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Less is more skills
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
The new trend in MMO´s is giving players less skills to play with, and thats something i worry about. Sure i do, like all sane players prefer the uncluttered look of those intefaces. But it takes away one major and to me very important part of the game. It disallows me to react to the different situations a game throws at me. In generally having less then 10 actuall skills will end up with players having a single rotation and/or having a single role in a group.
I prefer play where you need to adapt your role depending on the situation, i.e. where a healer needs to help prevent damage at a certain moment instead of healing, or where the backup healer should do DPS untill his healing skills are neeeded. Or for example a DPS class that switches to offtanking or crowd controlling when needed. Actually having people fullfill different roles during a single fight. This cant be done with few skills and so that takes away from the tactical part of the game.
It would be so easy as to give players different stances either tight to weapons or not, that allow them to quickly change their role during combat. And it would even turn up the fun in PvP to, as it would allow you not to spec to counter a single build but you could have like 3 different counters and more.
Anyway, to few skills in my opinion simplifies combat to much and takes away a huge part of the tactical gameplay (gameplay consistest of 3 major parts : tactical taking the right decisions at the right moments : strategical planning a fight ahead of combat : reflexes : reacting to the environment on time and in real time) These new games like Neverwinter, TSW, wildstar and such neglect one of those 3 parts. and thats a shame.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Comments
OP you barking up the wrong tree. I mentioned this in GW2 forum during the hype days and had a poster counter the argument pretty well. Dont feel like digging it up.
But that user also countered the argument that F2P/B2B is P2W and even had people believing P2P is P2W.
B=)
Very good debater. Anybody know what happen to that person?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Good Observation Lord..
I wish talent trees was something that didn't exist until max level.. I really enjoyed the concept of AA's as EQ started it, and I hate the idea that AA, skills or talent tree points are nerfed for PvE fun because of the effect it has on PvP play.. I believe the less is more is just to make balance easier to deal with.. It also makes dungeon encounters easier to design.. In any case when you give people the freedom to choose where to point their talent points in, you will get a min/max outcome and often that variance is too wide and it effect a players performance in a dungeon group.. Easiest way to make sure Mr Max doesn't steamroll a dungeon with ease is to nerf player options..
This is all part of the devs control issue.. From level 1 to max level a dev controls a players ability to play the game.. The invisible walls are so clear to some of us, it has actually become a turn off, and many of us refuse to play that way.. If I had my way.. I like a normal progression from 1st to max level, then give the player the ability to customize their character as they see fit using an AA system..
Actually GW2 has a great system, atleast some of the classes can have 30 or more skills and depending on weapon/kit/focus change their role and functionallity entirely. I think GW2 is one of the few games if not the only game that has a simplified UI while still having tactical choices.
You must have misunderstood the GW2, because this was actually the part of combat they really nailed (sadly they moved away from other things that spice up groupcombat like the trinity) or i misunderstood your comments on the GW2 topic.
Anyway, GW2 is certainly not a game that has to few skills, or forces people intoo singlefocussed builds.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
In my opinion you have to look at both. Because for me it is important to have a clean UI(or almost no disturbing UI at all) and at the same time a lot of useful tactical options. It is not a either .. or .. decision, it have to be a how do it to achieve both.
Different stances is one way to achieve it. You skillset could be dependent on weapons, but at the same time dependent on target. Target a enemy player and your skillset affecting the enemy player are available. Target a allied player and your skillset for helping(buff/heal) your allies are available. Target a ground target and your skillset with different GTAE spells are available. Target yourself and a different skillset with selfbuffs/selfheals are available. Target noone, and a skillset for PBAE spells are available.
Another options is to manually switch to different stances(as another options for more skills) like 3 different available stances, which you can define like you want, like a more defensive stance, a offensive stance or a more mixed stance, but it should be in the end player defined.
