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Author Topic: The Elder Scrolls Online  (Read 755808 times)
eldaec
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Reply #840 on: November 27, 2012, 06:58:43 AM

Have we done 'what makes a game a MMOG' yet?

That's a good one.

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Reply #841 on: November 27, 2012, 07:02:12 AM

Lately, with the obvious lack of discussions going on here (this pretty much being the only one active in more than a month, outside of some ongoing threads about specific games that don't have a subforum), and lots of products crossing borders all the time, I've been wondering if we have finally reached the point where a MMOG board is redundant, and it should be merged with the PC/Console Gaming one.

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Reply #842 on: November 27, 2012, 07:08:22 AM

I wouldn't go that far.  MMORPGs are still a hobby for most people vs. Single Player games that are just played until beaten for the majority of those that buy them.
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Reply #843 on: November 27, 2012, 07:11:54 AM

But that board is not the "Single player" board, and there's plenty of multiplayer if not multiplayer-only games being discussed.

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Reply #844 on: November 27, 2012, 07:50:04 AM

But that board is not the "Single player" board, and there's plenty of multiplayer if not multiplayer-only games being discussed.

So?  They still aren't MMOGs.  I would guess a majority of the people on this board are always playing, or at least, aren't far from playing an MMORPG while playing a lot of the games in that section.  Hence an MMOG section.
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Reply #845 on: November 27, 2012, 07:57:11 AM

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORING.


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Reply #846 on: November 27, 2012, 10:37:20 AM

...eventually it all boils down to reading the script and executing it as a machine. Again, no room for improvisation, no room for creativity.

You could argue that, but you would be wrong.  To use DPS as an example (correctly regarded as the least challenging role) the skill, so to speak, is executing your script like a machine while simultaneously maximizing your time on target, compressing the DPS ramp-up time as much as possible to make the most efficient use of your time on target, making the most efficient use of short-term buffs, and decreasing the negative impact you have on the rest of the raid.
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Reply #847 on: November 27, 2012, 11:49:14 AM

Yeah, the no room for improvisation and creativity thing just blows my mind. For one thing, if that's true of hotbar PVE, it's just as true of ALL PVE. Action combat is not more "creative". I mean seriously, what?

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Reply #848 on: November 27, 2012, 11:50:58 AM

Action combat has a whole other variable of movement.  And not just standing in the fire.
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Reply #849 on: November 27, 2012, 11:53:29 AM

There's no movement in other games? Ohhhhh, I see.

Are we seriously going to make the argument that adding double-tap dodge suddenly turns MMO combat into a Charlie Parker solo instead of a Glenn Miller one?

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Reply #850 on: November 27, 2012, 12:49:36 PM

There's no movement in other games? Ohhhhh, I see.

Are we seriously going to make the argument that adding double-tap dodge suddenly turns MMO combat into a Charlie Parker solo instead of a Glenn Miller one?

What?

In traditional DIKU hotbar combat you typically stand in one place using your rotation for dps or tanking only moving when there is a ground affect or there is a specific encounter design that forces you to group up at a certain time or shift in a certain direction.  The most skillful "action" you get is as a tank is positioning the boss so it doesn't cleave your group or moving to intercept adds.  The most skillful "action" you get as a dps is movement to stay on target and keep your dps time at max.  The most skillful "action" as a healer is actually the most involved, but it has nothing to do with your character, and more with moving your mouse around the UI clicking on boxes and reacting to icons.

In a twitchy, action based game, the most basic elements of combat ( attacking, dodging, blocking) require aiming and positioning that adds a complete additional layer of skill and involvement that I find much more pleasant.  This is in addition to everything I wrote above.

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Reply #851 on: November 27, 2012, 12:51:05 PM

There are quite a few raid and dungeon encounters that go way beyond that, and I'm not just talking about Heigan.

(then again, they are also the ones that lead to ridonkolous fun times when in pugs  awesome, for real)

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Reply #852 on: November 27, 2012, 12:51:47 PM

There's no movement in other games? Ohhhhh, I see.

Are we seriously going to make the argument that adding double-tap dodge suddenly turns MMO combat into a Charlie Parker solo instead of a Glenn Miller one?

