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Buttons, and Balance - Discussion
Luthric
Member
Dear friends,
I want to to bring up some thoughts in this thread on design philosophy, and be a bit critical. If I may. It should go without saying that the Intrepid team is, as ever, doing fine work. It's meat and potatoes time. No veggies. It's worth saying up front, as well, that I do not intend to portray my thoughts, collected here, as though you ought to share them. I only mean to state clearly what I think, and make a case for why I think it. Call me a fool or toss a dollar in the tin, as you please; the real hope is that the developers will get some value out of seeing the discussion. Mine’s a cynical perspective, sure, but that’s my disposition, so that’s what I intend to offer.
.
In Defense of Buttons.
In the last ten years or so, there has been a push for video games at-large toward what we can call “minimalism.” Not just MMOs, although I first noticed this trend being consolidated in MMOs—for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment. Elder Scrolls Online was the earliest I can recall where the studio chose to market this as a design philosophy, and as a selling point of the game. The idea was that having less ‘stuff’ on your screen meant you had more real-estate to look at the world, and therefore, that less stuff meant more immersion. We heard this a lot. Some players were excited by this line of reasoning; look how pretty. I was not. You’ll notice perhaps, like I did, that the argument very carefully conflates a minimalist aesthetic, with a minimal amount of actual gameplay mechanics. The reality of the situation was, that every class only had a bar of about five active abilities. You had your four buttons, and your ‘ultimate.’ I think this fashion was the result of two major factors.
The first was a general desire that cropped up back then (2011 or so, perhaps a bit earlier), to try and press the waning MMO format into the more popular space of MOBAs, mostly because they sold better. WoW was plateauing and losing subs for the first time in a long time. Several “WoW killers” had consumed massive budgets and flopped entirely. DoTA 2, and League of Legends were exploding. Corporate ear-pieces were trying to force their existing products to appeal to those markets. Good businessmen also demanded cross-console marketability for everything, which, meant that games had to have interfaces that were simple enough to be easily mapped onto a console controller. That created an environment where it became, understandably although regrettably, fashionable to reduce, reduce, reduce. What I’m talking about here, however, is a much larger subject—and one into the details of which perhaps I’ll go in a different thread—so, let's stick just to the issue of class depth in the form of buttons.
Most RPGs out there have, for years now and for a slew of reasons, taken it for granted that you get only a handful of actionable abilities. The second thing that fell into place, is that the prejudice for minimalism allowed the studio to explain away as ‘immersive’ what was essentially a bare-bones approach to actual class depth. It’s clever, but still made for a bad, shallow game. Guild Wars 2 provided a similar feeling in terms of curtailed combat. You had your five buttons. You press the single target button when its single target. You press the template attack button when there's a few targets. You press the heal button when you’re damaged. You press your big boy button when its time to make some big boy noise. That’s it. Of course, over time, Retail WoW became something similar. Every class was pared back to have a few ‘resource builder’ abilities, and a few ‘resource spender’ abilities. Every class got some way to self-heal. They all gradually began to more-or-less play the same, and feel the same. Build, build, spend. Build, build, build, spend.
Boring, boring, boring. No soul.
The main point I want to make is this: "Minimalism," so-called, does not equal immersion. As a matter of fact it’s the opposite. In old-school MMOs--take vanilla WoW, for example--a lot of players balk at the amount of buttons on the screen. Modern developers as well. How can fifty things on the screen possibly be immersive? Well... it’s not so much of a puzzle. In the early game, you have maybe five. As you progress, you accrue more, and more. Leveling up your character isn’t just a number on the character sheet, and floating combat numbers. It’s more thingsto get the hang-of. It’s actual, literal progression in the form of learning skills, not just abstract progression in the form of xp or numbers applied to a tooltip.
They’re not all combat abilities, they’re not all part of your rotation. Some are niche, some are out of combat utility. Some are crowd control. Some are lateral options, that make sense in one scenario, whereas others make sense in a different scenario. Some might get cooldowns that modify certain types of spells. Do I “quicken” my heal to an instant cast, or quicken my crowd control? Or do I quicken my fireball? Decisions, decisions. A huge component of this are utility spells. More than half the things on my bars in the old days were non-combat abilities. They were things that only my class could do, that provided utility to other players, or provided some kind of flavor. That made my class feel different. Travel forms, teleports, conjurations, pet taming, buffs, debuffs, enchantments, mind control, tracking, far-sight..
The end result being that by the time you hit cap level, you had become a master of your class. When I was a kid, I can recall playing a low-level hunter in WoW. I had my five buttons, and one afternoon I went over to a friend’s house to watch him raid Molten Core. There were buttons all over his screen. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. He wasn't just playing the DPS meter either. He was kiting adds, and controlling problems, managing complex positioning, dispelling the boss’s engrages, and managing his mana bar and his pet. He was an integral component of this massive group of players, and had to perform tasks that only his class could perform. I wanted to learn how to play like he played. I wanted to get better at my class, and see what all those abilities were, and learn how to use them all. I wanted to be a better hunter, and that’s immersion. Said another way, I wanted to play the game. That’s soul.
When you give me an action bar of only five active abilities, and a big-boy button, I feel like I’m playing a mobile game. So, I go back to bootleg private servers for 30-year-old MMOs, because they treat players like human beings who have the capacity to master a skillset. Not like buffoons who can’t fathom the idea of down-ranking a spell.