With such a separation you could at once minimize how many skils you have at any give situation, as example like 6 skills for any given set. But you could switch those 6 skills very fast to 3 times for stances, and like 3 times for different weapons, and 5 times for different targets that would be a 66 skills in one combat. And to top that one. You should be able to define your different skillsets completely so you can choose from what ever amount of available skills to fill those 11 different skillsets a 6 skills.
With a system like that you would accomplish to have a more clean UI, to have only a handful usefull skills per situation, but be viable, tactical flexible, and with a huge amount of skills at your disposal at any given time.
And in all honestly, this would be just one way to accomplish something like that, i can imagine that there are a lot of different solutions to accomplish the exact same thing differently.
And by the way... in my solution i did not included combos, or positional skills, which could change automaticly as required, which would increase so total amount even more.
But another problem is, at least in my mind, that you do have a lot of skills which are more or less exactly the same as similar skills you already have. Skills have to be really different, really have to be usefull. And it is not that easy to come up with more than 100 unique and usefull skills, especially when we talk only about combat. Because in non combat situation your UI could be completely different too.
Finally as i said in the beginning, you have to look for ways to accomplish both, and as i showed you, it is entirely possible to have just a few skills and a clean UI at any given time, but at the same time a huge amount of skills to your disposal. Because really.. the time for a UI filling up the Screen with skillbars all over the place is over... it have to be gone, because it just detract from actual playing the game. But that does not have to mean, that you have to sacrifice the diversity of skills available.
Yeap. That part may be rather part... but the exesive use of cooldowns, and especially longer cooldowns really draw me down. And it also reduced the total amount of actual useable skills massive.. so you had in a lot of situations just the choice between 2 or 3 skills, and sometimes even worst. In my opinion cooldowns are a good way to ruin your combat system. Especially the extensive use of it. To have 1 - 2 skills with a cooldown may have some sense, but that almost all skills have a huge cooldown is lazy or uncreative design.. but that is another discussion and rather off topic.
The only problem is when the simplification actually reduces game depth. Unfortunately, it often does with many of the few-skills MMORPGs I've tried, since those games didn't have deeper individual skills.
With fewer skills, each individual skill needs to be more dynamic. That way the "use skills to react to various situations" part remains true, even though there are fewer skills in the game.
Few skills per champion hasn't prevented LoL from being tremendously deep, and the reason why is because of how the skills are used. With a few exceptions of the shallower champions, of course...
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I don't see how comparing an arts game to an mmo is valid, also there are other games with much more depht than that...
Anyway, less skills is not entirely bad, but more skills isn't always good either when most are just redundant. Pressing a 4 instant skill combo with almost no conditions to be met is the same as pressing 1 button i.e same thing.
I do think they should move to the less skills but more skill groups. WHat I mean is, give players a choice on a smaller set of skills to use at a given time with each character having more group options to choose from (i.e different specialization groups). This puts a demand on both a) planning on picking the most optimal skillgroups for a particular engangement and b) execution for actually perming the task well with the group you picked. I find this model to be the most interesting so far, as long as most skillgroups aren't redundant of course.
Of course it's valid.
The core of what makes games fun to players doesn't change substantially from game to game. Fundamentally, players enjoy pattern mastery: the feeling of exploring, experiencing, and mastering new things.
So it doesn't matter what genre you're talking about because they're all basically the same in terms of what elements are beneficial. MOBA, RTS, or MMORPG, it just doesn't matter.
What matters is how you create a game with interesting patterns players want to explore. And you do that through dynamic gameplay, so that the game isn't a Tic Tac Toe (a too-simple pattern which burns out rapidly) but something more like Chess, LoL, WOW, Starcraft, or TF2 (games with deep patterns despite their simplicity, which stand the test of time.)
And dynamic gameplay is achieved by having lots of simple-yet-dynamic elements within the game. So instead of a shallow, flat Fireball ability which always hits your target and always deals 100 damage, you have more of a TF2 rocket launcher take on it, where it's manually aimed, only explodes on direct hit with the target or the ground, does splash damage with falloff (accuracy is rewarded,) and has a small knock-away effect. Basically the ideal is like TF2: instead of giving each MMORPG class a hundred different skills, you want to give them a handful of skills where each one has a very high skill ceiling and takes a long time for a player to master (meaning for them to figure it out, not that there's some arbitrary mastery time.)
