Human Skill Combat Movement
8/16/99
Further Defining It
I think my initial post on human skill, while it was a good start, didn't really clarify enough points to generate a good discussion. SO, I wanted to toss up a new post that delves into what I consider the kind of human skill environment that pays off in a game. There are a couple supportive issues to it, and then alot of direct ones. Of course all of these are just my opinions, so others out there might have better ideas. Shoot if you do.
When I put up my original post, I was really fishing for the perspective of the design team on this stuff rather than trying to put up my own views of what's needed. But it seems to me that maybe the best way to get the ball rolling on this topic is to put up my own views so that:
a) It's clear exactly what kinds of issues I'm talking about when I say that I'd like to see human skill in the game
b) There's a little more substance there to comment on, agree with or disagree with
First of all I strongly believe that the persistent world facet of games like these serve a couple of limited purposes. And what I mean by the persistent world facet is that you have a character that starts at zero, builds up over time, and eventually maxxes out. Throughout that process you keep the same name and face, and thus are recognizable in the community. Anyway, the purposes (to my mind) are:
1) To provide a period of time (should be about 3 to 4 months before you max) during which a players thoroughly learns the game environment, powers, geography, interface etc. Doing this while building power for your character is the best way to go as it keeps the process rewarding and exciting.
2) To provide a period of time during which the player gets to know the other people in the community, builds some allies/friends, learns who swings a big…er stick? Etc.
3) To create a visible tangible distinction between the newbie and the long-time player. People enjoy having their dedication to a game rewarded by being bigger and badder than somebody who just got into the game. They enjoy being able to show that power off by helping out or intimidating the newbies. Maxxing is a rite of passage.
4) AFTER maxxing, to continue to have the same name and face so that as you interact with other players and win fights, etc. you can build a reputation and a feeling of accomplishment. Essentially so you can walk down the street and feel like a bad ass because everyone knows you're a bad ass.
BUT THAT'S IT. Playing against the game itself (mob/npcs, puzzles, etc.) is a short-term, eventually boring operation. The time you spend raising your character to its fullest powers is your training-wheels time. It should ONLY be as long as it takes you to know the basics of the game engine thoroughly. Because it's not until AFTER you're maxxed that the real playing should begin.
Note that this issue (too long of a max time) is one that has severly hurt UO and EQ. Players don't begin to interact with each other in a truly FUN fashion until AFTER their characters are as good as they can be. It's natural human instinct to acquire respect, influence and power through the easiest means available. In UO and EQ, that means reptitive killing of monsters. Which means that during that period, there's very little role play, very little combat, very little anything other than using repetitive formulas to beat up low IQ mob/npcs.
The longer that max-time go beyond what it takes to learn the game basics, the more likely the game is to bore and frustrate players. Players who are busy trying to level don't talk to each other, don't roleplay, don't fight, don't hang out, don't really pursue quests for fun, don't learn the ART of combat within the engine (trying different tactics, etc.)… they don't form a community. The pressure to level up is just too high for anyone to disconnect from it and actually PLAY the game. The only way that you can eventually develop a world where combat and interaction is based on human skill is if you can eventually stop the treadmill of level-climbing so that people can develop those human skills.
The eventual goal of maxxing characters should be to give players a level playing field. Player combat must occur on a relatively even basis in terms of character power. Remember that I'm building these statements around a central theme. That theme is that human skill based combat is the most engaging. The ONLY way to have human skill based combat is to make sure that the overall power of fighting players is roughly equivalent. If I spent 30 more hours in game getting a big sword, and you didn't… well, if the game is structured to allow me to win based on that big sword… you're gonna be pretty ticked off. You're not going to bother trying to learn how to fight, you're just going to go out and try and get a big sword, and you won't come back to play until you have one.
If, on the other hand, we both have roughly the same stats, and roughly the same items, and I can consistently beat you because I'm smarter…
I mean seriously, consider all the captivating strategic games that have survived for long periods. Chess, etc. They do NOT rely on the players always building towards having more options. They rely on players LEARNING TO USE their options as the captivation.
