Does anyone else HATE the proposed card system??

Honestly, if the "deck" idea is how combat turns out it will make me never want to play a combat class. The very idea that I could learn all these skills and special moves for my sword and shield combo, and then have only a portion of those skills available to me when in a fight, is just ridiculous. We would end up with skills that people would never learn because they would see no point in it, until the day they are in that one crucial fight where it would have come in handy.

It would be different if we were talking strictly about items, or even spells if we are talking about a memorization type of mechanic where you use a spell and lose it. But something that's just flat out a trained skill should always be available. Now yes, there should be skills that can only be used in the right circumstance. For instance you can only fire off a quick riposte with your sword if you opponent has missed an attack and has left themselves open. That can be fun and lead to chaining different attacks together to get a result, based on what effects the attack has on the target. For instance a distracting jab to bring their attention, then while they are distracted a shield bash to stun them, followed by a quick jab to the body for a critical hit.

I just don't at all see how having to pre-pick your skills before starting a fight, when you might have no idea what you would need, would make for an enjoyable game mechanic.

 

not exactly. You can put up to like 30 different skills in a set. You can also have multiple sets for different occasions. You might want to load up a particular skill/move more than one time to make it show up more often.

One thing this will do is allow for unique characters. Not all people will fight or cast spells the same way. Also it doesn't refer to normal attacks. You can go through basic combats without using a single special move.

 

I'm not sure how well this deck concept will work for physical combat. I guess it depends on how many moves will be available. Also, I don't recall if RG said that this only applies to special moves. If it applies to basic combat as well, it could be rather cumbersome. As a former Magic the Gathering CCG player, I know it will work fine for spells, but this is certainly probably not what most players are accustomed to in a rpg. They may not want to spend the time building multiple decks for various possible combat scenarios and may become very frustrated after a while if they end up with poorly constructed decks and are badly defeated.

 

Exactly! If I take the time and effort to train a number of combat skills, but then I fail at a crucial fight because I had poor deck building, I will be rather upset. This is similar to the question posed in the thread about if dodging should be manually controlled or automatic. I do not want my character to suffer because I didn't build my deck the right way, so that even though he knows how to do the perfect special move that would win the fight he can't do it because I forgot to put it in the deck. If I'm playing an RPG I'm not expecting to play a game with CCG combat, and would not want to play that game.

 

While I agree that bosses and monsters with unique abilities can be fun, I would like to point out that this does not actually fix the "pigeonholing" problem I referred to. In fact, it can exacerbate it. If a boss pops up with a complex set of requirements, and they were designed so that all the common tank builds wouldn't be able to deal with it, then suddenly there will be a wiki, or game guide, that everyone will be referred to, that says "build this, play it this way". And you will have to do it that way. No think, no clever build, just follow the online guide. Or die. Your choice. If fighting monsters becomes "which costume should I wear for this" then my actual character, MY playstyle, become less and less important. It's all about learning the latest dance craze, rinse repeat.

Thing is, we've got a lot of ways to ruin a game, and everyone is still looking for the perfect course to sail between those reefs and snags to make a really great game. If you make a system with fixed classes, you will be besieged by requests to add such and such to so an so, and let that class be better. If you let the players design their own, you constantly risk some out of balance super skill combo destroying your game's difficulty progression. If you buff a class too much, you unbalance all the others, and the complaints grow exponentially. If you rebalance a sandbox system, you risk spilling unknown amounts of sand. There are ways to lose all around, and of course, we all want to see something in SotA that looks just like what *we* were thinking of building.

What I want to see is a sandbox system that really lets people build a unique working solution on their own terms. If there is a "best", leave it alone, someone worked hard to make that. Instead, buff everything ELSE a little, add in a new ingredient that will be useful to all the "third bests", introduce monsters with a weakness to the unused section of skills. The player base will swell towards what works and away from what doesn't automatically, but what seems to always be the response from game companies is to nerf the excellent into submission, while leaving the worthless disused skill alone.

