Alright, so, as many who know me know by now, I play a lot of different MMOs, as I have difficulty sticking with one thanks to the one I spent all my time with getting pulled (RIP). I've often enjoyed doing things like raiding in games such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14, and Neverwinter, usually as a healer. So when I was invited to join a raid group earlier tonight to take part in one of Guild Wars 2's raids, I figured I'd find them as fun as I usually do. This was not the case. I tried to play as both a DPS (since I was told learning fights as a DPS was easier) and as a healer (Which is what I usually play raids as), and for a good while, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't enjoying myself the way I normally do.
I spent some time after the raid group split to try and figure that out, and came to a conclusion. Specifically, Guild Wars 2's characters force you to pay attention to too many things. In WoW and FF14, you pay attention, in general, to two things. The first is your rotation, and the second is AoEs from your enemy and healers. As a result, fights can end up being wildly complex because you aren't dedicating much brain power to your own capabilities; you manage your attacks and your positioning, and the rest can be spent watching the very cool boss fight unfold. This is exceedingly good, as it can let the (frankly gorgeous) set pieces most raids take place in shine, and allows the bosses in question feel exceedingly epic.
If you don't mind spoilers for the Heavensward expansion of Final Fantasy 14, I heartily recommend watching this video; it's a great look at a really nice boss design, the set for the arena, and the mechanics of it.
[youtube]i6lzIz33gPY[/youtube]
Within the first couple minutes, you already see some of this come into play - when the boss uses "Dragon's Eye", you have to turn away. When a purple marker appears above your head, you need to get some distance from the group because you'll be slapped with an AoE. Then you need the raid party to come in to spread the damage over everybody. That's before the actual phase shifts start at 70% HP, and we're already three mechanics in. When the first phase shift hits, the entire arena changes, becoming simpler, darker, and yet still very cool looking; this arena shift is a breather moment that allows the players to let their fingers and brains settle and gear up for the next part of the fight - in which everybody needs to claim a pylon. What follows is battling each of the Knights of the Round in succession, each with different moves that, if you're watching for them, are obviously telegraphed. The one with the meteor circles is particularly interesting, because it lets the players destroy the impact zones of the meteors before they land, preventing party wipe.
The fight carries on further with another breather moment, punctuated by a massive attack the healers and supports ready the party for by putting up defensive boosts and barriers. Making you fight the king as a main combatant while also dealing with the Knights of the round in a ramp-up effect makes the fight all the more intense, but never tosses attacks at you that you haven't seen before. It layers them on top of each other, but never to such a point you can't respond. At least nine phases to that fight, all of which can be seen and responded to due to small breathers between combats and an understanding of the actions at play.
Conversely, the bosses I fought in Guild Wars 2 were nowhere near as impressive, visually or mechanically. In Raid Wing 1, you fight the Vale Guardian, which splits into 3 units that each require a specific way to fight them, makes it so that pats of the arena damage you, and occassionally does AoEs. On the other side, the first boss of Raid Wing 4, Cairn the Indomitable, has something to the tune of four attacks total, no phase shifts. And yet, these bosses still feel more difficult and less engaging than the fights I ran into in FF14 and WoW.
The reason for this is simple; the players were less complex in WoW and FF14. This man not seem like an obvious connection right off the bat, but the player character in Guild Wars two has more than double the number of things they need to keep track of; You're responsible for your own healing a lot of the time, so you have to watch your HP. You still have to watch positioning. You also have to watch the enemy health bar for the times you can crowd control the boss. You still have to pay attention to your rotation, BUT half your rotation is hidden at the time because of the weapon swap mechanic. And due to the nature of team buffs in GW2 and the fact that everybody resurrects everybody (rather than that just being the healer's job), you also have to pay attention to your ally's positions.
That's a lot to keep track of in any given fight, and GW2 doesn't really have a way to mitigate that kind of investment. WoW and FF14 both have some exceedingly complex classes that force you to pay attention to an equivalent number of abilities, but also have the option of simpler playstyles you can use to be effective (my favorite example being Beast Master Hunters in WoW, in which you have all of four core skills and four or so situational buttons you're likely to use in a given fight) so that the player can pay more attention to the fight. This feels like an important distinction when I'm playing, as I have a nasty inability to split my focus - if I can concentrate on one, maybe two things, I become very good at what I'm doing. I'm able to focus. But each extra distraction splinters my focus further and degrades both my enjoyment and my ability to operate effectively. Whether this is a trait of my autism, or something particular to me, I'm unsure. The simple issue I'm seeing is that, if GW2 had a very simple player class for raids, I'd have gotten much more enjoyment out of it.