You are thinking in GW2 terms. I am are thinking in action RPG terms, which we all agree are not where the MMOs are but where some of us want MMOs to go to.
I am making the argument that movement in hotbar MMORPGs is mostly irrelevant other than for sandbox-explorative reasons. That's why I made the comparison with Rock Band.


EDIT: Added quote.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 01:28:32 PM by Falconeer »

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Reply #853 on: November 27, 2012, 12:57:01 PM

You are thinking in GW2 terms. I am are thinking in action RPG terms, which we all agree are not where the MMOs are but where some of us want MMOs to go to.
I am making the argument that movement in hotbar MMORPGs is mostly irrelevant other than for sandbox-explorative reasons. That's why I made the comparison with Rock Band.

I'm thinking of GW2?  I would call GW2 a hybrid though.  I would love the shit out of an MMO that uses something like Zelda's Ocarina of Time combat system and dungeon style.
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Reply #854 on: November 27, 2012, 01:03:12 PM

Yeah, you guys may want to stop citing GW2. GW2 is part of the trend to more action combat. It's not on the side of the hot bar tab targeting stand around crowd. Its part of the march Against that, and most of you have praised them for it.

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Reply #855 on: November 27, 2012, 01:04:55 PM

I'm confused.  I always praised GW2's combat as a step in the right direction, away from old hat hotbar combat.
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Reply #856 on: November 27, 2012, 01:25:24 PM

I'm thinking of GW2?  

Not you. Ingmar, when he mentioned double tap as if our argument were based on that. And yes, I think it's a step in the right direction too, and I called it a bridge between the old hotbar combat and the evolution towards more action and meaningful movement/positioning/aiming.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 01:27:09 PM by Falconeer »

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Reply #857 on: November 27, 2012, 02:53:18 PM

The part I'm really questioning is why you think action combat involves 'creativity'. My comparison to saxophone solos probably went over people's heads, sorry. (By way of explanation, Charlie Parker's solos were mostly/all improvised, while Glenn Miller was notorious for having all solos pre-written for his big band.)

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Reply #858 on: November 27, 2012, 03:17:05 PM

In a twitchy, action based game, the most basic elements of combat ( attacking, dodging, blocking) require aiming and positioning that adds a complete additional layer of skill and involvement that I find much more pleasant.  This is in addition to everything I wrote above.

And when you dodge that giant's club smashing into the ground, you could almost go so far as to say you're exhibiting remarkable skill in not standing in telegraphed area of effect attacks.
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Reply #859 on: November 27, 2012, 03:50:29 PM

Action combat has a whole other variable of movement.  And not just standing in the fire.

So do the raids like the one I linked. The whole raid is constantly moving and it must be fairly precise. It's also a bit more skilful than guitar hero because in guitar hero an error is done and gone. In WoW an error, like a healer being out of position and getting too many stacks of a debuff, can be either a failure or covered by other players dynamic reaction. And the window of time to observe, decide and act can be really quite tight. But probably not twitch level because it's more about tactics and there's online latency to consider.

The fact you think it's easy only means you probably haven't done it.

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Reply #860 on: November 27, 2012, 04:11:33 PM

I think part of the discussion that seems to be unstated is PvP vs. PvE.  PvE is really almost always going to disproportionately reward understanding how the AI works, whether that is understanding a boss encounter, or just the general behaviors of AI.   A great deal of GW2 is based on PvP combat.  Dodging becomes a lot more interesting then you've not only got a guy casting a spell at you, but a guy who KNOWS you can dodge it, which might mean he tries to center the spell towards where you will dodge, but then YOU know he might do that, and so forth.  That sort of "dance" is always going to be more interesting to me, from a gameplay perspective, than the most complex choreographed dance I need to do for a raid.

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Reply #861 on: November 27, 2012, 04:26:18 PM

The part I'm really questioning is why you think action combat involves 'creativity'. My comparison to saxophone solos probably went over people's heads, sorry. (By way of explanation, Charlie Parker's solos were mostly/all improvised, while Glenn Miller was notorious for having all solos pre-written for his big band.)

I never used the word creative.  I just think action, or twitchy combat, adds another layer of skill in the game and in turn that makes the game more enjoyable for me.  