A perfect example in my mind is what happened to Bear tanks in WoW between vanilla and Cataclysm. At first, they were clearly inferior, I was actually told when I asked that the whole point was to be able to solo. In vanilla, I reached a point where my bear could tank 5 mans, but even I was eager to let a warrior do a better job with half the effort, because bears were based on fewer mitigations, and were just more squishy. Along comes BC, and suddenly the higher stat totals make it possible to really have high armor and high dodge, and suddenly there is a niche for my bear. It isn't that great against magic, or AOE, but any time there was a heavy melee swing boss, my 53% standing dodge with extra procs and cd's ready to go, coupled with my 75% armor, made me a really great tank. Along comes LK, and a friend who had liked and copied my bear design became a main raid tank with it. Then suddenly people were complaining that warriors were becoming obsolete, and what did the devs do? Not fix warrior. No, they redesigned the game so that dodging and armor didn't work anymore. The stats were still there, but suddenly bosses all had undodgeable armor ignoring strikes, huge dodge penalty debuffs came when you walked into the instance, and none of the gear for bears gave good stats there anyways. The IDEA was still fine, but the devs had decided it must fail, so they bent the game to make that happen. Meanwhile, did warrior get any help? No. The consequence? All bear tanks became massive balls of HP, with no mitigation worth talking about, and suddenly paladin tanks were incredible. Warrior players still complained, but now we were all playing paladins, because the devs had nerfed everything BUT shield block. And for a brief time, shield block was king. I pulled out 13k dps from a level 80 TANK (the top actual dps in the raid at that moment was doing 11k) by blocking and parrying. Around comes the nerf train again, any love for the now out of favor bear or the ever spat upon warrior? No. But tanking paladins got completely redesigned so that they couldn't do that anymore. (I hear WoW's membership is down...)

The problems with trying to level the playing field by cutting the tallest grass are threefold. First, it discourages the players who had those innovative ideas in the first place. You can only get punished for your trailblazing so many times before you start thinking about blazing a trail to a different game. Second, it stifles innovation. Suddenly, the only new ideas are coming from the dev team. You go from an online community that comes up with amazing tricks and ideas to an online audience that waits for the dev team to write a new song. Third, you can only cut the grass so short before you reach dirt, and anyone who has cut too deeply into their lawn knows how attractive THAT is.

 

Very well thought out post Malak, and I highly agree. It would make for better moral at the very least in a community if, instead of penalizing those that found a great way to play, we instead improved other areas to help people compensate that might not want to play the same way the first person is.

 

That's why I've been trying to promote the idea of completely customized skills with caps on everything, from the start, that prevent exactly what you've described. Additionally, determinable random encounters, coupled with customized skill acquisition paths and custom consumables would all be optional innovations that could tie in to customized skills.
However, all of that is apparently too innovative for SotA.

 

As I think about it more, the only way the "deck" mechanic would work for me in a melee combat situation is if we were talking about using special items and not skills learned by the character. Then it would make sens because you'd be talking about a finite resource you would have to manage to make sure you are using it effectively. Magic scrolls or runes you can cast to augment your weapons or something like that. Then a deck would make totally sense. It's just management of consumables.

@vjek: I think the problem with that much customization is just all the programming resources needed to make it all work and find all the combination of things people would want to do. I thik it might be a bit beyond the scope of what such a small team can do in a reasonable amount of time. It's an intriguing concept though.

 

It's actually less work for them. All they do is put absolute caps and relative caps in place and the players do the rest.
It does, however, require putting this level of control in the hands of the players, something that developers up to this point have been afraid to do.

Consider this: If you put an absolute cap of damage per second in place, regardless of what combination of levers or sliders the player tweaks per skill, they can't exceed it. Where's the risk, really? That they hit the cap? Ok, it goes into the metrics report and everything is working as intended. Not a problem.

Personally, I would start out with VERY restrictive caps in alpha/beta, but that's just me.

 

eyes totally glazed over at the second paragraph of malakbrightpalm... One reason I'm not an attorney.

 

Yes, I agree with bcxanth. The deck concept could work it was limited to special items (i.e., magic spells and limited use items). I think for most melee combat skills, you would have to use something like a turn-based or real-time combat system. Not sure how well this hybrid system would work in practice though...

 

@Owain

While I have to admit I didn't understand your analogy too well, I will echo that the proposed combat system sounds dumb as a doorknob.


Make it real time and [player] skill based. That is what makes a good PvP game, skill. Players plan to take a shield, a katana and a mace with them in case something happens, I should not be selecting skills... I trained them, they are my skills, they need to activate on the fly, even if all of a sudden I need to cast a paralyze field spell. UO to this day had the best PvP system, it worked on giving the players every tool and having them devise strategies and combos that worked. It evolved over time (trapped pouches!) and tactics were developed against certain builds (dexers vs mages).

 

I have mellowed a bit since my first post on the subject. I will wait until we see examples of the production combat system before I despair.

 

Combat. It's definitely a touchy subject. A large part of the goal of SotA is to attract more people to this game, including inexperienced gamers. This means combat needs to be relatively simplified and enjoyable to learn for people who are not hardcore 'action' gamers. But it's important not to dumb it down to the point that success in combat is more luck-based than skill-based. So though it needs to be easy to get started, there needs to be room to improve your skills and become more effective over time.

I believe this is a big reason why they are trying a new approach to combat, so they can design something fresh and different, and full of possibilities.

 

Sorry bout that Isaiah, lets see here, second paragraph easy mode..."Anything you do can get you killed. This includes doing nothing." Better?

