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The Game Designers should take a look at Raid: Shadow Legends
Swifty00
Member
I say that not because it is a particularly complex game, but because of some of the ideas that keep the game addictive despite the simple gameplay.
1. Having the 3 schools of damage, and one neutral to everything, make balance irrelevant. There is a hard counter to everything. Even the strongest character, is individually almost helpless against its hard counter, in terms of damage out and in.
2. There are constant arbitrary competitions with players put into brackets automatically by power, level etc., all giving rewards, fairly deep into the field in each bracket.
3. There are a lot of quests, missions, challenges and so on to do. These get you deep into the endgame.
4. There are constant free gifts, particularly once the game is established, that makes the content easier, and faster, but doesn't allow you to bypass it entirely.
So I mention this, not because the game itself is particularly deep or interesting, but because these mechanics enhance what is a very simple game. The way they can keep this game so balanced and rewarding for so long, for new and old players, is really remarkable.
However point 1 is key here. No single character can dominate. I cant help feeling that the introduction of a third category of damage, say "Heart", was introduced, a proportion of which caused aggro, and then making the classes either magic, physical, or heart (tanking), would take the issue of "balance" out of the discussion forever. Heart could be strong against physical, magic strong against heart, and physical strong against magic.
From a games design perspective you can do so much more with a triangle than a line.
1. Having the 3 schools of damage, and one neutral to everything, make balance irrelevant. There is a hard counter to everything. Even the strongest character, is individually almost helpless against its hard counter, in terms of damage out and in.
2. There are constant arbitrary competitions with players put into brackets automatically by power, level etc., all giving rewards, fairly deep into the field in each bracket.
3. There are a lot of quests, missions, challenges and so on to do. These get you deep into the endgame.
4. There are constant free gifts, particularly once the game is established, that makes the content easier, and faster, but doesn't allow you to bypass it entirely.
So I mention this, not because the game itself is particularly deep or interesting, but because these mechanics enhance what is a very simple game. The way they can keep this game so balanced and rewarding for so long, for new and old players, is really remarkable.
However point 1 is key here. No single character can dominate. I cant help feeling that the introduction of a third category of damage, say "Heart", was introduced, a proportion of which caused aggro, and then making the classes either magic, physical, or heart (tanking), would take the issue of "balance" out of the discussion forever. Heart could be strong against physical, magic strong against heart, and physical strong against magic.
From a games design perspective you can do so much more with a triangle than a line.
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2. There'll be multiple ladders in multiple different parts of the game and the whole game is built upon the concept of competition of scarce resources.
3. It's an mmo, it always has a ton of those.
4. This would have to be talked about after the release, but so far free presents are not really intended as part of the design, because they work against the scarcity of resources.
What I mean by this is that you should be able to make up for you being strategically countered through having the ability to overcome that disadvantage through skill in another area. This allows for the strategic aspect and balancing, while still being able to feel a sense of control and skill expression.
Its not fun to be hard countered with nothing you can do about, when there are other intertwined layers of gameplay on top of that over-arching strategic component. What i mean by this, is if it all comes down to "what class did you pick", then combat skill becomes pointless since the battle is over before it begins through hard countering strategic choices, rather than a more soft counter approach that would allow for the combat element to still be relevant.
3. It's an MMO, I would be very surprised if that's not exactly how it works. If you haven't played an MMO before then you'll enjoy how quest lines tend to go
4. Free stuff? Hmm, that really depends on what you mean. If you do a starter quest at lvl 1 where you go deliver a letter to an innkeeper and the reward is some food, that's basically an MMO way of giving you free stuff to help you out as you'll possibly be needing that in the next few quests. But I don't want an MMO to be like World of Warships where every day I log on and I get some post with free gold and crafting materials in it. That's the kind of stuff I need to earn.
The day a game adds dailies or a labour system like ArcheAge's is the day I slowly but surely start quitting that game.
Rock paper scissors won't really be balanced. Some classes will destroy others. 1v1 will be pretty unbalanced because of the rps aspect, but tuning will be done for group content
2. I dislike this too.
3. I dislike this but I don't feel like explaining why so can be disregarded.
4. I really dislike this.
That was the only thread I've ever seen on this forum where everybody was in full agreement with each other. It was actually quite nice!