.
On the Myth of Balance
Balance, balance, balance. Whatever the meta is, we hate the meta. Balance the meta, the meta is the meta, on account of bad balance. Yes, yes. Alright I’ll cut to the chase. Balance, in the way that most players seem to apply the term, is a myth in my mind. Read between the lines of much of the talk on the subject of balance in MMOs, and you’ll find people essentially describing their desire to have all classes play the same, have the same access to the same effects, and no specialties. ‘Anyone who can do something that I can’t, is unfair.’ Or, ‘Any situation where I’ve been pushed into a corner is unfair.’
What do you do? Remove all corners from the game, so no one gets pushed into them? Remove all specialties from the game so that no one has something I don’t? It's always about removing something seen as unfair, never about adding something to make the dominant strategy maybe more of a lateral strategy. Most players wouldn’t even agree that that’s what they’re doing—or realize that it’s the implication of the common attitude—but nevertheless, it’s a matter of fact. So much for the dangers of listening to the community too much. So what is balance, then? Balance, I think after a decade or two of reflection, is something I will try to describe as a function of two variables. The first is horizontal—or width. The second, is a sense of cost—or sacrifice. Very poetic, I know. Look here.
Width, or horizontal utility, is something that I believe Steven’s talked about, many times, in his own way on the dev streams. I’m hopeful about Intrepid’s design philosophy on this point. Width is generally a player’s ability to make multiple reasonable choices in a given scenario. If you play Magic: The Gathering like me, you can think of this like what we call 'lines-of-play,' at any given board state. If you don't, humor me a moment.
Magic players often talk about ‘playing to their outs.’ In lieu of a long-winded explanation: Playing to your outs means using what cards you have, and a degree of game-knowledge, to create scenarios on-board where the number of ‘bad’ draws from your deck are minimized. Good players constantly fight to keep the board in a position, where their deck is most likely to provide them something useful. In other words, bad magic players blame their deck, good magic players assume responsibility for their deck.
Often times there are numerous lines-of-play to negotiate. The skill ceiling can get quite high. There are horizontal options. Forks in the road. Risk, and reward. A number of ways to play it. A number of ways to win and feel smart, and a number of ways to lose and reflect on whether or not you did the most you could, with what you had available. Most times, you didn’t. Most times you learn. That’s what keeps me coming back to a game for twenty years, as opposed to logging out after twenty minutes and sitting in the shower, with the lights out thinking about how I don’t particularly want to go to work tomorrow. That’s width.
Cost, or sacrifice, is the idea that in order to gain some effect that puts you in a position over-top of someone, you have to expose a weakness to them. Scientific types call it entropy, that things fall apart without some injection of will. Literary types call it other pretty things. If you're into those funny black and white backwards-comics, its equivalent exchange. But the general principle is this: To get something, you have to give something first. This is true of good games, good writing, good craftsmanship, it’s true of anything good or lasting in life. And the result of wishing it away is atrophy.
If the rogue is going to have access to three stuns that lock me down for six seconds, he had better be a glass cannon. That way, when I use a cooldown the break the third stun--god willing I get a crit (which is likely, because I am stacking crit, at the cost of a larger health pool)--he folds like a napkin. Some players would not have taken the risk of stacking crit in this scenario, and they would die. Or maybe their health pool would be larger, and they’d get another hit. But they don't hit hard enough. So they die. Both players might be mad and complain. Take the stuns away, they’re unfair. It’s unbalanced.
For my part however, with youth having fled from me, now, like a good dream, I see the situation a bit differently. I see that had the gods blown the wind the other way and tipped my dice, it would have been the rogue with his shorts down, and I can see that I built my character so as to make that favorable wind particularly likely. I had options, provided to me by the game, to configure a little contraption of circumstance to counter the rogue, and I did so. I was playing to some of my outs. And that feels good. It feels like I’ll get him next time. Actually it feels like I hope he’s camping me so I can jump him and return the favor. It feels like I want to keep playing. And on a bit more reflection, perhaps it occurs to me as well that I forgot to slonk my evasion potion, because I was surprised. Had I gulped that, I might have gotten another roll at the crit. That’s something for me to keep in mind. It’s a way to grow; its tools I am hanging on my toolbelt and slowly learning to manage with my other tools. It’s a line of play I didn’t see. And that's cost.
So for the devs: Bring options to the table, and be smart about which options you bring, and to which tables. But the proper answer to some meta is more options, and more tables, so that the "right" option isn't always so clear, or definitive. Go broad. Get scrappy.
.
Buttons and Balance
Both of these ideas, about buttons and about balance, I’m sure you can see go hand-in-hand. I think that Steven’s talked about rock-paper-scissors several times in the past, and it sounds a lot like what I’m describing here in terms of cost and sacrifice. Rock slams scissors, but at the cost of being weak to paper. This is good balance. If you’re rock and you keep getting plastered by paper, make friends with scissors, or, go pick up the scissors professions. Develop your character. Make some sacrifices. Play to your strengths, and work with your flaws--instead of trying to be flawless. Flawlessness means indistinguishability. Balance means too many options and circumstances to determine the optimal line for all scenarios. And then the real magic occurs: Rock with scissors in his pocket now has a fascinating matchup against rock with paper in his pocket.
