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Classes vs. Skills in MMOGs
An anonymous reader writes "The buzz in the MMO blogosphere is yet another resurrection of the Class system vs. Skill system debate. A number of prominent online gaming bloggers have chimed in with their opinions on the subject, including: Scott Jennings, Raph Koster, Ryan Shwayder, Steve Danuser, Damion Schubert, and a host of others you can find linked on those blogs. The conclusion? Most of the devs favor class systems because of their simplicity and ease of communicating character roles, while a few devs and many players favor skill-based systems because of the freedom they provide for user customization."
The debate reminds me of the hybrid system used in Might and Magic IX. For all the game's flaws, it had an interesting tree-based class system. You started each character off as either a spellcaster or a fighter, and as they advanced in levels, they would specialize as clerics, mages, knights, etc. IIRC there were three tiers, with 2 low-level classes, four mid-range, and eight advanced.
The disadvantage is that if you want a particular advanced class, you need to plan ahead -- and have the manual page that shows the tree. On the plus side, it means you can get a feel for what you need during gameplay, rather than try to guess from the start.
I'm not sure how well this would translate to MMORPGs, because I'm one of the three people online who doesn't play any. But it seems this would be simpler than a fully skill-based system, and more flexible than a static class system.
It's been tried and tested with all the other MMOs. When you give the players such an open system like a skill-based system, the developers have exponentially more work on their hands. They have to make sure all the combinations are viable gaming options. Nevermind the balance for PvP systems. Skill-based systems are way easier to exploit, as opposed to class-based systems, where the developers have direct control over what the players can be, and what they cannot be. It's a hard balance to strike, though, since players in a class system often feel as though they're being oppressed, but every game needs a structure, and skill-based structures are too close to chaos.
Blerg.
This is no different than what happened in the Pen and Paper RPG world - ten years ago.
Most earlier PnP RPGs (AD&D, 2nd Ed. as an example) were heavily class based. Almost everything you were able to do was dictated by your character's class. When WhiteWolf came on the scene with Vampire: the Masquerade, I remember a lot of people being initially confused by the lack of classes. Your character is just a set of skills. But, as people tried it out, they LOVED it - it allowed them to have tons and tons of freedom over what their character is able to do, instead of being restricted by a class system.
I'm not a MMORPG fan at all - recurring fees and a limited scope of interaction make PnP gaming much more appealing for me - but I'm surprised that it has taken people so long to figure this out, much less write a news article about it.
Love sees no species.
I think World of Warcraft has shown that a good mix of both is a nice compromise. With simple classes (e.g. Priest, Warrior, Hunter etc) but allowing players to further customise those roles for their play style (E.g. Priest healer or Priest for damage).
You don't need to pick black or white, good or evil... Better to have a compromise between the two... A shade of grey as it were.
Perhaps Blizzard's ability to stay in the "Shades of Grey" is why it has 50% of the MMPORPG market at the minute?
FTFA
Class
- Simpler
- Easier to balance
- Heavily Contrained
- Easy to communicate
Skill
- Users aren't locked into one behavior
- skill based games are expandable
- There's no assumption that every role is equal
- There can be multiple reasons to play
Summary
Of course, the game design secret here is that class systems and skill systems are the same thing; they simply have different parameters.
I've been working a few RPG ideas over in my head for the past few years, piling details on as I find ideas I like or think I could improve upon in other games, and the class vs. skill debate is something I'm very familiar with.
I think the biggest problem with the skill system is that it makes the experience way too "loose" for the incoming player, and in MMOs or traditional CRPGs, that can be a serious problem. With a class-based system, you can make the player focus on one or two things early on instead of allowing them to run free, which gives them an ample chance to learn the game, the interface, and to get familiar with the characters and story. With a skill-based system, there's more of an unstructured feeling. You can't really force everyone into doing a few basic skills right away, because if those skills don't interest the person, they are going to feel like they are wasting their time. Since a lot of the developers who make large scale games, esspecially MMOs, don't have the time/money/desire to put a lot of instruction and guidance in for every single skill combination in the early game, it can be tough for people to stick with it long enough to find their niche.
I think that's why a lot of MMOs go with a sort of combination of the two. You get a class (or even just give characters generic experience levels that effect statistics and the ability to use equipment), and then later allow them to learn and explore different trade-skills. Some MMOs even go for keeping the character as a jack-of-all-trades earlier on, and then allowing the player to specialize once they are familiar with the different skills that they can use.
I still think that some of the best games only have skills. UnReal World is one of my favorite roguelike CRPGs, and I really enjoy it's skill system.
If you take every combination of skill distribution and call that a 'class', you now have a class-based system. Of course unless you've only 3 skills, you'll quickly get way too many classes, which is what happens in the class based systems, and it becomes a balancing nightmare. Since MMORPG is competitive, you have to have some semblance of balance because while it might be fine for a single player game or a small multiplayer game (say, 4-8) to have some utterly overpowered or useless equivalent classes, this is not okay in a MMORPG. The number of equivalent classes to balance, in a skill-based system, is simply intractable. Heck, people have a hard time balancing 5 or 10 classes and yet people expect to have any sembalance equality when you deal with an effectively hundreds, if not more classes?
I've come to prefer the system used in the Elder Scrolls series quite a bit, being a directed version of the skill-based subsumed in a class-based world. That is to say, you have a class, yes, but when you level, the options you are given to improve your character's stats directly reflect what you've actually been doing in the world.
Yes, it would take a spellcaster longer to level if they're focused on hand-to-hand combat (it would actually happen incidentally, through repated use of the skills that are associated with their class, but when they do eventually level, they would have the ability to increase their strength significantly more than if they had focused exclusively on spellcasting.
I find this to be a surprisingly effective compromise, and it reflects somewhat on the nature of experience and growth in the real world (minus the spellcasting, of course). By this I mean that if I were a surgeon, the more surgeries I participate in, the higher my skill is likely to grow, and therefore, my standing as a surgeon (overly simplified example, yes). This does not, however, preclude the option I have for taking tae kwon do lessons and improving my martial skills. Since I don't make my living as a martial artist however, even though my ability is improving in other arenas, it does not reflect back on my ability as a surgeoun.
Consider it as 'career track' versus 'personal development'.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
I like a system where you pick skills and you're free to diversify, but if you pick say a magic skill, it'd give you something like +1 intelligence. So if you picked several magic skills, you'd be a more powerful mage than someone who branched into half fighting and half magic.
God spoke to me.
The only MMORPG enjoyed was Ultima Online. And it used a very simple system: you can grandmaster 7 skills, be it fishing, archery, magic, mining, etc. (UO has a great variety of skills, by the way.) This system felt more "real" to me; I wasn't confined to some stupid class template. It also allowed for more customization. My secondary character, for example, could learn skills that would make him an ideal miner. And all skills increased through their use, not some ridiculous level system.
I quit UO years ago, but I believe subsequent expansion packs have toyed with this system, allowing you to gain more than 100 points in each skill.
EVE. hands down.
:P
you have to really plot out where you'll be going with those skills, but its pretty balanced...as long as you dont fly ravens.
I miss the 32 profession 250 point open skills system SWG once had. You had complete freedom.
Now it's just like any other EQ/WoW clone, you are locked into single professions without any multi classing. Only 2 even have talent trees.
Back when I started SWG (pre-CU, before all this revamp the game to death nonsense started) it didn't even HAVE levels. Now the AI is so braindead that damage/defense is basically higher CL - lower CL. Pre-CU it wasn't.
