Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Ngruk said:

I disagree, and always have. Healers usually aren"t my primaries or mains, but I do like being a healer. I like to be that guy people depend on to "live", and that"s usually the healer.

I think most of you aren"t saying you hate healing, but rather the mechanics and game play behind healing are the suck.

I think WAR did some great things as far as mechanics go, but in the end you"re still staring at everything BUT the action when healing in large groups or raids.

You play the UI, and that gets old, fast.

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Yes and no.
I"ve spent a good amount of time playing a healer. And, I would say, I do enjoy healing at times.

But, I dont enjoy when we have 8 people wanted to do an instance/dungeon/group, and we can"t because we don"t have the exact right class combination required. Its not like TF2 where you can just switch.
I don"t like having to have someone tied to my hip in order to do anything when not in a group.
I don"t like when I roll a class that can heal, that I"m expected to do nothing but heal. And vice versa, I don"t like when I"m playing another class, and the "healer" joins but isn"t a healers "spec/build", and expects to dps, tank, whatever. It goes both ways. Its not fair to the "healing" class either way. If we NEED a healer, the option might as well not even exist because it will be completely unwanted.

Ngruk said:

A game with "open world" flying is a completely different animal than one that is not. Something I didn"t realize, was taught, and came to learn the "expense" of having it needed to be carefully weighed against the "cost".

Basically you have to decide if the features being cut to include it, are worth having it as a core game play feature because the amount of work needed to create an open world goes into one of two things:
1) Making your world FAR smaller than you initially wanted to due to the immense amount of time/effort/resources needed to create a world that supports open world flying vs. On rails
2) Adding a ton of time to your dev. schedule to create a fully rendered 3D open world environment that will support open world flight.

We"ve certainly had conversations, lengthy ones too, about the risk/reward and cost-benefit and it"s those sort of things I refer to when talking about the "learning curve" I"ve been on the past 3.5 years.

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I"m personally over flying mounts. It was cool for awhile but now I really feel like I could take it or leave it. The only thing I love about them is the speed in which they get me where I need to go, and that can be replaced fairly easily.

I hate flight paths though. I mean, sure, it"s better than having to run all the way across a continent, but is telling the player to AFK for 12 minutes and then come back and they"ll be at their destination really the right compromise?

I say just make ample teleportation available. In a world of high magic, it makes more sense to travel that way anyway.

Something like a series of waygates that attaches each major city (you could even tie it into the lore by saying that people settled in that area due to the residual magic energy there, explaining why each city has one) and a few other hotspots would be a start.

Then you could have other ruins similar to the wizard spires/druid rings from EQ, but make it so that they must first be discovered and then anyone can use them to teleport to other areas.

I"m all about fast travel though. Despite being one of those EQ nostalgia guys, I actually thought the Plane of Knowledge was fairly good for the game. My main issue with it was it made little to no sense story-wise. These days people aren"t willing to spend several hours trying to get a group together and then just get to where they want to go. If you do everything you can to make it very easy--almost too easy--for people to meet up, get somewhere, and get to playing, then it"ll pay off big time.

Grave said:

If you do everything you can to make it very easy--almost too easy--for people to meet up, get somewhere, and get to playing, then it"ll pay off big time.

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So true. There"s a great example of this in fiction, just waiting for someone to implement it too. The trump cards from Roger Zelasny"s Amber series. To make it short, if you have a trump card for someone, you can attempt to communicate with them, and if willing, they can pull you through to their location.

I"d really like to see something similar implemented in a game.

Ngruk said:

You play the UI, and that gets old, fast.

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Amen to that. Staring at a hot bar, waiting for the next skill to refresh, quickly becomes boring. I want to see the action, not watch a timer slowly revolve.

One thing I"d like to see go is this annoying tendency of MMO designers to put massive mountains up between zones, or square them off entirely from the rest of the world, making it feel like at worst a series of interconnected valleys (eq) and at best a large, patchwork quilt with mountains along the edge of each square (WoW).