If your classes don’t have flaws, and if they don't have a dozen janky ways to account for them, I’m going back to my bootleg MMOs with buttons all over the screen to mess around with some janky build I haven’t tried before. Bear with me just a tick. Emil Cioran wrote, in discussing the idea of utopia, or for our purposes, in discussing the idea of some mythical “fair” game, where no one has one-up on anyone, ever--he wrote that “A child who does not steal is not a child.” Point being, the soul is in the cost, and the width.
.
Assessing Ashes
In a recent dev stream, Steven and Margaret also described that the average number of active abilites for a given class will be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. If that’s true, I’m beside myself. It’s been decades since a video game had the balls to give me a spellbook full of buttons to figure out.
It also seems like weapons have skill trees, which are tuned around passives and procs, as opposed to providing active abilities themselves. This also, if I understand correctly, seems very good to my eye. However, I’ll voice one concern. Perhaps someone can tell me if this has been addressed in a video I haven’t seen. In the ranger dev stream, Steven and the developers described how one weapon might synergize with a class ability, whereas a different weapon might synergize with a different class ability. On paper this sounds like interesting width, however, I can also forsee a situation where, using a shortbow to get one synergy means foregoing the class ability that synergizes with a different weapon. So, while its true I have “access” to thirty five abilities, in practice, when I choose my weapon, I am choosing to render some of them useless.
If that’s the case, I worry about creeping back toward the unhallowed ‘five-button-bar,’ which so obviously and admittedly haunts me in the small hours of the morning, like a disapproving look from my disappointed father.
Elder Scrolls Online provides another cautionary example for this concern. It was marketed as having huge width, because your weapons gave you access to skill lines outside of your class. The unfortunate reality, however, was that all weapons had the same four-or-so abilities available. Morphing one didn't give you an additional ability, it consumed and replaced one. And further, you only had the ever-present five-button-bar anyway, into which to slot your abilities. So, while its true that a class has the potential for forty abilities, a mage with a staff and a cleric with a staff are both seeing the same pool of staff abilities. It’s really twenty. And then, you pick maybe one from your staff, add it to your bar, and that’s that. Suddenly forty abilities is really five buttons; anyone with a staff equipped had the same one or two abilities equipped. A boring shame.
I think at this point I run the risk of rambling, so I’ll leave it here. Presuming it goes without saying that Steven and the Intrepid team are a gasping breath of fresh air, in an industry up to it’s neck like Tantalus in the stagnant water of ‘just good business.’
Direct your tomatoes below, if you would.
Yours, brashly
Luthric
I want to to bring up some thoughts in this thread on design philosophy, and be a bit critical. If I may. It should go without saying that the Intrepid team is, as ever, doing fine work. It's meat and potatoes time. No veggies. It's worth saying up front, as well, that I do not intend to portray my thoughts, collected here, as though you ought to share them. I only mean to state clearly what I think, and make a case for why I think it. Call me a fool or toss a dollar in the tin, as you please; the real hope is that the developers will get some value out of seeing the discussion. Mine’s a cynical perspective, sure, but that’s my disposition, so that’s what I intend to offer.
.
In Defense of Buttons.
In the last ten years or so, there has been a push for video games at-large toward what we can call “minimalism.” Not just MMOs, although I first noticed this trend being consolidated in MMOs—for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment. Elder Scrolls Online was the earliest I can recall where the studio chose to market this as a design philosophy, and as a selling point of the game. The idea was that having less ‘stuff’ on your screen meant you had more real-estate to look at the world, and therefore, that less stuff meant more immersion. We heard this a lot. Some players were excited by this line of reasoning; look how pretty. I was not. You’ll notice perhaps, like I did, that the argument very carefully conflates a minimalist aesthetic, with a minimal amount of actual gameplay mechanics. The reality of the situation was, that every class only had a bar of about five active abilities. You had your four buttons, and your ‘ultimate.’ I think this fashion was the result of two major factors.
The first was a general desire that cropped up back then (2011 or so, perhaps a bit earlier), to try and press the waning MMO format into the more popular space of MOBAs, mostly because they sold better. WoW was plateauing and losing subs for the first time in a long time. Several “WoW killers” had consumed massive budgets and flopped entirely. DoTA 2, and League of Legends were exploding. Corporate ear-pieces were trying to force their existing products to appeal to those markets. Good businessmen also demanded cross-console marketability for everything, which, meant that games had to have interfaces that were simple enough to be easily mapped onto a console controller. That created an environment where it became, understandably although regrettably, fashionable to reduce, reduce, reduce. What I’m talking about here, however, is a much larger subject—and one into the details of which perhaps I’ll go in a different thread—so, let's stick just to the issue of class depth in the form of buttons.
Most RPGs out there have, for years now and for a slew of reasons, taken it for granted that you get only a handful of actionable abilities. The second thing that fell into place, is that the prejudice for minimalism allowed the studio to explain away as ‘immersive’ what was essentially a bare-bones approach to actual class depth. It’s clever, but still made for a bad, shallow game. Guild Wars 2 provided a similar feeling in terms of curtailed combat. You had your five buttons. You press the single target button when its single target. You press the template attack button when there's a few targets. You press the heal button when you’re damaged. You press your big boy button when its time to make some big boy noise. That’s it. Of course, over time, Retail WoW became something similar. Every class was pared back to have a few ‘resource builder’ abilities, and a few ‘resource spender’ abilities. Every class got some way to self-heal. They all gradually began to more-or-less play the same, and feel the same. Build, build, spend. Build, build, build, spend.