And when you dodge that giant's club smashing into the ground, you could almost go so far as to say you're exhibiting remarkable skill in not standing in telegraphed area of effect attacks.

I would agree with that in most respects, and I never said both forms of combat are worlds apart.  But that usually only matters during special attacks or scripted events.  In action combat your gameplay is just that.


So do the raids like the one I linked. The whole raid is constantly moving and it must be fairly precise. It's also a bit more skilful than guitar hero because in guitar hero an error is done and gone. In WoW an error, like a healer being out of position and getting too many stacks of a debuff, can be either a failure or covered by other players dynamic reaction. And the window of time to observe, decide and act can be really quite tight. But probably not twitch level because it's more about tactics and there's online latency to consider.

The fact you think it's easy only means you probably haven't done it.


You're putting words in my mouth because I never said it was easy or that it lacked skill or you can compare WOW to Guitar Hero.  I agree with you 100% in that raid encounters, especially high end ones, are incredibly difficult and success is balanced on a razor thin edge.  They require high amounts of coordination and effort.

My point is if you added twitch combat to it, it would make the menial task of "press button, make affect" more interesting for me.  I enjoy the task of aiming and positioning my attacks.  

I want TERA's combat in my MMOs.  I really enjoyed tanking and dps in that game.  That act of manipulating my character and performing abilities was satisfying in its own right.  In hotbar combat I don't get the same satisfaction of performing my rotation.

Edit:  Shit, I want Dark Souls combat in my MMOs.  What I want, essentially, is for some MMORPGs to begin to blend open persistent world games with arcade style play.  I'm tired of having 2-3 banks of hotbars with abilities that I have to hit in order.  I love the raiding aspect of the games where it takes teamwork, concentration and effort, but I want the basics of combat to go away from hotbars and keypresses.

« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 04:30:01 PM by Draegan »
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Reply #862 on: November 27, 2012, 04:28:30 PM

A lot of the things you're saying you didn't say, Falc did, and those responses are (or were originally) directed at him.

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Reply #863 on: November 27, 2012, 04:31:44 PM

Holy crap all this threat meter discussion makes me want to cry.

It doesn't matter if the threat meter is hidden or in plain view, if your game has a threat meter it's terrible.  It leads to very static and formulaic combat, which (at least for me) makes it extremely boring.  Don't heal too much, don't do too much damage, etc...

Threat needs to have a good deal of randomness to it to make sure every fight isn't the exact same way, force you to pay attention and adjust to changing circumstances.
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Reply #864 on: November 27, 2012, 04:36:49 PM

In action based combat you can win some fights due to manual ability, reflexes, and/or creative unscripted manouvering and thinking, for sure. That's how I see it. EDIT: We can call it "unscripted" if we decide that "creative" is really not a good word for it. Dark Souls is a perfect example but Dark Souls is probably one of the best games ever made so it's probably aiming too high. But sure, that's the target. Unscripted combat where there is room for so many more layers of player direct input than, in my opinion, in hotbar tab-targeted combat.

Also, solo pve hotbar combat is WAY easier than any Guitar Hero game. On the other hand, I compared group instances and raiding to Rock Band (group coordination) not Guitar hero. The difference is important.

EDIT: plenty.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 04:45:07 PM by Falconeer »

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Reply #865 on: November 27, 2012, 05:19:52 PM

For the purposes of discussion here's a WoW Wrath hard mode raid Firefighter Mimiron. This is a demonstration so it's a near optimal takedown and it looks a lot easier than it is when you're in the game.

Yeah, sorry, this looks dull as shit and is literally "don't stand in the fire."

The "skill" here is basically the same as in every raid ever - know which spot to move to when. (And herding cats, which is really the main skill of every raid encounter) Go watch a video of the Ifrit fight in FFXIV - it's basically the exact same fight! Which makes sense given that there is so little to the mechanics. Nearly every raid boils down to "don't stand in the fire" because there just aren't that many ways to demonstrate skill in a combat system so basic. Positioning doesn't really matter (outside of not standing in fires), there's no active dodging or blocking (outside of moving out from spawning fires), not much in terms of movement options (other than running away from fires).

"How do we make this enemy hard?" is a pretty difficult question to answer in a game where combat is so limited and execution is trivial.