Corporatism != Free Market
Whew that was a lot of reading. :-)
I definitely agree with those experts. My own observation was that Battlefield 2's introduction of the dynaclass system was an interesting evolution in the characteristically static realm of online shooters. You could choose your "class" every time you spawned, allowing yourself the freedom of experimentation without the punishing nature of a repetitive level grind (commonly found in MMORPGs). Dynaclasses also provided a mechanism for filling vacant roles within the game arena, another mode that well suited the fast-response nature of a combat-centric game.
And the skill part of it? Well, that's entirely up to you. :-)
While I do currently play World of Warcraft (only because it is the least buggy and simply best MMO on the market right now) I favor games like old school star wars galaxies. In that game you had over 30 professions to choose from and you could customize your charcter any way you wanted pulling certain skills from those professions. Diversity is what really attracted me to that game because no two people were exactly the same, whether it was skills that they had, the way they looked, or even the outfits they wore. You could customize your character around you. In games like WoW you are totally restricted in that because within your own class you really only have 2 options to choose from and those 2 options are based around what you want to do, PVP or Raid End Game Instances. So there is no real diversity, in the end everyone is shooting for the same armor, looks the same, and has the same skill sets.
Old School SWG is the perfect example of what I consider to be a great MMO, unfortunatly with the success of WoW, SOE decided they wanted to take a chance and make the game more WoW like in hope of stealing some of their market share. SOE failed and all SWG is now is a cheap WoW wannabe with a diminishing player base.
The problem I've found with MMORPGs with a lack of classes is kids can level up all day in the school holidays while I'm at work, and if I ever dare wander near a PK area, I'm instantly slaughtered by a 12-year-old.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Also, look at the real life. Do we say that some employee can do a bit of accounting, some direct marketing, little bit of sales and has extensive skills in drafting legal contracts? So how do you find a job for such person? How do you talk about him? How can you put him in a social context? Or do you just say he is a "Contract Lawyer" with some extra business skills? We simply tend to stereotype that is how our brain works.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Arguing which version is better is pointless. Both have their pluses and minuses. It's like arguing whether peanut butter sandwiches are better than tuna. For some people it depends on the day. Some people never like one or the other, and some people really don't care. It's really a personal decision.
...but I enjoy the Guild Wars class/skill system. The focus is primarily on skills, as your primary class really just determines one attribute and your armor set. The addition of a secondary class creates a great amount of customization in terms of player ability. And, the PvP system is a little more fair. While I enjoy picking one class and sticking with it the whole way as per most MMOs, I love the ability to be versatile and design my own playstyle, and I think the GW system allows that quite well.
Classes have a tendecy to be more focused. You wanna be a sneaky bastard.. be a theif. You wanna hit stuff.. be a fighter. wanna reign firey doom upon your enemies while wearing a dress.. be a mage! but it's always boiling down to a class title. Even in games with open skill sets, a overly melee skill set will get labled as a "fighter". Both systems are fine for their uses, but a class system is the easy and simple way. Skills sets are just the long way of going about setting up a charicter. As in all things, it's going to come down to what level of control some people have to have. Some people are fine being a Fighter.. while others want to rule their charicters skill sets and pick and choose from every skill available and be a Fighter/Healer/Monkey/Pirate/Robot.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
Start the game by choosing a class that defines your initial skillset and ease of developing certain sets/types of skills. Then as you level up and progress through the game, the class becomes less and less a definition of your character. All skills can be available to train, but certain types would be easier or more difficult. Once you reach a certain point you start having the most developed skills define the class the character belongs to. So if I start out as a berserker but soon find that magic is a lot of fun, I can slowly steer towards becoming a mage, and once I hit a certain point, my class distinction would change to mage, rather than berserker, and the benefits/restrictions of the class would be inversely proportional to my level. This way those just starting out can get a boost in effectiveness, but are somewhat limited in what they can do, whereas those that have been around a long time get relatively no boost from their class at all, but can do whatever they want.
Yes, a lot of rambling. No, I didn't RTFA.
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
The simple problem is the more choices a player has, the more times a different level character can come out.
When playing D&D there's either the core classes or multiple prestige, which works well except that there's always players who find the one way to get a character who at level 10 is so significantly more powerful than everyone else in the power that it's boring to play because the game becomes "hide behind loserboy".
Classes allow a simple way to balance a game, certain classes have certain skills and roles. A rogue might be able to solo in WoW but with a healer he's a lot more effective. A paladin can do well healing or fighting but he's not a master at either.
Imagine if you could have a stealth enabled caster who could equip heavy armor and knows the strongest magic in the game? It'd be unstopable but some open skill systems basically allow that. The secret is to give the players the option of any skill but to require specialization at the very least. Of course most games would even balk at that because that's going back towards Classes again.
Honestly The question is more what works best in your game? In a single player game do you want there to always be a solution to the problem so you can beat the game? Then you'll want classes. Do you want the character to possibly placed in a situation where they can't complete the game? Then skills will be you're option.
Or instead you can constantly play the game and change the rules over and over but by the third rule change many of your fans will start walking away because if there's one thing the fan's want is stability, especially stability with their own characters.
I don't think skills vs classes matters all that much. Case and point- nethack (sorry, I'm going to whine a little about nethack is better than EVERYTHING ;-P). Nethack has classes, but I never feel confined when playing it. Every nethack character has the simple goal of retrieving the amulet of yendor- it is a hack 'n' slash, after all. But somehow there are enough items in the game, and they interact in unique enough ways, that every game plays out differently. In other words, there is strategy. So you play the game for its own sake. I haven't played any of the new, commercial MMORG, but I played different MUDs (text-based MMORGs, for those who are too young to know) back in the day, but skill or class based, I always got bored of them, because there was very little of what I would call "reason-based" strategy. You found a good area, went and typed "kill foo" (now I suppose you click on foo), and you killed it or didn't. Rinse and repeat. Sure, as a player you get better, but this is mostly due to better knowledge, not better reason-based strategy. Then the entire strategy becomes shaping the character, which doesn't matter all that much anyway, since you are just typing "kill foo" or "cast fireball foo" or "alias kill=cast fireball; kill foo" anyway. So we get into having to suspend belief as to the differences in characters. (We also have to suspend belief as to the importance of leveling your character as a goal, since the game play doesn't stand completely on its own.) This is where the skills vs classes comes in. Classes make you choose between a character with a strong close attack, a strong ranged attack, or OK close and ranged attacks. Is this enough to suspend belief that you have a real choice in strategy when you type "kill foo"? Or do you need a skill-based system which allows you to be able to choose a character with a better-than-OK close attack, and a crappy-but-still-sort-of-useful range attack? What we need are MMORG that take real strategy. I don't now, maybe World of Warcraft, for example, has this. I have never played it, as I said but I have read a lot about it. And I would think that if it did, the emphasis wouldn't be on improving gameplay of exisitng levels and classes, not putting more high level content or adding more classes.
On a slightly different topic, I've heard that people really play these games for the social interaction, not the gameplay, which is fine, but I wish that someone would figure out how to implement permadeath in a fun way and effective way. Then we would start seeing real politics in MMORGs (and I might try such a game.)
