Green Monster Games - Curt Schilling

Pyros said:

I think the 16 number isn"t too bad, 4 of each major archetype, tanks healers melee dps and ranged dps.

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We"ll have to agree to disagree on the tanking part. Tanking is extremely binary: you either can or cannot have the everliving shit beat out of you and continue standing. The one that does it the best will be the one who is your main tank. If all your tanking classes are somewhat equal, why have seperate tanking classes in the first place? If they are not, then the best case scenario is that you use one tank for one thing, and another tank for another thing. Worst case is they are permanently worse in every way, and you don"t use them at all, and you may as well not have the fucking class in the first place.

Sure, healing you can spice up a bit. Here"s a healer with a focus on AE damage, here"s a healer with a focus on single target damage, here"s a healer with a focus on preventing damage, etc, etc, etc. Tanking, not so much. Both Blizzard and Verant have proven this.

Locithon said:

I know you can"t say specifically for your game, but what is your opinion on the number of classes a game should have? Do you prefer the WoW approach and only have 8 classes at launch? Or do you like the archetype system more and have 16 classes? Or maybe somewhere in between similar to EQ with 12?

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Danuser stalks these forums, so I will tread lightly.

Suffice to say, have the classes in your game, AT LAUNCH. Adding classes is saying "here"s something we cut".

Spend the time post launch fixing everything wrong with your game, and making future releases polished as hell.

We"re talking episodic content delivery, so we"ll never be looking for things to do

If people that are WAY smarter than me are to be believed, you do spend that first 8-12 months "fixing" your game anyway right?

The other piece regarding classes and Copernicus is this. While we have less than what we "started" with 4 years ago, it"s more about classes that "fit" rather than striving to hit some number that no matter where you end up, someone is unhappy.
If all the classes fit, and there"s something for every MMO/Fantasy player, then the number isn"t the relevant piece, it"s the polish and completeness the classes you include are at when you launch.

While that"s an understandable argument James, it goes back to the whole balance thing. For me, I"d rather see fun put before that. I want different flavors in a tank, from both a roleplay and gameplay point of view. It doesn"t matter to me if they all tank the same mobs just as well as the other, what is important is that they feel different to play and have a different image. Some people dig that holy knight image the Paladin conveys, others want to be the darker Shadow Knight. This is important in a good MMO, imo, much moreso than worrying about whether or not you reallyneedthe class to fill that role. You need it for variety and interest.

I think something around 12 classes is more appropriate though.

Grave said:

Glad to hear it. I think it"s definitely worth giving each race a unique starting experience that really ties the player into the lore and history of their race.

One thing I"ve always wanted to see was a starting area that was actually in a high level, dangerous zone. You"d start out and be able to see a little bit of your racial home city, but then through some series of events are forced away to some other land (appropriate for your level). This would instill in the player that sense of sort of finding their way "back home", a grand tale that would have them returning home a seasoned adventurer. Even better if they find that home in peril when they at last arrive!

I just think it"d be interesting to see a little variance on the old "home city = newbie grounds" deal, not that there"s anything particularly wrong with it. It seems like it"d give the world a little more of an "adventuring" feel if you came across the city of the Barbarians around level 40 or something and it actually felt somewhat exotic and interesting to meet them and be among them. You can"t get that same feeling in WoW because, well, why would you go back to another races" newbie ground for much of anything.

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Maybe they didn"t do it well, but this sounds a lot like Gnomeregan.

The EQ nostalgian is running pretty strong in this thread lately - I think people are pretty hard on WOW"s starting areas - some were very good and some where not, just like EQ. Toxxulia forest sucked dick, and you got out of there as quickly as possible. Seeing Thunder Bluff was awe inspiring. Seeing Sen"Jin village as a troll was pathetic. Kelethin was badass. On and on.

That to me is where I have always felt the design disconnect. As if one group of people worked on one part, another entirely different one worked on the other, with no liaison working overseeing it all.