The reason I bring this up is because I believe the way to strike a healthy balance on this sort of thing is, essentially, allowing the player to choose their own complexity level; you can make the bosses as complex as you like, both visually and mechanically, and the players have the chance to choose a power setup as simple or as insane as they're comfortable having fun with. Just food for thought - I, in particular, always love having the ability to make characters that all but play themselves.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
Very interesting. As someone who doesn't usually do much end game content this was a pretty good read.
From the boss fights and such I played on FF14 I quite liked most of them, being a black mage (read as DPS for those not familiar with FF14) most of the time it was nice to find a spot to stand there and hammer the enemy with attacks, and given the nature of the class it wasn't just having to use the same button. And by stand there I mean find somewhere AoEs aren't and then get lucky that they remain that way, felt pretty good.
That said I have claimed to dislike gimmicky boss fights in the past on here. Now after reading this and thinking on it I think I just mostly just dislike boss fights that are very stop and go. Those fights are less fun for me because they feel less like a fight and more like a minigame. FightfightfightfightSTOP! Now everyone has to go and do something else to make the boss able to be hit again! I believe Champions Online had this kind of set up for a number of bosses, and I never found those fun.
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So like, I dunno. I don't raid very often or end up playing end game content that much either because of how the high end player base acts or because I don't enjoy how the boss fights are set up. Sometimes a combination of both.
"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."
"That's a lot to keep track of in any given fight, and GW2 doesn't really have a way to mitigate that kind of investment." -- No they don't. As you essentially say by completely removing the holy trinity setup they made everyone responsible for the things that was previously part of someone else's role. GW2 has taken one or two baby step towards a trinity model through their elite classes/specs but not anywhere near enough to make a difference imo.
I think CoH struck the golden balance in this regard, at least in concept. Having every AT clearly be intended for one of the trinity roles but not bound to it nor having group content strictly requiring a specific composition between roles was brilliant and one of the top three things I miss about the game.
I haven't really thought about it before but reading all this I think I'm very close to you Halae in my ability for the number of different things I can concentrate on. I fairly sure that autism is at least part of the reason (i'm on the autism spectrum as well) so the question should rather be how much influence it "provides".
I think a lot of boss fight mechanics are going to depend on how active we are on player "rotations". Are we going to be using a slower combat style or are we going to be mashing buttons as fast as possible (similar to more action combat based games)? A slower style will allow the use of more complex mechanics while a faster style will be less complex and lean more toward a "synchronized jump rope" style of fight.
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There are a number of variables at play in boss encounters. If a Boss has phase shifts (on a timer or by hitpoints), the players prioritize rotations to damage as fast as possible or to maximize big cooldowns. The phases of the fight are a known quantity, so the encounter can turn into a whack-a-mole with a varying degree of forgiveness for poor/lazy play (or severity of RNG coupled with players not handling pressure). Sometimes that is what you want out of an encounter >> consistent behavior so you can judge one tactic vs another or to gauge composition effectiveness (or as a benchmark for your other characters). These boss encounters are all interesting until you 'solve' them. And some people devise 'optimal' rotations, create a smart macro (one button push to cover everything) and then only have to worry about positioning.
Also, for the most part, Boss encounters occur inside a small room in an instanced dungeon. They are frozen in time, always the same (until a patch or rebalance tweaks something). This preserves the vanilla experience for players to experience what it is/was like when the content was first made available. It is a nice feature for players who haven't been playing forever, but that content is usually kicked to the curb when the next expansion releases. You can 'experience' that content on a new alt if you choose, but that content usually becomes a wasteland, forgotten in time. The CoT world should be a living thing, with few areas frozen or kicked to the curb.
Consider what could be in a game where Boss encounters were a bit more dynamic. For instanced fights, what if current open world events impacted the encounter? In CoT we know there will be open world multi-faction (NPC) events. What if the outcome of those events impacted resources that were available to the instanced Boss fights (types of powers available or minions to call upon). Or maybe the status of the open world could impact how the instanced encounter plays out. Let's say there is an alien invasion (Rikti for example) and they just roll in and scare off or kill the Boss. You'd have to find a way to shield the Boss from the aliens long enough to capture/defeat him yourself.