Boring, boring, boring. No soul.
The main point I want to make is this: "Minimalism," so-called, does not equal immersion. As a matter of fact it’s the opposite. In old-school MMOs--take vanilla WoW, for example--a lot of players balk at the amount of buttons on the screen. Modern developers as well. How can fifty things on the screen possibly be immersive? Well... it’s not so much of a puzzle. In the early game, you have maybe five. As you progress, you accrue more, and more. Leveling up your character isn’t just a number on the character sheet, and floating combat numbers. It’s more thingsto get the hang-of. It’s actual, literal progression in the form of learning skills, not just abstract progression in the form of xp or numbers applied to a tooltip.
They’re not all combat abilities, they’re not all part of your rotation. Some are niche, some are out of combat utility. Some are crowd control. Some are lateral options, that make sense in one scenario, whereas others make sense in a different scenario. Some might get cooldowns that modify certain types of spells. Do I “quicken” my heal to an instant cast, or quicken my crowd control? Or do I quicken my fireball? Decisions, decisions. A huge component of this are utility spells. More than half the things on my bars in the old days were non-combat abilities. They were things that only my class could do, that provided utility to other players, or provided some kind of flavor. That made my class feel different. Travel forms, teleports, conjurations, pet taming, buffs, debuffs, enchantments, mind control, tracking, far-sight..
The end result being that by the time you hit cap level, you had become a master of your class. When I was a kid, I can recall playing a low-level hunter in WoW. I had my five buttons, and one afternoon I went over to a friend’s house to watch him raid Molten Core. There were buttons all over his screen. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. He wasn't just playing the DPS meter either. He was kiting adds, and controlling problems, managing complex positioning, dispelling the boss’s engrages, and managing his mana bar and his pet. He was an integral component of this massive group of players, and had to perform tasks that only his class could perform. I wanted to learn how to play like he played. I wanted to get better at my class, and see what all those abilities were, and learn how to use them all. I wanted to be a better hunter, and that’s immersion. Said another way, I wanted to play the game. That’s soul.
When you give me an action bar of only five active abilities, and a big-boy button, I feel like I’m playing a mobile game. So, I go back to bootleg private servers for 30-year-old MMOs, because they treat players like human beings who have the capacity to master a skillset. Not like buffoons who can’t fathom the idea of down-ranking a spell.
.
On the Myth of Balance
Balance, balance, balance. Whatever the meta is, we hate the meta. Balance the meta, the meta is the meta, on account of bad balance. Yes, yes. Alright I’ll cut to the chase. Balance, in the way that most players seem to apply the term, is a myth in my mind. Read between the lines of much of the talk on the subject of balance in MMOs, and you’ll find people essentially describing their desire to have all classes play the same, have the same access to the same effects, and no specialties. ‘Anyone who can do something that I can’t, is unfair.’ Or, ‘Any situation where I’ve been pushed into a corner is unfair.’
What do you do? Remove all corners from the game, so no one gets pushed into them? Remove all specialties from the game so that no one has something I don’t? It's always about removing something seen as unfair, never about adding something to make the dominant strategy maybe more of a lateral strategy. Most players wouldn’t even agree that that’s what they’re doing—or realize that it’s the implication of the common attitude—but nevertheless, it’s a matter of fact. So much for the dangers of listening to the community too much. So what is balance, then? Balance, I think after a decade or two of reflection, is something I will try to describe as a function of two variables. The first is horizontal—or width. The second, is a sense of cost—or sacrifice. Very poetic, I know. Look here.
Width, or horizontal utility, is something that I believe Steven’s talked about, many times, in his own way on the dev streams. I’m hopeful about Intrepid’s design philosophy on this point. Width is generally a player’s ability to make multiple reasonable choices in a given scenario. If you play Magic: The Gathering like me, you can think of this like what we call 'lines-of-play,' at any given board state. If you don't, humor me a moment.
Magic players often talk about ‘playing to their outs.’ In lieu of a long-winded explanation: Playing to your outs means using what cards you have, and a degree of game-knowledge, to create scenarios on-board where the number of ‘bad’ draws from your deck are minimized. Good players constantly fight to keep the board in a position, where their deck is most likely to provide them something useful. In other words, bad magic players blame their deck, good magic players assume responsibility for their deck.
Often times there are numerous lines-of-play to negotiate. The skill ceiling can get quite high. There are horizontal options. Forks in the road. Risk, and reward. A number of ways to play it. A number of ways to win and feel smart, and a number of ways to lose and reflect on whether or not you did the most you could, with what you had available. Most times, you didn’t. Most times you learn. That’s what keeps me coming back to a game for twenty years, as opposed to logging out after twenty minutes and sitting in the shower, with the lights out thinking about how I don’t particularly want to go to work tomorrow. That’s width.
Cost, or sacrifice, is the idea that in order to gain some effect that puts you in a position over-top of someone, you have to expose a weakness to them. Scientific types call it entropy, that things fall apart without some injection of will. Literary types call it other pretty things. If you're into those funny black and white backwards-comics, its equivalent exchange. But the general principle is this: To get something, you have to give something first. This is true of good games, good writing, good craftsmanship, it’s true of anything good or lasting in life. And the result of wishing it away is atrophy.