I don't know about other games (aside from WoW) but Final Fantasy XI allows someone to switch to ALL classes any time (in a town). You do have to level each class, so basically you don't have a "level 50 character" but instead may have a character that's a level 5 warrior, level 25 thief, level 12 mage, and so on... For all the game flaws (loading every time you go to another map), this was one of the best feature.
if an MMO is trying to get smaller groups, then perhaps this is fine, but if you'd like a more traditional group of Fighter/Cleric/Wizard/Thief each with their own defined roles, then classes are the way to go.
Yes, Anarchy Online's approach of being skills-based but defining classes which have preferential improvement point costs worked very well indeed. And the implants provided yet another level of skills customizeability in AO.
Guild Wars is even better in that regard though, and this was mentioned briefly by the fifth of the people mentioned in the headline article, Damion Schubert.
In GW, every character has both a primary and a secondary profession, but you can raise the attributes of your primary profession higher than a secondary could through runes that your put on your armor. Since armor is switchable on the fly, even while fighting, this gives you a lot of flexibility for optimizing your build for a particular zone or encounter. It's better than AO's equivalent, the implants, since those couldn't really be changed in the field (AO's portable clinics were useless).
And since in GW your secondary profession can be changed to any other one with a 30-second visit to Crystal Desert or Senji's Corner, the range of possible combination builds is truly astronomic, yet everyone still knows that (for example) the Elementarist can provide the most powerful nukes. One of the bloggers wrote that skills-based systems introduce uncertaintly, but that doesn't apply to GW -- the primary will always reign supreme at the top end of their skill's abilities.
Quite a few of the other points made in those blogs seem to have been overcome in GW too. For example, it's no hardship at all to call for a "healer" instead of a "Monk" specifically, and everyone is perfectly happy to be healed by a Ritualist or an Elementarist/Monk or a Mesmer/Monk who are running healer builds despite not being primary monks. In fact, it introduces some very pleasant variety.
In summary then, hybrid systems work really well in practice, so the "classes vs skills" debate is a rather pointless one. Just combine the two, and you get the best of both worlds.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The problem with almost all online RPGs is there's too much focus on the latter. Unfortunately the game companies probably think it's the only way to sell subscriptions.
I've seen this behavior in both (the original flavour) SWG and UO.
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
EVE is a classless system- you can learn anything in the enormous tech tree. But what? I was seriously confused as a noob since I had no idea what I needed now vs. what I might need in a few months. There are prereqs for every piece of equipment, and it's hard to figure out a decent way to get what you want to do. However, when you do figure it out you can make any character you want. (And then have everything you own wasted by some 12-year-old pirate in 0.0 space.)
Compare to WoW. You start with about two spells/abilities. You get new ones every few levels, and don't even start worrying about talents until 4-5 hours in. You can fairly rapidly get a feel for a given class- it only takes a few hours to create an alt and play through all the noob quests, so you get to choose what you want to play, but if you sink 100 hours into a warrior and decide it's not what you like after all and you'd rather be a mage, you're out those 100 hours since all you can do is reroll.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
sometimes too many choices can hurt not just the game but the player. I'm not a fan of the skill-based MMORPG, someone mentioned early how it can take away from the game itself.
;)
RF Online is pretty much a skilled based game. Granted there are classes to start out with but in order to actually do any real damage and be able to use higher level weapons you also need to level your skill in the use of those weapons. This is done with the stats required to use them. So I hit lv30 I get to change my class from Ranger to either Scout or Gunner. Luckily I get an automatic boost to certain skills depending on which job I go. Scout gets a boost in ranged skill allowing it to use higher level guns while the gunner gets a boost in the racial skill of launchers allowing it to use a higher level launcher (this is the accretian model). Then at lv40 you get to choose your 3rd job/class set, and you get the same choices and stat boosts, but between lv30 and 40 not only are you grinding levels but you are grinding skill as well since in order to use the next set of armor or weapons you need to have a certain amount of defense points/range accuracy/melee etc... I won't even get into using class abilities. But its the same idea.
I've since left that game because it was definately not intended for the casual gamer and frankly got boring as hell with the skill leveling. I've been playing WoW for a couple years now and frankly it keeps me coming back with the simplicity, its almost relaxing to play a couple hours after work. And sure its pretty cookie cutter when it comes to the classes. But it allows me to enjoy the game more and follow the story line. I do like the idea of the talent tree, this does provide some diversity among players and allows them to customize their toon to their play style or even to accomodate guild mates for raids. Lets say I want to melt faces off, so I will most likely pick a priest and go down the shadow talent tree, leveling has been pretty easy up to 37 with this spec. What this also allows for me to do is to get to 60 at which point I can make a choice, stay shadow or put points into holy and become a heal bot, if I want continuous invites for raids, I will go healing. The nice thing about WoW is that you don't have to stay one specific skill set, change anytime you want and play with combinations of talents. Granted with 3 talent trees, eventually everything has been tried. And with the fact that there are so many players, new players can scour the discussion forums for talent builds and try them out. But this still allows for some customization among the classes and even the play style of the gamers.
Final Fantasy XI - played that too before WoW, they used class/sub-class system which I thought was pretty cool. you had the ability to sub any class with your main class. Granted you were limited to only half the level of skills of the sub; for those that don't know, I have a lv60 warrior and lv60 Monk, if I sub the monk with the warior it will be something like this War60/Monk30, so I will only have the skills of a lv30 monk added to my warrior. Now that is usually the popular combo for class and sub. With the newer classes that have been implmented with the Ziliart and Temple I am sure that the possibilities are even greater. I liked this idea because you got to have more variety in your skill. Even to sub a healing class to your melee class for better soloing or just to get invisible spells and such. But FFXI is not a PvP based game so if there is imbalance among the players, its not as much concern as it would be if it was a pvp game. And no the little pvp that FFXI does have does not count
I do wish that Blizzard would have introduced new classes in the expansion with the new races rather than just giving the each side the other's faction class (palladin/shaman). But hey who knows how thats going to be turn out. Sorry for the drawn out discussion.
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
For the record, I don't play MMOS.
But this is similar to FFI vs FFII. In I, you were severely limited in what each character could use (magic set, weapon set). Whereas in FFII, it was much more open ended (every character could use everything). But as mentioned before, people would tend to create a tank, a healer, a mage, etc...And in FFI, the Red Mage was a mostly useless class, as it sucked at both Black and White magic.
Cynical Idealist
...but there are many more knuckle-draggers with disposable income, so it's a better business decision.
I guess this post only applies to pen-and-paper, due to balancing issues...
Over time I've realized that I'm strongly anti-class. In this postmodern world, I just find it incredibly difficult as a dm to construct, and as a player to believe in, a world where everybody has to fit cookie cutter stereotypes. Where vampires are evil, magicians can't cast healing spells, and clerics must use bludgeoning weapons, just...well...because. Of course this leads to class-system equivocating in the form of "class sprawl". Bards and rangers can cast spells, whuh!? There are literally dozens of "special" classes, excrutiatingly detailed in extra "guidebooks" and campaign tomes I haven't cracked open since I first bought them (dragonlance, dark sun, ravenloft...). This is simplicity? A class system with separate classes for rangers that live in jungles and magicians that are witches? And are monks clerics or fighters anyway!? As science and reason explain the acceleratedly vanishing mysteries of this real world, likewise we have to start making up real (and stupid) rationales for the mysticism of class systems.
