It looks like Saturday will be the first night Aria (the fiancé) and I try to get back into some MMO gaming together, with the Guild Wars trial up first. Hopefully she likes it, my very brief time with it was positive enough, for a themepark.
Which brings me to today’s topic: how in gods name do you people (yes, YOU people) stand tab-target MMO combat? I’ve been playing DarkFall for close to a year now, so it’s been some time, but my god is tab-target combat slow, boring, and about as interesting as watching paint dry. I know I’m level one, I know I have limited hotbar abilities (hey I’m back to being able to click those, whooo…), and I know starter mobs are meant to be easy, but ugh, really, THIS is what I was playing with before DarkFall?
Going back to candyland has made me realize just how different everything is in DarkFall at the most basic level, right down to killing the easiest mob with nothing but melee swings. Because even when you are doing just that in DF, you are still constantly moving, constantly aware of all the terrain around you, constantly trying to kill the thing quickly for more reasons then just to be able to jump to the next one, and constantly aware that anyone who runs near you is a potential threat. In short, some level of tension is always present, and SOMETHING is always around that makes even the shortest afk something to consider.
In candyland you run up and start auto-attacking (with 0% chance to miss based on player skill), you can safely ignore everyone and everything else around you, and even if you get disconnected or die IRL during said combat, you will still beat that mob unless you are fighting a raid boss. It’s no wonder so many need ‘epic’ rewards for plowing through such gameplay for hundreds of hours. And I was wrong, you DO deserver being called a hero (by the NPCs) for that, dear WoW player.
So yes, the trip back to candyland is going to take some adjustment, but as long as it does not dull my already limited DarkFall combat skills, I should be fine. I’ll just have to find a way to go into a half-como before loading up whatever we decide to play. Now excuse me, I think my guy just finished auto-attacking some ‘scary’ beast, time to collect my vendor trash and click on another to progress my ‘epic’ quest to save the world.
(No, I’m not in any way bitter that Aria refuses to play DarkFall, nope, not at all…)
Hardcore Casual 
It’s that much of a difference huh? Now I’m really excited for a Darkfall Trial! :D
I hope you enjoy Guild Wars for its own sake though. :)
Darkfall is honestly in an inelegant meeting place between the intensity of an FPS and the overarching speed of an MMO. It sounds fun, and you have great stories…
But, when I want to play my precious little gametime… I’d rather have a more relaxing pace. One where I can have one hand on the mouse, one arm around honey, and I can still talk to her.
I’d say with how WoW has this in spades (btw in LOTRO you cannot AFK kill a mob without coming really close to dying) that the majority of MMO gamers also like to play like this.
/shrug with the sheeple
And this is why EVE is not feeling threatened by STO
It always puzzles me when you go on about “Tab Targetting”. I target with the mouse pointer and always have done. I won’t say I *never* use Tab totarget, but I’d been playing MMOs for years or more before I even found out it existed.
I also main heal and main tank using mostly (usually only) the mouse-pointer to target. Much of the fun in being main healer in a group is working out who needs healing, finding out where they are, managing to target them from among the chaos on screen and getting back to the hotbar to cast the heal. Ditto with getting and holding agro and swapping targets for agro management.
Again, I do sometimes use the group display and click a name to target for healing, but mostly I just look at the screen, see who’s getting hit, click on them and heal. It’s the main reason I find combat in most MMOs far too fast nowadays, but I absolutely don’t see the point of automating all this with Macros, Add-Ons and custom UIs. I’d just like us all to play much more slowly.
Similarly, all the things you like about combat in Darkfall I find pretty unappealing. I’m not a computer gamer, never have been and never will be. It’s supposed to be my character that’s good at all this fighting stuff, not me.
I’m the director in this film and he’s the actor. I tell him where to stand and what to hit then I let him get on with it while I watch. Then I review his performance and send him for another take.