If the rogue is going to have access to three stuns that lock me down for six seconds, he had better be a glass cannon. That way, when I use a cooldown the break the third stun--god willing I get a crit (which is likely, because I am stacking crit, at the cost of a larger health pool)--he folds like a napkin. Some players would not have taken the risk of stacking crit in this scenario, and they would die. Or maybe their health pool would be larger, and they’d get another hit. But they don't hit hard enough. So they die. Both players might be mad and complain. Take the stuns away, they’re unfair. It’s unbalanced.
For my part however, with youth having fled from me, now, like a good dream, I see the situation a bit differently. I see that had the gods blown the wind the other way and tipped my dice, it would have been the rogue with his shorts down, and I can see that I built my character so as to make that favorable wind particularly likely. I had options, provided to me by the game, to configure a little contraption of circumstance to counter the rogue, and I did so. I was playing to some of my outs. And that feels good. It feels like I’ll get him next time. Actually it feels like I hope he’s camping me so I can jump him and return the favor. It feels like I want to keep playing. And on a bit more reflection, perhaps it occurs to me as well that I forgot to slonk my evasion potion, because I was surprised. Had I gulped that, I might have gotten another roll at the crit. That’s something for me to keep in mind. It’s a way to grow; its tools I am hanging on my toolbelt and slowly learning to manage with my other tools. It’s a line of play I didn’t see. And that's cost.
So for the devs: Bring options to the table, and be smart about which options you bring, and to which tables. But the proper answer to some meta is more options, and more tables, so that the "right" option isn't always so clear, or definitive. Go broad. Get scrappy.
.
Buttons and Balance
Both of these ideas, about buttons and about balance, I’m sure you can see go hand-in-hand. I think that Steven’s talked about rock-paper-scissors several times in the past, and it sounds a lot like what I’m describing here in terms of cost and sacrifice. Rock slams scissors, but at the cost of being weak to paper. This is good balance. If you’re rock and you keep getting plastered by paper, make friends with scissors, or, go pick up the scissors professions. Develop your character. Make some sacrifices. Play to your strengths, and work with your flaws--instead of trying to be flawless. Flawlessness means indistinguishability. Balance means too many options and circumstances to determine the optimal line for all scenarios. And then the real magic occurs: Rock with scissors in his pocket now has a fascinating matchup against rock with paper in his pocket.
If your classes don’t have flaws, and if they don't have a dozen janky ways to account for them, I’m going back to my bootleg MMOs with buttons all over the screen to mess around with some janky build I haven’t tried before. Bear with me just a tick. Emil Cioran wrote, in discussing the idea of utopia, or for our purposes, in discussing the idea of some mythical “fair” game, where no one has one-up on anyone, ever--he wrote that “A child who does not steal is not a child.” Point being, the soul is in the cost, and the width.
.
Assessing Ashes
In a recent dev stream, Steven and Margaret also described that the average number of active abilites for a given class will be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. If that’s true, I’m beside myself. It’s been decades since a video game had the balls to give me a spellbook full of buttons to figure out.
It also seems like weapons have skill trees, which are tuned around passives and procs, as opposed to providing active abilities themselves. This also, if I understand correctly, seems very good to my eye. However, I’ll voice one concern. Perhaps someone can tell me if this has been addressed in a video I haven’t seen. In the ranger dev stream, Steven and the developers described how one weapon might synergize with a class ability, whereas a different weapon might synergize with a different class ability. On paper this sounds like interesting width, however, I can also forsee a situation where, using a shortbow to get one synergy means foregoing the class ability that synergizes with a different weapon. So, while its true I have “access” to thirty five abilities, in practice, when I choose my weapon, I am choosing to render some of them useless.
If that’s the case, I worry about creeping back toward the unhallowed ‘five-button-bar,’ which so obviously and admittedly haunts me in the small hours of the morning, like a disapproving look from my disappointed father.
Elder Scrolls Online provides another cautionary example for this concern. It was marketed as having huge width, because your weapons gave you access to skill lines outside of your class. The unfortunate reality, however, was that all weapons had the same four-or-so abilities available. Morphing one didn't give you an additional ability, it consumed and replaced one. And further, you only had the ever-present five-button-bar anyway, into which to slot your abilities. So, while its true that a class has the potential for forty abilities, a mage with a staff and a cleric with a staff are both seeing the same pool of staff abilities. It’s really twenty. And then, you pick maybe one from your staff, add it to your bar, and that’s that. Suddenly forty abilities is really five buttons; anyone with a staff equipped had the same one or two abilities equipped. A boring shame.
I think at this point I run the risk of rambling, so I’ll leave it here. Presuming it goes without saying that Steven and the Intrepid team are a gasping breath of fresh air, in an industry up to it’s neck like Tantalus in the stagnant water of ‘just good business.’
Direct your tomatoes below, if you would.
Yours, brashly
Luthric
8
Comments
With permission, I'll parse it too.
The result of the parse is unlikely to be provided, as your points are all very clear and I just need more practice for my sentiment tracker.
I do *not* like the idea of having just a few active abilities per class, but I *LOVED* the GW2 system of choosing what to bring for each encounter/journey.
