(04-01-2014, 12:44 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: Such a game would simply be tuned so that you take considerably less damage from enemies. I've played many tabletop and computer RPGs where healing takes too long to be used during combat, so you're stuck with the HP you have while fighting.Or they just make it less forgiving. Â Or make your armor durability into a sort of HP. Â What I'm saying is that we've gotten a bit too used to games that coddle us and give us ways out. Â I'm saying you could make a game where you fight a dragon and you would have to go into it knowing that a mistake doesn't get fixed, it can only be overcome, and your mistakes are limited.
It's not really any different, you just get hit for far less. If they took healing during combat away with the current enemy DPS, it would not work out.
It's all relative. If you're not noticing your HP dropping, either you're only playing easy content or you've got some really good healers.
I think a "healer" is sort of a facet of game design that's been with us without question for so long, especially in fantasy games. Â It's not strictly necessary, though. Â It could be that you only have a limited amount of health and take injuries as in real life, so you need to know how to avoid attacks and manage your own health.
It isn't in the current crop of MMOs not because of viability, but because of creativity. Â The answer game developers come to in the race to erase the class system is to simply homogenize the classes, I.E. make everyone their own healer and tank, not to simply reorganize the structure of the gameplay to make class a non-issue. Â One game that comes to mind, oddly, is Bushido Blade, a PSOne fighting game developed by Light Weight (and ironically published by Squaresoft). Â Unlike all other fighting games, there was no life bar and no health pool. Â They structured the game so that any single hit to a vital area of your body would kill you, and any strike to another part of your body would be debilitating. Â You certainly paid a LOT more attention to what was going on, and the UI was totally clean.
It was ingenious. Â Nobody would have thought to make a fighting game without the traditional health bar and light-medium-heavy attack at that point, but I'd say that Bushido Blade was my favorite fighting game of all time. Â Not only was it idiosyncratic, but it was genuinely more thrilling. Â Most of all, it was intuitive; it wasn't just a fighting game with no HP, it was a completely different animal.
MMO developers, I daresay even modern developers in general, just don't develop that way anymore. Â Originality, today, is to set the same FPS game they released last year in the wild west instead of World War 2 Belgium. Â The problem with MMO design is that everyone's gotten stuck in a rut and essentially tried solving some of the player disaffection with band-aid solutions, e.g. giving us FATE-style quests to keep us from falling into the paragraph-chapter style of leveling or giving us a more "active" style of combat by removing cooldowns or the auto-attack.
As much as I've complained about EVE, it is, to its credit, something different. Â I'm not sure it's necessarily better and certainly not carried to its full potential, but it is structurally and organically different from the rest of the MMO market. Â And it isn't like other companies aren't capable of making something structurally different from the ground up; lots of the old companies that made genre-bending and idiosyncratic games are still around even if the new batch wasn't able to come up with something.
It's just disappointing seeing the new crop and knowing I'll still be playing World of Warcraft when its next expansion comes out. Â I sometimes wonder if I play it not because it's, in and of itself, a great game, but because of all the games trying to do what it does, it is simply the best, and everyone shouldering in to try to take their market share is doing so by adding and subtracting from what WoW did well (though not first, even it wasn't the original).
I guess it's just being in a design profession myself. Â Game design is very similar to architectural design, they just seem to have become somewhat complacent, even with the almost unlimited resources that modern technology gives them. Â Or maybe their failings are like ours, and pedestrian video game design is like pedestrian architecture, generally dictated and organized by business minds that don't understand how design actually works, just what they saw in their hometown.
Reminds me of a project we were working on where a Christian television station in Atlanta asked us to design a new studio in the southern antebellum style from an abandoned grocery store. Â They even gave us a picture of EXACTLY what they wanted it to look like. Â It's the ugliest thing I've ever put together in Revit, and largely because people who don't have any idea how a building will actually work or look in real life are dictating architectural decisions.
Who knows. Â I know CAPCOM hasn't exactly benefited from its horrible business analysts and administration, despite still having a game design studio that can intermittently churn out an amazing game.