I think the key difference, though, is I hate getting excited and I detest adrenalin rushes. About as pleasant as toothache. I play to be entertained, amused and above all relaxed. The calmer, slower and more relaxing the gameplay, the better I like it. Yes, I know that’s completely contradictory to the way I choose to use the mouse all the time, but there we go. My motto since I was 16 has always been “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds” (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
“I hate getting excited and I detest adrenalin rushes.”
Which is why you are indeed a special snowflake :)
At the min/max level, tab-targeting is simply faster than clicking, just like hot-keying skills is faster than mouse-clicking them. It all just comes down to what ‘level’ you play your MMO at (although in many of today’s MMOs, that level caps out somewhere around ‘shortbus status’)
When I want to be relaxed I break out Sim City or Civ IV. MMOs CAN be relaxing (EVE Mining for example), but I feel like its quite fair to expect COMBAT of all things to be exciting. Also, somewhat ironically, by playing that way is going to make the combat more frantic than it needs to be. There are intense moments in group healing situations, but it is far from anything that someone playing a first person shooter player has to deal with almost all the time.
I mean, if you want to click on actual avatars to heal, thats your prerogative, but don’t complain when the games are designed for the people who actually play efficiently, and your way of playing makes it seem way more chaotic than it has to be.
This is something that has always fascinated me. I wrote a blog entry a couple of years ago about how people use the interface to move.
In FPS games, you have to ‘look’ at what you want to hit. In an MMO like WoW (or even EVE), it just has to be ‘targeted’.
In a game where your target is sticky, the faster you can cycle through targets, the better. And in most cases, hitting tab three times might be faster than clicking on a unit — particularly if it’s far away or not something seen well.
In an FPS, it’s all about keeping what you want to hit in front of you. That’s why circle-strafing is so important.
Heh, Syn, GW will send you out on some quests that are much more than an auto-attack can handle. If you are in the Prophecies (original) campaign, the Shiverpeaks mountains will do nasty things to your party.
What class are you planning on playing?
GW does one thing well: by limiting party size in instanced areas, it’s a lot easier to believe that your character is special (one of six or eight to save the world). It’s a good story with interchangeable supporting characters, rather than a dynamic world.
Oh I have no doubt it will, I was exaggerating in the post for effect. I’ve heard that GW has some fun instances/area, and I’m looking forward to them.
I don’t know about class. Since we are going duo, what would be a good combo? One class can be more intensive (my guy), the other class can hopefully be less so (fiance), but we need a combo that can handle most of the game. Do the henchmen (or whatever GW calls them) work like they do in DDO, where you can pick them based on class to fill in what you need?
Yes, that is how GW henchmen work, though the monks can be kind of slow on the uptake.
Personally I find the clickclickclick of manually attacking to be reallly annoying and it makes my hand cramp up. I positively hated DDO for this and even in Fallen Earth, which I found interesting enough on a few levels, it grew old after a few levels of having to continuously stop to massage my palm out.
As others have pointed out, many people don’t just tab-target everything – I find it frustrating because it doesn’t always cycle through targets in the order I want to cycle through them, especially in Guild Wars where “target next nearest” likely won’t select the healer you want to smite, etc.
Oh, and I’m with Bhagpuss on hating adrenaline rushes.
henchmen pretty much. Plain vanilla henchmen such as you get in prophecies come in several flavours – tank healer dps etc. They do a reasonable job but you cannot control them other than basic movement commands. In Nightfall you get uber henchmen called heroes who level up with you and who can control explicitly. They pretty much make the entire game solo-able if you are prepared to micro manage your heroes. Prophecies is probably a better starting point though – it breaks you in more gently. A few things you may not remember about Guild Wars: Free instant travel to anywhere you have already been. Free respecs in any town. Gear is also interesting – There are rare armour sets that take huge grinds to earn but they have no better stats than common or garden armour. They just look cooler. Combat is fast and furious but is also surprisingly tactical – the tougher fights need careful skill selection and good tactics.