As for min/maxers, well, don't play with dolts. We're not trying to balance the international economy here...it's just a game.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
A lot of us like our skill-based MMO (and RPG)s thanks much. Really the aren't that much harder to balance -- you just need to balance the attacking skills that do damage versus each other (and versus cost) and you're 90% of the way there.
Asheron's Call, for all the flaws it may have did a fairly nice job of this WITHIN SETS. By that I mean, the melee skills: dagger, staff, spear, unarmed, mace, axe, sword were fairly balanced. The more you paid (low to high cost in that list) the more damage you did. But the more you paid, the less other skills you could get. Dagger cost 4 to spec, sword cost 16. On the other hand with those 12 free points, the dagger user could pick up life magic to heal and protect himself (and allies). Or they could pick up specced healing skill and pretty much NEVER FAIL a healing-kit application (cheap and plentiful, unlike in practically every other game in existance).
Now balance between sets, don't get me started. 28 points for war magic and it does less damage than a 16 point sword swinger? Something went horribly wrong. Add life magic in to the picture, the mage is up to 48 points spent and is doing on-par-ish damage with the sword swinger who's spent 36 points. Plus the sword swinger has a shield and is MUCH more survivable. Still, that's not an insurmountable problem.
Skill-based also tends to help soloists out -- becuase you can get all the relevant skills you need to really excell in one character. Also, you don't have to roll up 5 billion characters if you can do respecs -- start a sword user. Decide you hate it? Swap over to dagger. Don't like that? Try an archer. Now, sometimes the big 3 conversion (mage vs archer vs melee) is a problem because of other stats (attributes, equipment) but you CAN do it if you put your mind to it. That's cool.
Classes? Attack of the clones. Bleh. Everyone is the same FOTM build. Yes, you can do that in a skill system too. But frankly in my experience, less people do.
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You can have a completely different style of gameplay depending on what class you are. Skills don't often create that. Classes create limitations which can make gameplay more interesting.
The most interesting gameplay I've ever seen in an MMO was Nexus TK. Four classes: Warrior, Rogue, Poet, Mage. Warrior and Rogue are fighters, and early in the game (before level 99), they are useful for completely different things. Rogues can "ambush" around creatures, and can thus charge straight past a huge hoard of enemies and kill the boss. They can deal the most damage, but only to one target at a time. Warriors deal more net damage, but they take much more damage, and are really only effective against large hoards. Poets deal almost no damage -- they are healers. Mages can heal, but not as well as a poet, and they can paralyze the room.
So, you have your two basic classes: fighter or caster. Then you have your main paths: Warrior, Rogue, Poet, Mage. Then, to make it more interesting, at level 99, you're able to trade experience for individual stats, so the main difference becomes what kind of items each class can use -- except, if you're obscenely rich, you can almost always find ridiculously good armor.
There's still plenty of creativity. There is real roleplaying, there are all kinds of ways to use your class, and plenty of things to exploit. For a long time, Rogues could skip fighting the Forever tree, which is required for certain levels much, much higher than 99, and requires a good few hours to kill, no matter how strong you are. There is no upper limit in strength, and the strongest character in the game (last time I played) was a Geomancer (Mage), which makes him much better at hitting individual targets -- high-level Mages can throw spells at any visible target that deal damage proportional to how much mana is available, and with several million Mana (level 99 is only a few thousand Mana), he could one-hit most people.
Sometimes I think the game seems to have settled into a WoW-like grind, only never-ending, because the most powerful people we know about only have around 2 million mana/vita, and the only cap is technological, based on the size of an int -- that's about 4.3 billion. But every time I think that, I see something creative and new to do with some aspect of the game. And a small, finite number of classes -- even if I count all 16 possible subpaths -- makes the whole thing go round.
(I could point to crafting skills as an example of a "hybrid", but while there are a few shared skills, even the crafting is something you have to choose (can't be a smith and a carpenter) and it doesn't affect fighting/hunting at all.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I found the Reign of Kaos MMPORG to have one of the better systems (and for the time the absolute best game play and graphics, using the fantastic Descent engine.) For the uninitiated you have a standard class system, but players could actually teach each other skills-- eg. your warrior watches a rogue open a lock, and he gains a small boost to his own lockpick skill. Ditto prayers (as long as you have the same diety), mage spells (as long as you have the books), magic item use etc. You could also gain by practicing as long as you have 1% skill in any area-- so this same warrior could gain more % by trying locks himself (or spells, or prayers, etc.) You actually gained double skill points for failure, which was a nice touch.
This also gave incentive to form diverse parties and clans, since everyone would benefit from associating with different sorts. Basically by end game you could have a character who's powerful in one class and, if he chose his friends right, he could have functioning knowledge (IIRC up to 1/2 his class level) in widely used skills from all other classes. Which means that warrior could open most non-artifact locks and disable many traps, cast quick healing and boost spells, use a magic item here or there-- never as well as a master of said class but enough to get by.
Unfortunately the masses never came to the game, I wish someone would release a 2.0 because it truly could have blown Guild Wars and WOW out of the water.
Why does it have to be either or? Now this isn't MMORPG, but at one point (and still might be the case) the LARP NERO utilized what could be considered both... where if you had a 'Fighter' like character the physical skills you would be able to purchase cheaper than the scholarly like skills, so you can say a character has a predisposition to acquiring a physical based skill set, while a scholar has a predisposition to having a intellectually based skill set. Nothing stops a fighter from learning the scholarly arts, but they require more time and effort to acquire these than someone else with a scholar class. Its like life not everyone has talents in being able to do a particular thing, but with enough patience and effort even a muscle bound jock with no talent for mathematics can learn how to do quadratic equations, it might just take a little longer thats all.
I've always thought it would be good to have a skill system that was based on your use of particular skills rather than on experience or skill points. I mean, it doesn't really make much sense for a fighter to earn experience points smashing creatures over the head with a mace, and use them to learn a new spell does it? His experience was in monster-bashing, not hand-waving.
The idea I've had floating around in my head is to link progression with abilities used. Every time you make a melee attack, there's a chance of your strength increasing. If you keep on using the slow, powerful attacks, eventually you get access to the higher level slow, powerful attacks. If you keep using the quick, weak attacks, then you advange in agility and get more fencing-type skills. Same for progressing along elemental strands of magic.
The advantage to this is it gives flexibility (if you know you want to be a fire mage/warrior, you know you'll have to cast lots of fire spells and attack in melee) and it lets casual gamers build a character that fits their play style without having to research a lot of skills - the character just grows in the direction you play it. It's also a bit more realistic, in that practicing a certain skill will get you better at it.
The only game I've played that had anything resembling this sort of system was Final Fantasy Adventure II (Gameboy game, using the Final Fantasy franchise, but not, I believe produced by Square). In that game, at the end of every battle, you had a chance of your character changing. Everyone had a chance for more HP, if you used a strength attack in the battle, you had a chance for a strength boost, if you used a magic attack you had a chance for learning more spells, etc. It really didn't go far in that direction though, as most character progression and abilities were gained through items.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
The ideal is the middle of the road
Probably one of the best examples of a skill based system is Ultima Online. It gave/gives players freedom to experiment and try different combinations. Have met crafter/tamers, Archers with begging and so forth.
Problem is those that take "different" routes are a tiny minority of players, vast majority go with proven and tested templates made of complimentary skills for maximum efficiancy, thus basiclly resulting in a situation where they might have have well implimented a class system in the first place.