5 weapon-tied abilities, 3 utilities of choice (be it damage, survivability or otherwise), 1 heal and 1 "ultimate". The difference between a good player and a decent player is how they manage to swap abilities depending on the situation. Also, it reminded me a lot of D&D (which I realize Steven is a fan of) - you have *access* to many abilities, but you need to *choose* what you need for your particular situation. That way, two fighters could fill two completely different roles/fantasies even though they play the same class.
I played WoW since first day of launch in Europe and been both raiding and PvPing at the top % levels, and I absolutely hate having 40+ keybinds where most are niche abilities used every now and then.
I'll be able to cope if they choose to go with the "here's 40 abilities, HF with your 40+ keybinds" - I am used to it. But I would never consider it a highlight of the game.
EDIT: to clearify - I am not so much for the MOBA-kinda system in MMOs - but I am all for the typical "hack-n-slash" game style (D3, Wolcen, Grim Dawn) where one can build a character in many different ways and adapt their gameplay to suit their preferences and situations.
To paraphrase in a way, a lot of reasons player's use to explain why they don't like a system is grounded in wrong perceptions, such as using "balance" as an excuse to not include certain features. They may have played a game that had a decent amount of "buttons", and that game is unbalanced (or is at least in their minds), and therefore conclude more buttons=imbalanced when they are two completely different game-design aspects. Players in general tend to "throw the baby out with the bathwater", when they find something they don't like, leading to less and less gameplay features they are willing to accept. The issue with this is that since pretty much 90% of everything is indeed crap, this makes it very hard to get things tuned correctly into a state players are willing to accept, thus resulting in less features players will accept, and thus less actual gameplay that could have been otherwise polished and innovative, had feedback been more contstructive.
I think this is a big reason for the push toward minimalism, that, and the fact that a lot of players don't really want to have to put forth any effort in anymore, which means designers compensate for this by making things far more shallow and approachable, leading to less interesting gameplay and less opportunity for personal advancement.
As to your main point-
I couldn't agree more- situational options/tools/buttons are essential, and make for more engaging gameplay, and are probably the most important thing to focus on for compelling gameplay in general.
I agree with most of what you said and am glad you made this post. The main point I wanted to comment on is that I think rock/paper/scissors balance is very good, but not in the traditional sense that people think of, in that "all else equal- you automatically lose/win based on automatically countering others or being countered based on one choice" (like your initial main character class choice forever determining your fate)- The reason why rock/paper/scissors (the real life version) works because you can choose and adapt with either rock paper or scissors. If you couldn't then it wouldn't really be much of a game, because it would be over after the first turn, and not be much fun. Just like "buttons" require situational adaptation, so should the rock/paper/scissors aspect, in that there is counterplay available to the player, even if there last choice wasn't successful.
Access to change and adapt to the situation in some way is neccessary for good and fair gameplay, but through that added layer of strategy it opens up the possibility for classes themselves to represent one of those three core counterplay aspects (rock, paper, or scissors) allowing for a clear difference, rather than all the counterplay/strategy coming though just the more granular level of gameplay, like combat itself- while still being balanced and empowering the player.
Basically player choice/counterplay should always be relevant, so rock/paper/scissors class design should allow for that, there should be counterplay and strategy in classes themselves, and it shouldn't be "you chose rock, you are stuck with rock, therefore you will always lose to paper". This could even come through the ability to rechoose sub-classes/skill specs to allow for this type of counterplay to be accessible.
If i read it right, you might be implying this, which I would agree with, but I couldn't tell 100%. Its important to note that even when you are at a disadvantage class wise, I still think you should have a fighting chance- so that class strategy and combat skill are both relevant at all times.
Im assuming because you like having to make impactful build choices?
Because you can have both a lot of buttons to pres and impactful build choices, as long as the combat has a lot of options that means it can add those options as choices for you to choose between for your builds. That way you can still make sacrifices, while still having the end result of having a lot of activities to do during combat.
Same response/question for you as well
Of course, I felt that NW had way too few abilities (6), even with 2xlight attack, 2xheavy attack, block, dodge, drink potion and eat food adding to that.
I'm hoping that AoC has about 12-15 usable class abilities at max level. Then add block, dodge, potion and maybe an item ability or two.
The way I think it's going is that you could have more abilities available to you by spreading your skill points around, but they will be less effective abilities than someone who concentrated skill points into less abilities
Depends on how its executed. There can easily be 40 useful skills, if the designer knows how to give each one a defined purpose. Yeah, some will be more niche than others, but there is nothing wrong with that, its a good thing to have specific ways of dealing with specific situations.
You saw those buttons from the idea of Class Design, but when you consider elements of combat those buttons can be accounted for in the way the combat is designed.
Following mechanical movements, the measure of space between objects, aiming, movement, combat geometry, all of those can be accounted for in the combat side of the design without taking away from class design.
Then, it increases spatial interactions through the world on a non superficial level, it becomes ever more important to have Visual-Spatial and Bodily-Kinesthetic intelligence and awareness instead of just Logical-Mathematical intelligence.
When they balance that out, the game will have soul.
For me, more buttons without the things I listed above, isn't a game with soul at all. When it comes down to class design heavy games with only Logical-Mathematical intelligence involved, it becomes a parse simulator. And that's incredibly soulless.
Flowing parts of class and combat will be the most enriching design if done right.
I personally fall into this same bucket of players. I like having options, but during the moment to moment gameplay of combat, I don't want to have to worry about too many keybinds.
