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Versatility - A major key to success
Zindaihas
Member UncommonPosts: 3,662
When I think about what it takes to make an MMORPG fun to play, what makes sitting at a computer for hours on end playing an online game and not get bored, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is variety; the ability to mix things up so you're not doing the same thing over and over. And this is probably one of the greatest challenges devs have to overcome. How do you make it multi-dimensional? And the more dimensions the better.
When I was in college, I took a writing fiction course and our instructor impressed upon us that it was the characters that drove the story. And basically, there are two types of characters - flat and round. Flat characters are one-dimensional, they have very little substance; in other words, they're boring. Round characters, on the other hand, are full of personality, they have multi-faceted personalities; in other words. they're interesting.
An MMORPG, like a story, is a body or work or a form of art. And as such, its characters need to be round and not flat. Thinking back on my days of playing EQ, I remember trying to make my own character as "round" or as possible. That's probably one of the reasons I chose to play a hybrid class (a ranger). And I tried to get the maximum versatility out of my character. That's why I would sometimes fight hand-to-hand (most of the time actually). But sometimes I tried to attack at a distance using my trusty bow (mostly on raids) and sometimes I would sit back and cast spells (either to deal damage or to heal group mates).
Even the specialty classes can by multi-dimensional with a little imagination. I'll never forget this one time fighting in the Dreadlands of Kunark. We were doing our routine thing, pulling and killing, when our enchanter decided he wanted to mix things up a bit. So he charmed a Drolvarg and got it to fight for us. He was the first enchanter I grouped with who did this, and I was in my mid-forties (level wise) at that point. I thought that was pretty cool. Up until then I figured enchanters had two primary functions - mezzing and mana regen. It added another dimension to the enchanter class that I was unaware of.
That's why mining and crafting are so important even though not everyone chooses to do them.
So anyway, I don't know if this an interesting topic or not, and it may have been addressed before, but I thought I'd add my two cents on the subject.
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EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
The thing I've learned is not everybody is like this. And it's not easy to figure out how it all comes together. The result has been devs catoring to the simplest answers. They're reducing the risks to a minimum--err appealing to common denominators.
I also like deep character development and skill-based systems. I want to think. Yet most players seem to not. Sid Meier sums it up best to describe most people when he said "Don't give me too many choices. I don't want to make the game to have fun." I don't agree with Sid. But my experience has been most players do. They almost always will say the systems I like are overly and unnecessarily complicated. They make a distinction between complex and complicated. Complex is good. Complicated is bad. Suffice to say I disagree again because what matters to me is whether I'm having fun.
I can usually forgive a lot of things if a game plays hard. If I die a lot then it usually qualifies. I also like "hands on" interaction. I don't like automatic things.
Sorry I can't expand more on the versatility thing. I've been jaded by all these years. I've discussed this in other forums. I have to go to work now.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
For everything else there's gear. This is something modern devs have totally forgotten. Gear is independent of class and balance.
You can do all kinds of fun stuff by creating gear sets that for instance make it easier for a warrior to stealth around at the cost of stat penalties to strength and such.
Seriously, it's like devs today don't know the difference between a dependent and independent variable and how to utilize them.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I thought after I posted this that the subject might be misleading. What I mean by versatility in this case is not making your character solo-able for most of the game. In fact, I'm against that. I'm totally in favor of group oriented games like EQ and what I hope Pantheon will be.
Rather, what I mean by versatility is being able to bend and stretch your characters to the limit so as to get as much out of them within the confines of their class. I liked the ranger because he was versatile, but was hardly able to solo at high levels. He could melee, but not as good as a tank. He could cast, but not as good as a druid. So there were sacrifices to his versatility.
So every class has its limits, but I like the idea of being able to augment your character through various means, mostly through the acquisition of equipment. Let me give you an example. In EQ, my ranger could neither increase the speed of his attacks nor slow those of mobs he was fighting. However, by obtaining my epic weapons I was able to start slowing mobs because one of my swords had that spell as a proc. And I worked like a dog to complete the Eye-patch of Plunder quest because it was able to cast a haste spell that speeded my attacks.