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Of all the bosses I've fought in all the games I've played, I prefer the ones from Tera Online. The reason is because there was no "fight" to learn. No scripted set of events with certain triggers. Rather, the bosses themselves were what you had to learn. There's an important distinction here. Because Tera is an action combat game, there are no marked areas to announce a spot on the floor to avoid, or other types of boss mechanics that made the fight into a script that just needed to be rehearsed. Rather, players have to watch the [u]B[/u]ig [u]A[/u]ss [u]M[/u]onsters themselves to see where the vulnerabilities are and when to get the heck out of the way. And you could tell when the BAM raged and you know that when it rages if is faster and deadlier and might have a different attack or two.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I was never a fan of the scripted fights that it seems all MMO end game content is becoming. I understand that game designers need to remove as many variables out of end-game content as they can to be able to fine-tune the challenge, based upon known power level and capabilities of the player character classes. But I'd much rather fight a Boss who had a smart AI and was able to act and react to the players themselves. And from what we've been told by MWM, I get the feeling that this is what the AI developer is striving for as well. (maybe?) Just search these forums for the term "AI dev" or "Neural Network" and you'll find enough clues.
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Sounds like boss fights like in Monster Hunter, bosses have tells.
It'd be nice for boss fights in MMOs to be less scripted. An idea I had while reading this thread was having boss phases be player dependant somehow. Like if the boss manages to do X next phase happens. Could be anything, players have to keep stones of power away from the boss less it becomes extremely powerful, all the boss has to do is hit players with a certain AOE to get the stones from them, and every one he gets grants him new attacks and abilities. Could have badges for not letting him get any, and for letting him get them all and beating him anyway.
Just some thoughts.
"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to."
I've gotten that feeling as well Huckleberry. Not sure if they will react that noticeably in a single fight but they will learn over time so "easy tactics" will become not so easy after some time.
I seem to remember them also saying that bosses would not have the exact same powers each and every fight. Rather they will have a fairly large pool and only use a subset of it for each encounter thus reducing the predictability even further.
When it comes to character complexity, I think CoT is on a good route. To my knowledge, there will be health, power, and momentum meters. Power will be endurance from CoH, so that might just net in under rotation management. Healing and revives are going to be more in the hands of specific players (with the universal revive being out of combat or in several second long breathers, if I recall correctly) and momentum won't be important to every character, or at least there will be characters that care far less about it.
There is things like tab vs soft lock targeting (though in theory it will only be a button press between the two), but one thing that might be a bother is the powers with an alternate activation. Especially since the main thing we've heard about with an alternate is knockdown or knockback powers, and when you want one and get the other it could be very bad.
Of course, an easy way to deal with that is to include some kind of toggle option. My current understanding is that left-clicking a knockback power will make it use the knockback version, while right-clicking will make it use the knockdown version. If there was an option to make it into a toggle system (right clicking changes between KD and KB), that would let you switch to the KD version for grouping and only need to worry about right-clicking if you want to switch. This has its own set of problems (an extra click, keeping track of which mode the power is on, when you just want to use the alternate method once) but that's why I'd recommend it as an option; the player can choose whichever mode they prefer or switch as needed.
As for enemy complexity... I'm not really an endgame player, in anything, ever, but my golden rule is that a boss encounter should make me think. This can be done with scripting (though I find that loses its luster after a time or two) and it can be done with AI, but as long as it's not too predictable and boring it should be fine by me. FF14 (from what I've seen, I've never played it) relies heavily on scripting and telegraphed AoEs, and while I feel that extreme is absurd I think a little bit of that kind of scripting isn't bad.
In the end, maybe a mix of the two (especially with large groups, such as open world bosses and raid-like missions) would be best. In any case, communication should be clear: if the target has a toggle that makes them nigh-immune to control powers, it should clearly communicate when that toggle activates and deactivates. That kind of thing; it'll keep the fight feeling fair and let the players adapt and plan accordingly.
So, at this time I'm not worried over the baseline complexity of characters, and time will tell how enemy complexity goes. That said, thank you for better explaining some of the backend mechanics of MMOs for me. I love this kind of stuff!
Under Construction...
Lost Deep, you have the knock effects backward or are left handed. The default activation is knock down. The alternate activation is knock back.
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Oh. Guess I misread them? Still, having a toggle for it might be nice. Then I can easily use KB in solo play and KD when teaming.
Actually, if you're smart about it KB can be good in team play, too, especially with CoH levels of maneuverability. You just need to get behind them and knock them into the tank. All the same, I understand why most people are less thrilled about it.
wait
CoT WON'T be able to rely on telegraphed AoEs. All characters are going to be super-mobile. Either a boss will need an option to shut down travel powers or no one will ever get caught. At the same time, this means that interesting things can be done with player and enemy positioning (as a Blaster in CoH I ABUSED the hover power for combat positioning) but it's likely that scripted AoE attacks are going to be in a great minority.
Since a lot of scripted combats rely on telegraphed AoEs (not just in FF14, and not even just in MMOs; I beat Diablo 3 not too long ago and the boss fights in that were pretty telegraph-heavy) that implies that CoT is going to need to lean on the AI for those big boss fights.
Interesting!
Under Construction...