I like the idea of customizing my class to fit what I want to do, or to help solve a specific problem. I then want to master that subset of skills. Knowing exactly when/how to use each ability to the greatest effect.
There is a line somewhere, where adding abilities is only adding buttons, and nothing really new to the combat rotation. For example: A mage has 2 abilities that do roughly the same thing, they both have a CD of 30 sec. The first skill is a fireball, the second is a lighting bolt. I would rather be able to choose 1 of those abilities and have it on a 15 sec CD or a charge system. I'm doing roughly the same amount of damage, pressing buttons the same amount of times, but I only need to use a single button, and only pay attention to 1 CD indicator.
With that all said, I still want interesting ability rotations/interactions. I just don't want to have buttons on my bars that I use once every week because they are so niche.
Absolutely not. It is way more complicated than that. Are the 3 stuns block able? Does the stun duration decrease the longer it has been applied? To merely say "give me the ability to, get gud" when referencing stuns is folly.
Stuns are needed in the game to provide balance and structure but they are FAR more complicated than this statement above indicates.
IS plans on having a TTK of 30 seconds to a minute as well.
It wasn't awful; on the contrary it was often fun and I liked the challenge.
Then I played other games that were different. Years before ESO came out we had The Secret World, where you had many skills in a system where there were no levels or classes. It was fully skill-based and there was no limit to what skills you could learn; you could literally learn every skill in the game if you spent enough time. And there were a lot of them. 525 of them to be exact. They were divided between active and passive abilities; active abilities were things you could do, like attacks, heals, defenses, charges. Passive abilities usually modified how the active abilities worked, or added additional utility to them. (Not unlike how augments are described in Ashes of Creation.)
What defined a character in a game with no classes and no levels was the level of gear you had, and what skills you chose to combine. You could only have 7 active and 7 passive abilities at a time. You could swap between saved builds on the fly, putting different gear and skills on each build. But narrowing what you could do with all of those skills was essential to making the game work.
I thought it worked great, and it was a refreshing change from what I was used to. And it didn't dumb things down or simplify them; the vast variety of things you could do and all of the choices you could make were a massive challenge in themselves. And I saw other games follow suit, ESO as mentioned was like that. WoW and SWTOR also limited the UI but unfortunately they also dumbed down the systems by limiting choices. I suppose they wanted to make it easier for players by giving you only a few choices per tier per spec per class instead of huge trees to plan out. That to me felt like the wrong way to do it.
So far, what Ashes of Creation is doing is similar to what The Secret World did. A limited ability bar but tons of customization behind it. As I said, I liked the "airplane cockpit" style of older games as well, but having played both I still prefer the paradigm where you have fewer active skills at any given time. It has just made for a better gameplay experience for me, personally.
That being said, your rambling was a damn good read, and I see nothing to disagree with.
I honestly think if your game doesn't have enough hot-buttons on its main bar to fill a gaming mouse, it should probably have been released on a console, not a pc.
the problem with having lots of buttons is that 90% of your keyboard becomes situational. you slot a skill or a piece of gear to swap because you will need it in 1/50 fights. so if most buttons are useful most of the time, I'm all for lots of buttons. otherwise, I'm ok with not many buttons to press.
I think a key point being communicated in this post, is that if all of your buttons are relevant all of the time there isn't as much thought or depth that goes into playing, compared to having more niche buttons that still are useful, but used less of the time. Its really about "more gameplay vs less gameplay" which when people advocate for less, that preference tends to be driven by either a "skill issue" or "misperception" about how more buttons impact the gameplay.
As you say, ESO went to the other extreme, and realising the problem that was a cluttered and ugly UI, they decided the best approach was to give players such a tiny amount of skills that it prevented them from being able to create a meaningful build.
For me, the ideal is a large amount of skills that you can swap in and out while you're not in combat, with a small selection to use at any one time. Having access to all skills you've unlocked at all times isn't creating a build, and takes the tactics and decision-making out of the gameplay.
I like the 1-8 buttons, and I'd be comfortable with adding an alternative for each, such as holding Ctrl while I press 1-8. 9 and 0 could be, I dunno, Health and Magic Potions or something. But just let me have to think about the skills I'm taking into an encounter. I don't want them all available at all times, cos it's boring and takes away that aspect of character gameplay that keeps things fresh.
You can have the best of both worlds though- the amount of skills available at once is not the problem, the problem as you pointed out, is
1. making sure you have to make meaningful build choices
2. Making sure the UI looks clean
This just means having more skills to choose from, relative to the ones that are available to the player at once- so if you have a ton of skills available at once, make sure there are even more to choose from, to force sacrifices/decisions to be made. For example, if you can equip 30 skills, make the player choose from 60 for example, if you can equip 100 skills, make sure the player chooses from 200, etc.
If there are only 20 to choose from, its backwards to say the player should only be able to equip a handful, instead of suggesting that they simply add more to choose from, making the equipped ones more meaninful without eliminating gameplay options. The former approach is the "minimalist" approach the OP was highlighting, which is having a negative affect on modern ganme design imo.
As far as the UI goes- you can have different ways of performing skills other than having a separate button for each individual skill. Such as
1. having those individual skills consolidated into just a few buttons, and having a character "mode" (like a stance for example) that can change the effects of of each of those small handful of buttons you actually see on the screen, in order to produce the effects of the overall amount of skills available.
