you are so quick to point out flawed logic. how can you not see that a major system(macros) is not going to be removed. the point that several people have made now. that you are not seeing. is that all those skills can, and are dumbed down to 4-8 macros.
don't blame everyone else, because they paid for a second account, and you would not. was and am i against buff bots? yes. did i have one to compete? yes.
once again you are floating on your opinions as fact.
1) pointing out flawed logic like that is not opinion.
2) You keep using the same flawed logic in every post, macros are not relevant to the discussion. The pros and cons of macros can be debated elsewhere, the ability to use over 10 abilities is a seperate issue. And no, all of those skills cannot be dumbed down into 4-7 macros. There are more than 4 situational skills per character that wouldn't work well on a macro. Stuff like levetation, emergency defense buffs, mage teleport etc. etc . The macros would only work for some (not all) sequencial combat chains. So what you are saying is utterly false even if we accept your idiotic flawed premise.
Actually you couldn't be further from the truth. I am not in anyway for having less options. I do however see the other side. I am by no means out of touch with the average gamer. I like yourself i am guessing have a preference to succeed.
Obviously you are not going to see what others are saying. That's cool. I have respect for anyone that stands their ground right or wrong. This is one of those agree to disagree moments. You can continue to get on everyone that diagrees that the logic is flawed. Which for some reason i think of star trek every time i read it. I can keep saying come on these are your opinions.
I would honestly say everyone is going to hold where they are. The subject is going much like politics. It depends on your personal veiw
Originally posted by Xssiv I'd much rather have less active abilities with the option to swap abilities out to accommodate various play styles / roles as opposed to just using the same 15-20 abilities day in and day out.
I completely agree with you. But, lets be honest. You wouldn't even be using the 15-20 abilities. To maximize whatever role you are filling, you would use the most optimal rotation which would most likely use 8-10 abilities at most. Or in games like WoW Rift. You can use 2 macros for all those abilities.
Previous themepark games had dozens of abilities because most of them were in high cooldown. If you ignore abilities with CDs higher than 30 seconds, you will find that you need somewhere around 10 skills in PvE and about 15 in PvP. The higher number in PvP is because you potentially face X classes instead of one scripted mob and you need the equivalent tools, again you are not using all of them against everyone.
High cooldown ability-design is bad for various reasons that are beyond the scope of this topic. If you want to debate about it start a thread on General discussion.
---------------- We don't need a king of MMOs, we need a group of Titans so that everyone can play what suits them best. -Ascension08
Previous themepark games had dozens of abilities because most of them were in high cooldown. If you ignore abilities with CDs higher than 30 seconds, you will find that you need somewhere around 10 skills in PvE and about 15 in PvP. The higher number in PvP is because you potentially face X classes instead of one scripted mob and you need the equivalent tools, again you are not using all of them against everyone.
High cooldown ability-design is bad for various reasons that are beyond the scope of this topic. If you want to debate about it start a thread on General discussion.
They were on high CD because if I could spam mindblast and smite everyone would die. Which is why the damage in instacast action combat mmos is pretty low. Even the action combat games that work have CDs for the bigger skills and most of them are frankly bad games. Sometimes people are nostalgic for a reason. Besides were not talking about ancient history here, we are talking about this current gen of games as in this last 2 years of releases and none of those games are catching anyones imagination so far.
I totally disagree. All those active skills are really just added complexity. Not really needed. TSW does just fine with how it does it. I prefer that as a matter of fact.
Originally posted by Xssiv I'd much rather have less active abilities with the option to swap abilities out to accommodate various play styles / roles as opposed to just using the same 15-20 abilities day in and day out.
I completely agree with you. But, lets be honest. You wouldn't even be using the 15-20 abilities. To maximize whatever role you are filling, you would use the most optimal rotation which would most likely use 8-10 abilities at most. Or in games like WoW Rift. You can use 2 macros for all those abilities.
Obviously you have never played Wow or Rift.
Well he actually meant 1 macro.
