Multiple Ways to PvM - Lessons from UO

Discussion in 'Skills and Combat' started by Alayth, Apr 29, 2013.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Alayth

    Alayth Avatar

    Messages:
    223
    Likes Received:
    269
    Trophy Points:
    18
    I recently went back and played some UO for the first time in years. Instantly I remembered all the things (good and bad) that led me to love the game, and eventually leave it.

    I think one really important feature in UO was that you had multiple very different ways to approach PvM combat, something many MMOs fail to implement.

    You had the standard stuff:
    Warriors standing toe-to-toe with monsters, bashing them
    Archers, shooting and maintaining distance
    Mages, mana dumping
    etc.

    But then you had more unique approaches:
    Tamers commanding dragons to attack
    Mages summoning strong monsters to attack
    My favourite, bards provoking monsters into attacking each other
    etc.

    So the great thing was, you had choice in how to approach fighting monsters in various situations, choices that went beyond which skill/spell to open with.

    But of course, this wasn't perfect - provoking was just a matter of clicking one monster then another, summoning energy vortexes and hiding behind walls was extremely effective but silly and often boring. So these methods often became formulaic and dull.

    The devs have talked about how the combat system is going to be unique. With the dominion-style combat, we'll need to plan in advance what skills we'll need, and in combat we'll have to be alert. I'm excited to see how that turns out. But I very much hope that this isn't our only option for defeating bad guys - it sounds very much like the standard stuff I listed above. I know we'll have taming. What else?

    Some ideas (not necessarily good ones):
    -Provoking but improved: make it require more user input than two clicks. Maybe force the user to maintain the playing for as long as the monsters are enraged, so you, the user, need to be playing some sort of mini-game the whole time.
    -Speechcraft: Maybe this would make more sense than musical provocation, but the idea is similar - through speech, convince your enemies either to fight each other, or to not attack you, or to give up and hand over their weapons.
    -Stealth/poison: This might be easy to implement within the planned combat system, but the idea is you can stealth, sneak around the enemies, poison them without them noticing you, or maybe put them to sleep with an injection of a sleep potion.

    Do people have other ideas for fun alternative methods for dispatching monsters?
     
  2. PrimeRib

    PrimeRib Avatar

    Messages:
    3,017
    Likes Received:
    3,576
    Trophy Points:
    165
    Gender:
    Male
    The enrage timer killed interesting combat for all games. For those not familiar with the mechanic, WoW like games arbitrary decided that certain bosses needed to be killed in x minutes or they got really strong. This was to prevent combinations of kiting, cc heavy, healing, tanky classes from having too easy a time. But what it actually did was turn every encounter into a dps race. So suddenly, everyone needed a dps meter and no one paid attention to anything but optimal rotations.

    So really, it's the last 5-6 years where games stopped having interesting combat and degenerated into mashing out a rotation the fastest. (Even WoW wasn't like this until lich king).
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.