WARs PvP and PvE systems, felt like 2 completely different companies worked on them, and then met up at the end, and put them together.

Some areas in games feel that way to me, starting with UO.

Grave said:

While that"s an understandable argument James, it goes back to the whole balance thing. For me, I"d rather see fun put before that. I want different flavors in a tank, from both a roleplay and gameplay point of view. It doesn"t matter to me if they all tank the same mobs just as well as the other, what is important is that they feel different to play and have a different image. Some people dig that holy knight image the Paladin conveys, others want to be the darker Shadow Knight. This is important in a good MMO, imo, much moreso than worrying about whether or not you reallyneedthe class to fill that role. You need it for variety and interest.

I think something around 12 classes is more appropriate though.

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Well 3 of each then, but yeah my point with tanks was basically the usual warrior paladin death/dark/shadowknight type, and one more which can be monks for example. They can all tank equally well and do it through different mechanics. Warriors with better mitigation, paladin with self healing, bad knights with lifetaps, and so on. There"s also more than one aspect to tanking, and as long as boss tanking is equal, you can have many difference to tanks. Burst threat, sustained threat and AE threat, as well as various external utility(heal/lifetap/attackpower buffs, various debuffs).

If you only have one tank, then why have more than one healer and 2 DPS. 4 classes game, yay Gauntlet.

Just don"t try to make an Avoidance Tank Role.

We"ve seen how those go.

Pyros said:

If you only have one tank, then why have more than one healer and 2 DPS. 4 classes game, yay Gauntlet.

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What would be wrong with 4 classes? Diablo only had the three classes, if you"ll remember, and it was a pretty phenomenal game.

The goal should be to make each of your classes feel as powerful as they possibly can. If you have just one tank class, you can make it as weak or as strong as you want. Add another with an entirely different approach and you have to start balancing them against each other. Is the warrior"s higher mitigation better than the monk"s higher avoidance? If so, how do we compensate that without going too far overboard? How do we design an encounter where both tanks, with entirely different approaches to mitigating/avoiding damage, are at least viable, if not both the best at what they do? Remember, you want your classes to feel powerful and unique, seeing another class do the same exact shit you do, and better, is not a good way to accomplish that.

At the end of the day the target of the boss can either take damage, or he can"t. But there are many different types of ways you can DPS a target, and there are many different types of damage you can throw out to a raid for heals.

Thengel said:

Maybe they didn"t do it well, but this sounds a lot like Gnomeregan.

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It would be if gnome players actually got to start there and sort of see the events that cause Gnomeregan to be evacuated. That"d actually be an awesome starting instance. Then when the player sees it in game later on it resonates with them much more than it does in the game now where just start with the Dwarves and hear about Gnomeregan through quest text.

That"s actually one way to handle things nicely if you don"t want to overpopulate the world with newbie zones. Certain races could start in an instanced (or phased) flashback of sorts that gives them some of the history and important events that happened, but the player could actually level up and experience some quest content during this time. Then the events lead them to another race"s starting area and they continue from there.

That"d be a lot better than just dropping them in as an afterthought, as it feels with the Trolls and Gnomes in WoW. Imagine how cool it would"ve been to play through an experience like the DK starting area as a Troll, where you see how Thrall first met the trolls and why they joined together, etc, but you"re actually playing through it. Then you understand why you"ve now come to settle in Durotar.

That kind of stuff is really important to me, to making me become more attached to my character, and after the Death Knight experience I think it proves to be important to a lot of other people too - several people I know only rolled one to "try it out" and then became attached to it through the great introductory storyline.

Edit:

Pyros said:

Well 3 of each then, but yeah my point with tanks was basically the usual warrior paladin death/dark/shadowknight type, and one more which can be monks for example. They can all tank equally well and do it through different mechanics. Warriors with better mitigation, paladin with self healing, bad knights with lifetaps, and so on. There"s also more than one aspect to tanking, and as long as boss tanking is equal, you can have many difference to tanks. Burst threat, sustained threat and AE threat, as well as various external utility(heal/lifetap/attackpower buffs, various debuffs).