And I did play both and yes you could successfully do endgame with 1 macro in each.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
They were on high CD because if I could spam mindblast and smite everyone would die. Which is why the damage in instacast action combat mmos is pretty low. Even the action combat games that work have CDs for the bigger skills and most of them are frankly bad games. Sometimes people are nostalgic for a reason. Besides were not talking about ancient history here, we are talking about this current gen of games as in this last 2 years of releases and none of those games are catching anyones imagination so far.
We are talking about abilities with CDs higher than 30 seconds. The ones that were ~10 exist for two main reasons:
For PvE, it's because they need to add complexity to the otherwise boring rotations. It reinforces theorycrafting and adds more "builds" in the game. For PvP, as you mention, it's for balancing factors. Wildstar has its fair share of abilities like those, and as you did in WoW, you usually have 1 or 2 that you commonly use.
The fact that Warriors had Shieldwall / Retaliation / Recklessness with 30 minute cooldown, for example, helped no-one. Abilities like that in PvE were either a get out of jail card, if someone fucked up, or a necessary tool for a mechanic, which meant that the mechanic could have been designed without that CD in mind in the first place. In PvP they provided an exponential increase in power that could be matched by either a high CD ability of your own or Crowd Control.
And the last part is the important one. Wildstar does not have hard Crowd Control, so there is no need whatsoever to have high cooldown abilities to counter those. Not having a need for high cooldown abilities means that the number of abilities you need access to in order to perform satisfactory, are reduced .
(I have to point that wildstar has some 30 and 45 sec CD utility abilities that are taunts / stuns / and the like. Still nothing like the abilities we see in WoW).
---------------- We don't need a king of MMOs, we need a group of Titans so that everyone can play what suits them best. -Ascension08
Not a fan of the dumbed down RPG's with just 5 active skills, prefer the more tactical MMO's with tons of active skills available for clicking for tactical reasons mostly.
Also there is a reason we have freakin' 100+ keys on the keyboard and 7+ on the mice!
Missing the old days when RPG's were tactics orientated, not like these new age MMORPG's which are just stupid button smashing arcady action games.
Originally posted by LlexX Not a fan of the dumbed down RPG's with just 5 active skills, prefer the more tactical MMO's with tons of active skills available for clicking for tactical reasons mostly.Also there is a reason we have freakin' 100+ keys on the keyboard and 7+ on the mice!Missing the old days when RPG's were tactics orientated, not like these new age MMORPG's which are just stupid button smashing arcady action games.
I miss the days when people would actually play video games instead of some Excel spreadsheet simulator with graphics.
The UI in MMOs have reached critical mass and its time they stopped adding needless complexity and pretend its "tactical".
i disagree complelty with you i played many games with few skills and had fun i balieve gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skils it old sorry and skilless just button rotaions sad when will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations give me a honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system were to win i have to out play and have skill and be good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dote you all are skilless and complane to much i want a combat system thats evolved
Originally posted by Tatercake i disagree complelty with you i played many games with few skills and had fun i balieve gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skils it old sorry and skilless just button rotaions sad when will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations give me a honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system were to win i have to out play and have skill and be good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dote you all are skilless and complane to much i want a combat system thats evolved
That is just painful to read. I fear game combat system evolution should be the least of your worries.
all these games you sead failed are still going srong and have strong communitys how are these fails i think your closed minded and you balieve your opinion is the only one that matters
Originally posted by Tatercake i disagree complelty with you i played many games with few skills and had fun i balieve gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skils it old sorry and skilless just button rotaions sad when will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations give me a honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system were to win i have to out play and have skill and be good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dote you all are skilless and complane to much i want a combat system thats evolved
I disagree completely with you. I played many games with few skills and had fun. I believe gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skills. ? It old sorry and no-skill just button rotations. ? Sad. When will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations. Give me an honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system where to win I have to out play and have skill and be a good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dolt. You all are no-skill and complain too much. I want a combat system that's evolved.
There. Better?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
GW1 had the most incredible skill system I've seen in any MMO I've played, the sheer amount of builds and ways to play you could put together just by using different skill setups was incredible. The limited action bar MADE that game, and if Wildstar can do the same I will be happy. It was never about using each skill individually and wondering why one thing did the same as the next, it was about looking for interactions and chains between abilities, something that just hasn't been replicated in other games (even GW2) quite as well, I'm hoping Wildstar will pull it off. The underlying fact is I used more skills in GW1 on a regular basis than I have in probably any other mmo I've played, including things like WoW and EQ1/2.
