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[Column] General: Taking Your Turn in Turn-based MMOs
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In preparation for an upcoming livestream with the developers of Wakfu, I logged into the game in the hopes of touching up on my skills. Wakfu can be challenging for casual players, with abilities and systems that often need to be played with a lot in order to understand them. One of the coolest aspects of the game – other than its original setting, artwork, systems and animations -- is its turn-based combat.
Read more of Beau Hindman's A Casual, Cornered: Taking Your Turn in Turn-based MMOs.
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Comments
Wakfu was a great game in it's infant stages. Ever since they moved to Open Beta it became a massive #$%^storm with devs being distant, way too many nerfs, large amounts of support tickets not being answered, large number of game-breaking bugs not getting fixed timely (6 months - 1+ years), newbie unfriendly community, etc.
With the addition of F2P they also added a quest system which kills the open-ended sandbox feel of the game.
TL:DR Wakfu is crap. Don't waste your time.
Now, which one of you will adorn me today?
I like wizard101 but seem armor pierce getting little overpower because I just think unfair for tank wizard and also storm seem be to overpower and if was me people complain every talent/spell mostly likely resist and rather just give everyone a immunity resist get people stop complain about tank talent because nobody wouldn't care about resist/immunity because high armor pierce unless give tank wizard immunity to armor pierce?
That's Atlantica Online. It becomes much larger in scale later on.
Beau
W101 was not designed for armor piercing,that idea was imo rushed into action because they could not thin k of a better idea.The design was made to work well to level 50,after that they needed an idea to keep players coming back for more levels.It all ended at Waterworks,after that Wizards became stagnant better spells were just more costly making them not very useful just really a bad direction and yes most the time if not always they are resists by the bosses the ONLY fights that really matter,so ya wizards became stagnant.
Personally i don't mind turn based but it needs a LOT of planning for the long haul.The main problem that will ALWAYS haunt turn based is WHO goes first and last.The more players involved makes going last even worse yet,so it can really hamper the design.The only idea i can think of is to rotate first and last each round,so if last,then first next round.
Even still you have to be careful about the damage,if you can go first on a turn where you can wipe everyone out in one swoop it again ruins the design,so in a way turn based is not really the best option for game design.it is not even as casual as you think either,as i said if you can only sit there and watch your opponent or a npc wipe you out one swoop,not much fun there.It doesn't even have to be a 1 shot kill,if they get you near death,you spend all yoru time healing to save yourself from the next turn dying.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I've been tempted to give Wakfu another shot. I tried it a while back and could not get into it. It has all the elements of a game I would like.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I do enjoy turned based games, I spent way too much time in AoW3 with friends the last year.
But for me the MMO genre is far from the perfect fit for those mechanics, not because of the amount of players but because MMOs are something that I keep playing for along time (same game and character) and for some reason that doesn't work for me with this type of games.
The closest one was SSIs "Neverwinter nights" (not to be confused with Biowares game later named after it, or worse, Cryptics), not sure I would call it a MMO since MMOs kinda didn't exist at the time butit was the one I liked best still.
Then again, taste differs and I can understand why turned based combat is a good idea.
With over 300 million register users, the pay to play Chinese turned based MMORPG Fantasy Westward Journey is arguably the most successful turn based MMORPG to date.
In 2009, during the launch of Atlantica Online (AO) in China, when faced by Chinese game journalists, Kim Taegon the Korean producer of AO was reported as saying that when developing AO they studied the systems in Fantasy Westward Journey in depth "since it is best game of its genre". AO eventually flopped in China even with a F2P model from day 1.
Meanwhile, published in 2003, Fantasy Westward Journey is still going strong in 2015 and the major earner for its developer Netease with over 2 million peak concurrent users paying USD 0.10 per hour to play (for comparison Chinese WoW players pay Netease the equivalent of USD 0.11 per hour).
"A game is fun if it is learnable but not trivial" -- Togelius & Schmidhuber
Wait, Wakfu went F2P? Last I heard they were clinging to their $5 subscription.
fire wizard is a chicken (scare facing life) easy kill fire when your life (use guardian spirit) make fire wizard force them to FLEE!