Nobody likes to lose a fight simply because if they'd spent a few more hours repetitively killing drones, they could have done better. It pisses people off, and the repetitive killing bores them.
BUT, if someone loses a fight because they made bad decisions, suddenly a light gleams in their eye, and they focus on becoming good. It's mentally challenging to get involved in, and learn a complex strategic game... it's boring and numbing to slam AI monsters... always will be for the forseeable future. AND, even if the NPCs were exceedingly smart, when you beat them... their reactions would be boring, and they wouldn't be hell bent on killing you back, and no sense of community would form, and you couldn't shoot the shit about the results of the fight, etc. etc. etc.
Options options options options options. Did I mention options? There has to be enough options during combat so that at any given moment there are several different intelligent moves that you can make, as well as lots of stupid ones. This is what human skill based combat is all about.
Before I dig into what I mean by options, let me lay out a couple of things that are NOT what I mean.
First, I don't mean making decisions as you build your character so that at the end of maxxing you have a set of abilities that are different than your neighbor Bob's. That CAN certainly add a lot to the game. In fact, it has TONS of interesting possibilities. BUT!!! If at the end of that process what you have is a semi-unique character who nonetheless has no options in combat… bleh. That's not human skill.
Second, I don't mean choosing to form groups in an intelligent manner such that you decide to have 3 clerics and 2 wizards, and 1 fighter, and that turns out to be the best combo. While that's a perfectly valid approach, much like number one above, if it doesn't leave each individual player with some real choices to make throughout combat… well then so what.
Third, I don't just mean coordinated attacks by groups (as someone else mentioned). Although there can be a lot to training a close knit combat unit to attack and retreat as one, that's not the same as what I mean.
All of the three above issues are good ones to put in a game. But they're over-lays. Lying underneathe them has to be a combat system whereby each individual player can make decisions about what spell to cast, what blow to strike, when to duck, when to run, when to hide, when to advance, etc. etc. throughout the course of combat. If you have that FIRST, and then you over-lay the above three concepts ON TOP, then you're smoking.
Here are some examples of combat system that suck wind. EQ - an EQ caster has EIGHT FREAKING SPELLS that they can memorize at any one time. 8? EIGHT? What is this, tic-tac-toe? EQ also has level after level of spells that all do the SAME DAMN THING. At level one X spell does damage, at level 4 y spell does more damage, etc. etc. At the end of this mind-numbing ladder, you have what…. Some spells that do damage, and eight slots to put them in. Not exactly the stuff that engrossing combat is made of.
OK, heard enough about what I don't mean? (laugh) Let me take a shot at what I do mean in a level of details where it can make some sense. I'll do most of this by example, so what I'm talking about is just one approach to implementing a human skilled environment. There are lots of other ways to go about it, but this will at least put us on the same page.
The strongest example of human skilled combat in an MMORPG environment that I've ever encountered was in my old home - Neverwinter Nights (the original, not this new bastardization). It was a turn-based, 16 color piece of crap game that didn't get any significant software updates in the 4 years that I played it. But people played it like addicts. This was in the old days of AOL hourly charges, and lots of people payed big bucks to make this game their addiciton. It was more strategic and involving than anything else out there even today.
(No, don't flame me for AOL, newbies. Back then there were NO OTHER MMORPG of a graphical nature so this was the only game in town. Period. Beyond that, it was still a better game than anything else out there today, and I would go back to it, as would a couple thousand other people, in a heart beat if it still existed.)
OK, so what I'm going to describe is the kind of decisions and play-through that NWN had. Again, not because this is the only way to go, but because it's a good example of human skill in combat. I won't be able to describe ALL of the nuances of NWN combat here, simply because it would take a lot more examples and a lot more words than I'm up for at the moment. Anyway, it will give you a feel for it (I think).