Quote from: KallDrexx
It doesn't matter if the threat meter is hidden or in plain view, if your game has a threat meter it's terrible.  It leads to very static and formulaic combat, which (at least for me) makes it extremely boring.  Don't heal too much, don't do too much damage, etc...

Threat needs to have a good deal of randomness to it to make sure every fight isn't the exact same way, force you to pay attention and adjust to changing circumstances.

Agree 100%. I've said for a quite a while that the ability of players to exactly dictate how combat works out is a huge limiting factor in MMOs. I think the stories and fun times people remember most from MMOs are the times when crazy shit happened, yet the systems of MMOs are dedicated to players exactly controlling the experience such that crazy shit can't happen. To some degree things like Rifts are an attempt to counter this but at a different strata.

With more randomized threat players would have to think on their feet, organize on the fly, hybrid types would be more viable, redundancy of roles more viable, etc.

In other words WoW players would hate it.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 05:33:22 PM by Margalis »

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Reply #866 on: November 27, 2012, 05:53:02 PM

Quote
But nothing annoys me more than people, or even friends, going straight on Youtube as soon as you wipe in an instance to look up the walkthrough for the boss. That happens now all.the.time. And it makes me wonder what is their point, why do they even bother playing.

Talking to people super into WoW makes it clear that some people are just wired differently.

When you get to a raid in WoW you try, you die, you learn from experience, you try again. Depending on how quickly you adapt and how well you can recover from a bad situation this process can take a widely variable amount of time. Let's call this phase 1.

Next you get to the phase where you know what to do to some extent and you do it, while trying to optimize so that it becomes safer and faster. You can fall into local minima here and this phase can last forever if you don't have outside knowledge. You may have hit on a pretty good strategy that is different from the optimal one. (Phase 2)

Finally you reach the phase where you know exactly what to do and just try to execute on that - at this point the only way to fail is to botch the execution. You know the global optimal solution, or at least the best known solution. (Phase 3)

To me phase 3 is the least interesting phase. It's the phase where the encounter becomes rote. But that's the phase WoW players want to skip directly to! Anything else is erroneously termed "obfuscation" apparently.

And that's fine. People can play and like WoW. But one WoW is enough. (Or, more accurately, one WoW and 50 bad clones) What I don't get is why every game has to be WoW and why branching away from that has to be a niche effort. It strikes me as some guy who is super into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the arcade game saying God of War will be niche because the fighting is too involved and people just want to keep putting in quarters and mashing buttons.

The fact that WoW is successful and has lousy combat doesn't mean lousy combat is the reason it's successful. And so far AFAIK there isn't a game that has much better combat in the context of a game that rivals WoW. You can point to a game like Planetside and say "see it has twitch combat and it's not that popular" but on the other hand it's Planetside.

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Reply #867 on: November 27, 2012, 06:22:18 PM


Yes, that's how it goes. And by the time phase 3 has begun to bore the next tier of content is out to replace it. So the people still stuck in phase 1 and 2 can keep going, probably with a boost from some low-hanging fruit from the new content, and the people who have mastered and farmed it move on.

It's also why a raid oriented game needs a regular addition of more content.

Yeah, sorry, this looks dull as shit and is literally "don't stand in the fire."

The "skill" here is basically the same as in every raid ever - know which spot to move to when.

Yes, and FPS games are putting the crosshair over the man and push button. Everything looks easy when being demonstrated by skilled people from an eagle eye view. When you're at ground level tracking your mana, your cooldowns, your aggro, your team, the enemy, the enemies attacks, patches of fire and your own positioning it becomes a pretty high skill game. And the stats for this are available because a very small number of players achieved the reward for completing all hard modes.

And AFAIK I know bumping up the raid difficulty in Cata helped lose them a couple of million people.

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Reply #868 on: November 27, 2012, 07:03:38 PM

Yes, and FPS games are putting the crosshair over the man and push button. Everything looks easy when being demonstrated by skilled people from an eagle eye view. When you're at ground level tracking your mana, your cooldowns, your aggro, your team, the enemy, the enemies attacks, patches of fire and your own positioning it becomes a pretty high skill game.

Almost everything takes skill. The question is what kind of skill, what range of skill, is that skill an interesting and worthwhile thing to test, etc.