Depth is about how you apply and use the skills, not how many you can use at once.
As a point, try actually running through the skills you use in your current mmo in a combat situation (And I don't mean things like Path of Frost on a DK in WoW for example, they've already said in Wildstar you should have access to a utility bar) and I suspect it won't be anywhere NEAR as high as you think it is.
Originally posted by Tatercake i disagree complelty with you i played many games with few skills and had fun i balieve gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skils it old sorry and skilless just button rotaions sad when will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations give me a honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system were to win i have to out play and have skill and be good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dote you all are skilless and complane to much i want a combat system thats evolved
I disagree completely with you. I played many games with few skills and had fun. I believe gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skills. ? It old sorry and no-skill just button rotations. ? Sad. When will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations. Give me an honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system where to win I have to out play and have skill and be a good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dolt. You all are no-skill and complain too much. I want a combat system that's evolved.
There. Better?
Barely.
Play for fun. Play to win. Play for perfection. Play with friends. Play in another world. Why do you play?
In all likelihood, the number of active skills/spells will probably not be the reason Wildstar is either (a) successful or (b) ultimately a failure. There are people that don't care, who will adapt, who will not play because of it, or will play despite it, or any other category of people you can think of in regards to the number of active skills/spells. In the long run, there will be much more important things that Carbine will deal with to guide this game.
but it's failing, which was the point of the thread.
Neverwinter isn't failing because of the combat, in fact that's the only reason its still afloat to be honest. Its failing because of poorly designed dungeons / encounters, poor end game, missing classes and a heavy handed cash shop. The combat itself is great fun and rewards good movement and timing.
The days of multi-hotbar combat is dead my friend.
Anyone who thinks that having access to so many abilities knows nothing about how to balance and build a successful and fun game. Especially considering that the on average only a handful of those skills get used a majority of time. Not only that anyone who enjoys playing whack-a-mole with their hotbars is deluding themselves in thinking it is any more skillful.
Any active or former WoW player would like to comment on this?
I find it rather amusing.
Currently in WoW most classes have a primary rotation of 3-5 skills, with 1-3 cooldown skills that get thrown in a macro. The damage priority of a Frost Mage for instance goes:
The entire damage rotation for a Frost Mage can get handled with 1 button, and casting Frostfire / Ice Lance when you see the procs. 4 buttons total when you include the AoE.
And all of wildstars attacks could be consolidated to 2 buttons, 1 for damage one for healing. Heck, lets remove action bars entirely because you have 2 mouse buttons that can handle it. That's the funny thing about these specious responses to my OP, I could use the same reasoning to justify only 1-2 abilities per class maximum.
Actually no. If you had bothered to look at Wildstars combat you would know that you have builders and finishers like TSW, but the rest of the skills are situational, so you cant dumb it down into one button macros like most multi-hotbar MMOs.
Furthermore, Guild Wars 1 had a far better combat system than most MMOs could even dream of by using a single hotbar with 8 skills. Each of those skills was important and highly varied and situational. You weren't just spamming away in damage priorities. Making builds was far more strategic than anything I have seen in these cluttered hotbar MMOs.
I have yet to see a MMO that justifies having 50+ skills on multiple hotbars. These aren't 50 situational skills we are talking about, its just clutter.
1) Builders and finishers are the same type of attacks that wow has on the rogue class for example. Thanks for proving my point about the skills being almost IDENTICAL to what you have in Wow. The difference beeing, in Wow I can have multiple finishing options and builders, where in TSW you are rather limited in your utility with these types of moves. Pressing one button 5 times and then a finishing move is not a deep combo system. But yes, it is conceivable to make a macro of some sort that hits the key 5 times and then hits the other key for a finisher. This is very simple stuff, not some complex system you are making it sound like. Even with limited macros, using your logic you could use far fewer than 10 buttons.
