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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Class (64) play styles to match personalities/abilities of real gamers?
Xeeg
Member, Alpha Two
When we talk about class fantasy we are often talking about some kind of abstract vision of what a fictional character could be like. We say mage and we imagine the spells and abilities of the mage. Or the style of clothing, or we "roleplay" what a mage might act like. Highly intellectual, very knowledgeable in their domain, possibly clumsy and ignorant of basic common sense.
But what about if we looked at classes from the perspective of what kind of gamers would enjoy playing this class?
For example, I was recently playing Overwatch 2 with my kid. I am not very good at shooters, and my fast twitch muscles on my fingers aren't what they once were. There is no way I am headshotting some kid before they headshot me. But I have a decent mind for strategy, and I understand positioning and the flow of a battle.
I chose to play characters like Winston and Reinhardt. Don't need to react with lightning precision mouse control, just need to be at the right place at the right time and swing in the general direction of your enemies. Perfect for me.
I was thinking about this in relation to the classes in Ashes of Creation. What if, as part of the 64 class structure, the devs made the classes themselves appeal to different gamers from across the spectrum of the gaming world.
Some people are faster on the keyboard than others. Some can react to battle situations quicker. Great, make some classes that feel great in the hands of these players, and some classes that are still very effective with slow players.
The average IQ is 100. Why not make some classes really require a higher IQ to figure out and control properly, while others are pretty simple and straight forward. That way, instead of saying "The game is too complex", or "The game is too simple", we might think a certain class is too complex or simple, and we swap to something that suits us better.
We all have different strengths and weaknesses.
We have 64 class fantasies to work with here, the classes should cater to the strengths and weaknesses of actual gamers, rather than just subjective abstract lore fantasies.
But what about if we looked at classes from the perspective of what kind of gamers would enjoy playing this class?
For example, I was recently playing Overwatch 2 with my kid. I am not very good at shooters, and my fast twitch muscles on my fingers aren't what they once were. There is no way I am headshotting some kid before they headshot me. But I have a decent mind for strategy, and I understand positioning and the flow of a battle.
I chose to play characters like Winston and Reinhardt. Don't need to react with lightning precision mouse control, just need to be at the right place at the right time and swing in the general direction of your enemies. Perfect for me.
I was thinking about this in relation to the classes in Ashes of Creation. What if, as part of the 64 class structure, the devs made the classes themselves appeal to different gamers from across the spectrum of the gaming world.
Some people are faster on the keyboard than others. Some can react to battle situations quicker. Great, make some classes that feel great in the hands of these players, and some classes that are still very effective with slow players.
The average IQ is 100. Why not make some classes really require a higher IQ to figure out and control properly, while others are pretty simple and straight forward. That way, instead of saying "The game is too complex", or "The game is too simple", we might think a certain class is too complex or simple, and we swap to something that suits us better.
We all have different strengths and weaknesses.
We have 64 class fantasies to work with here, the classes should cater to the strengths and weaknesses of actual gamers, rather than just subjective abstract lore fantasies.
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Comments
The questions related to this go way deeper, if you poke around in the games that have that complexity.
It's possible that I am saying the equivalent of "round wheels are good everyone!"... Kinda new to this.
I just see a lot of talk about lore and fantasy image with regards to classes, but not a lot of talk about how classes cater to different gamers. Sometimes I see people just say "Ashes isn't for you" when really it could just be how a class operates that isn't for us. I recently had a guy comment about how spreadsheet gamers are bad and good gamers just play by intuition alone. Not the exact quote but that was the gist of it. Got me thinking about how those types of playstyles can be integrated into the classes.
My recent posts on UI touch on this too. Maybe I like a complicated/messy UI, and maybe that suits a few classes really well. Maybe some classes can get away with a really simple UI without any significant drop in their effectiveness.
Shrug.
It's moreso that I probably view it wrong.
This type of topic normally ends up in a weird space where I want to engage with it, but I've noticed that most forum posters have relatively limited experience with it, so it gets weird to discuss.
