The Trouble with Computer RPGs

[Hwed]

This started as a simple reply in another thread to complaints about the boredom associated with MMORPG combat systems. I wanted to address those issues, but as I blabbered on and on, I convinced myself that they're worthy of their own discussion.

The trouble with RPG combat systems stems from their origin in tabletop gaming, and the inappropriateness of such a system in the world of video games. There are two major schools of MMORPG players, in my opinion...

The first group are people who never really got into video games, but were strong table-top gamers. To them, it's all about roleplaying, socialization, and teamwork. They're usually ok with the combat system in games like EQ because they don't have years of video game-enhanced eye-hand coordination.

Then there are people hailing from video game backgrounds... people who grew up on Atari, Nintendo, and MS-DOS. They're a twitchy crowd, and although they like the adventure, stat-building, and character customization in RPG's, they tend to find combat extremely dull and unchallenging. They're used to moving around using WASD and a mouse while flying through hotkeys without looking, having to keep their eyes on the screen and depend on sharp reflexes.

EQ and games like it cater to the first group. It's system of fighting is based on table-top gaming, where random numbers and statistics determine battle outcomes. This was a good system in the table-top world, as there was no other way to determine if pudgy_geek_01 had the sufficient skill with a blade to smack down big_dragon_02.

Table-top gaming tends to incorporate feats of strength and athleticism into people who haven't exerted themselves since the high school band had to march at a football game where the temperature broke 100 degrees. So do video games, for that matter. The Difference! is that video games provide an alternate subsitute for real-world athletic ability and weapon skill: eye-hand coordination through the mouse/keyboard/gamepad.

The clash comes when the table-top system is applied in a video game that has also drawn a huge audience of hard-core video game players. Video game players were ok with table-top rulesets in games like Final Fantasy VII, because at the very most, you could accomplish everything in that game in 5 days of playtime.

However, that combat system really starts to wear thin for gamers when applied to a game where they're going to spend three hundred days playing instead of three.

The video-game crowd sits around waiting to move into position and press auto-attack, something that, on an individual level, is about as stimulating as programming Grandma's VCR clock. That's when eyes start to wander to the TV, the second computer, or the Grand Theft Auto 3 jewel case.

We crave more stimulation than that. We want to interact in the fighting, like we do in Jedi Knight, Battlefield 1942, or (YourGameHere).

Morrowind took a step in the right direction as far as this is concerned, albeit in a single-player environment.

I don't want to press A and watch my dwarf swing his sword. I want to control that sword through my mouse. I want the timing and strength of my swings, as well as where on my target I strike, to affect my success. I want dancing around my target to mean I'll evade more hits. I want looking at the screen to be rewarding.

There are some obvious challenges with implementing such a system. You do have to balance skill levels and progression into the mix, otherwise a brand new character would have just as much potential as a seasoned veteran, if played by the right person.

The advantage to this is that there's a greater range between players who suck and players who don't, and it's influenced more by talent than by time investment.

Another challenge to designing a game that incorporates more active combat is mob AI. If a player's agility at the keyboard affects his ability to avoid damage, there is a potential that the AI can be exploited in a way that would make ALL combat in the game trivial. That doesn't do great things for the lifespan of a game, a major concern for any MMORPG developer.

I really hope future game development will focus on these challenges. It's quite a leap from the status quo, but some of the best and most successful games ever made were those that broke away from tired genres (the way Myth broke the Warcraft/Clone&Conquer mindset, for example).

Insert "You f***ing moron." comments below!

[Rathmort]

good ideas.

however, if you make melee require real-world dexterity and skill, you are going to have to come up with some way of making casters require similar skill.

and please dont says 'those gesture things like black and white had'

[Hwed]

A good point.

Aiming the spell at specific body parts?

Timing a spell's initiation and "release" for optimal effectiveness?

"Combo" spells where properly timed moves add additional effects or efficiencies to a basic spell (the hocus-pocus equivalent of following a one-two jab with an uppercut)?

Casters are tricky. And god yes, that Black & White spell-casting was the absolute doom of that game.

[Ukerric]

Originally posted by Hwed
...The advantage to this is that there's a greater range between players who suck and players who don't, and it's influenced more by talent than by time investment....

Which sound good.

Until you realize a couple of things.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of anything is crap. That includes people. Put the barrier at average skill, and 5% of the people will find it laughably easy, 10% challenging, and 85% will hit the cancel button when they realize they really suck at this game, and haven't noticeably improved during the free month included.