2) Guildwars 1 combat system was aweful in regard to player skill. Heck, a lot of people couldn't even use their 8th skill for anything but a simple resurection skill. 8 skills was limiting and repetitive.
3) Again, I said 15-20, not 50+ a lot of people here keep building strawman. Just because I want more active abilities doesn't mean I think we need to cover the screen in hotbars.
1) In TSW there is nothing stopping you from using multiple finishers for variation / different effects. You can put whatever you feel like on your hotbar, did you even play the game? In WoW you only use two, one to keep up a dot and one as direct damage while the dot is going. Hardly rocket science and both go into a macro very easily. You are proving my point by saying how shallow WoWs system is. You don't need all those cluttered hotbar skills when they can be easily macroed. All it does is create slightly different visuals, that could be easily copied by just having the attack change visually on multiple presses and go through a combo.
I actually play WoW at the moment (mostly to be social with friends), and I only use one hotbar with macros and my rogue tops the damage meters in raids and does very well in arenas. People saying you need 30 keybinds are just talking shit. Two damage macros (single and ae) and the rest of the hotbar is just the situational stuff (smoke bomb, vanish etc).
The bottom line is that if the combat is so shallow that you can macro the same rotation for optimal results, the system is broken. Fewer skills which actually require thought as to why you are pressing them is much better than the static rotations that these cluttered hotbar mess games offer.
2) Clearly you didn't play GW1 in competitive PvP. It had the most tactical combat out of any MMO style game to date, taking a resurrect skill (and which type of resurrect - signet, secondary class, life sacrifice etc) was a choice you had to make. A lot of spike builds did not take resurrect.
3) Having limited available skills actually brings more tactics and depth into a game. If everyone of your class has access to all 20 skills available all the time like you suggest, then you are just a cookie cutter copy of everybody else, how boring. As I said, most games I have played with limited hotbars have had far more tactical and interesting combat than the billion WoW and EQ2 copies I have played. Macros and whack-a-mole combat, no thanks. Looking forward to the next gen of games.
Also FYI, GW1 is one of the top selling PC games of all time, no way in hell could you call it a failure. People did not play it for short stretches, the game was packed all the way up until Eye of the North, people stopped playing once they stopped updating the game. The game had one of the most active PvP communities around, and kept me playing for longer than any MMO other than EQ2 has managed.
but it's failing, which was the point of the thread.
Neverwinter isn't failing because of the combat, in fact that's the only reason its still afloat to be honest. Its failing because of poorly designed dungeons / encounters, poor end game, missing classes and a heavy handed cash shop. The combat itself is great fun and rewards good movement and timing.
I agree completely and the reason I stopped playing a couple months after launch. The combat was really fun though.
I, respectfully, have to disagree with the game needing that many active skills available. I enjoy having a lot of skills to chose from because it means I can adapt to almost any situation but having more than 8-10 skills to worry about would actually be a bit of a problem in a game like Wildstar.
In a game like Rift, or SWTOR, or WoW, or any other number of examples it's either A: Walk out of an AoE once in a while, kite, or just face-tank the enemy. There's plenty of time to decide what skills you want to use, how to react to a situation, so on and so forth (Never mind how the time needed to make decisions decreases the more adept a player becomes in playing the game). Having plenty of skills works fine in a setting like that but there's one thing I've always noticed: People fall into skill rotations (From my personal experience, 8-10 abilities with the occasional 11th or 12th to break a CC or move about an area). So being limited to 8-10 abilities isn't necessarily a bad thing. When raiding, it's all about perfecting the skill rotation either manually or via macro and moving now and then to adapt to the fight. The better your personal stats are for the fight the better it is for the raid. Most of (In my case, at least) my attention goes to trying to max out my DPS/HPS and using the correct skills at the right time. I'm only constantly moving if the fight demands that I do so and even then it's not hard to WASD about. Hell, I've found myself watching the boss fight out of the corner of my vision while focusing on that skill bar before - especially when I have to break rotation to react to a situation.