Also the players ability to mix skills in unexpected ways can cause total nightmares for developers, where one little tweak to X can totally overpower one template if people combine it with other skills while totally destroying other templates. And over time these interdependancys build to such a degree that the developers cannot make a single small change to a skill without affecting huge parts of the game, be it nerfing templates out of existance or creating such powerful templates that they basiclly become "one hit killers". Something that happens in UO now nonstop.
A pure class system is more controled but in some ways too controled for the players, all types of class X are equal and any competition between class's becomes a basic case of "rock,paper and scissors", both of which can be fun..for about the first 10 minutes.
WoW has kind of hit on the right track with their ability to customise class's with talents, a shadow priest is as different to a holy priest as day is to night, but these customisations are not "uncontroled", you cannot be part priest, part rouge, part shaman, thus they only have one 10th of the headache EA faces with UO. Plus as you are not stuck with those talents forever if you get tired of being a heal bot for your guildmates you can respec to shadow for a while and go melt some faces
But i will say, while WoW is on the right track, they have not got it 100% either, they still need to break out of "class role" mentality a bit more, as do most of the wow players themselves.
While I personally prefer a skills based system, I can see that class and level based game design offers some directly advantageous things to the developers of a game: Its far easier to determine what capabilities a character may have in a given situation, and by controlling those abilities via character level, far easier to determine a challenge rating.
Class also offers the player a clear definition of their role in a group - and thus the ability to choose that role. Essentially they all boil down to the D&D Classics: Tank, Damage Dealer, Healer, Magic User, Thief. The names may change but they are essentially the same. I suppose you can add Ranged/Melee as subsets of damage dealing classes.
I actually think thats the reason that AD&D is so popular. Its easy to define your role, the way you *want* to play, with relatively little real decisions required, and every other player knows easily what to expect of you. Its easier for the GM to manage the game session in a PnP game for the same reason that its easier on the developers to manage encounters.
I loved the SWG 250pt character generation system. I think its the pinnacle of MMORPG gaming design for flexibility, variety and configurability. Its a shame that they tossed it in favour of WOW's pathetic class based system - and made a far worse one that WOWs while they were at it. I can concede though that it was probably a pain to develop for. I think their essential mistake was to toss the 250pt system in favour of a linear system, but reducing the classes was probably a smart move - much as I miss TKM, Doctor and Creature Handler.
Now sadly SOE's approach to SWG character design seems to be that everyone can solo, so no one has a clear role, everyone can heal, so no one needs to be support. As a result, grouping is not a part of the game at all any more.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
At it's heart, all online role playing games try to hook the players (not all..but by my accounts most) by turning them into "tweak the numbers" players.
They don't care about role playing, or talking with friends (unless it's for the following reason). They care about tweaking their numbers and making their characters more efficient "systems" at doing things designed to to reward the "ahhh" pathway in the brain and start the cycle all over again.
Kill monster, get gold, buy armour, so you can kill bigger monster (or kill monster faster) so you can get better sword and better armour so you can kill bigger monster (or kill monster faster) so you can level up and kill bigger monster...etc..you get the picture.
Why do you think there are not very many online roleplaying games where you don't see numbers and stats? The companies KNOW this. They have VERY smart people who understand the psychology.
When it comes down to it, you are basically doing the same thing that addicts day traders. People have a natural tendency to want to improve mathematical systems.
The resistance to class based games is in part a reaction kinda like "Don't take my crack! I LIKE tweaking numbers, it makes me FEEL good!"
Yes..there ARE people who really role play and people who socialize. But it's the exception, not the rule (in my experience).
Another downside of sklil-based systems seems to be the lack of excitement in some of the choices that you get to make. When you play a melee class in D+D, you might obtain the ability to go into berserk mode, or get a strong pet and strong scouting skills, or a smattering of holy spells, or maybe just a lot of different melee feats. When you look at something like Gurps, you don't see a lot of truly unique skills like that. You get "karate" and "first aid" and the like, but you don't get "uncanny dodge" or "divine smiting" or "precise shot" and such, because abilities like that aren't things that get scaled over the amount of building points that you put into them. You don't have the huge wizard's spellbook like you do in D+D - instead, you just get "You gained three more experience points, so your fire magic does one more point of damage now." WhiteWolf systems, as well as Shadowrun, tend to feel similarly restricted, where you can do anything, but there's really a very small percentage of your game that's actually going to change because of the things you take. You're also usually going to fall into a particular archetype anyhow - the blaster, the tank, the healer, etc. - so most people don't feel that out of place with choosing classes. To some extent, even Hero System, with its total open-ended skill design, still tends to make it feel like every ability is the same at its core, though the ones with the time to crunch numbers can figure things out.
I think that's part of WoW's popularity as well. If I want to play a spellcasting class, do I want to be the mage with lots of different useful ice spells, or the one that just nukes for heavy fire damage? Or do I want to have the warlock's special debuffing power, or the shaman's versatility and melee strength, or a shadow priest with decent heal ability? And the excitement of hitting 40 for the first time and getting the talent at the top of one of your talent trees. For all the "customization" that skill-based systems provide, they rarely have the depth and uniqueness of options that class-based systems provide, since class-based systems are usually able to offer unique feats and abilities to different people rather than just making lowest-common-denominator abilities.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I've read almost all of the posts and everyone seems to hve missed a great game that balanced classes and skills as wonderfully as any other game that I can think of. It was called Dragon Realms.
When you first started you chose a class, anything that you wanted.
I belive there was about 15 or so I think.
You were then allowed to do *anything* that you wanted.
There were a few restrictions of course such as that only healers could heal people, but my mage would train with a battle sword and run around and hack people up for all he cared.
The more that you did something the more that you got skills in it. Of course some classes were faster at learning things than others, but that made sense. You didn't even have to spend points or tokens or anything. If you wanted to do it, do it.
You then leveled up in your class when you had enough of the skills that class needed to become better.
It was a brillian system that encouraged people to try new things since you knew that you could always spend a day or two experimenting with something and then leave it by the wayside and continue persuing whatever else you were playing.
The only real problem with that is that it took more time to implement and of course massive tweaking to ensure the proper balance, but isn't that a small price to pay for a great game?
Maybe you should try a skill based game instead of talking out of your ass? Skill based games don't promote solo play, they simply don't force you to always group wether you want to or not, and don't force you to always wait around to find class X that is required to complete your party. I played UO by myself when I wanted, with a handful of friends when I wanted, and in big ~30 people groups when I wanted. And there was never any discussion of who was what kind of character, what skills they had or didn't have, everyone could just play together and have fun.
At a first glance, it looks like you could do anything with a "free" skill system that does not limit the skills your character can have. You could be anything. A specialist, a generalist, a combination thereof, your imagination is the limit.
In fact, caused by game dynamics, the truth is more often than not a few "working" templates you can choose from. Usually, when you go for generalism, you suffer the "jack of all trades, master of none" fate. Yes, you can heal, fight and cast, but you still suck at any of them because your punches do no damage, your spells fizzle and your healing power is laughable. As a specialist, you are 100% reliant on a group.
So those "templates" again press you into a certain pattern. And at the end, when the smoke settles and the templates are hammered out, you're exactly where you'd be with classes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
FWIW, I went back to Basic D&D (not even AD&D) after many years of gaming, including some systems with extensive and fine-grained skill systems like Rolemaster. I went back to Basic D&D because I got fed up with the overhead of micromanagement that skill systems introduce. I get along fine with a dozen archetypes or so, and allow minor variations here and there to satisfy a player's customization needs. Just my 2 copper pieces...
