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aumentouSo, I started playing an MMO. No, not WoW. This has left me with
So for those who don't know (and if you don't, why did you click that link?), aggro is a targetting mechanic within the AI of monsters. Various actions increase or decrease the amount of it a monster feels towards you, and it will attack you if it's in combat and it has more aggro towards you than towards anyone else. Attacking a monster will cause aggro, but healing the monsters target will ALSO cause aggro, and the game I'm playing is balanced so that if you don't do something special the monsters will go for the healers after a brief engagement with the front line.
Tactics for dealing with monsters therefore involve the manipulation of their aggro, and indeed there are class-related mechanics specifically allowing said manipulation. There are five class "branches" in this game, and one of them (the Defender branch) is deliberately designed and has skills aimed at drawing aggro to it (and also the best armour and hit points), while every class I've tried within the the other four seems to have at least the option to decrease aggro somehow.
All of which makes the paty-based combat paradigm pretty simple. You need at least
one character assigned to a defender class, who we refer to as the tank. The tank draws aggro with their array of aggro-drawing powers, and then gets pounded on thereby keeping everyone else alive. You then need a healer to keep the tank alive. After that, everyone else is just there to do damage, though for larger parties it's advisable to take a backup healer (who can have better attack powers than the primary, since they might actually do some attacking), and maybe even a backup tank (who might start a fight with an aggressive weapon setup and ten switch to a shield if the primary tank falls over).
All of which is fine, in some ways. It makes for a reasonably entertaining game that I enjoy playing, even if I do seem to end up being the healer a lot.
However, conceptually it does also annoy the shit out of me. We have a targeting algorithm for enemy AI that is (or was once, maybe?) designed to mimic sensible tactics (hit the thing that is hitting you. Hit the healer if there is one.), and is now just there for us to play against. It's actually making the monsters weaker than they would be with a simpler targeting algorithm (like, hit the thing with the least hit points), and much much weaker than they would be if they were human-controlled. What's more, we deal with the mechanics of it on an explicit level, which means the standard game tactics are not about tactics - they're about manipulating the AI through the mechanic that is handed to us on a plate. In my mind the AI setup and game mechanics ought to be such that tactics which beat the AI are the same tactics which work against human-controlled opponents.
Which for me raises the questions, "why is it like this?" and "what's the alternative?".
It's like this because there aren't any movement restrictions or penalties based on the proximity of enemies. In real life people form lines with their heavy troops and those lines stop you from moving through them or too close to them. Even if there's a gap large enough to pass through you generally don't because moving through that space will probably get you stabbed. In game you can't construct a defensive line and keep your squishy support characters at the back because there is absolutely nothing to stop the enemy running straight through said line. Characters can pass remarkably close to each other, so blocking the path simply doesn't work, and moving within strike distance of the enemy doesn't carry any sort of penalty at all - there are no attacks of opportunity or anything like that.
I can see clearly why there aren't, too. The idea trying to make a real-time game with ZoC mechanics makes me twitch at the complexity, and I don't know how popular it would be either - especially when the target audience for MMORPGs are all used to running around pretty much where they like. ZoC mechanics also implies facing mechanics (as stepping forwards into a ZoC shouldn't invite penalty, but stepping backward into one... ouch), which means that every potential target on screen needs a quatri-parted ZoC ring around them. It also probably implies an auto-targetting system based on ZoC. And that's just off the top of my head. It's going to get complicated, fast.
It would also mean bigger parties, and that's a problem too. The game I'm playing has so far had three player and five player dungeons. The three player setup is one tank, one healer, one other. That simply isn't going to work if you get rid of aggro - the monsters will run past your tank and start hitting your squishies. It's hard enough to get five players together to do something, so if you have to get ten together AND they have to use sensible tactics whilst trying to co-ordinate via a chat system it's likely to be frustratingly hard for them. Either that or all the quests have to take place in really cramped quarters so that small groups can block areas off easily.
There is another approach that holds some appeal for me. A game called Tinywarz demonstrated to me a method by which a turn-based game can run online - you have a limited time period to issue orders, and at the end of the time step the units all act as ordered. Turn-based makes thing much easier - you can have a square or hex map, ZoCs can be marked, and the tutorial can explain it all. As a bonus, any ZoC system can have different weapon reaches which is a sweet little thing that is so often ignored in games.
Give each player a three or four character party and let them manage that in a turn-based environment and that should be workable as an MMO game while simultaneously giving enough separate pieces for small groups of players to still have options and control terrain. Of course, it wouldn't be an MMORPG as we're used to... it would be an entirely different thing, an MMOTBSG (turn-based skirmish game). But it might well be good.