That's why I wrote the accompanying thread on potions because I am a big proponent of them temporarily adding to your character's repertoire.
And to Hawkeye's point about non-casters, I think it's entirely possible to make melee classes well-rounded as well. As I said, I think a lot of it can be accomplished with magic gear. Also through secondary skills and even different styles of fighting (for example, offensive posture as opposed to defensive).
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Being versatile means the player has a variety of things to do; it doesn't automatically make a character or a player able to function without help. If you can, you're probably playing a single player game, or a single player game dressed as an MMORPG. Versatility should never reduce the player's decision to 'All of them'. That sorta undercuts the importance of making a decision in the first place.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
It was great for scouting, quickly running fallen troops back out to the fight, had a couple of nice DDs for quickly catching up to and finishing heavily wounded and fleeing opponents.
Also had a quick stun for rapid get aways, I often survived most fights while others went down.
Whilebit was the most versatile class I played in game, its Midgard counterpart was the class I loved the best, especially in PVP.
It was not unusual for me to be one of the top killers in a fight, which is very uncommon for me. That class fit me like a glove....
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
That's a good point. You could almost look at it as a tug-of-war between players and devs. It's a player's job to try and make a character as self-sufficient as possible and it's the devs' job to make sure a player can never quite get there.
The one thing I could never get for my ranger that I wanted most was the ability to stun mobs. I looked everywhere for an item that would give me that skill, but to no avail. Perhaps it was by design.
Even GW2 fell into this trap after a bit where unless you were doing open world content, you pretty much needed to follow some established build to be viable.
Rangers COULD solo better than most non-hybrids and non-casters. So the argument he put forward had some merit. Is versatility tied to soloing? A little bit. It's in the word. Being versatile means being able to do many things. One reason--among several--players grouped in EQ was because they couldn't do some things well enough on their own. Eq had primarily 6 (or so) elements in its combat: dps, tanking, buffing/debuffing, healing, crowd control, utility (this is more than most MMO's it seems). Lacking in any of them will encourage a player to group. The combat encounters in EQ were designed around these elements both to give the classes a reason to exist and to control the amount of soloing and grouping.
But lets be honest for a moment. EQ didn't give anything away for free. Rangers took a hit to their damage mitigation, hitpoints, spells (they were well behind druids in healing and hot and dot), experience gain (early on) and in other areas. In Kunark, for example, their damage mitigation was further reduced. In groups, rangers were less sought after than the group-dependent classes. And grouping gave the fastest experience and the greatest rewards. Rangers traded some of their grouping power to kill weaker NPCs on their own for less experience. Many would consider this a bad tradeoff. And rangers weren't the best soloers by far. This is unlike strong solo-based MMO's. In them, soloing is nearly equal to grouping, at least until max level. And this is ignoring all of the other differences between early EQ and modern MMO's, like corpse runs, hell levels, death penalty, crowd control, trains, no maps or radar, downtime and so on.
I don't think versatility is the right word for what you're trying to convey. I think the right word is depth. Depth doesn't have to mean versatility. It could just mean doing a simple backstab requires more focus and training. For example, when I played Quake 2 and attempted to do a difficult jump. At first it was hard to do even the simplest jump (which happens to be a strafe jump). It gets even harder when the environment is less suitable. At its apex, it becomes a circle strafe speed jump in a difficult environment. It's frustratingly hard to master. None of this is about versatility. It's about accomplishing one thing: a jump.
A believe this is about having choices in the game. It's not about being able to cheat or do everything. Choices mean tradeoffs. Now I've always preferred skill-based game. Class-based games tend to make me feel like I'm pigeon-holed and railroaded. I like to build things and experiment. Whether it's by mistake or by design, I don't know.
Here're some jumps in Quake 2 (believe me it's harder than it looks):
But we don't all agree what's good gameplay or experience and tha'ts the primary reason we argue, and why there can't be a single best game for everyone. I arrived at this conclusion long ago. Most of the arguments in the forums I've visited lasted far longer than they should have merely because this point is forgotten. Find what makes you happy and spend your time there. Don't dwell on those who disagree. Most of the time it's harmless and yet we worry about it needlessly.