In selecting your class don’t feel too hidebound by traditional roles. If you don’t want to be a healer (monk) for example you can always pick a henchman monk. Than means you can choose what ever classes you like really. Warrior is probably the most straightforward class to play and mesmer probably the hardest but rewarding none the less. Necromancer is an interesting class with some incredibly useful pve skills.
With the little research I’ve done, I think warrior would be a good choice for my fiance, and I think I might go Necro (always liked that style of class). I’m guessing you get access to henchmen as soon as you might ‘need’ them to do any group quests?
Also, how does the whole different campaign thing work? Can you take one character through all 3, or do you re-roll at the start of each one?
Each character gets to take two classes (primary and secondary) so there is plenty of scope for experimenting. Yup Henchmen are available once you get out of the starter zone. Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall are all stand alone chapters that you can play from scratch on their own. If you own more than one chapter you can also bring a character from another zone – they get to skip the initial levelling content but most of the game is at max level. Eye of the North is an add on for max level characters only.
At release I made a Warrior/Necro which was pretty cool. I had a life leeching spell that lasted around 15-30 seconds I think, throw that on all the bad guys, run in swingin and rarely die. Probably not as powerful anymore, especially with some of the newer classes, but it was good times nonetheless.
You guys could always try DAoC out, on the Co-Op server for her to play on. If you get bored you could always try a normal PvP server when she isn’t playing.
GW is pretty fun, but it seems to get boring being instanced all the time.
Sadly DAoC is just about dead. Currently there are 63 people playing on the Co-op server. All clusters are now 1 cluster and there are 3,200ish players on there right now. That single cluster means Trials of Atlantis, since the classic cluster has been shut down. A whopping 16 people on the PvP server.
Sad sad days indeed. If only they had actually made the Origins server.
I suppose at peak time it might be a tiny bit higher. I have not played since 2007 but the community was still great even if it was quite small. Plus the game had a unique feel about it. Sad to see it so dead.
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Never really got bored with GW. GW is fairly challenging, has great areas to explore(yeah its instanced but still had fun roaming about) and if you get into a good group it makes it even more fun. But PVP is def where it was the funnest. Although I haven’t played it in a very long time I still have fond memories of my former guild and our epic gvg battles against “overpowered” builds.
The only thing I didn’t like is how NCSOFT always seemed to be pandering to carebears. I pretty much stopped because they nerfed rangers.
Hah! While I’m not playing any mmo’s at the moment, and while I do not object to themepark MMO’s (though I’ve a deep seated love for sandbox games)…. I loath hotbar combat. Not because of player skill issues (that’s a function of balance, hotbar combat COULD be hard) but rather because it’s just too abstract. I want a visceral feel, immersion, and I just don’t get that from hotbar combat.
Wait on your cooldown, hit a key, wait on cooldown, hit a key…. Or don’t even wait, just mash a key till it happens. Meh. Yawn.
I understand hotbar combat started in MMO’s because of latency and server issues, but that is no longer a concern. Let hotbar combat die now, please.
I’m curious as to what you’d replace the hotbar with. In a game like WoW that has dozens and dozens of skills/abilities/spells/items, how would you manage all that without a hotbar? Or is it not truly the hotbar, but rather the vast collection of skills etc. that you detest?
A game like DarkFall has a bar for your skills, but you don’t click to use them, instead you ‘load’ them into an active slot, which is then triggered with the left mouse button. On paper it’s a subtle difference, but in-game its huge. Bind your most common skills to certain key combinations, organize others by bars, and you have both a complex yet fluid system.
And part of the reason games like WoW have dozens of skills is to mask the fact that overall, the combat is so bland (hence the 1-2-3-1-4 criticism)
Or you could use some sort of combo system, where a combination of key strokes casts a spell or whatever. Granted, that would be much harder as people would need to memorize this sort of thing, and I don’t think they would like it. (I’m thinking like fighting game “moves” just as an example of what I’m talking about).
Of course, this could lead to things like failing/messing up, I can just see how pissed everyone would be if someone accidentally did the wrong combo and wiped the raid.