Is it so hard to just make zones segue into one another naturally? I don"t understand the obsession with walling each zone off and giving it one or two exits, can"t they just make the landscape connect up naturally? Instead of having a massive mountain chain at the end of the forest with one little pathway in a ravine with grasslands on the other side, can"t they just make the forest end and the grassland begin? It feels a lot more natural and a lot more immersive.

I understand the logic behind it in a game like EQ where you have a loading time between each zone, but in one like WoW where this isn"t the case, it just feels like an absurd relic of an older generation of games. I thought it a little ridiculous that they kept this "mountained off" design philosophy even in Outland and Northrend where you can fly around the world across zone barriers.

Jerrith said:

So true. There"s a great example of this in fiction, just waiting for someone to implement it too. The trump cards from Roger Zelasny"s Amber series. To make it short, if you have a trump card for someone, you can attempt to communicate with them, and if willing, they can pull you through to their location.

I"d really like to see something similar implemented in a game.

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Yeah, I like that more causal games like Free Realms and Wizard 101 let you summon friends to your side, and its particularly handy when doing RAF on WoW.

I think I came up with a pretty good system last year that sort of combines elements from various travel systems I"ve liked in other games into something unique:Traversing the World: Long Distance Travel Solutions | The Wandering Rogue

Short version of it is:

Players travel the world on foot, encountering ancient ruins at various points along the way. Once they"ve stepped into them, they"re attuned to that location.

The player can purchase or find runestones which allow them to instantly teleport to the ruins they"ve visited. The lowest type of runestone can be vendor bought cheaply and teleports the player to cities and other common points of interest, the mid-level type can be found as a drop or bought from players with the runecrafting tradeskill and teleports the player to dungeons and other more out of the way areas, and the highest level runes must be bought from the tradeskillers and teleports the player to even more exotic locales and raid dungeons.

When a rune is broken it leaves behind fragments that can be sold or traded to players with the runecrafting skill which can then be turned into new runes.

Essentially, imagine if instead of hearthing out of an instance in WoW after the group is done, you could pull up the map and go to any flight point instantly. Nice, right?

The major benefit to a system like this is you can use the runestones at any time, from anywhere. If you"re somewhere across the world questing and get a group invite, you don"t have to ask the group to run out of the instance to the meeting stone to summon you like you would in WoW (or hope they have a warlock), you don"t have to hearth and fly there, none of that, you just bust a stone and you"re within walking distance of the dungeon.

Afterwards you might want to quickly get back to your questing, so when the group breaks you just crack another stone and you"re whisked away back to the very zone you were questing in before.

The runestones wouldn"t even need to take up inventory space really. I pictured it in my head as being a rune button on the minimap that you could click that would open the world map, but with tabs on the side. The tabs would refer to the different levels of runes. You click the lowest tier tab and it only shows you places you can travel with that stone, as well as how many you have. Click that location on the map and you teleport. Free Realms actually does something similar to this now, but they have no cost associated with it. I like the idea of tying it to a tradeskill and encouraging players to buy/sell/trade runes.

I guess the only potential annoyance is with people that don"t want to keep an eye on their rune count, but it has never bothered me to stay stocked up on reagents on my Mage and Paladin in WoW, so I don"t think it"d be that bad.

tl;dr version: Three class roles in tank (reduces damage to himself, controls agro), defensive support (reduces damage everybody takes via buffs/debuffs) and offensive support (increases raids dps via buffs/debuffs).

Remove healing so that you aren"t locked into tanking minimum amount of healers/tanks to win fights.

Ngruk said:

You play the UI, and that gets old, fast.

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I can pretty much garuntee you that if you did some focus testing or took a poll, most people who enjoy healing aren"t doing it because they really get a kick out of playing whack-a-mole. The main reasons are typically that they enjoy the power it gives them (who ~isn"t~ looking for 1 more healer and then they"re good to go?) and that it offers a break from the rotation style of other classes.

More importantly, it"s because it"s one of the most important roles on a raid and fuck if I"m going to rely on some other assclown to do it when I know I can do it better.

Anyways...

Step one is moving away from targeted healing and more smart healing so the players can spend more time watching the fight. Obvious examples have been the various fire and forget style heals such as prayer of mending, judgement of light, sacred shield and so forth.

