If we look at good old tabtargeting games like WOW or final fantasy 14, there are no alternatives right now. It seems that FF14 will be the new reference in the next 5 years, leaving WOW behind, because of strange decisions Blizzard did recently. There is a HUGE audience for this type of games, that love classic tab target combat. Let's face it, fast paced action combat ala BDO didn't make it - no one wants that, so why is no AAA gaming company investing in a big future mmorpg that can attract millions of people?
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The reason i love tab target as i was eluding to nobody else mentions it is because it frees up your fingers to do a LOT more than simply moving and aiming.The ONLY genre i can accept move and aim is fpsr's in arena maps.
Fortnite tries to as Epic has since the first Unreal game was to add something new but in FN's case it is silly and i cannot take a fpsr seriously when i see those building stairs nonsense.
However mmorpg's you can do so much ,more so than simply a hotbar icon,you can write your own scripts to interchange stuff and create a back n forth thinking game.FF14 is Square Enix a very long time developer that has been in touch with the role play game environment,much different than the Korean developers.
Now when mentioning Wow,i don't think it is quite the same because you could literally bind your 2/3/4 hotbar icons to a mouse and not even care about anything else.FFXI did it th best,FFXIV was a step backwards and then we got to the point of ARPG's where you don't need any thought and only 2 buttons,so we are seeing a downgrading of game play year by year.Now in fairness to Square i know what happened,the asshats at the top pushed the game out way too ealry because it was costing too much,very similar to SWTOR..OH NOES 200 million STOP development,put it out for sale.
NOW..lol like i said a degradation in the gaming industry,NOW early access and worse.Long winded point?It is that devs don't WANT to do MORE,so it is way easier to just got pvp/move/aim and call it a game.Then we get 500 more of the exact same gameplay and wonder why the market looks so stale,at least stale to someone not living under a rock.
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Tab Targeting allows for more complexities and diversification in a long running game where you play for months and years. It's the accumulative of abilities that stack to keep the on going character interesting to build....Skill trees and Talents.
As apposed to Real-time-combat abilities that you could do only so much with. Boring after awhile.
For example:
Melee fighter the best you can do is SWING faster, SWING harder, use less stamina...Boring !
Putting the off combat character build aside, their equal as fun to play. Both with pro's and con's
Other people wanted less engaging combat so that you wouldn't have to do so much. There were some such options when WoW launched, but today, we have games that have gone much further with automatic combat so that the game basically plays itself.
The audience for what you want is thus likely to be much smaller than it used to be.
Consoles are what I blame. ALL fingers and thumbs are utilized on a console controller, so it is hard to sit "and do nothing" but hit a key/button every now and again.
It also depended on the MMORPG one played. I played a Bard in EQ 1 (tab target) and twisting songs (3 or 4 songs) was much busier than any "action combat" I've partaken in. And the songs weren't "automatic", meaning I'd see a lot of, "You missed a note and the songs ends."
My most loved feature about tab targeting is when faced with a group of enemies, trying to "click" on the one you want can get quite frustrating for me.
But alas, the money is with a more action oriented combat now, as combat is by far the number one activity in MMOs these days.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Tab target has nothing to do with stimulating or not. that is all down to game design.
1) released and not yet shut down
2) action combat
3) comfortable on a controller
4) plausibly described as an MMO
5) not tab target
Off the top of my head, there is Spiral Knights, Tree of Savior, Kritika Online, Elsword, and that's it. I haven't tried Vindictus, which might belong on that list, but that's all that I can think of. I don't think any of those games are even available on consoles.
There are kind of actiony games like Champions Online or Guild Wars 2 that are tab target. There are some click-to-move games that are action combat, but click to move is death to controllers if you have to do it very precisely. There are games like TERA that you might think were designed around consoles if you haven't tried using a controller with them, but are actually really awkward with a controller.
There has certainly been a lot of movement toward action combat, but a lot of it assumes keyboard+mouse. The movement toward controller-friendly has been much less, and would include some tab-targeting games like FFXIV.
Long live variety and options in computer gaming!
I come more so from a background where I used to play and enjoy the likes of the original Rainbow shooters, and a preference towards real-time strategy elements in general. If you wanna talk about a neglected genre, action-strategy has a very narrow window of titles.
I can understand the tab mechanic being a mechanical solution to the stability of a game, but I feel people should never make the mistake of conflating what it means for the complexity or depth of a game, as those elements are separate factors to do with how a system is implemented, not just which base framework is there.
For those that do like tab target, I would say you might have a better opportunity looking for more games that use a soft targeting or z-targeting style system, as those are both at home on consoles as much or more than they are on PC, and plays directly into that type of system.
The big limitations of using a controller are:
1) You can't do analog movements that are both fast and precise like you can with a mouse,
2) You don't have that many buttons, so if you want a lot of hotkeys, you have to jump to combinations of buttons that you can't hit that quickly, and
3) You need a versatile control scheme that allows players to remap things in ways that the designers never anticipated.
Point (3) is huge on a PC, but might be moot on a console if you know that all of your players are using exactly this particular controller, but (1) and (2) are still major issues.
As for mobile, that's a different genre entirely, with very little overlap with console or PC gaming. Sometimes a mobile game may also be available for PC if it's easy enough to port, but being playable on mobile really cripples what they can do, and they're not expecting to make much money off of the PC version. The problem isn't merely that you don't have a button to switch targets; it's that you have no keys or buttons at all.
Also don't use the console excuse for preferring mmos I ve been a gamer for long before consoles being in my 40s and so all my friends that are gamers and we prefer bdo or eso that is also kinda action over the tab targeting games
And yes it does promote afk activities but would you go so far to say that nobody wants it like the op does?
If i had a guess wow is still king followed by bdo and eso who go head to head pop wise everything else is just too low to matter
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Yeah I've seen so many estimates of player bases. I would leave it to someone who plays all games to give an accurate estimation. I played FFXIV a few months ago for a bit and it seemed moderately busy but not super popular. WOW has always been its own category and will probably lose competition only to itself. ESO seems like it has the edge in the non-wow category now, but maybe I'm wrong.