In a game like Wildstar there's telegraphs popping up constantly. While I do like the idea of having plenty of variety in my skills in this case having that many would end up making it harder and very frustrating to play the game. Instead of being able to focus on using skills it looks like attention has to be focused on the fight itself lest you want to die in a matter of seconds. That means someone has to know their skills without having to look at them and doing so gets harder and harder the more abilities one has to use. It's all a matter of where focus needs to be given and I think in Wildstar's case the game is better off with a wide variety of skills to pick from and limiting the number of active skills to 8-10, thus allowing focus to be applied to gameplay (Well, telegraphs) instead of the action bar. I'm not saying variety is a bad thing, but in this case I believe it's critical to give whatever is happening to your character more attention than your skill bar.
As far as the title of the thread goes.. I'm sorry but that's just flat-out absurd. No MMO will ever fail because they restrict the number of skills/abilities you can slot. If an MMO fails it's just not good as a whole or has severe issues like no end-game, boring progression, uninteresting combat, etc. Even then a bad MMO can easily run for more than a year. Honestly? The only thing that could have a hope of making Wildstar "fail" is NCSoft by making stupid decisions like interfering with Wildstar's development. Not having a buffet table full of abilities as your action bar simply will not make an MMO fail - there's no argument that could possibly make that statement factually true.
Every class gets at least 30 abilities to choose from, that seems like a lot of variety. And with all the combinations possible you're not not so likely to find two people with the same selection, so that's like variety squared.
My point is variety in active combat, it is not about variety when you are sitting at a skill/ability screen.
You barely have enough room for any utility abilities or defense buffs with 10 total skills if you are a DPS class for example. So the range of things your character can do in a fight is severely limited, that is the point.
And again, I am asking for around 15-20 actions, not 1 million like other posters here have implied.
I agree with his point, though I would not draw such strong conclusions as: "It is going to fail in the long run".
Apparently some people like fewer abilities and that's that.
But it's also a reality that if you have very few abilities, it suddenly becomes much harder to fit diversity in there.
If you try to add both utility and DPS and something else in there you're gonna end up being good at nothing. At least in GW2 you saw clear-cut builds going for a very specific role, in contrast to the focus on eliminating things like the trinity.
Some classes were exeptions, and those were the ones I enjoyed most: the elementalist and engineer.
It depends on what you like for playstyle. Perhaps you like being put in that one role you can do well. Personally I like choices inside even a single fight: that way you can start out going full offense for example, only to switch back to defense-based utility to recover afterwards.
Fights are more dynamic for me if I have access to more kinds of play.
It's also not even needed to fill multiple hotbars in order to have more active abilities, you can put in a system of stances or styles to switch between. Like GW2's weapons or attunements or Age of Wushu's different martial arts sets.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Originally posted by fantasyfreak112 Agree with OP. Part of the reason GW2 got boring so fast was the lack of usable abilities made the gameplay dry up faster then Joan Rivers. No idea why companies think this is a good feature to copy. Sick of every other new game having a cheesy dodge roll too. It isn't even used to dodge, it's just a cheesy 1 second immunity whether you roll right into the attack or not.
i would completely disagree with you.
the problem, imo, with gw2 was not the number of abilities, but infact much larger things.
1. no pure healers, the reason the holy trinity has been around so long is because it appeals to such a large amount of people, it gives everyone something they prefer doing, remove that and you destroy 1/5th of your consumers.
2. most of the classes feel too similar. people want things to really stand out, but alot of the classes feel like M&M's. different colors, same taste.
3. poor endgame, pvp and pve content were both released too slow. same mistake warhammer made.
even after all this a ton of people still play gw2 though, but i positive that it wasnt the limited action set that hindered them, it was the other much larger aspects of the game that did. also, i have a theory that many people have a preference for slightly lighter and more cartoony graphics. something about them soothes people and makes them prefer to play, check the interview or world of warcraft in general if you want some proof of that. my theory is darker, more realistic graphics cause people to be slightly more depressed than lighter brighter graphics, something like comparing people who dont get much sunlight and not even vitamin D, they have depression. just my theory though.
Comments
1) pointing out flawed logic like that is not opinion.