Sure, you can make "don't stand in the fire" REALLY hard if the fire is big and spawns really fast, and thus beating that encounter requires more skill of some sort, but that doesn't make it particular interesting or strategic.

An FPS has a lot of different ways for a game to introduce skill tests and strategy. You don't just put a crosshair over a guy and shoot them. You move, often with a physics based movement system. You jump around. You use terrain in a variety of ways. You use strategies that take advantage of sight lines. The game may have active dodging or an Unreal style teleporter or whatever. And you can also not stand in fire and manage ammo and keep track of your position and that of the enemy.

In an MMO like WoW there just aren't many things that a player can actually do that matter, so the things you can test are relatively low. Players can move so you can make them move out of fire. They can use abilities so you can make them use the right abilities at the right time. But they don't have to really aim their abilities, so you can't test that or anything that goes along with that like leading a target and movement prediction. They can't dash or dodge or roll or do anything movement-related except for a basic run and jump, so while you can test their ability to not stand in fire you can't test much else. Positioning tends to not matter at a base gameplay level so you can't test that without shoehorning it into the raid mechanics.

You can tune numbers so that an encounter takes more skill via a smaller margin for error but that's not the same as making a game interesting. There's nothing interesting about Battletoads or those crazy Mario romhacks, even though they are hard as hell.

The number of ways a WoW encounter can test skill is low because the number of meaningful things players can do in combat is low. By the way this is the exact reason Arkham City boss fights are so terrible. Against a non-human-sized single enemy there's just not many ways you can meaningfully interact.

Quote
And AFAIK I know bumping up the raid difficulty in Cata helped lose them a couple of million people.

WoW is an old game with a well-established audience with certain expectations. Getting 6 years into WoW then sitting around a design roundtable saying "hey guys, our game is kind of simple, maybe we should make the fights take more strategy" is silly. That doesn't mean other designs can't work, just that swapping designs that late in the game doesn't work.

Edit: Primary point again: give me an MMO with more interesting combat. What I consider "more interesting" is very broad.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 07:12:05 PM by Margalis »

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Reply #869 on: November 27, 2012, 09:46:37 PM


In an MMO like WoW there just aren't many things that a player can actually do that matter, so the things you can test are relatively low.

heh, you must be kidding.

You're just extremely biased. The encounter I linked took 10 minutes just to discuss the positioning and tactics and each character has to be tracking a lot of variables and using multiple abilities it didn't even mention. In most shooters you have a tiny number of abilities, your interaction with others is far more limited and environmental effects you need to react to are miniscule. Planetside 2 is much more basic tactically than WoW raiding.

What it does have is the adrenaline and twitch of tracking fast moving targets, which is fun. And if you want that then you don't want an MMO. PS2 is laggy, the field is so large that battles are dispersed and unstructured and the free movement means it tends to be imbalanced zerg rolling over defenders or empty bases. There are already more than enough shooters that provide good twitch action we don't need MMO's aping them.

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Reply #870 on: November 27, 2012, 10:03:44 PM

There's also a lot more than just 'don't stand in 234 different kinds of fire' that may not be evident in the video. There are also adds to manage, 3 different segments of the boss to target and attack (not all available all the time), I seem to recall there being drops that people have to pick up and use, etc. It's an extremely complicated fight, well beyond just the ground effects everywhere.

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Reply #871 on: November 27, 2012, 10:32:02 PM

