Originally Posted by stormlord
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I LOVE your comments here because they highlight something that I've said before and has fallen on deaf ears.
The interplay between class design vs content design. I played a ranger a lot on live. One thing that bothered me is that content seemed to get increasingly stale over time. Rather than rooting or snaring or tracking or invising or kiting or doing some of the other things my ranger could do, I ended up being reduced to a simple dealer of DPS. Maybe this has to do with the fact that I leveled up. The early levels involve a lot of rooting/snaring/kiting/etc and those things make the gameplay more interesting, but as you get higher you start to group a lot and most of the gameplay for rangers is simply DPS-oriented and, of course, monsters would summon and become hard to tank. This was not a fault so much of the class as it was the fault of the content. The content was just not there. There were too many creatures that could summon, the fights/deaths were too quick, the creatures hit too hard, everything seemed more predictable, and so on.
I think the game would have been better if there was no summoning and players had more hp or the creatures didn't hit as hard. There should be zones that have more chaos so groups need more hybrids/utility and then some zones that're more predictable and you don't need hybrids/utility as much. But it just seems that with time everything was chiseled away until combat encounters were just hack/slash; heal/tank/dps.
It might be that the game just ran out of money and they were unable to make diverse gameplay. So this is what led to the simplistic triangle-based content; heal/tank/dps. Rather than rogues disabling traps and sneaking past monsters to loot chests, they just stood behind and stabbed in the back. There was very little thought into developing content for classes. All in all, it seems that the developers decided it was cheaper to produce content for heal/tank/dps than it was to produce content for all the different classes. What happened is they reduced all the archetypes to just these 3, mostly. In the process, a lot was lost.
You can reduce all the classes to simplistic archetypes, but that's a slippery slope. They do it to save money and if the players eat it up then they continue to make it. It shouldn't be acceptable.
Why shouldn't it be acceptable? Because rangers aren't DPS, they're MUCH more than that. They're explorers. They're hunters. As explorers, they can respond with more abundance to the unexpected. DPS is a far cry to the expanse of the wilderness and the dark hollows of caves. Put most men in those places and they're go mad. Rangers are at home. Rogues are more than DPS too. They disable traps, they sneak and hide, they poison weapons, they stab people in the dark, they lock pick treasure boxes, they emanate charm to their unwary victims, they're as much about stealing and tricking as they're about killing. A lot of this detail is lost when you simplify it to a cut and dry system. That's what happened to everquest content over time.
That's how it felt to me, wrong or right. My ranger felt gutted.
Basically, classes are stupidly boring when content is mostly made for just heal/tank/dps. You see, in a wizard's case, it's not just the dps, it's the BURST-dps. The simplistic content wasn't prepared.
I remember reading something similar about Morrowind, an old Elder Scrolls SRPG. It had something to do with classes wanting unique content but it not being there or something. I can't recall the details. I know a lot of games are guilty of relying too much on heal/tank/dps. There needs to be content that's more diverse. A way to solve it with just casters or just melee or just hybrids or something similar. For example, a man of the sword will slay his enemy to get his jewels, whereas, a rogue will sneak into his home and steal his jewels without touching him. A wise man might simply con him into giving away his jewels without a fight. A criminal man might extort him. There needs to be more paths that lead to success, not just one or two or three.
I think camping also partly ruined it. Players would settle into a single camp and stay there for days and weeks, grinding it to dust. Everything was a science. Rogues didn't need to lock-pick. Rangers didn't need to track. Chanters didn't need to mez. Druids didn't need to succor. Nobody needed to root. Etc. Players themselves, with the support of developers, paved the road to a game that became much more boring.
I think they should have put locked treasure boxes in the dungeons for player and trapped some of them. In all my time in EQ, I only ever saw rogues lock pick in LDON, if ever. I think maybe once. Then there was ONE other time that I shrouded to a goblin rogue so I could unlock a door in a kunark zone. There was no excuse for that. It was plain laziness. It also seemed that there were not enough dungeons and zones with 3d twists and turns. It just seemed to be one flat area with simplistic pathing and etc. Very boring.
Modern MMORPGs, like WoW or EQ2 or DDO (somewhat modern) or etc, they've improved somewhat on some of this. In fact, I've been very impressed at times. Too bad EQ only ever got a passing glance at it. But I'll admit that the maps and radars and (!!) icons and cartoony gfx and too much hand-holding does not appeal to me nearly as much as the other things they've done. In that sense, I still like classic EQ.
Sorry that I wrote so much. A big wall of text can easily ruin what's at the heart of a message. I'll lose a lot of people. Maybe I even lost a bit of myself in all that sh**. But I know that there's something to it. I didn't make this post mindlessly. These issues have crossed my mind for years and years. It's hard to pack all of that into a single post without error and with absolute completeness. Actually, it's impossible.
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06-27-2012, 01:40 PM
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