2) You keep using the same flawed logic in every post, macros are not relevant to the discussion. The pros and cons of macros can be debated elsewhere, the ability to use over 10 abilities is a seperate issue. And no, all of those skills cannot be dumbed down into 4-7 macros. There are more than 4 situational skills per character that wouldn't work well on a macro. Stuff like levetation, emergency defense buffs, mage teleport etc. etc . The macros would only work for some (not all) sequencial combat chains. So what you are saying is utterly false even if we accept your idiotic flawed premise.
[mod edit]
Obviously you are not going to see what others are saying. That's cool. I have respect for anyone that stands their ground right or wrong. This is one of those agree to disagree moments. You can continue to get on everyone that diagrees that the logic is flawed. Which for some reason i think of star trek every time i read it. I can keep saying come on these are your opinions.
I would honestly say everyone is going to hold where they are. The subject is going much like politics. It depends on your personal veiw
<img src='http://lotrosigs.level3.turbine.com/0320200000031cd29/signature.png'></img>;
Obviously you have never played Wow or Rift.
Dear people with nostalgia goggles:
Previous themepark games had dozens of abilities because most of them were in high cooldown. If you ignore abilities with CDs higher than 30 seconds, you will find that you need somewhere around 10 skills in PvE and about 15 in PvP. The higher number in PvP is because you potentially face X classes instead of one scripted mob and you need the equivalent tools, again you are not using all of them against everyone.
High cooldown ability-design is bad for various reasons that are beyond the scope of this topic. If you want to debate about it start a thread on General discussion.
----------------
We don't need a king of MMOs, we need a group of Titans so that everyone can play what suits them best.
-Ascension08
They were on high CD because if I could spam mindblast and smite everyone would die. Which is why the damage in instacast action combat mmos is pretty low. Even the action combat games that work have CDs for the bigger skills and most of them are frankly bad games. Sometimes people are nostalgic for a reason. Besides were not talking about ancient history here, we are talking about this current gen of games as in this last 2 years of releases and none of those games are catching anyones imagination so far.
Well he actually meant 1 macro.
And I did play both and yes you could successfully do endgame with 1 macro in each.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
We are talking about abilities with CDs higher than 30 seconds. The ones that were ~10 exist for two main reasons:
For PvE, it's because they need to add complexity to the otherwise boring rotations. It reinforces theorycrafting and adds more "builds" in the game. For PvP, as you mention, it's for balancing factors. Wildstar has its fair share of abilities like those, and as you did in WoW, you usually have 1 or 2 that you commonly use.
The fact that Warriors had Shieldwall / Retaliation / Recklessness with 30 minute cooldown, for example, helped no-one. Abilities like that in PvE were either a get out of jail card, if someone fucked up, or a necessary tool for a mechanic, which meant that the mechanic could have been designed without that CD in mind in the first place. In PvP they provided an exponential increase in power that could be matched by either a high CD ability of your own or Crowd Control.
And the last part is the important one. Wildstar does not have hard Crowd Control, so there is no need whatsoever to have high cooldown abilities to counter those. Not having a need for high cooldown abilities means that the number of abilities you need access to in order to perform satisfactory, are reduced .
(I have to point that wildstar has some 30 and 45 sec CD utility abilities that are taunts / stuns / and the like. Still nothing like the abilities we see in WoW).
----------------
We don't need a king of MMOs, we need a group of Titans so that everyone can play what suits them best.
-Ascension08
Not a fan of the dumbed down RPG's with just 5 active skills, prefer the more tactical MMO's with tons of active skills available for clicking for tactical reasons mostly.
Also there is a reason we have freakin' 100+ keys on the keyboard and 7+ on the mice!
Missing the old days when RPG's were tactics orientated, not like these new age MMORPG's which are just stupid button smashing arcady action games.
The UI in MMOs have reached critical mass and its time they stopped adding needless complexity and pretend its "tactical".
That is just painful to read. I fear game combat system evolution should be the least of your worries.
all these games you sead failed are still going srong and have strong communitys how are these fails i think your closed minded and you balieve your opinion is the only one that matters
I disagree completely with you. I played many games with few skills and had fun. I believe gaming needs to get out of twitched combat styles of massive skills. ? It old sorry and no-skill just button rotations. ? Sad. When will games evolve to be skill based where a player is not rated by his gear and how fast he can mash skill rotations. Give me an honest combat system with some magic involved and a skill to skill combat system where to win I have to out play and have skill and be a good player and not just mash buttons and stand there like a dolt. You all are no-skill and complain too much. I want a combat system that's evolved.