Step two is limiting the power of healing in a fight. Or more importantly, making sure that classes that heal aren"t a liability past the number of healers you need to win.

The ideal we"re trying to strike here is that you don"t say "Okay, we need 2 tanks and 5 healers for this fight, 3 tanks and 4 healers for the next, then 1 tank and 6 healers for the next" and then you spend several minutes inbetween each fight juggeling spec"s or who is in the raid.

The "bettter way" of doing it is that you have your tank classes who control agro and take less damage through their own defensive abilities.

Then you have your defensive support classes (healers). With straight up healing though, you"re only going to want enough tanks to cover all the mobs and then enough healing to keep them alive. If you remove healing and instead have it be wards and preventative damage, as the tank gets lower you move onto the next tank.

In this case, you"re balancing your support casters against your tanks. The more support casters, the longer your tanks live. However, if you don"t have as many support casters, your tanks may not live as long, but you have more for the mob to chew through.

The "third" grouping of characters for those who don"t necessarily enjoy the various defensive roles, would be your "offensive support" classes. These people put out the same raw dps as the healer/tank classes, however their utility comes in the form of debuffing the mob to increase the amount of damage it takes.

At the end of the day, what it works out to is you have a choice. The more tanks/healers you bring, the longer you survive. The more offensive support classes you bring, the shorter the fight. If you remove raw healing as a normal means of survival, you instantly remove the soft cap on how many healers/tanks you bring and it becomes a moving point.

There are other ways you could manage it I suppose. Non-stacking debuffs/buffs, dimishing returns on classes, etc...but those always feel so much more tacked on and forced then just designing cleverly to begin with.

Anyways...

Oh, and open world flying is worth the trade off. I would gladly pay full expansion price for Blizzard to redo the art assets of the old world to allow flying there.

Grave said:

I guess the only potential annoyance is with people that don"t want to keep an eye on their rune count, but it has never bothered me to stay stocked up on reagents on my Mage and Paladin in WoW, so I don"t think it"d be that bad.

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-Fuck- reagents. That"s another nuisance that needs to die a painful death.

If you get a hadron for the idea of material components for spells, then use Catalysts and don"t make it take up an inventory slot.

Hat trick post?!

Azrayne said:

One thing I"d like to see go is this annoying tendency of MMO designers to put massive mountains up between zones

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I think it"s mostly for the on rails adventure. You"ll notice most of these narrow passages lead directly to a new quest hub. I think it"s done mostly because it"s easier for designers to say, "Okay...this is where they enter, now where do they go?"

Plus they sorta kinda do this already. See the image below as reference. Not the best example but you get the idea. It"s the edge of a forest leading to a farmstead. If they wanted they could call them different zones, but they don"t.

I get what you"re saying though, and it"s not like they don"t already do it on occasion. But ultimately I think it"s for the on rails design. It"s easier to design a zone if you know where players will be coming in.

Yeah, its for funneling purposes.

Imagine if you zoned into South Karana from god knows what part of NK and had to find a quest hub. Not an easy task.

With the mountains they can be sure to sort of guide you where you need to go or at least stick points of interest in your face as you move by.

I still hate it though, makes every zone look like a crater. Northrend is slightly better.

Zehn - Vhex said:

Hat trick post?!



I think it"s mostly for the on rails adventure. You"ll notice most of these narrow passages lead directly to a new quest hub. I think it"s done mostly because it"s easier for designers to say, "Okay...this is where they enter, now where do they go?"

Plus they sorta kinda do this already. See the image below as reference. Not the best example but you get the idea. It"s the edge of a forest leading to a farmstead. If they wanted they could call them different zones, but they don"t.

I get what you"re saying though, and it"s not like they don"t already do it on occasion. But ultimately I think it"s for the on rails design. It"s easier to design a zone if you know where players will be coming in.

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Seriously, thats just good design. You don"t WANT your world to be completely open and formless with random hills, etc.
Rivers, mtns, etc separating zones is a natural barrier, that tells you what is on the other side is different. The blocking out lets you create diverse areas right next to each other, in an environment that is limited for space.
This is also true for difficultly. Universal game truth. higher level npcs are on the other side of the bridge.
Quest hubs were good as well. Funneling players together is a great mechanic.