I can't speak for White Wolf. Never was a fan. However..
:(" syndrome.
"Also, you're completely missing why MMORPG's have classes: balance issues."
Bullshit. The words 'balance' and 'change' are burnt into the minds of MMOG players. Forever. The balance excuse is continually used by poor developers and designers to futz with existing, established, working systems with regard to classes. If classes made balance easy, there wouldn't be a proven history of this - and there is, spanning all the way back to the original MUDs.
"In a tabletop game, if you make poor choices early in the game that limit your character later in the game, be it role-playing or mechanics, things can be tweaked. In a MMORPG, a poor selection of skills early in the game may lock you out of further advancement, meaning many more hours retraining or building up a new character."
Not really. About the only time this happens is in class-based MMOGs - in a class-based MMOG, you're stuck with one skillset. Want another one? Sure, here, have just as much time wasting as in a classless MMOG, with the added benefit of not being able to access your previous class's skillset.
"They is less of a problem for players interested in gaming that part of the system, or players willing to do lots of online research up front, but it's bad for casual players."
Not really. Five minutes of talking with pretty much anyone older than a month on EVE Online, for example, will get you pointed in the right direction - and as a newbie, you don't need to be thinking about what race's titan you'd like to eventually pilot. You can't 'gimp' yourself, either - the skills you train, you keep. Trained mining? While it's not going to help your combat ability, it's not exactly hurting it, either.
DAoC was similar, though it must be stated DAoC had a hybrid-like class/skills system. But five minutes on a forum would get you the knowledge you needed to get started.
"Classes also make design easier. Given the complexity of MMORPG design, "easier" may mean "feasible." Many games designs want to create interesting mixes of player characters with different focuses."
Not really. Skill based systems have the bonus of letting anyone use anything. There's no class vs. class balance to worry about, because there are no classes.
"In a pure skill based system you are more likely to end up with a bland mix optimized in a small number of ways. This is tied into the poor skill choice issue: you might optimize in a way that seems cool ("I want to be the best fire mage possible") only to discover that no one wants you in their group because it turns out that the fire-mage/healer hybrid is far more efficient. While classes force you to sacrifice flexibility, it means you can better ensure that the remaining selections are more evenly attractive and playable."
In a skill based system, you're likely able to pick up something else once you figure out that no one wants your gimp ass fire mage. A classed system? Sorry, you're stuck, please create a new character.
Go check out some classed MMOG boards, and see how well (har) classes prevent the, "I'm useless! Nobody wants to group with me!
(Hint: They don't. At all. Unless, of course, you're a cleric - everybody loves clerics!)
Chaos is a problem when it gets beyond the scope of even the player's ability to 'control' it. Just look at WoW's PvP system. No, not Battlegrounds, Open PvP. Whats the number class for ganking? Rogues. Only counter-measure against them? Paranoid, constant vigilance. How is that enjoyable? And before someone says 'just call for help', thanks to recent updates players below a certain PvP rank cannot use the World Defense channel. (And no 'well a GOOD player would just kick his ass' arguments since theres nothing in the game to prevent a level 60 from killing and then corpse camping a level 20.)
Ok that was a very bias argument, but what about fights involving large numbers of players? Healers are COMPLETELY disregarded due to their uselessness (theres no way to hold hate against another player). Players with slower computers are at a SEVERE disadvantage due to system lag (especially when you consider the hyper-fast gameplay of WoW). Hunters... well. Blizzard still hasn't addressed the blind spot issue so that speaks for itself. (For those who don't play WoW, there is a certain range in which Hunters are too close to use their ranged attack and are too far to use their melee attack. Casters do not get this disadvantage and can usually devastate a hunter with impunity at this point.)
Leeroy Jenkins must have missed the memo about this debate.
You call him "Tank mage", "template of the month", or "gimped". Because all players in a skill-based system will be one of those three. One just happens to cover more ground than the other two.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I prefer skills because I love to micromanage and create out-of-this-world combinations; Take Asheron's Call, for example. Any players of that game will probably remember the extreme templates, where they would create a character with maxed stats for their primary skills, and have minimum endurance/everything else. Starting out was rough, but when you got to later levels in the game, it worked out fine.
Of course, I also played ADnD (3rd ed), and Shadowrun (2nd & 3rd). ADnD was my favorite; It's class based system worked because of multiclassing, and supplemental material (Eldrich Warriors were just too cool). Most games based on the ADnD ruleset neglected to include any sort of supplemental material, and just relied on the mage/warrior/rogue/ranger/priest/paladin/sorcerer basics. Feh. Not enough. Not enough "cool" factor. Where are my blood mages? My eldrich warriors? I want to micromanage. I want to plan out a character class that is going to be wildly unique.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I hate the idea of messing up my character by training the wrong things. Saga of Ryzom has a very forgiving skillbased system, given enough time the player can train up every skill.
Ultimately, the problem with variety isn't player confusion - though that surely is a very real problem for players.
The problem with offering variety is the need to ensure that variety doesn't lead to unbalanced play. Someone else hit it on the nose - huge amounts of variety leads to huge amounts of testing. It doesn't matter whether or not some builds work well and others don't - while ideally you want to avoid that kind of situation, it's not actually going to damage the game itself, just the players' experience.
The problem is with unbalanced characters created for the purposes of farming the world. Game developers have to work hard to balance and carefully tune the rate at which resources can be plundered from the world, or the whole economy goes up in smoke. For those who have been in a game where the economy has done just that, they can attest how hard it is to play a game where the economy is buggered.
Ultimately, it's all about the virtual Benjamins. The further a game gets from needing to maintain an economy and control the rate of loot acquisition, the more flexibility it has to experiment with variety.
-- A mind is a terrible thing.
I have played an almost completely skill based MUD, Dartmud, (www.dartmud.com) for many years now. All skills are open to all characters - although some skills interfere with each other. You can learn both magic and combat - but you will slow down your learning rate in both by trying something like that. Many try, but few actually do become proficient in both. There are no experience points. The skills are not completely balanced - but in this game your ability to interact with other players is more important than your individual skills (even though you are pretty worthless without your individual skills.)
The MUD is free PK with permadeath (actually there are ways around permadeath but you can end up stuck in an amulet doing nothing for RL months on end unless someone rescues you or you give up and commit suicide) and the way the skill system works it is not possible for any character to become powerful enough that it is completely immune to being killed by one or more other characters.
It sounds like this should end up in free for all player killing - but with permadeath and free pk together people tend to be careful about escalating things to that point. The politics and plotting can become very convoluted though.
I guess I strayed off topic....but the point is that a completely skill based game can be stable and if done right absolute balance is not necessary.
Most of my experience has been with GURPS and AD&D, less with online games (the only one I play is Kingdom of Loathing, and I only play that for the clan chat). In the past few years and especially when the 4th edition came out, GURPS has also gone to a sort of hybrid. The thing is, GURPS doesn't call them classes, but templates.
I think the template method actually holds the most promise from a programming point of view. A possible implementation in a computer RPG would be for the player to choose the template (say, a woodland scout), and the character generator then sets the minimum stats, the beginning skills and the list of recommended options. If the players clicks "advanced", he can access the larger list. This may sound like a lot of work for the programming team in the beginning, but it pays off later.
