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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.
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.
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