EQ and most MMORPG survive because, quite simply, they let player who suck progress. You think you progress, you keep playing. You think you don't, you stop paying. And the easiest way of making sure (for the developpers) that your customer think they don't suck is to make sure they don't.

And that's priority #1. The customer isn't always right, but he's the one who brings in the bucks.

If I had to pay $13/month to even play EQ like Diablo, I'd have cancelled in june 99.

[Olio]

MUD combat runs the way it does primarily because of the latency involved in doing internet network play. We're talking about 1-2 seconds of delay between swings here, opperating that manually with a 500ms ping becomes cumbersome.

You can distribute your servers around more so that people can pick one with a smaller ping time, but then you're more limited in which friends you want to play with.

You can slow the game down, but then the interactive folks get bored because it all runs 5x as slowly. Strifing reigns supreme in combat (and you have to end up with /stick or similar to make it work anyway), and healing becomes really hard because the mobs retain the same DPS but dish it out in huge slow chunks.

The most popular option right now is a hyrbrid system where the auto attacks happen, but then they are augmented with user play. A good example of this is the Rogue, where you have to position your character and whack backstab and evade hotkeys to augment your damage, or the hybrids where you hit the occasional spell on the mob in addition to kicking/bashing it. DAoC has a more elaborate attack scheme, but it's more like playing a monk. They have lots of different attacks they can use, but since all of them but flying kick suck, that's the one you whack over and over. You can even add an endurance meter so that everyone has to sit and rest between mobs, but it doesn't really add anything to the gameplay.

Olio

[Scorpvenom]

Great post, Hwed. I've thought the same for a while. I never played Morrowind but I'm assuming the combat system is pretty similar to Daggerfall. Your ideas are great and should be implemented in new games. Hitting "A" and experiencing with just hitting "A" and doing very little else sucks. This is part of the main reason why I quit EQ.

As for spells, you could have a cross hair which moves up and down left and right etc. by moving the mouse. This will affect where spells are thrown. This would require being a spell caster to be extremely hard, however, to substitute you could make spells extremely powerful. Also that would be cool as shit if you are fighting a monster and you get cut on the arm. The cleric then points at your arm and cast a heal spell which cures that area of your arm. IF the cleric gets higher level, the cross hairs get bigger or the area of the body that is healed grows larger. You could really do some awesome shit. Also you could do lower damage heat-seeking spells that are currently in EQ. Those players with skill, however, could become very powerful because THEY ARE SKILLED.

[Tuco]

I would hit a mmorpg that required a lot more player skill...

But correct me if I'm wrong, but raiding at the high end game, while an average melee character is only hitting A, isn't there a lot of coordination involved with most raids(IE: the ones that are hard for you, not your 50th AoW kill)

I know in my guild when we did our first few kills on some new mobs, it required a lot of timing learning etc...

But for grouping... feh

Isn't planetside supposed to be close to a skill required massive etc etc?

[Szlia]

When someone advocates for a RPG where advancement is based on player skill it can only be because they think that if such a game existed they would be amongst the skilled.

Now think for a second that you might not be amongst the skilled? You still find that idea to be good?

I agree that it's not exactly what you are saying, but you seem to immediately put player skill above time invested. Currently in EQ time invested plays a big part but player skills also factors in. Good time management for example, organization skills, social skills, analyze skills, memory and, to a lesser extend, fast decisions, and reflexes.

Why are fast decisions and reflexes not that determinant? Because in the one group scale, we choose to make our time efficient, which mean putting us in a very favorable risk vs reward situation. Low risk means close to no need for fast decision and reflexes since all you do is perfectly planed and almost no surprise can occur.

In the same way, at the raid scale, things are - or at least should be :P - carefully planned. Everyone has a task and executes it (it can be very dull to do, but sometime it can also be pretty intense).

In both situations, troubles can occur. Be it because something not expected happens or because someone makes a mistake. Then, fast decisions and reflexes play an important part and it's true it is fun. The problem are that, at the raid scale, mobs are so powerful it's very difficult to recover, so fun does not last long and, at the group scale, problems are pretty uncommon since the efforts made for them to not happen are more trivial to provide.

