Our Challenge
Written By: Lemming
I was soloing for a while Everquest 2 the other day, and I came to an astounding realization that probably will not endear me very much with the readers of this column. Nevertheless, the realization is so mind-bogglingly clear that it begs to be discussed.
I realized that what I was doing took no skill.
I suppose it takes a little bit of skill to distinguish between monsters with different colours of names, and to keep your distance from ones you know you can't kill. Challenge and skill requirements are upped again when you add in group and raid management. For the most part however, skill requirements for the solo portion of the game are limited to the motor skills necessary to click certain buttons repeatedly in a certain order.
Now, I can remember the days of the original Everquest, where fighting as a warrior-type class often meant hitting the auto attack button and then going to the kitchen to make a sandwich. Clearly, the combat system in Everquest 2 is an improvement, at least in terms of keeping your attention at the computer. Still, I couldn't help but wonder what sorts of things could be done to improve combat in MMORPGs.
When I left off last week, I had posed the question, "Can MMORPGs ever aspire to be a truly immersive, cinematic experience?" If you take MMORPGs in their present state - a number crunching game where battles are decided by abstract combinations of button strokes - then your answer should be something along the lines of, "You're kidding, right?"
I think that the solution to our problem lies in a number of key elements in the MMORPG design, one of the most important being the humble combat system, and surprisingly enough, the lack of skill currently involved in manipulating it.
For some reason, whenever someone mentions adding skill-based elements to MMORPGs, a collective groan emerges from the community. I've never understood why that is. Maybe to some of us, the low amount of skill required in order to be competitive in an MMORPG is comforting. I'm sure that a fair share of us have been humiliatingly defeated at one time or another in a strategy or action game. However, adding skill-based elements to combat in MMORPGs would have many clear benefits for the immersiveness of the genre on the whole.
Imagine, for example, that when warriors took to the field of battle, they were greeted with a first or third person melee combat simulator where their actions were worth as much if not more than the mere dice rolls in the background. Anyone who has played a game such as the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or Severance: Blade of Darkness should be familiar with this type of system. Essentially, you have direct control of when and where your character swings, dodges, parries, and so on; and in order to do damage to enemies, your weapon needs to actually hit them. Your character's stats affect the combat in subtle ways, such as strength increasing the damage each stroke does, and agility decreasing the amount of time your character needs to recover from an attack. Visually, the result is a fight where opponents wheel and circle around each other, trying to isolate weaknesses and gain the upper hand in any way they can.
First and foremost, I'd like to see someone try and macro a combat system like that! Oblivion in particular shows how promising, immersive, and outright exciting a well-implemented player skill-based combat system can be. Secondly, this would help to differentiate one player from another early off in the game. Not only would a warrior's ability to tank depend on his level and equipment, but also very much on how good he or she is at playing his or her part in the game.
It would take a little bit more imagination to come up with equivalent systems for the less melee-oriented classes. To this end, some of creativity would go a long way to liven up MMORPGs and break away from traditional MUD convention. Puzzles and mini-games can be crafted around all sorts of different skill sets, such as memory, reflexes, rhythm, pattern recognition, even the various different branches of mathematics, just to name a few. Imagine a wizard duel where instead of just pressing ambiguously-named buttons, the wizards were trying to outwit each other in a logic battle. Or perhaps try to envision a blademaster-type warrior/bard hybrid class that, upon detecting the proper rhythm in the battle, used it to execute an impressive display of acrobatics and administer a killing blow. Sure, it would be a heckuva lot more challenging than your standard MMORPG today, but wouldn't it also be a lot more gratifying to play?
Oh, come now. I think it would be. Where's your sense of adventure?
The main complaint about skill-based gameplay, as far as I can see, is that it does not promote equality. My 60th level paladin with some decidedly über gear is not necessarily as powerful as your 60th level paladin with equivalent gear. I have to play it as well as you do, too! Personally, I don't see this as a problem. I've played games with cookie-cutter characters for far too long, and I'd love to see some real competition as well as real differentiation in our endless sea of identical heroes.
Questions? Comments? Starting this week, feel free to head to our forum thread for some rousing MMORPG design discussion. Next week, I'll be taking a break from this train of thought to talk briefly about a couple of important items of MMORPG news from this month. But after that, I'll be right back with an article about emergent gameplay and dynamically created content.