The bigger point is probably that the vast majority of players aren’t playing MMOs because of combat mechanics, but because they are social games. There is a reason facebook games are getting insanely popular very quickly, even among people who have never played a computer game in their life.
AoC attempted this but the problem with the combo type of system is difficulty.
Raiding etc wasnt too bad, I got to Mt and heal in a few and it was pretty fun but large scale pvp was really awful and took so much focus. Combo systems seem to fall over when fighting other players.
In AoC It really was quite enjoyable duelling players and landing that 3 part combo or dodging/side stepping their combos.It ment fights could go on for literally hours or be over in seconds depending on who was fighting. It didnt really work on a large scale though.
I think FE and DF have found a good ground with the FPS system. It takes individual player skill but its very simple so player skill counts but you have time to think about tactics/skills as the FPS side comes naturally.
oh and g15’s failed :P
They couldnt add randomness to a combo so you could predict and whack someone in the face
I tried Allods. couldnt stomach more than 5 levels, I mean I remember WoW was relatively fun for a few months, but after one evening of same experience I wonder how I lasted several months
I had a similar experience with Allods. I think part of the problem is that I’m so established in WoW that when I’ve gone back to it from time to time I have several very powerful characters already, and any new characters have the benefit of starting with things like heirlooms and whatever gear I want to buy for them. It makes the early level/boring content whiz by in no time.
When I go to other WoW-like games, I just feel like I’m plowing my way through so I can get to the fun part. When WoW was new and I was doing that with my first character, it was a new enough experience that at the time it didn’t seem too bad. Now, years later, it just makes me want to uninstall whatever I’m playing, which I usually do.
Facebook games = fad. It will die shortly.
As for a combo system, my G15 says bring it on :)
That’s exactly the opposite of my take. In almost all MMOs I’ve played, the fun part is the start, where you have nothing. Gameplay then is compulsive because every upgrade to your gear and every new ability either adds a completely new element to what you can do, or makes you look visibly different, or makes you noticeably more able in some way.
Later all these changes become increasingly less noticeable or significant and eventually the difference can only be measured by parsing the logs. By this point I have usually lost all interest and started another character or moved games.
I’ve loved low-level gameplay for ten years now. Starting new characters and gearing them up never tires. Doing stuff with them once they are well-dressed and capable is a LOT less interesting.
Yeah, i think that this is the problem, we must do the same thing (instance, raid, bg, etc) looooots of times, and this is boring, i think that WoW is a great game, but i don’t understand some people that do the same thing every day for months/years.
It’s been so long since I leveled up a character in WoW but I think I’d probably share your frustration with the early combat.
Much of what you describe though about Darkfall’s combat, minus the manual targeting, is present in WoW’s PvE endgame (and I’d imagine to an even greater extent in arena PvP). Raiding at anywhere near a high level requires constant spatial awareness, the ability to respond quickly to special boss mechanics and nigh perfect execution of one’s role (in my case dps). The last element – doing the most damage possible – involves its own host of dynamic elements: watching and responding to procs, negotiating one’s threat/mana/rage/runic power/energy, and constantly deciding what ability to use next given their mutual interaction and DPCT (damage per cast time). Some specs (arcane mages) are much simpler than others (affliction warlocks, my main, and feral druids) but I’ve never felt bored in the least by WoW’s PvE endgame. The current raids still get my heart racing at times and for me that’s as good a barometer of my engagement as any.
High-end raiding does require more attention than leveling, but even then it’s nothing like DF PvP, and this is coming from someone who raided back before it was made ‘accessible’. The major difference is that in a raid, you are just playing a complex game of Simon Says, which is very very different than a 1v1 PvP fight, which is different than a 5v5, which is still different from a 20v20.
Regardless of which is more complex, I find the complexities to be much different. You can kill a raid boss the same way every time, but a group of playable characters can and will adapt, improve, and react to certain strategies you put forth. Ultimately, I personally find the complexities in DF much more enjoyable than WoW due to the competition found. I like competing against bodies, not a giant creature that someone developed.
That’s my opinion atleast.