There. Better?
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
GW1 had the most incredible skill system I've seen in any MMO I've played, the sheer amount of builds and ways to play you could put together just by using different skill setups was incredible. The limited action bar MADE that game, and if Wildstar can do the same I will be happy. It was never about using each skill individually and wondering why one thing did the same as the next, it was about looking for interactions and chains between abilities, something that just hasn't been replicated in other games (even GW2) quite as well, I'm hoping Wildstar will pull it off. The underlying fact is I used more skills in GW1 on a regular basis than I have in probably any other mmo I've played, including things like WoW and EQ1/2.
Depth is about how you apply and use the skills, not how many you can use at once.
As a point, try actually running through the skills you use in your current mmo in a combat situation (And I don't mean things like Path of Frost on a DK in WoW for example, they've already said in Wildstar you should have access to a utility bar) and I suspect it won't be anywhere NEAR as high as you think it is.
Barely.
Play for fun. Play to win. Play for perfection. Play with friends. Play in another world. Why do you play?
Neverwinter isn't failing because of the combat, in fact that's the only reason its still afloat to be honest. Its failing because of poorly designed dungeons / encounters, poor end game, missing classes and a heavy handed cash shop. The combat itself is great fun and rewards good movement and timing.
1) In TSW there is nothing stopping you from using multiple finishers for variation / different effects. You can put whatever you feel like on your hotbar, did you even play the game? In WoW you only use two, one to keep up a dot and one as direct damage while the dot is going. Hardly rocket science and both go into a macro very easily. You are proving my point by saying how shallow WoWs system is. You don't need all those cluttered hotbar skills when they can be easily macroed. All it does is create slightly different visuals, that could be easily copied by just having the attack change visually on multiple presses and go through a combo.
I actually play WoW at the moment (mostly to be social with friends), and I only use one hotbar with macros and my rogue tops the damage meters in raids and does very well in arenas. People saying you need 30 keybinds are just talking shit. Two damage macros (single and ae) and the rest of the hotbar is just the situational stuff (smoke bomb, vanish etc).
The bottom line is that if the combat is so shallow that you can macro the same rotation for optimal results, the system is broken. Fewer skills which actually require thought as to why you are pressing them is much better than the static rotations that these cluttered hotbar mess games offer.
2) Clearly you didn't play GW1 in competitive PvP. It had the most tactical combat out of any MMO style game to date, taking a resurrect skill (and which type of resurrect - signet, secondary class, life sacrifice etc) was a choice you had to make. A lot of spike builds did not take resurrect.
3) Having limited available skills actually brings more tactics and depth into a game. If everyone of your class has access to all 20 skills available all the time like you suggest, then you are just a cookie cutter copy of everybody else, how boring. As I said, most games I have played with limited hotbars have had far more tactical and interesting combat than the billion WoW and EQ2 copies I have played. Macros and whack-a-mole combat, no thanks. Looking forward to the next gen of games.
Also FYI, GW1 is one of the top selling PC games of all time, no way in hell could you call it a failure. People did not play it for short stretches, the game was packed all the way up until Eye of the North, people stopped playing once they stopped updating the game. The game had one of the most active PvP communities around, and kept me playing for longer than any MMO other than EQ2 has managed.
I agree completely and the reason I stopped playing a couple months after launch. The combat was really fun though.
I, respectfully, have to disagree with the game needing that many active skills available. I enjoy having a lot of skills to chose from because it means I can adapt to almost any situation but having more than 8-10 skills to worry about would actually be a bit of a problem in a game like Wildstar.
