How do you make a combat sandwich? For Carbine, you start off with some freshly baked Movement bread, add a couple of slices of Aiming meat and some delicious Crowd Control cheese. But a signature dish isn’t complete without special sauce, and in WildStar that’s Ability Mechanics.
Although it’s still an MMO sandwich, it’s vital that it tastes different to a Warcraft, or Rift one. The simple reason comes down to what makes games fun to play from a purely mechanical point of view.
Confession time: I’m pretty excited about Guild Wars 2. After being able to get in to both press beta weekends, I’ve been impressed by the amount of detail already in the game. All the major game systems are present and correct, letting me get a real feel for what’s involved. You can find some of my more general thoughts on the game over at ZAM.
As part of the process of adapting from more stationary MMOs like World of Warcraft and SWTOR to ones that are more movement focused like TERA and Guild Wars 2, I’ve been reassessing how to make the most of my MMO-designed Logitech G15 and Razer Naga Molten. It’s not as straightforward as you’d think. Guild Wars 2 only has a single action bar with 10 abilities, which in theory would make the Razer Naga pretty much redundant. Add modifiers like weapon switching and profession abilities into the mix, and combine them with trying to limit moving your left hand so you can stay mobile, and you can see why a different approach is needed.
It’s why I spent the last four weeks playing movement based games like Team Fortress 2 in order to get used to moving again. I used to play a lot of Counter Strike and Quake 3 Arena back in the day, but raiding as a Mage in World of Warcraft has made my reflexes and spacial awareness soft and flabby. There’s only so many ways you can stand at the back pressing One, One, One, Two and occasionally moving out of bad stuff.
If there’s one thing that the recent MMO betas have shown me, it’s that I need to raise my game. The days where I’d be able to casually stand at the back, throwing out spells and dodging the occasional bad stuff are fading fast. The new world order is in keeping characters moving purely in order to survive.
For those of us brought up on a diet of Warcraft, Rift and Star Wars, spellcasters have been in a priviledged state where most of the PvE combat is managed for us. We have a small selection of abilities to choose from, a list of easy-to-spot things to stay out of and a simple role to do. It also makes for boring combat – once you have a fight memorised you’re laughing.
But changes are on the horizon. In the future breed of MMOs roles are more loosely defined and combat systems have been revamped. Instead of staying at range and just flinging spells, Spellcasters are likely to be taking a much more active role in the future. As I’ve found to my cost recently, this isn’t going to be an easy one for many of us to adapt to.