I do think the mountain pass thing is a bit overused though. Elwynn/duskwood/westfall use a river and that works fine and feels slightly more natural.

That could be since I"m from the midwest and that"s how we do most of our borders out here. Everywhere else feels like Oregon with all the random forests and mountains.

And especially with how often it fucking rains. 8(

A tectonic map of Azeroth would be hilarious.

Kuro said:

A tectonic map of Azeroth would be hilarious.

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Ask and ye shall receive.

MapWoW.com World of Warcraft Maps

Actually EQ was the game that did have several long continous zonelines between zones, examples being between Qeynos newbie area/Qeynos Hills, West karana/North Karana and East Commons/West Commons. Also EQ did not really work with Questhubs in the beginning, their "hubs" were the starting cities. After that, Quests were scattered across NPCs throughout the world.

Old World EQ was built from the idea of a World with Races that had Starting Cities. Nothing wrong with Quest hubs, I guess, WoW did both.

You can funnel to new zones with quests, like they did for some parts of wotlk. Random NPC has a quest telling you his cousin in xlzlaica has requested for help, ask you if you want to go(with a confirmation for ppl who don"t read quest text, it always sucks when I take the grizzly hills quest before I"m done questing and have to fly for 10mins to come back), and he takes you right to the quest hub. You simply add those at the end or the start of a hub to direct you to other hubs in the same or next zones. You don"t even need to auto fly there, you just have info on how to get to the hub(follow the road, cross the bridge, turn right, tada) and you reward people for the travelling at the same time, easy stuff really, no need for mountains all around the zone with a tiny entrance.

The mountains in vanilla wow were more because of technical limitations and also because zones in wow have a strong identity which doesn"t mix too well when the zone next to it is an entirely different color scheme(you know like how you run from the red hellfire into the purple swamps of zangar).


As for the healing discussion, filling bars when they deplete by spamming/reactively casting a heal spell isn"t fun, it"s total shit. Prempetively healing with hots stacking, absorbs and spells that you can"t spam usually prove the be challenging and interesting, even if it still involves looking at bars. I loved playing my resto druid in pve(in BC, in wotlk they"re too powerful nothing is really a challenge), didn"t like playing a paladin though(in either). So yeah, removing healing and having other mechanics to prevent tank deaths is fine really, just the concept of totally removing the defensive buffing class type isn"t gonna work because some people only like healing. Not only because it gets them group or make them feel important, but because that"s what they like. Just like some people like ONLY dpsing, they don"t want to do fancy shit, just do the big numbers.

I"m an altholic and play every archetype, but I can understand these peope and removing their roles would lead to somewhat big issues. There was quite a lot of bitching in aoc because the healers didn"t have direct heals, only hots, which were the same for all 3 healing classes(barring talent specific stuff). Oh and healing on a Disciple or a Bloodmage? Awesome as shit. And yeah, you"re still mostly looking at healthbars, but the way you heal makes it nongay. You don"t necessarily have to do away with healing, just have to make it good so it"s not the old boring big heal rotation/heal spamming that are dominant in current mmos.

Edit: Oh and while I"m at it, better balance between the number of tanks/heal/dps needed at normal group level and raid level. It"s stupid in wow that you need 1tank 1healer 3DPS for 5man, but you only need 3(and half the time only 1-2)tanks but need 6-7healers for 16DPS in 25man. Making more classes true hybrid would help greatly with this I guess.

Pyros said:

You don"t necessarily have to do away with healing, just have to make it good so it"s not the old boring big heal rotation/heal spamming that are dominant in current mmos.

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Agreed. I think "remove healers totally" is a sledgehammer solution to a problem that needs looked at by a fine scalpel. There"s nothing wrong with healing itself, imo, it"s just a problem with the class mechanics most of the time.

Basically, if you"re designing a healer, after asking "is this fun?" (which is always the first requirement), next step back and ask "does this make the player feel epic/cool/badass?"

It"s pretty easy to do with DPS, and often even tanks, but healers tend to feel like they are only supporting the real heroes who are taking the boss down. That sucks.