You see, once the skills are chosen, the program doesn't have to treat each class differently. The chance to hit or not comes straight from the weapons skills, not from the class list. It's all stored in the character. It seems to me that the skill method means less info to look up, less databases that have to be added to the game. It also makes the game engine more universal, easier to adapt to different genres or even to allow transporting characters between game worlds (one of the things the makers of GURPS like to claim about their system).
It's also easier for the players to change professions, as class systems are biased to "once a [CLASS], always a [CLASS]" manner of thinking. This prevents the classic backstory of so many tales, like the priest who once was a bloodthirsty warrior until he found remorse and devoted himself to his god, or the thief who was an apprentice wizard. With the earlier versions of AD&D, this was clumsily handled, with (for example) a warrior-turned-wizard being demoted to 1st level again, and unable to use his old to-hits in combat (if he did, then he didn't get any XP).
But why don't the game makers then not adjust their game to upset the most favoured templates?
Naff hunting was a grinding path in Star Wars Galaxies. They happened to be a critter on a planet that was just right to level up on.
SWG had missions you took to then go out on a mission (max of 2 per player) to then go to location X and kill all the critters and their lair. Naff's had all the right stats. The missions could be gotten with a small group, they paid decently, were not too hard to kill, didn't have nasty attacks like disease or poison, their meat and hide were not useless, they were in a relativly safe area that was easy to reach. Most important they were not aggresive and this meant they would not always kill you if knocked out (SWG required NPC's and players to actually kill a player after he lost all his health and most times naff's didn't)
So you hunted naffs, oh, rancors paid more but were a bitch to group for and getting jumped by the occosinal night sister was a bitch and when you mistook a normal rancor for an enraged one and got yourself poisoned you had to go all the way back to the naff planet anyway to get cured.
SWG dev team could have easily fixed this however. Just announce that due to overhunting naff's are now a diseased species and aggresive, a logical, sensible result off overhunting and one that would instantly force all players to adapt their strategy.
SWG already did something like this by changing the loot you got from critters a bit. Meat/hide/bones changed their stats every now and then so wich critter dropped the best would change over time. The poor ducks of naboo really had it hard on my server when they started dropping some of the best meat in the history of the game. In one week I gained all the money I ever need until the game went CU/NGE and I left.
Same with skills. I am thinking of the "schools" mentioned in the movie "The Princess Bride". Surely if a particular school of combat becomes extremely popular and successfull then a rival school will come into existence designed to counter it? If X% of players choose a particular set off skills simply introduce a new skill combo for the NPC's that counters it.
The problem with SWG for me wasn't that I could just write a macro to handle fights. The problem was that I needed just one macro for all the enemies in the whole game over the whole time I played it.
The current MMORPG crop has just a static universe were you can find out the combo early on and then just keep using it time and time again.
WoW is a nice enough game but I recently player a rogue on a bad drop mission. Tower of Althasomething needing a glowing gem. Had to kill casters (warlocks) for it. These are ranged mages with a pet who are strong on damage but weak on armour. The tactic is just to fucking boring. Stealth approach the caster, sap him (disables them), attack and kill their pet, wait for your energy to fill up and kill the caster making sure to cripple them to stop them running away.
Easy as pie. The "game" was figuring this combo out but once you done that you can reuse it for every single caster NPC you encounter with a rogue.
With a hunter? Set pet on caster, kill caster making sure not to attract the pet with your multi-shot (area of effect spell) so the casters pet would attack your pet, then once the pet is down kill the caster's pet. Easy as pie.
But the game devs should "see" this tactic and then adjust the game to counter it. Group the NPC's closer perhaps. Give the casters a new pet that can dispell the sap effect on their masters. Make the casters set their own pet on the hunter.
But the problem is offcourse that the class/level system is just a shitload easier to implement. With a skill system
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh and the choosing to look like every armoured player OR having the choice of some rather nice looking clothing. I also didn't spend ages on creating a pretty face to hide it behind a helmet thank you very much.
In all but the highest level content I would do fairly well with clothing, especially since it was tricked out clothing but still get reminded constantly that I should wear armour. No matter that I saved a bundle on armour costs (clothes did not take permanent damage from fights, armour did, meanign armour had to replaced every so often), I was a noob for not wearing armour. Oh and wookies sucked because they could not wear the best armour for a long time. Never mind that wookies had better unarmoured stats then everyone else.
Being unique is a pain. I would love a game wich simply allowed you to choose wich armour for instance to wear. Cloth/Leather/Mail/Plate or whatever, make them all viable options in their own rights.
You can compensate the armour rating of Plate with the agility of cloth for instance. The cloth player will usually not take hits but has to accept the occasional whopper of a critical while the plate player can just stand there and take it and hope that his clumsy swings eventually, connect.
If a RPG has a "X is the best" then it is a flawed game in my opinion. Offcourse we still got to remember the UO is near death while WoW is setting records.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think a friend of mine summed it up excellently. We were discussing MMORPG's at the time, and we had just gone from World of Warcraft to more esoteric things like ideas for Call of Ctulhu Online (just make a digital Arkham and surroundings, and let players live there and occasionally have something weird happen). We really like that idea, and even thought the Cthulhu system is pretty well suited for the purpose, if you could find a way to force players to play mad (lots of ideas there too, but that would lead us too far...). Anyway, after about an hour of talking, he said: "you know, it sounds great, but we're forgetting the first law of MMO's: It may sound great, but it will go down the drain as soon as it hits players."
Jesus saves... the rest takes full damage.
EVE Online uses skill system. Each skill improves your abilities only a little (like %5 more damage to your guns). Skills have only 5 levels and each level take more time to learn. Learning is done in realtime wven if you are offline. Longest skills can take more than month to train from level 4 to level 5. If you never heard of EVE Online go check it. It's massive multiplayer Elite (old game for Sinclair Spectrum) and it uses SINGLE universe with currently upto 25-30 thousands people in it at the same time. It has working economy and player politics. Skill system and very brutal game (pvp is non-consensual and every loss really hurts) is what makes EVE unique.
Balance is easy in enough in single player game, the superior intellect of the player vs the slightly more mighty forces of the computer who just don't have the AI to actually fully make use of this.
The realtime strategy genre shows this extremely well. Ever notice how in game like command and conquer the enemy always gets new units before you do? Even if you then switch side? The enemy gets units you would get one mission later if you played that side. But over all the balance in on your side because you are more intelligent and can outwit the computer. There is also usually a designed in flaw in the enemies defences. Anyway their is no real need for balance after all, the player should be capable of winning.
This already changes when you then add multiplayer. You now go to make sure that both sides have roughly the same capacity. You can hardly give side X more units then side Y like you do in single player mode. Neither can you hope that the vapid intelligence of one player will offset their better forces.
play a FPS online and you will ALWAYS get a discussion about wich is a noob weapon (any weapon you use to kill another player with). In the half-life mod "firearms" i have been accused of using a noob weapon with every single weapon in the game. Great mod if only they removed the chat from the game.
In MMORPG land the problem is even worse. At least in FPS or RTS games everyone is the same level. Both players in a RTS start out with the same amount of money. FPS assign the same base weapon to all players (btw anyone else every noticed that all the people who complain about unbalance in FPS games don't like the Unreal instagib option wich is the ultimate balancer?)