So for those who don't know (and if you don't, why did you click that link?), aggro is a targetting mechanic within the AI of monsters. Various actions increase or decrease the amount of it a monster feels towards you, and it will attack you if it's in combat and it has more aggro towards you than towards anyone else. Attacking a monster will cause aggro, but healing the monsters target will ALSO cause aggro, and the game I'm playing is balanced so that if you don't do something special the monsters will go for the healers after a brief engagement with the front line.
Tactics for dealing with monsters therefore involve the manipulation of their aggro, and indeed there are class-related mechanics specifically allowing said manipulation. There are five class "branches" in this game, and one of them (the Defender branch) is deliberately designed and has skills aimed at drawing aggro to it (and also the best armour and hit points), while every class I've tried within the the other four seems to have at least the option to decrease aggro somehow.
All of which makes the paty-based combat paradigm pretty simple. You need at least
one character assigned to a defender class, who we refer to as the tank. The tank draws aggro with their array of aggro-drawing powers, and then gets pounded on thereby keeping everyone else alive. You then need a healer to keep the tank alive. After that, everyone else is just there to do damage, though for larger parties it's advisable to take a backup healer (who can have better attack powers than the primary, since they might actually do some attacking), and maybe even a backup tank (who might start a fight with an aggressive weapon setup and ten switch to a shield if the primary tank falls over).
All of which is fine, in some ways. It makes for a reasonably entertaining game that I enjoy playing, even if I do seem to end up being the healer a lot.
However, conceptually it does also annoy the shit out of me. We have a targeting algorithm for enemy AI that is (or was once, maybe?) designed to mimic sensible tactics (hit the thing that is hitting you. Hit the healer if there is one.), and is now just there for us to play against. It's actually making the monsters weaker than they would be with a simpler targeting algorithm (like, hit the thing with the least hit points), and much much weaker than they would be if they were human-controlled. What's more, we deal with the mechanics of it on an explicit level, which means the standard game tactics are not about tactics - they're about manipulating the AI through the mechanic that is handed to us on a plate. In my mind the AI setup and game mechanics ought to be such that tactics which beat the AI are the same tactics which work against human-controlled opponents.
Which for me raises the questions, "why is it like this?" and "what's the alternative?".
It's like this because there aren't any movement restrictions or penalties based on the proximity of enemies. In real life people form lines with their heavy troops and those lines stop you from moving through them or too close to them. Even if there's a gap large enough to pass through you generally don't because moving through that space will probably get you stabbed. In game you can't construct a defensive line and keep your squishy support characters at the back because there is absolutely nothing to stop the enemy running straight through said line. Characters can pass remarkably close to each other, so blocking the path simply doesn't work, and moving within strike distance of the enemy doesn't carry any sort of penalty at all - there are no attacks of opportunity or anything like that.
I can see clearly why there aren't, too. The idea trying to make a real-time game with ZoC mechanics makes me twitch at the complexity, and I don't know how popular it would be either - especially when the target audience for MMORPGs are all used to running around pretty much where they like. ZoC mechanics also implies facing mechanics (as stepping forwards into a ZoC shouldn't invite penalty, but stepping backward into one... ouch), which means that every potential target on screen needs a quatri-parted ZoC ring around them. It also probably implies an auto-targetting system based on ZoC. And that's just off the top of my head. It's going to get complicated, fast.
It would also mean bigger parties, and that's a problem too. The game I'm playing has so far had three player and five player dungeons. The three player setup is one tank, one healer, one other. That simply isn't going to work if you get rid of aggro - the monsters will run past your tank and start hitting your squishies. It's hard enough to get five players together to do something, so if you have to get ten together AND they have to use sensible tactics whilst trying to co-ordinate via a chat system it's likely to be frustratingly hard for them. Either that or all the quests have to take place in really cramped quarters so that small groups can block areas off easily.
There is another approach that holds some appeal for me. A game called Tinywarz demonstrated to me a method by which a turn-based game can run online - you have a limited time period to issue orders, and at the end of the time step the units all act as ordered. Turn-based makes thing much easier - you can have a square or hex map, ZoCs can be marked, and the tutorial can explain it all. As a bonus, any ZoC system can have different weapon reaches which is a sweet little thing that is so often ignored in games.
Give each player a three or four character party and let them manage that in a turn-based environment and that should be workable as an MMO game while simultaneously giving enough separate pieces for small groups of players to still have options and control terrain. Of course, it wouldn't be an MMORPG as we're used to... it would be an entirely different thing, an MMOTBSG (turn-based skirmish game). But it might well be good.