I agree though the combat system in EQ is very simplistic, both in mobs and players abilities and in mob AI. Many people do have very little to do and/or decide during a fight. I certainly would like to see an improvement in these departments to make it so each fight matters and is not a simple replica of the 40 fights made before. I think that can be made without turning the game into an action game like you seem to propose, but still have fights where a number of changes requires a chain of fast thinking and fast reactions to be at top efficiency. I doubt we will see that in EQ (at least not for the single group xp grind), but I hope it will become the norm of future MMORPG.

Still, it's important to me that less efficient players can still progress. That will maybe take them more people for a longer duration, but they must be able to do it, or at least a majority of it. I think that's an important premises for a MMORPG. Of course, like all the rest, it can be finely balanced.

Booo long post, blah.

[Iannis]

Making targetted combat would make combat fun for us tank classes. You're really dumbing it down to the dirt saying "press A and masturbate for 5 minutes", although it doesn't require much more than that...

city of heroes, for the mythical day when it pops out, claims it will have attacks aimed at body parts...Arcade-style combat. That would be pretty keen. A crosshair would be so ridiculous...maybe forcing you to actually pay attention and press certain keys while you cast spells. You know, like /dance /wave /giggle /salute and suddenly the mob bursts into a fiery conflagaration equal only to the ones that GREAT WHITE invoke...

The thing is, twitch games suck for the most part too. You have the same experience curve in them as a, well, ACTUAL experience curve. You have to learn how to strafe, how to dodge, how to tumble and blast and all sorts of gay crap that I can't stand doing...

dumbed down games certainly are more fun for the vast majority. I'd cancel a game where I had to cause serious harm to my mouse by throwing it against the wall and breakdancing to cast a spell...

[Tabb alt]

Simplicity is the base idea for anything. I believe its part of why everquest is popular. Simple is good. The elements you really want here, the ones you are asking for, arent brought out by manual dexterity on your mouse. They're brought in by more challenging and entertaining gameplay.

If you want a twitch game, buy planetside.

that's my thoughts on it anyways :P

[TruckerNuts]

ETA on those virtual reality things that you hook up the visor thing and the gloves and the boots and electrodes and whatnot? MMORPGs would be a whole lot cooler (along with any genre) where you could actually swing a sword and whatnot.

Anyone notice on the EQOA commercial the guy that gets hit by the dragon ingame is like "OMG I HVAE been hit IRL111!1!" and recoils from the screen almost throwing his controller in the process. heh, "HEY GUYS ITS TIME TO SLEH DA DRAGON ))" Does FoH call eachother up like that? that wud be so shreet.

[Archeiron]

While I like the premise of the intial post in principle, the subject stuck in my head more.

The problem you are discussing is that game designers need to make a game that is 'easy enough' for the 90% crowd and at the same time immensely, insanely crazy hard for the other 10%.

I don't give a fuck whether or not fucktard_00 thinks "New L33t RPG" is too hard, I want it to be soooo hard that even after two years I still find challenge, but I do see that games_maker_00 needs to cater to all of us (casual and serious gamers).

Why not have an autoattack based system where doing extra 'body area' targetting clicks and hotkey presses (that get queued rather than instaneous/twitch) allow for more damage to be dealt. That way the joe gamer types could click auto and then wank off to Furor's magelo while hardcore types could learn to execute more advanced techniques and be rewarded (albeit minorly) There could be sequencable attack combos alla old skool beat'em ups and hell even quests to unlock them for your character. Fuck it would be nice to throw in new animations for it so l33t gamers could have a new status symbol as they unlocked move sequences and then executed them for more damage and to show off. The same thing could go for spells that chain together etc.

[Kreugen]

Control of more than one character goes a long way to making combat more interesting and strategic.

[Tuco]

Control of more than one character goes a long way to making combat more interesting and strategic.

I think this dictates the need for making it most challenging. =)

[Jovec]

Could a MMORPG have a complex comabt system and be successful? Probably.

Would EQ have been as successful with a more complex combat system? Probably not.

The lax comboat system allows for little constant interaction, so you have time to have conversations, go afk while fighting, watch TV, etc... Because EQ doesn't require full time concentration (usually), people are willing to spend more time playing. Lax combat makes it easier to spend longer sessions playing, which means that the playerbase are more tolerant of a "slow gain" of experience/items.

Remember also that much of the EQ design probably happened in '97ish, and game companies/programmers didn't have a whole lot of experience in Internet multiplayer games, ISDN was uber (dual-channels!), and bandwidth was more expensive. etc. In all fairness to Verant, EQ did a lot of things right, and the combat system, all things considered, works pretty well.

-Jovec