Mostly because I end up feeling like the part that actually 'matters' to a good game never actually gets talked about (the issue that a simpler choice with equal effectiveness, in 90% of games, is just chosen by everyone, or the more complex choice with higher theoretical effectiveness, is too dominant).
This is a very good point. The IQ thing might not really the best measure, because it is more related to how quickly can you figure something out. Once it is figured out, it then becomes about how best can you execute it.
Although, that is talking more about builds or spell rotations. If you have a lot of triggered abilities, for example, the trick might be in deciding on which one to choose at any given moment in the battle.
So maybe one way to do it is have some classes that are based a lot more on triggered effects, and others that have solid rotations that they execute based on muscle memory or something.
This is also ok, but it doesn't tend to work out in practice because triggered effects are susceptible to more 'forced errors' and therefore must be compensated with additional power.
Making them binary. When your opponent can force the error, it's 'balanced', but if they can't, it's automatically superior.
Or, you can design it so that it's balanced based on some 'expected number of forced errors' and then weak against everyone who knows how to counter it (but if they don't have the tools to counter it, we're back to the first situation).
I'd mostly prefer numeric/spreadsheet style balance for a game as complex as Ashes, because I don't like to see underutilized/specialist only classes/characters, but that wouldn't prevent the problem anyway, it would just change people's understanding of it.
this is normal in every game like this T_T
... ... but it sounds interesting.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
I have datasets.
You are right though, it's closer to 90 playstyles for this game type.
That's the maximum I've ever found in a design space where you could reasonably say that frame data is a determinant for anything.
Generally, though, 52 is about right.
Right, good point. It's more that you HAVE to work a lot harder just to be as effective as another character, and who wants to do that if they don't have to? Otherwise the game is broken.
I was thinking about about how they balance Starcraft 2 recently. Different kind of game for sure, but 3 unique races with very different units and mechanics.
Other than specific timings of things, which is an iterative process, part of the game balance is tied around units that require a lot of attention (micro) to be effective and units that require your enemies attention to stop.
For example, a widow mine doesn't require a lot of micro to be effective. You can burrow it (hidden) in a choke point and never look at it again, and by the end of the game it can have 200 kills. Your opponent, on the other hand, needs to get killed by it first before they even know it is there. Then they need to get an observer over. Then they need to attack it with a ranged unit or sacrifice a unit to put its attack on cooldown.
This type of unit "forces errors" on the opponent with little risk to the player using it.
Part of the downside is that if you spend resources making it, and it is just sitting all game somewhere the opponent never goes, then you are effectively reducing the size of your active army, and could lose a big battle head to head. Either that or they are already travelling with an observer and just kill it before you can move it and it didn't do anything.
Not exactly sure how to tie this into MMO balance, but maybe there are some clues...
They seem to be mostly on track.
Sorry if it's weird, I'll try to put it differently.
A lot of the reason I don't just 'lay out all probable 64 classes' is that I expect the responses to be 'nitpicks' and 'wishes for more originality' (with no actual suggestions or bases) because this is what happens to nearly every other developer I've seen or helped do it.
What I'm trying to say, overall, is that this is so common, that even if I did that, it wouldn't be because I am necessarily 'very good at designing these' (I might, or might not be), but that it's been done reasonably correctly so many times by now, that just about any game can spin up a class tree or about 50 individual character types.
I'd bet you could ask ChatGPT to do it and get decent results. And yes, that includes the balance. So it's weird to 'discuss' it, y'know?
I like the thinking.
As some others have pointed out, I think this is fairly common but I wonder how deliberate it is.
I think the skill floors/ceilings just naturally vary but I like the idea of consciously designing it in more.
Oh I see...
I'm basically talking about how round wheels are good, while you are saying that the optimal tread pattern is already figured for a dirt bike tire on a muddy race track.
I'll just leave this to the experts then. LOL
I have, in my Discussion history, a bunch of '[Archetype] Desires Compilation'. They're somewhat fun reading for this, if you want to see a few examples of 'what sorts of things people want and expect from AoC classes'.