Twobit Whore said:
Combat *is* the whole game, or at least most of it. That"s what these games are based on. If you want to break the mold and forge a new genre.. go ahead. Wait, they did this.. it"s called the Sims Online and Second Life.
What you want are virtual worlds that are engrossing to a few and boring for the masses. So go ahead use that climbing skill to climb that mountain.. then what? Combat? Or do you just stand on the peak and plant a flag?
RPG"s aren"t solely about combat. I will tend to agree that the MMO portion of the games seems to have sunk to a level where combat is the primary focus...but it doesn"t have to be and shouldn"t be.
Sure, everyone wants to storm the castle and fight the baddy. But does that mean you can"t have meaningful content getting to the fight?? Or more dynamic fights? Or the opportunity to avoid the fights all together if you can?? These games are currently about the destination, lets make the journey worthwhile without delving into the world sim crap.
Why don"t alarms sound if you don"t do everything right and the whole dungeon or instance re-aligns because of what you did?? What if your climbers go in the back, the swimmers go in another way then you take your big hammer and go knock on the front door?? Why don"t we have teams with specialties infiltrating with stealth??
Why not tackle that bandit lord, hogtie him, then attempt to return him to the town alive rather than just his head??
The options are as varied as imagination and technology. No one is doing much very imaginative and the technology is there to do a lot more than we have now.
I still want more of a game than a world simulation but I would prefer more an RPG slant rather than a FPS slant but you can do both. I just don"t want to continue looking at it like its black and white...you enter, you kill stuff, you loot stuff, you repeat. Thats the Doom method. You walk in with your BFG and blow the crap out of everything. Hell, your entire raid walks in as a group together.
Lets get a little strategy involved, lets get a multi-pronged attack going where someone takes the gates, someone disables the warning claxon, etc, etc.
You can do both types of content. The hack n slash big hammer method, the alternate stuff, a mix of stuff, etc, etc. Its not about just one or the other its about how can we make what we do right now more varied and interesting, engrossing, fun, dynamic, entertaining and all that crap.
Right now we approach these games with hammers. A tank hammer, a healer hammer, a dps hammer. The main reason that it works is because that is how the content is designed. To change to a multi-tool would require a change in how the content is designed as well. You don"t switch in the new content with the old hammers and you can"t put the old hammers in the new content. It has to be a synergy between the two.