Although as RPGs, what you might want to aim closer to is something like Magic the Gathering, where the depth isn't about twitch skill (like the TF2 rocket) but entirely about the tactical decisions (the order you use your abilities, and where you decide to target them.) Because part of the point of RPGs is to keep the twitch element light or nonexistant; that's why they appeal so broadly.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There are two ways I like my combat.
Very low user input. Where ability use is down to only a couple times a minute. Essentially abilities have such high cost(Material, Energy, or similar). But where every ability even the weakest ones matter a lot and change the course of the battle, it just seems silly to have so much interaction and not really change the course of the battle(IE: World of Everclone boss raid). I want to be able to talk to my allies/Guild-chat during combat and similar.
Or something a lot closer to what you see in iron realms. Where the point is to afflict and heal away status effects to minimize the number of actions your target can do and maximize your own. Combat is an intense proposition that can last 30 mins if both sides play "amazingly" well or 20 seconds if a couple wrong choices are made, where you're trying to out think/counter/counter-counter your enemy.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Think of Magic; the Gathering. Does the 7 card hand limit simplify the game? Does the 60 card deck limit? Would increasing either one add any meaningful depth? I know. Answer me this: Can you think of a reason why such limits would ADD depth?
Not only that, but forcing the player to choose a set of abilities from a larger pool actually puts MORE emphasis on planning and tactical thinking. Hence...
Furthermore, you are approaching the subject from a very arcaic point of view: rotations. Games with less abilities have generally more useful ones too. They're multi purpose. A good example of multi purpose abilities are utility and control skills. They are not necessarily used in rotations, but the player must identify the right situation when to use a skill to his/her best advantage. Control, in particular, can be useful for both offense and defense.
Guild Wars 1, where your skill bar could hold only 8 skills (7+1 elite), was/is one of the most demanding PvP games in the genre and has arguably the best (hotkey) combat systems. For this you earn...
I'd say your way of thinking is quite old-fashioned and much of what you talk about has little to do with the amount of skills available to you at one time. Combat roles, for example, are affected by objectives, game mechanics, skill design as well as encounter and map design. I'd say the number of skills you have in your skillbar is not high on the list to affect combat roles.
More is not necessarily better and complexity is not the same as depth. If you can take that in, you're going to be a better gamer, better poster - just a better person in general.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Its not the number of skills available to the player at one time, it is how you use what is available to you.
Some people understand that sometimes "more" doesnt add depth, it just adds needless complications.
The Chinese board game Go, on the surface, may seem simple as it is just placing black and white stones on a grid but it is one of the most complexly strategic game ever made and has been around for over 2000 years.
Adding 30 different types of stones to Go wouldnt make it more complex it would ruin the game.
I generally perceive high amount of skills as bad game design, tbh. Most games I play hardly have too many of them, it's certain MMO's that generated far too much for no apparent reason. I think it generally came from simplification of advancement systems (compare WoW or even Rift to DnD), and from trying to generate something to fill up levels with.
I personally felt GW2's organization of skills was pretty good, and I definitely prefer multi-purpose skills with drawbacks and bonuses to where every skill does some singular thing, that's both unrealistic and clutterly... GW2 was very well done as far as sPvP theorycrafting was concerned.
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW
Currently playing: GW2, EVE
Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
Your magic the gathering example doesn't work. Yes, the game is pretty complex, even with only 7 cards. But it would be more complex with 8. Thats just a fact. Cutting peoples skill limits from all skills to say 5 DOES decrease the complexity. It's not simple, sure this is very true. But it is far LESS complex than it could be.