And like I said before, there are quite a few encounters that break the mold. We're not in Molten Core anymore, etc. Just off the top of my head (I'm not even a raider, so I'm sure I'm missing quite a few):
- enemies using player-scale abilities without an aggro table and some rudimentary reaction scripts (cleanse debuffs from friendlies, CC enemy healers, focus fire the squishiest targets): BRD fight in the tier0.5 questline, Priestess Delrissa and friends, Faction Champions
- encounters with arcade elements: Alysrazor (you get to play Starfox flying through the air through random fire rings), Vizier whatshisface (he starts shooting very large numbers of random-moving / bouncing projectiles at one point, just like dodging shots in 'bullet hell' games), Zon'ozz (have to bounce a ping-pong ball between players for a long time and then bounce it into the boss, making sure it doesn't hit too many or too few people and it rebounds at the right angle), Saboteur mantid boss (places bombs that explode in bomberman-like patterns). Actually there are a lot of such encounters while leveling up / questing too, but they're so easy and impossible to fail that I'm not sure they count...
- positioning requirements: Vizier whatshisface targets someone in the raid and channels a high-damage attack on them; the tank must interpose between the boss and the target to save them. The Will of the Emperor fight has the tanks dodge combo attacks from the bosses they're tanking - afaik these are randomized, so you have to watch their movement to dodge in the right direction. If you dodge 5 in a row, you get to do a 1million damage attack on the boss; if you fail to dodge, you get an armor debuff that makes you much harder to heal. Also in the brewery dungeon there are mobs that constantly channel healing beams between themselves - players must interpose between these beams so they get healed instead of the mobs. There are several mobs in MOP that have a directional shield, so you have to attack them from a certain side.

In fact, positioning and non-scripted movement is one of the most important things in high-end WOW arena PVP (putting aside the lulzy class balance issues) if we're comparing FPS pvp to MMO pvp. If we're comparing MMO pve to FPS pve, well... I don't remember Global Agenda's pve being too fun or interesting at all.


e: 7/11 WOW classes have some sort of combat movement ability on short cooldowns (the rest 'just' have various ways to increase movement speed). Mages can blink forward, druids can choose to blink forward / teleport to an enemy / teleport to a friendly, hunters can disengage (fly backwards), rogues can shadowstep, warlocks have a personal teleport and a group portal (they can set exit/entrance), monks have dodge rolling and a personal teleport, warriors have various charge (friendly / enemy) abilities and a targeted leap attack.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 11:06:53 PM by Zetor »

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Reply #872 on: November 27, 2012, 11:07:53 PM

There's also a lot more than just 'don't stand in 234 different kinds of fire' that may not be evident in the video. There are also adds to manage, 3 different segments of the boss to target and attack (not all available all the time), I seem to recall there being drops that people have to pick up and use, etc. It's an extremely complicated fight, well beyond just the ground effects everywhere.

Almost any other game can do all of this and more.

Quote
- enemies using player-scale abilities without an aggro table and some rudimentary reaction scripts (cleanse debuffs from friendlies, CC enemy healers, focus fire the squishiest targets): BRD fight in the tier0.5 questline, Priestess Delrissa and friends, Faction Champions
- encounters with arcade elements:
...

And these as well.

I want to make a distinction between base gameplay mechanics and individual boss gimmicks. Flying around like in Starfox, dodging bouncing balls, etc, are not base game mechanics in WoW, they are boss gimmicks. (I'm using gimmicks in the non-pejorative sense) It's cool that there is a boss where you have to dodge left or right 5 times in a row I guess, but dodging attacks like that matters in what percentage of WoW encounters? 0.01%? In a game where dodging is part of the core combat system you can dodge a variety of attacks from a variety of enemies at almost any time - not that there is one specific enemy that has what is a basically a QTE built into it.

In a way a lot of these boss battles are one-off separate mini-games or puzzles where the designers brainstorm ways to uniquely script them to keep them interesting because standard combat is too limited.


Quote from: Kageru
There are already more than enough shooters that provide good twitch action we don't need MMO's aping them.

What a weird defensive reaction. Not only do you want WoW to be the way it is you demand that literally every MMO play in your preferred style. We don't need MMOs with decent combat? I disagree - I need that. And some MMO is going to nail the combat along with other stuff and a bunch of other people are also going to agree.

It's one thing to personally prefer something but demanding that every MMO match that preference (and that none match mine) is absurd.

There are already plenty of shitty boring RPGs with bland combat - so why do we need MMOs?
« Last Edit: November 27, 2012, 11:14:13 PM by Margalis »

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
satael
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2431


Reply #873 on: November 27, 2012, 11:16:59 PM

I always thought "creative raiding" lead to emergency patches and bans.  why so serious?
In my experience most MMOs do not appreciate creative ways of defeating raid encounters...
koro
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2307


Reply #874 on: November 28, 2012, 12:08:46 AM

Funny, I seem to remember the Faction Champions fight in TotGC being one of the most universally-loathed boss encounters in WoW's history.
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