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Yep, I agree.

It becomes easy to keep them relatively even if you make all of the tanks hybrids as well. You can give them equal mit/avoidance/cooldowns on the tanking side, and then just spice things up with their hybrid side. Paladins would have cool healing/shield moves, SKs have the taps, DoTs, whatever, and Warriors have their aggressive berserker style attacks.

Then it becomes a choice you make based on what flavor you prefer, which seems more interesting to you, and not a matter of which is the "best" tank.

After coming back to WoW for a bit and doing hefty amounts of both PVE and PVP, here"s a few things IMHO are outdated and should be fixed. Yeah WOW is still the most playable MMOG on the market, but I think it could be even better if they either changed or fixed these:

- Mana ... get rid of it already please. Going OOM and being absolutely useless was bad design even in AD+D. It is even more egregious in a game where some classes can go on fighting forever at nearly max DPS, while others have to drink due to OOM. WAR showed that mana is not needed, and in fact, most will be glad it is gone.

- Auto-attack: either all classes have it or none of them do

- All non-auto-attack specials base damage must be determined in the same way (preferably fixed amount based on the ability). If it is based on main-hand weapon, then it must be so for all classes, including casters.

- Absolutely no passive CCs (snares, silence, stuns, etc...) as weapon procs, enchants, poisons, or whatever. Your mantra should be nothing passive except damage, dots, and non-cc debuffs.

- Every thing must require a GCD (^mainly addressing the no passives issue). The only thing that should be off GCD are self-buffs and reactive interrupts.

- All classes have the same GCD. I don"t know of any other game that has classes with different GCD, it seems like a balancing nightmare.

- No "complete fight reset" (Preparation, Readiness, Cold Snap, etc.) talents or skills . If a class needs a complete reset of all cooldowns to compete, it is either brokenly bad from the ground up, or is guaranteed to completely IMBA in PVP at some point.

- No internal cooldowns on anything (if you think it may need one then don"t make it a proc)

- No "free stamina" on any armor type. No "free stats" or "cheap stats" to any class. This breaks PVP very quickly. All classes should pay the same amount for stats. I needn"t mention what high stam plate classes with the same (or more) DPS as cloth/leather does to PVP ...

- Get rid of BOE and level restrictions on everything. BOE and BOP is fine in moderation for the best stuff in the game. But BOP on level 5 garbage is ridiculous.

- If you care about PVP at all, every class should have a similar number of hard counter classes. Rock, Paper, Scissors, Nuclear Bomb gets old quick.

If WoW did most of the above it would greatly simplify balancing. As it stands now WoW is sort of a Frankenstein of mechanics that seems nearly impossible to balance.

Kuro said:

Boomba the Big.

The day EverQuest changed the Dumb Smiling Fatty Ogre character models was the day doom descended upon Sony"s house.

Damn you Luclin, damn you forever. (Also, killing the troll face was a slightly less weighty sin, but still abominable)

They really need to make it so you don"t have to be Luclin Models to ride horses.

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Yeah, I agree and it"s one of the many things Vanguard got wrong too. I bitched big time when Brad and co cheaped out on their races. They had all these races but they just had one skinny humanoid model and stuck different heads on the model and called it an entirely different race...ugh. It was just so wrong. Of the whole reason for skinny trolls and ogre"s in EQ where to save money so they didn"t have to keep designing different mounts for them.

Imho any fantasy mmo needs diverse races! It is what makes the fantasy genre! Skinny trolls and ogre"s need not apply! They need to be fatasses! A skinny troll or ogre is a dead troll or orge because they aren"t eating their fill of gnomes or dwarves!

Grave said:

Then it becomes a choice you make based on what flavor you prefer, which seems more interesting to you, and not a matter of which is the "best" tank.