2. Having less buttons, with effects changing when interacting with that button in different ways, such as holding it down for a longer amount of time to charge it
There are tricks like that, that can be used to avoid visual clutter without removing the skills themselves.
But yes. If they can balance this, I'll be very happy.
I like your idea of changing the buttons based on context. For example, using my 1-8 with Ctrl from above, pressing the Ctrl button could swap in the Ctrl-bar, so you're seeing the skills you need, but the UI hasn't been affected further. And once you release Ctrl, it's back to normal again.
If we can keep the equippable skills down to the point where player builds matter, I'd like to see something like this implemented.
This is implemented already.
Yes and no. The main reason why I belong to the "many choices, few active buttons"-category is because I cannot stand messy UIs. Like @daveywavey illustrated above, 40+ active abilities is a UI nightmare. I cannot imagine a way to not make it so. Meanwhile scrolling action-bars is only viable for 3ish rows without being a pain to deal with, and it is generally really clumsy imo. In WoW I utilized WeakAuras to make my UI not look like the above, but that is not an option in AoC. If you can provide a decent example of 40+ active abilities without having the UI being a cluttered mess, then please go ahead and I shall reconsider my stance.
Another reason is that I enjoy ARPGs and tabletop games where limited spells in combat but complex build alternatives is the norm. I have never once felt that talents (in any MMORPG I've played) come even near the feeling of choosing between abilities to make yourself a build that is (more or less) unique and tailor made for you.
When it comes to MMORPGs (in terms of combat), I'd rate it as follows:
1. Guild Wars 2 - when it comes to combat in MMORPGs, then GW2 takes the cake imo. You can make unique builds depending on what you're doing, choose between damage over time builds or direct damage for all classes, and melee and ranged options for all classes. All classes also have access to support or DPSing (or hybrids), with different strengths and weaknesses depending on class and builds.
2. Guild Wars (the original) - class diversity as you could mix classes and combine spells. Concept-wise, this one is a clear winner. But as expected from a game that came 2005, the combat is a bit clunky and was never as "free" and fast-phased as WoW combat due to the limited mobility when casting abilities.
3. Star Wars The Old Republic - I loved the unique take of SWTOR (but unfortunately I hate EA). The way you had your own base, your own story, companions (that were class dependent) and all of that - but in terms of combat it'll be in first place when it comes to "40+ abilities". The take was far from unique in any way - but it was alright.
4. World of Warcraft - probably more of a case being used to the game rather than liking it. But one thing I do love about WoW is that (most of the time) each class have their own strengths and weaknesses and different playstyle. You have classes that require "build up" and classes that require more reactive gameplay. The downside with WoW (and one of the primary reasons I prefer GW2) is that you always knew exactly what to expect from each class. All fire mages are the same, all marksmanship hunters are the same, all holy priests are the same etc. Especially in PvP - everyone plays the same build in competitive PvP in WoW. In GW2 you'll see a lot of strange builds as you reach the highest levels of PvP as everyone already knows how to counter the standard meta builds. And this comes from someone who has spent an unhealthy amount of time in both casual and competitive PvP in WoW.
Other than the titles above, I've also played Age of Conan, Final Fantasy. Lord of the Rings Online and Aion - but I don't feel like I played them enough to comment on the gameplay in depth. None of them really stuck to me in the long run.
I feel similarly.
I prefer the Guild Wars 2 system with weapon swapping (5 skills per weapon), a healing skill, 3 utilities, and 1 elite. By far the best, most balanced, and fluid combat system out of any MMO imo. Tons of build diversity, multitude of ways to use each of your skills in different scenarios.
If Guild Wars 2 had the secondary class system and depth of skill customization that Guild Wars 1 had, it would be leagues beyond any competitor.
The trick to a good UI though isnt to just remove functionality, it is to only show what is needed in the moment.
In games that allow for it, I set my UI to have an area for travel, an area for combat abilities, an area for pre-fombat buffs etc.
I then set the UI to not show any of that unless the context is in place. My combat UI elements will only show if I am in combat (our have the mouse cursor over them). Set traveling elements to only show while mounted (or mouse over) etc, quest journal and mini-map to only show when have updated a quest (or mouse over) etc.
All of a sudden, I have an empty UI, that only shows me what I want to see in that moment.
To me, that is how you develop a game with a clean UI. You dont do it by cutting off half of your combat system like ESO did.
I see, as I responded to davey with then, there are workarounds for that, I think a problem in general that hurts the genre is when the first reaction to an issue such as with the UI, is when gamers think eliminating correlating features would be the best way to solve the issue, rather than directly addressing the cause of the core issue itself, or maybe adding new aspects that would address the issue. In this case, just because a correlating factor to a messy UI is number of abilities, the problem could instead be solved through figuring out how to maintain abilities without cluttering UI- such as having abilities be contextual through different fighting modes/button interactions, like holding down a button to change its effect, in order to produce a different ability. These would be a couple examples that would allow there to be less buttons on the screen at once, without gutting the combat.
It may be good, but only looking at existing combat systems as a whole, rather than what the best components are from different combat systems, will only limit potential improvements from being made. Instead you could look at what components make up great combat systems in various games- in which case lots of tactical options and niche tools are a common theme, so a good combat system like guild wars 2 could potentially be made even better by applying this reasoning even if it is already good in many other ways. I could link you combat design case studies and other great combat systems to support my point if you are interested.