In a game like Rift, or SWTOR, or WoW, or any other number of examples it's either A: Walk out of an AoE once in a while, kite, or just face-tank the enemy. There's plenty of time to decide what skills you want to use, how to react to a situation, so on and so forth (Never mind how the time needed to make decisions decreases the more adept a player becomes in playing the game). Having plenty of skills works fine in a setting like that but there's one thing I've always noticed: People fall into skill rotations (From my personal experience, 8-10 abilities with the occasional 11th or 12th to break a CC or move about an area). So being limited to 8-10 abilities isn't necessarily a bad thing. When raiding, it's all about perfecting the skill rotation either manually or via macro and moving now and then to adapt to the fight. The better your personal stats are for the fight the better it is for the raid. Most of (In my case, at least) my attention goes to trying to max out my DPS/HPS and using the correct skills at the right time. I'm only constantly moving if the fight demands that I do so and even then it's not hard to WASD about. Hell, I've found myself watching the boss fight out of the corner of my vision while focusing on that skill bar before - especially when I have to break rotation to react to a situation.
In a game like Wildstar there's telegraphs popping up constantly. While I do like the idea of having plenty of variety in my skills in this case having that many would end up making it harder and very frustrating to play the game. Instead of being able to focus on using skills it looks like attention has to be focused on the fight itself lest you want to die in a matter of seconds. That means someone has to know their skills without having to look at them and doing so gets harder and harder the more abilities one has to use. It's all a matter of where focus needs to be given and I think in Wildstar's case the game is better off with a wide variety of skills to pick from and limiting the number of active skills to 8-10, thus allowing focus to be applied to gameplay (Well, telegraphs) instead of the action bar. I'm not saying variety is a bad thing, but in this case I believe it's critical to give whatever is happening to your character more attention than your skill bar.
As far as the title of the thread goes.. I'm sorry but that's just flat-out absurd. No MMO will ever fail because they restrict the number of skills/abilities you can slot. If an MMO fails it's just not good as a whole or has severe issues like no end-game, boring progression, uninteresting combat, etc. Even then a bad MMO can easily run for more than a year. Honestly? The only thing that could have a hope of making Wildstar "fail" is NCSoft by making stupid decisions like interfering with Wildstar's development. Not having a buffet table full of abilities as your action bar simply will not make an MMO fail - there's no argument that could possibly make that statement factually true.
I agree with his point, though I would not draw such strong conclusions as: "It is going to fail in the long run".
Apparently some people like fewer abilities and that's that.
But it's also a reality that if you have very few abilities, it suddenly becomes much harder to fit diversity in there.
If you try to add both utility and DPS and something else in there you're gonna end up being good at nothing. At least in GW2 you saw clear-cut builds going for a very specific role, in contrast to the focus on eliminating things like the trinity.
Some classes were exeptions, and those were the ones I enjoyed most: the elementalist and engineer.
It depends on what you like for playstyle. Perhaps you like being put in that one role you can do well. Personally I like choices inside even a single fight: that way you can start out going full offense for example, only to switch back to defense-based utility to recover afterwards.
Fights are more dynamic for me if I have access to more kinds of play.
It's also not even needed to fill multiple hotbars in order to have more active abilities, you can put in a system of stances or styles to switch between. Like GW2's weapons or attunements or Age of Wushu's different martial arts sets.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Smite has a grand total of four abilities for each God and I have fun playing it constantly.
It just depends on the combat and the abilities themselves.
i would completely disagree with you.
the problem, imo, with gw2 was not the number of abilities, but infact much larger things.
1. no pure healers, the reason the holy trinity has been around so long is because it appeals to such a large amount of people, it gives everyone something they prefer doing, remove that and you destroy 1/5th of your consumers.
2. most of the classes feel too similar. people want things to really stand out, but alot of the classes feel like M&M's. different colors, same taste.
3. poor endgame, pvp and pve content were both released too slow. same mistake warhammer made.
even after all this a ton of people still play gw2 though, but i positive that it wasnt the limited action set that hindered them, it was the other much larger aspects of the game that did. also, i have a theory that many people have a preference for slightly lighter and more cartoony graphics. something about them soothes people and makes them prefer to play, check the interview or world of warcraft in general if you want some proof of that. my theory is darker, more realistic graphics cause people to be slightly more depressed than lighter brighter graphics, something like comparing people who dont get much sunlight and not even vitamin D, they have depression. just my theory though.