Since grouping seems to be a great evil in MMORPG's and should only be done when their is absolutly no other choice and then in great shame the designers need to make sure that each and every player can handle each and every quest. So healers and warriors, rogues and paladins all need to be able to tackle the same enemies in roughly the same time. Never mind the 'realism', healers can hold their own as well a warrior in a melee fight.
PvP makes this even worse. You now need to balance each and every class with every other class and you better make sure not to give one class just a tiny bit of an advantage over another. If you played WoW or Guild Wars vs a non-pvp game or a single player game you might have noticed how short stuff like daze and such lasts. That is because if classes that could stun could do it for a usefull period like say 30 seconds they would be far to powerfull in PvP. In a PvP fight a player is going to complain bitterly if they find themselves trapped/stunned the whole time.
If you want a MMORPG to be "more" then you need to make a game wich is about grouping. Where players compensate each other weaknesses and combine their strengths. But in current MMORPG land grouping has an negative meaning. Only noobs group. Read a site like allakhazam and every quest description will have players bragging about how they soloed quest X at level Y.
I sometimes comment in game when a "noob" is being ridiculed for asking for help with a quest that player X who is bragging about doing it solo is bragging he masturbated this weekend to a couple.
Surely MMORPG's are about doing it together? Well not for a lot of people.
Depending on my mood I tend to think that the problem is not with the game but just with human nature.
Rough stone is a nearly useless mined resource in WoW for a squirrel engineer. So I sell it for a few silver way way undercutting others and using the money to buy linen.
I also sell my squirrels for way to low prices. 10 silver, free if you bring me 2x the resources. That is hardly giving it away in my opinion but I got a rather nasty tell from a guy who charged two gold a piece for them.
This is not a fault of the game design, it can only be blamed on human g
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Classes, levels? Republican, Democrat? Coke, Pepsi? Whatever How about niether? The real tedium hardcoded into to CRPGs is the hamster wheel experience/level-ladder nonsense. Dump that and I'll get interested. It's not the only way to run an RPG. "Traveller anyone?"
Experience doesn't bear that out. You *can* be a Jack of all Trades somewhat in UO for example, but you'll be terribly weak. In practices most people have their character specialize in a couple of areas.
A class-based system allows the designers to easily control how long it takes player to finish the PvE content. Unfortunatly, many recent games only offer large group team-based combat against scripted opponents for PvE content after a certain point. In a class based system like EQ or WoW the designers can control which of these battles the players can win by controlling the quality and rate of equipment drops for single class.
In a skill based system the players can develop skills that compensate for a lack of equipment or make the quality of their equipment much less important. This makes it likely that hard-core players will find a way to beat the top level content in the game before the designer can get new content ready for them.
In a PvP environment it's possible to go completely skill based and let the classes naturally evolve. As the game matures, favored "builds" will become more and more popular.
IMHO it's naive for game developers to assume what they have lumped together in a "class" will be the most effective configuration. Let the "meta game" decide what needs lumped together.
What really needs to be done is drop both systems. The player should not have to worry about specifics. Build a good game engine that modifies stats behind the scenes, where the player never sees. players don't need to know there stats. All that matters is that after swinging a heavy sword for weeks he'll notice that he does a lot more damage, or that when he holds a rifle he has become more steady and accurate. Let the story be immersive with out breaking from its reality by worrying about stats. People will be good at what they do not what they want. It will change the entire gamming experience and I believe improve it.
The problem with the skill based system is it isn't easy to figure out how a person can benefit your party...you have to have a 5 min conversation to figure out what they actually *are* since you can't rely on any type of base class to determine their primary role.
In class based games if you need a healer, damage dealer, tank, or supporter, it's as easy as finding someone of that class.
MMORPG.com: The usual debate over skill vs. class system rages here. Why did you go for skill-based?
Tasos Flambouras: Why allow players to take the skills they want and need as their character develops and the game evolves?
In a skill-based system, such as Darkfall's, players can create exactly the character they want to play, without limitations dictated by design choices or by the need to balance a class-based system. It's more challenging for us as developers, but we feel it's better for the players and for the game.
In a class based system you get a pretty much already developed character with little room to grow, whereas the skill based system allows you the freedom and the pleasure of developing your character yourself. With the number of skills in Darkfall, each character will be unique.
In Darkfall, you pick and choose exactly the skills you fancy, and if you tire of the combination, you just switch your focus to some new ones - any new ones. In a class-based system the only time you have complete freedom is right before you create your character and then you're boxed in by your initial, often uninformed, choices.
The skill based system allows the player to adapt, as he learns more about what he needs in the game, to best fit his playing style. New players may not know which class to pick since they don't have experience of the game, essentially forcing them to be stuck with a gimped character, or having to re-roll and forcibly retire a character that was a part of the community and had its own history. The same applies as the game evolves and new skills become important.
Allowing characters the freedom to grow and adapt allows us to add new content and new challenges without worrying about being unfair to certain groups of player characters. In Darkfall all players will be able to take advantage of the new opportunities that come along with the evolution of the game.
for reference, the entire interview can be found here: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/feature s/gameID/4/loadFeature/408/page/2/from/
I think the main problem aren't classes, but simply the point in time when you have to choose them. With most RPGs, both online and offline, you have to choose your classes at the very beginning of a game, even before you do your first steps in the game world. That however doesn't make any sense from a players perspective, how am I supposed to make an informed decision if I don't know anything about the game world? I can now of cause use an FAQ and basically cheat my way through the class selection, but forcing users to do that isn't exactly a nice thing to do.
The solution to that however is relativly simple and demonstrated well in Gothic (offline RPG). Instead of having to pick your character at the beginning of the game, you simply get a default one assigned, there is nothing you can or have to customize at this point. You then are put into the world and can go and solve your quest and have fun, all of this is basically skill driven, only much later in the game, about 1/4 of the total game you have to actually pick a class by joining a guilde, which is reasonably easy to do at that point, since you then already know what the whole game is about and how you have mastered the first quarter of the game.
Classes break a couple of very good tenets of game design:
...'s frequent respecs are a good step in this direction) then the combinatorial problem of skills would be less of an issue.
1) Games are pretty much defined by interaction, and therefore choices. The more choices (within in reason) the better.
2) The choices offered should be *meaningful*, ie. have an effect that is obvious to the player. At the start of a game, a player rarely has an idea of what effects a given class will have, and so the choice is less meaningful.
The things Skills do right:
1) Offer more player expression through greater breadth of choice.
2) Provide an easier mechanism for tweaking and adjusting a character as they advance, or to changing circumstances.
3) Give players the opportunity to use their imagination and experiment across the far greater combinatorial possibility space.
The downside to Skills, as has been mentioned frequently, is the other half of point three above - the resultant complexity of the many combinations means balancing the skills becomes pretty much impossible past a certain number.
This isn't a problem unique to RPGs, however. Consider Magic:The Gathering. This could very easily be viewed as an RPG, where each card is a skill/ability. There are thousands of cards to build a "character" (deck) from, and there have some very broken combinations in its history. These tend to be quickly banned from tournament play, but generally, little tweaking is necessary, for one important reason: You can change your deck at any time.
If someone comes up with a killer combination it usually takes less than a month for someone to design a deck to break it. Since anyone can use any deck at anytime, no "uber-build" can last for long (Yes, I'm aware that there have been exceptions - the principle still stands).
If RPG's allowed players to change their builds without penalty (City of
Besides, a much simpler reason is this: Just because something is difficult does not mean it's bad or worthless. Often, quite the opposite.
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