Instead, how cool would it be if a Cleric earned favor from their god the more they healed/buffed allies during the battle, and then those points of favor allowed them to fire off huge one-shot offensive spells at the boss? Imagine the Cleric tossing out heals and suddenly shimmering, golden hammers begin to circle around them. Then three celestial spirits descend from above, each taking a hammer into their hand. For the next 30 seconds they wade into battle against the Cleric"s enemy. This basically goes back to making healers hybrids, in this case letting the Cleric do DPS even though they are focused on healing, which some people do enjoy doing.

You could even have a class that healed entirely through NPCs, like a Shaman who focuses on debuffing/DPSing the boss, which allows him to maintain a connection with the spirit world. These spirits could intelligently apply HOTs/Wards/Heals to those that need them in the raid, and the potency of their spells could be tied to how well the Shaman is maintaining his spirit link via DPS.

Any number of options are possible really without removing healing as a mechanic. It just needs to be made more interesting for the player.

VG"s flying mounts are awesome (ya, i know VG). Anyways, its 2009, there shouldnt be any game developed now days that doesnt have a flying mount. I hate easy travel like flight paths as well. I think early eq"s was perfect. Wizards and Druids do the porting was great. It was great for the people involved. I didnt mind at all paying a few plats/golds whatever for a port.

I mean, i dont like long ass travel by any means, but you can do it better then auto get there.

Grave said:

Agreed.

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Making healing interesting is only half the battle and there are a myriad of ways to do so. How do you solve the soft cap on tanks/healers then though?

The easiest is to remove healing and make fights a zero sum game. You start with 10 million health as a raid and once that"s gone, it"s over. By varying the amount of tanks, healers and debuffers you bring, you change how long you last and how long the mob lives. Everytime you screw up the bar moves closer to failing.

In a game like WoW where you have a regenerating resource pool and can outheal damage, you can go indefinitely. This leads to the enrage mechanic. The enrage mechanic puts a softcap on raid composition. You only bring enough healers/tanks to survive and then no more.

WoW has tried to rectify this at various points by making mana a limited resource. This also falls flat on it"s face because it introduces one of the gayest MMO mechanics ever accidentally invented. Cancel casting. Some call it skill, I call it a mind numbing exercise in wanting to kill myself after about 30 seconds.

And as we"ve discussed before, mana as a finite limiting mechanic sucks donkey balls.

I guess my stance on it is there"s no need to reinvent the wheel here.

You could try, and it might turn out great, or it might turn out awful (see AoC"s attempt to make combat more "involved", that probably sounded great in the meeting room) and spell the doom of your game before it even gets off the ground.

On the other hand, just making the roles and classes more exciting is fairly simple, and completely safe. I really doubt anyone is going to complain about healing being made to be more exciting.

I think the trinity as a core concept works. I just want to see the method used to fill those roles become more varied and exciting, and I want to see it become easier for any group of friends to complete content as long as they havesomevariance in class makeup. Removing the limitations of talent specializations goes a long way here. Classes should have all of their tools and be able to perform each role intended to them straight out of the box.

Make enough classes hybrids and you"re likely to end up with a tank and healer by accident. Then, if the player can play like a DPS class (unquestionably the most popular role) while still performing the role of tank or healer, you eliminate the issue of people not wanting to do it. I absolutely hate healing, but I loved the utility my old Shadow Priest had in TBC because, even though I was mainly brought for mana regen, I could look at healing done at the end of the fight and see that I was actually contributing a large amount that wasn"t overheal. I realized then that if there was ever a class that could actually serve as main healer by DPSing, I"d finally play a healing class. People"s love for classes like Blood Mage, Disciple, Disciple of Khaine, and Warrior Priest further confirms that others feel the same way.

Zehn - Vhex said:

How do you solve the soft cap on tanks/healers then though?

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I think that problem exists only in a small minority of raiding guilds that have the numbers to be selective on who and what they bring to a raid encounter. This is averysmall minority even if it might seem otherwise because of how vocal they tend to be, especially on boards like this and EJ.

The common guild will just bring whoever they"ve got online, and the hybrid concept discussed earlier goes a long way towards making it easier to field the necessary components to making the raid doable.