You are 100% correct that smaller skills puts a larger emphasis on planning. You are fairly wrong on the skills being more useful however. First off, this blanket statement is not static. Many games have BAD balance. Secondly, and MOST importantly, when you give people an ultimatum of skills they can use, you know what happens? They number crunch. This results in people finding very quickly which skills are useful and which skills should never be used. Because when you have a small set of skills you can use, you literally cannot afford to fill a spot with dead weight, especially if there is a better option.
Both systems have their merits. A system where you see all of your skills available to you means that every skill can have value and thus will be used. The downside is that there is virtually no planning, and it becomes incredibly cluttered. A system where you have a select few of your skills available to you means that you develop an intrinsic understanding of your skills and can plan and design your character to be effective. It adds more customization. The downside is that if a skill is bad, it may as well not even exist, because people will find little reason to use it and many reasons to never touch it.
Completely agree with OP. I think he makes a very valid point. More skills simply add more personality to the static avatars we play over the internet. While I consider GW2 a much better game then SWTOR, I could never get attached to any of my characters in GW2 because they just didn't do anything interesting. At least in games like SWTOR, WoW, EQ2, EQ, ect. there are so many abilities that just add more character to your avatar. Even simple things like building a fire, eating a dead corpse, throwing an offheal, raising totems, these abilities diversify the gameplay and make things less monotonous.
Or have no rotation.
This whole "rotation" thing is one of the worse parts of gaming I've ever seen.
How about just have skills that allow you to act and react depending on what the opponent does?
I'm all for the less skills trend. I'm also more for the action combat trend as I find it more immediate and visceral. I imagine the "less skills trend" might go better with an action combat system.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
In my MTG example, I was talking about depth, not complexity. The two mean two different things. Rule of thumb is to avoid complexity if it doesn't create depth. That is the needless complexity people keep referring to. Furthermore, the hand limit in MTG enabled new tactics to beat your opponent (such as forcing your opponent to discard cards). So if you increased the hand limit, such tactics would be less viable, hence, actually reducing depth.
Even more so: if you can simply hoard cards (or in MMORPGs case, skills), you could potentially be ready for anything at any time reducing the need for meaningful decision making. Yes, a huge skillbar is complicated, but complexity is not the same as depth!
And people number crunch in every game. Every single one. Regarding the size of the skillbar, there's no difference.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
You make some very good points that I cannot argue with.
Depth in any skill set is very critical to making good game play, However having a skill bar of 5 versus 10 versus 20 doesn't inherently do that. a skill bar of 5 can have absolutely no depth to it while a skill bar of 20 can have as much depth as possible. I don't necessarily agree with your assessment that increasing the hand limit can reduce depth, because by the same token, adding another card to your hand gives you another card that can synergies with your previous 7. That adds more depth.
I actually hope that the GW2 skill slots are here to stay.
I really don't see the point of having 50 spell available on my GUI when I can barely remember what they are for and where they are located...............
MMORPGs needs less but more defined skills.
I don't need an attack that makes 100 damage, another that make 150 damage but with longer cooldown, another that make 80 direct damage and 20 DOTs................sorry I can't be arsed
I need a couple of main attacks, a CC skill, a DOT attack, a movement skill, a couple of Buffs, and few utility skills.
Everything else should be pure player skills.
Having choice is always good, but I believe that having a total 30 skills to chose from (only 10 sloatable) for each Class is more than enough to have fun.
So, although I don't like GW2, I believe that its skill system is the way to go.
I'm going with this.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
GW2 does have one thing going for it.
Even some of it's newbie abilities do more than some of the most complex abilities in other MMOs. The same goes for level of interaction with other skills and similar. The paladin(called guardian in the game, but lets be honest it's a paladin) has a several knock backs, wards which control the area and are a knock down if ran into(which interacts with knock backs to become a longer knock down), A knock down, Abilities that buff the paladin if they stay in a small area(helping with their wards and their knock backs/downs), And mechanics that really really help the party if they are around them.
Players are offered all this in the first couple of hours of play which is more depth than some MMOs offer with their 50 skills. Demonstrating a class based system can be pretty awesome with good design, especially when I described a simple/newbie class.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."