 

My personal opinion would be to do a system like NWN and NWN2 did when it comes to abilities/spells. You get X amount of hotbars to put ANYTHING into be it weapons, spells, potions, armors, toolkits, etc. Before anyone starts getting pissy, lemme remind you. NWN was great about this in that you didn't press one button and spam attacks on your target. You didn't HAVE an auto target, but instead had to select what was attacked every single time with the mouse when using an ability. I know, hell in the eyes of the typical MMO player. The same with AoE attacks and "grenade" type weapons (thrown items like flasks of alchemists fire or thunderstones). The thing that made this really useful was the extremely limited amounts of spells you could cast, even at high levels, and even then you had a limited number of casts you could use. Every spell was useful. EVERY. Then again this was based on DnD ruleset... but even then, so was Ultima back in the day. Now one thing I do like and hate is the lack of having to use components needed to cast these spells. Like it because it'd make magic tedious and not AS useful as it is in those games. Hate it because it makes magic so much more useful than melee until you've used up all those uses.

Now where does all that fit in with the topic? Simple. I say keep the style where you need to select the abilities you use.. but don't limit it. And really, only use it for magic-based abilities. Melee users shouldn't forget how to spin with their blade or block all of a sudden as it just doesn't fit right. That being said, it also shouldn't be limited on a per-encounter basis but rather an overall. Just shouldn't be allowed to change DURING combat. So if you anticipate AoE needs, put a few AoE Spells in your list along with the single target (Why you wouldn't have them in there to begin with, I don't know).

 

Auto target may not be necessary but I like short cuts like LASTTARGET and stuff like that.

 

well of course there might be a few shortcuts needed. The thing I hated about NWN2 was how you could click on a party member in the heat of combat and not be able to reclick your target if they were in the way of it.

 

Does anyone else feel like magery was, in a lot of ways, perfect in UO? I'm saying that, and I seldom used the skill (by seldom I mean only for a few years). The fizzling, need to know spell timer lengths, need to key out your spells, need to react to your opponent, and even the ability to do more novelty things like creating food and polymorphing into a chicken made magery engaging, and rewarding. I won't go to the length of suggesting we copy that system, but there is certainly a lot to learn from it.

The melee and archery systems however weren't as dazzling. Even after the addition of special attacks, it was like a brain dead, close-quarters version of magery. There was no aiming your weapon, mixing up basic combat moves, active and timed blocking, dodging, or the like. A fight between two melee fighters in UO was very systematic: 1) Stand next to each other until one person is dying (either use an auto-healer, or be daring and map out 1 hot key). 2) Whoever is dying runs around until healed. If they survive, repeat step 1), if not, congratulations. A few suggestions to make combat more interesting:

a) Use special attack cards which fit logically into the deck system
b) Add basic combat moves to allow for interaction with every attack
c) Add timed blocking and/or dodging to create the need to consider what your opponents are doing
d) Require aiming, even for card abilities (I personally think casting and archery should require aiming as well but if aiming is too hardcore, then it should be left out of combat all together)
e) Slow down swing speeds, but increase damage. Video games seem to habitually blow up swing speeds which leads to less intense, drawn out hack n' slash sessions. Deadly combat is one way to make all combat more meaningful.
f) Lastly, look for innovative ways to make combat between archers, mages, and melee fighters more engaging.

 

Yes SOTA magery should be as close as possible to what UO had before AoS. That would give SOTA a name for being a very skillbased game that take alot of practice to master. There is so many MMO games out there that have moved away from having the playerskill the decider in a 1 vs 1 fight.

My guild had some of the best PvP players of the Europe shard in old UO (before AoS) and they could win a 2 vs 15 against less skilled players and that say alot about the PvP system and how much you had to gain with practicing it. To be interesting in the long run a game need to be competitive in the way there is always something you can improve with your own skill, and UO magery had just that skill demanding system. There need to be a interesting and fun endgame also of course.

UO Melee was not as bad as you claim. There were melee hybrids (dex + 75) that had the possibility to cast spells like heal, poison and the very effective mindblast. Some also had some meditation skills which brought back their mana fast. Those UO melee charaters if played well just about always won against mages or other less well played melee characters. My guilds best hybrids never lost a free for all tourney in years and reason was they played with more playerskill and also experimented with new Avatars that worked better then the standard UO melee ones. I would like to see the possibility to have a wide variety of PvP Avatars both in stats and skills. That itself will bring diversity to PvP and make players experiment to find out a PvP Avatar that suit his gameplay.

Could you explain abit about this card system you speak of? Is it like the skills you choose before going out for PvP?

I think you have good ideas but i disagree that speed should be slowed down. I want fast paced PvP with as many variables to trick your opponent as possible. A fast system that requires intelligence, twitch skills and tactics.