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I would love to hear in what imaginary world this is even remotely possible in. Is this also the game where the lead class designer hops on my server for 10 minutes every day and sucks my dick? This sounds like an excellent design goal, if so.

James said:

What would be wrong with 4 classes? Diablo only had the three classes, if you"ll remember, and it was a pretty phenomenal game.

The goal should be to make each of your classes feel as powerful as they possibly can. If you have just one tank class, you can make it as weak or as strong as you want. Add another with an entirely different approach and you have to start balancing them against each other. Is the warrior"s higher mitigation better than the monk"s higher avoidance? If so, how do we compensate that without going too far overboard? How do we design an encounter where both tanks, with entirely different approaches to mitigating/avoiding damage, are at least viable, if not both the best at what they do? Remember, you want your classes to feel powerful and unique, seeing another class do the same exact shit you do, and better, is not a good way to accomplish that.

At the end of the day the target of the boss can either take damage, or he can"t. But there are many different types of ways you can DPS a target, and there are many different types of damage you can throw out to a raid for heals.

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Diablo wasn"t a MMO. It works fine when your max number of people is 4-8, when it"s 20-40 in raids, you don"t want 25people playing the same fucking class.

Monks/avoidance tanks are usually harder to balance, on this I totally agree, and as such they should only be hybrid tanks for like trash tanking or what not, don"t care. But balancing the other tanks should not be complicated. Especially since as I said, it doesn"t have to be different in how well you tank, but what you bring and the mechanics on the player side to achieve the same mitigation.

No one wants to be the "trash tank". It"s the fucking "you suck, but I"m going to let you tank this meaningless crap while I go get a blowjob and sammich and come back just in time to tank the boss and get the praise from everyone for getting the job done" role.

Maybe you haven"t played games much, but balancing tanks is a nightmare. The fewer the better.

Yeah, I certainly miss the days of "Time to bust out the Prot Paladin!" Hyjal raids. Though I guess that"s better than now where it"s "Just go ret or holy if you want a raid slot" Ulduar. Or the soon to be "Protection Paladins are untouchable fucking gods" Coliseum.

The worst thing Blizz ever did was try to make DK"s 3 different specs of tanks. It"s just so stupid especially when they could have just made 1 dps, 1 tank, and 1 healer(the wow bloodmage) specs and try address both the healer and tank shortages in one swoop.

imready2go said:

Yes, please!
Assuming you don"t mean to imply I"ll be motivated to level up so I can upgrade to "Swing Sword II" from "Swing Sword I", then I"m in total agreement.

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Amen. No more frakking Firebolt 1, Firebolt 2, Firebolt 3 kind of crap. Unique spell names make each one seem more special.

I certainly miss the spell graphic upgrades I got while leveling in EQ. I remember when I hit 35 in EQ i was happy as shit that my undead DD spell on my necro looked so badass! I was very disappointed this wasn"t in WoW.

"If all your tanking classes are somewhat equal, why have seperate tanking classes in the first place?"

There"s a great reason. Even if you have two tanks of equal durability, there"s no reason they couldn"t differ in important aspects such as play style (ie, how many buttons per second the player pushes) and secondary abilities. Perhaps it hasn"t been done, but that doesn"t mean it can"t be any more than any other invention or concept being "impossible" before someone actually went and thought it up.

Verant failed at "tank balance" in EQ because it never even tried to make them comparable. I can"t comment about EQ2 due to inadequate experience with that title. Blizzard fails with WoW because it"s too obsessed with trying to make every single aspect of each tank unique, down to health pools and such.

It comes down to subjective preference, perhaps, but *I* don"t want to play a "generic tank". I want to be the Paladin or push relatively few buttons, while Bob over there might rather be a Warrior and spam keys like mad--but both of us want to be (and ought to be) as good at our tank job as the other guy. Contrary to the present results of an often incompetent industry, that"s *not* an impossible task. Settling for mediocrity just because quality takes a little more effort doesn"t sit well with me.

Danth