Halae, everything you were talking about in your OP can basically be boiled down into a relatively simple concept ... [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workload][b]WORKLOAD[/b][/url].
Games that make you "do everything" on the basic assumption that "everyone CAN do everything" (resulting in a behavioral dynamic of everyone MUST do everything) you functionally load up each and every single participating player and character with an enormous workload. There is no meaningful "delegation" of responsibilities in any direction, since everyone is "on their own" (together?) and it's everyone for themselves. Because of this, the factors of coordination (with others) and cooperation suffer, since your primary responsibility is looking out for number one (yourself!). Furthermore, since everyone can (and therefore must) do everything for themselves, there is a lot less room left over for people to specialize in any particular roles (since everyone can do everything).
All of that combines to create an extremely heavy workload on each and every character/player ... a workload that, as you've observed, demands SO MUCH of your attention that you have no spare time to relax and ENJOY the fight that you're in. You're needing to keep track of so much ... stuff ... that you haven't got the spare attention span for anything else beyond simply trying to keep up/tread water (as it were). Because of this, the raiding feels [b]demanding without being rewarding[/b] while the combat is in progress.
Needless to say, that tends to NOT be the case when you have characters who Specialize into different roles and purposes and who simply [b]CAN'T[/b] "do everything" for themselves. Even when you can do "a lot" in a group, so long as you can't do "everything" you avoid the worst demands on your attention span while playing the game.
In that regard, I will agree with everyone here that City of Heroes did manage to find a sweet spot in which each character had something to contribute but they rarely wound up stepping on each other's toes (uncontrolled Knockback being a notable exception) and in which everyone had something to DO but in which no one character was responsible for EVERYTHING. The result was a delegation of responsibilities within any given grouping of characters, and a building of TRUST between players, such that your teammate would be there for you and you would be there for them. Characters had strengths and weaknesses and people worked around those to bring their strengths to bear while mitigating their weaknesses. But because you couldn't do EVERYTHING, characters would specialize in "their thing" and then focus on just bringing that element into the team (even if the team size was solo).
So yeah, I think that what you're objecting to with GW2 raiding is the sheer weight of the workload that is being thrust upon you by some of the very fundamental underpinnings of how the game is designed. Things that work great when soloing and/or leveling can become liabilities in massively multiplayer environments ... particularly if there is an ingrained sense of Every Man For Himself that has been instilled into the community owing to the fact that since they CAN do everything for themselves they therefore MUST do everything for themselves. The result is an enormous workload of multitasking, and that becomes taxing on the player's mental headspace just in order to keep up with all of the different things that need to be paid attention to.
Keeping track of one or two things at a time ... is okay ... with one thing at a time being the most effective (re: Scrapperlock!).
Keeping track of three or more things at a time is just begging for stuff to get missed and breakdowns to begin occurring.
No wonder you resented the GW2 raiding experience as much as you did.
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That seems to be about the size if it Redlynne, yeah. I'm not sure I'd say I resented the raiding in GW2, but the game is deeply frustrating when you're thrust into a position where you can't rely on allies despite needing to have a decent party size. In fact, I've gone out of my way to structure several of my builds in the game to either completely ignore the need for managing my self defense, or for ignoring the enemy so I can focus on my teammates.
In one way, I think the workload structuring they set up is good, and in another way it's bad.
The good side of it is that the GW2 community is top notch. It's never been quite to the level CoH was at, but comes in close behind it. By letting everybody handle themselves, your forced reliance on other players is cut off; the vast majority of player friction in games like MMOs stem from people perceiving that others aren't doing their job; by taking away that expectation, you eliminate the frustrating elements, since everybody is built in such a way that they can easily and readily go "alright, I know what went wrong. I'll be better next time."
Conversely, in high-end combat scenarios, you're relying on people to keep themselves standing and damaging the target. when they fail to do so, it's very easy to blame people for failure - in many games, if the party wipes, it's either the tank's fault, or the Healer's, so if somebody starts calling out a specific player for their failure, it's easy for the group to spiral down into aggression for that individual. Even worse, the "I screwed up" deal is easy for people with self-esteem issues to latch onto; if they have low self-esteem, they'll be unhappy because they believe they're bringing the group down. Conversely, someone with high self-esteem is likely to either start laying into someone for their perceived failings, or get frustrated at themselves for being a failure. It can lead to some unhealthy mindsets.
Thankfully, raiding in GW2 isn't really required, but the fact of the matter is that the "handle everything" paradigmDoesn't work for high-end content, and that is content that a looooot of people enjoy, creating an issue in the playerbase. It's certainly an issue for me, and I don't think I'm ever going to try the GW2 raids again, in spite of getting a ton of enjoyment out of them in other games.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".