The next great MMO: I need a game where the mechanics don’t break my immersion
With any game, I always hit a point where I cease to be immersed in the game as a world and start thinking about the mechanics, the way the game actually works. In Counter-strike, it was the day I learned to jumpcrouch. Suddenly this game-changing mechanic turned me from a terrorist running about desperately trying to stay alive into a hopping ball of impossibly accurate death. In Halo, it was the way grenades would explode once they sat still. I perfected grenade trapping on every map, so there was always an extra burst of damage where and when I needed it. With Oblivion, it was discovering that I could beat the game at level one by choosing primary stats and never leveling them up.
WoW suffers from this immersion problem as much as any game. Creating a class for the first time, you rarely think about the different racials. If you’re going to PvP, though, it’s obvious that human is your best choice. I always loved Beast Mastery on my hunter because I got to have a big scary pet and, in Wrath of the Lich King, unique pets, but when Blizzard nerfed BM damage into the ground, it pretty much killed my favorite way to play the class. Hunters lost a lot of flavor for me that day, and it was because of a mechanical change.
The thing I’ve always loved about MMOs is the flavor of the different classes. While I love to try different things, I’ve always been a player who settles into the class I enjoy most and really identify with. Every time mechanics intrude on my class immersion, I wonder how the next great MMO will deal with it. I started taking a look at RIFT recently, a game that has been getting a lot of positive attention in its beta phase. To me, the game looks too much like WoW for me to seriously consider it. If I’m going to pay a monthly fee for WoW or a game that looks an awful lot like WoW, I’m probably going to stick with WoW if only because I have so much time invested in it. Still, I was trying to keep an open mind on RIFT, until I read the talent trees for the different classes. They’re basically the same kind of boring crap you get in Warcraft. Increases your spell haste by 3 percent. Increases your damage from this spell by 10 percent. Gives you a chance to get a free spell cast. None of that stuff is fun or flavorful – it’s all mechanical. It helps your name climb up the damage meters. It doesn’t make the game any more interesting than it was before you put your talent point there.
My hope is obviously that someone will find a way to blend flavor and mechanics for an MMO, but it’s going to take someone with serious vision. I think a lot of developers confuse depth with complexity. League of Legends is a great example of a deep gameplay experience without a super complex experience. The fact that my hunter in WoW has 50 action buttons on the screen seems to me like a design failure. With so many different skills, I’m immediately sucked out of the game to worry about where to put my latest macro. While the four button approach for LoL may be too slim for the MMO experience, there has to be some happy medium, one hopefully much closer to four buttons than 50, that allows me to engage with the game world intuitively and simply enjoy my class for what it is.
Have you tried Bloodline Champions? You have like 9 or so abilities. I’d say it’s a mix between DotA and WoW arena.
To complement what Mar has said:
It does indeed feel like WoW arena but you strip all the random factors out of the game. No gear to worry about, no crits and all skills are skillshots.
Yes, even heals and also heals are capped to a certain amount of the target’s health so it’s not really as crucial as in WoW.
You are right about RIFT, it is a very similar game to WoW but the customization of your character does not stop at your gear choices and your talent choices but you decide ‘how much’ you want to be of each class. I’m not sure if this is an enjoyable mechanic or an unnecessary layer of complexity but it seems like a good idea.
RIFT kind of took some great ideas from most recent MMO’s and incorporated them into their game, they have rifts, which are similar to WAR’s open quests, badge/reputation grind is introduced to the player early on, PvP battleground kind of are a mix between WAR and WoW.
Hmm. Have you checked out City of Heroes? Old school though it may be (now), this is not an issue I ever have with it. Pretty much any and every possible build combination is valid at all points in the game. Sure, some solo better than others (and PVP is kind of tacked on and its own animal, but I don’t PVP so I don’t care), but I don’t find that to be an especially valid complaint – even the ones that don’t solo as well, still solo just fine.
I never did much with the superhero MMOs, but I’m looking at all them right now in light of the DCUO release. DCUO actually looks pretty cool, but I don’t know if it’s worth $15/month – I’m trying to locate a buddy key to see if it’s any good. I’ll be giving Champions a shot when it goes free-to-play later this month, too.
I really like to PvP in MMOs, but Guild Wars 1 didn’t quite do it for me. GW2 looks promising, though.
Oh, and yeah, I tried BLC, but that’s not really what I’m looking for in a long term game. It’s basically a MOBA without any leveling. Decently fun game, but I don’t really have the time/energy to learn all the different champions and a new game. I realize that sounds a little silly but hey, it’s where I’m at.