of the weather it all should matter then you get intresting fights the opponents in this case the mob should have same abillitys with hide strafe jump rollover so we get exciting fights.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
I never said you were whining. I'm not attacking you. I guess I'd just like to know if your original post had any other insight than your combat preferences?
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.
The basic point is this:
Whether an MMORPG that is mostly about combat is good or not depends greatly on whether the combat is good or not. Yet when reviewing games, the combat often gets only a brief mention, and instead, various fluff gets most of the attention. An in-depth discussion of how a game does combat differently from normal, whether minor points or huge innovations, is usually by far the most important part of a review of an MMORPG. And yet, it often gets only a brief mention.
Ah I see. Well I respectfully disagree. Any mmo I am interested in, I almost always have a very good idea what the combat is like before it releases. I can always find plenty of articles about combat regarding any upcoming mmo. I just haven't felt this lack of comprehensive info.
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.
This isn't even about getting all innovative. It's just matter of devs thinking, yeah, maybe combat should be at least a little more engaging and cool looking, rather than just doing the bare formulaic minimum.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Pretty sure Vanguard has that exact move for their rogue classes that you are describing. I know basically all its melee classes (even clerics) had moves that could only be used after a block,parry, or dodge. Each class had a few of these moves for either two or all three of the types of evasion.
Pretty sure Vanguard has that exact move for their rogue classes that you are describing. I know basically all its melee classes (even clerics) had moves that could only be used after a block,parry, or dodge. Each class had a few of these moves for either two or all three of the types of evasion.
Yeah, that is kind of my point - its not even a new idea, or "innovative" but a lot of other MMOs fail to even have this much. As for Vanguard, it just wasnt animated that impressively. Wish more MMOs would take that more seriously, too. It wont make boring combat fun, but can help, and too many MMOs just dont get creative with it at all.When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Well, its a fairly dated game now and had more than its fair share of problems above and beyond combat animations. They would have been great addition and likely would have been added had the game not launched so poorly and then basically fallen by the wayside. Still, its combat was definitely less boring as far as player skill in PvE was concerned. Glad other people can appreciate that as well.
Yes combat is important. I just can not enjoy any melee class in most MMO's. Barring rogue types, they are just plain boring to me.
I would say that over 90% of the characters i make are ranged. At the very least you need to plan and use some tactics, other than run up and stand there.:)
But, i am not very good at reaction type games, guess thats why i suck at shooter games and most PVP, just do not like to get to fast or involved with combat in games.
Guess that is one of the main problems the Dev's run into when these games are drawn up. Just how do you make combat better? And still not make it where people like me can still play and have fun?
Heh other than make all classes ranged, not sure how i could make a combat system that did something besides make it a game of hit points. How do you make a game that is more fun in combat for some without reducing the fun or even the ability for others to play too?
Guess that is what you are asking as well:)
The key to making combat interesting is that players should constantly have to make interesting gameplay decisions that matter. Using the same skills in the same order twenty fights in a row is not interesting gameplay.
For example, consider blocking in Champions Online. Some mobs will occasionally use some fairly nasty attacks that can really hurt if they hit you with their full force. If you see that coming, you can block, and take far less damage (1/3 damage with the basic block skill, with various upgrades that can reduce it to less than 1/5 damage in some cases). So there's the constant decision of, do I want to keep attacking, or do I want to stop to block? If you never block, then you'll end up dying needlessly a fair bit. If you constantly block, then you'll never do any damage.
It doesn't have to be quick reaction times, either. Consider how combat goes in Wizard 101. You can set up your card deck and put whatever cards you want in it. When it's your turn to attack, you pick from one of seven or so cards, chosen from your deck at random. Once you've played a card, it gets replaced by another on your next turn, but not put back in the deck. You can't just use the same skills in the same order every single time, as sometimes, you simply won't draw the right cards for it. This forces you to adapt--and puts a lot of emphasis on choosing the cards for your deck to maximize the chances that you'll have some good options available.
I rarely read anyone commenting on RO on these forums... unless it's me. I loved that game, and I have yet to find an MMO that can fill that hole. It's really hard to grasp the genius of RO's combat until you experience it.
Combat in MMOs these days have gotten far too "generic". By that, I mean every attack hurts every enemy the same i.e. a fire spell does just as much damage to a fire-based mob as any other. This is one of the reasons I could never get into WoW. Every fight was that same. I can't really speak for PvP, becuase I got into the game too late when world PvP was dead, and I never really liked the idea of battlegrounds. As for PvE, it just wasn't fun for me.
Combat in an MMO needs to be fun, because, for most games, it's a huge part of the experience. However, it can't feel like a chore either. Every MMO has grinding to an extent, so invariably there is going to be repetition. That's what I liked about RO's combat. It was pretty straight-forward at the core, but there were so many different combat situations that each senerio felt friesh. Many of the enemies had to be approached differently. I'm not saying that every game has to be like RO, but I feel that is an important element that is missing in almost every recent MMO.
I guess my point is that combat needs to be simple, yet diverse. If it's too complex, then every encounter is going to feel like a chore. But if it's over-simplfied, then it gets really boring really quickly.