In NWN, your ultimate PVP character was a dual-class human, who was Cleric/Magic User. Because of level caps, he capped out at 10th Cleric, and 11th Magic User. There were about 5 spell levels per class, and each level he was allowed to memorize on the average, 4 spells per level that he could actively use in combat. Thus, he had 40 spell slots. To fill those spell slots there were usually about 6 to 8 spells to choose from. So, about 70 available choices. Options options options (compared to EQ's 8).
Filling those slots were pre-fight decisions. You decided what to use based on the known fighting style of your opponent, the characteristics of the fight location, whether you were going to get the first or second turn as you started the fight, etc. Often you would double and triple up on certain spells that were more usefull depending on those variables.
Once you were in the fight, there were lots of things to keep track of. There was a spell in the game called Minor Globe of Invulnerability. This made you immune to all spells in spell levels 1, 2, and 3. BUT, it only lasted 11 rounds. Good PVPers knew this fact. Everyone always used this spell, but good PVPers knew EXACTLY when it was going to turn off, and thus when to re-cast it. And they knew EXACTLY when it would turn off on their opponent, thus they knew when to open up with high-damage spells like lightning bolt which would otherwise be completely resisted. There were also lots of tricks to how you used this spell. You COULD cast a protection vs. evil spell which had almost no effect in PVP EXCEPT that it looked exactly like you were casting a minor globe. Thus, you could fool your opponent into thinking you were protected when you weren't. That gave you the time and opportunity to either save your globe spells for late in the fight so that your opponent was unprotected when you still had some left, OR you could cast something like mirror-image to protect yourself during the fight. Mirror image can't be cast on yourself while you were wearing a globe.
The above is a small taste of the way the spells interacted. There were also lots of things like lightning bolts that bounced off walls, and thus were smartest to use when your opponent was forced next to a wall. And stink clouds that could be used to keep your opponent from casting at critical moments, and dimension door spells that could whisk you out of danger, and haste spells that allowed you to move faster, and fumble spells that allowed you to slow your opponent, etc. etc. The point here is that they were NOT just basic damage spells. There were EFFECTS that had a strategic place in battle.
Inside of the fight itself, it was you versus the other person WITH a whole group of NPCs (mobs, monsters, etc.). Now normally the game was set up so that you and the other person fought against those NPCs. The monsters did NOT know that in fact you were going to try and kill each other. That meant that those creatures were attacking the two of you as normal. Thus, your strategy could vary GREATLY depending on what type of creatures were in the ring with you. If the NPCs were few and weak, you would just go for the throat with pure damage. This type of fight was known as a "slug-fest" or "newbie fight", because there was almost no need to react to anything in the fight. Run up and cast was the order of the day.
HOWEVER, when the NPCs were tough, it was a whole different ballgame. The NPCs followed certain rules about who they attacked. Basically, they would head toward whoever was the last person to cast or strike something that wasn't invisible. Good PVPers knew this fact. Thus it was a valid strategy to go into a fight invisible and jockey hard to get a position where you could cast on your opponent and then run away and re-invis before the NPCs jumped you. Or to take NO action on a turn because you saw that if you passed, the NPCs would stay on your opponent and rush him instead of you, and losing one cast was a small sacrifice to weight against your opponent getting hit by 5 dracholichs. Or to use a stink cloud to trap yourself into a corner where the NPCs wouldn't come to attack you, and thus would focus on your enemy, etc. etc.
You can see that what I'm describing here is a system that had tons and tons of options DURING THE FIGHT. It was essential to REACT to what the opponent and the NPCs were doing at all times. If you didn't, you'd die. Plus, the system was balanced in such a way that you had the resources to take actions that were not directly oriented on killing your opponent. In other words it made good sense during a fight to do something beside blast blast blast. In most games today, if you take time and/or manna away from blasting the other guy, then you'll lose.
SOOOOOOOOO
After all that has been said… I'll return to my central question. What kind of thinking are the designers doing about setting up a HUMAN SKILL BASED combat system?
Regards,
Hedron
KAAOS
P.S. All of this has just been the tip of the ice berg. But how much can ya put in one post?