Thought I'd knock up a simple MMO based around PvP and a low end level caps, so you spend more time playing the content and less time grinding.
Attributes:
Health: if it runs out ... you die
Stamina: The power type you use to pay for physical skills
Chakra: The power type for magical spells
Armour: Lowers physical damage taken
Muscle: Increases physical damage and increases amount Blocked or Parried
Reflexes: Increases Dodge, Parry and Block Chances
Mind: Increases spell damage and Spell Critical chance
Vigour: Stamina and health regen
Soul: Chakra regen and spell armour
Accuracy: Increases chance to hit and physically critical chance
Factions:
Mountain Tribes:
- Mountain life has resulted in a more stoic breed of people:
+10% Health, Muscle, Armour
+15% vigour, Stamina
- However it takes it's toll on their ability to think and act:
-15% Chakra, Soul, Mind
-10% Reflexes
Nomads:
- Living in the wildlands and Deserts has resulted in better hunting prowess:
+10% Reflexes, Accuracy, Vigour
+5% Mind, Soul, Chakra
- Always moving around has resulted in a certain amount of attrition though:
-10% Muscle, Stamina, Health
-15% armour
Evenheart Republic:
- Trading in a multiple village republic has granted a shared knowledge and training techniques:
+10% Mind, Soul, Chakra
+10% Muscle, Armour
- All the easy living though has weakened their bodies:
-15% health, Stamina, Vigour
Darkland Bandits:
- Living in the wilderness and forests has given them an edge in combat:
+ 10% Reflexes, Accuracy, Vigour, Stamina
+ 10% Soul, Mind
- Having to always be aware and move fast has taken its toll on these men and women:
- 10% mind, muscle, health, armour
Classes / Equipment:
Light weapon
Medium weapon
Heavy weapon
Melee:
One Handed
N/A
Two handed
Ranged:
Fast firing, low damage, long range
moderate fire rate, damage, range
Slow fire rate, heavy damage, moderate range
Armour:
Class: Mitigation: Speed Penality:
Light 3% None
Medium 5% 1%
Heavy 10% 3%
Heroic Upgrades are titles granted to a player within their faction once they meet the level and pvp score requirements then complete a series of challenges. The bonus grants them attribute boosts and unique powers in combat which can boost themselves and allies.
Mountain Tribes:
Weapons: Medium bows,Heavy spears, Light axes, staves
Armour types: Light / Medium, Light / Medium Shields
- Huntsman: Bows / spears, light armour. Can tame beasts and deals moderate damage.
- Brave: Axe / Spear, Medium armour / Shield. High health, single target tanks / dps.
- Shaman: Staves, Axe / Light Shield / Armour, Frost damage, Nature healing.
- Berserker: Dual axes, light armour. Damage goes up as health goes down (percentage), hits multiple targets.
Heroic Upgrade: War Chieftain
Nomads:
Weapons: Short bows, Light / Heavy Spears, Staves, Dagger
Armour: Light / Medium, Light / Medium Shields
- Tracker: Bow, Dual Daggers, light armour. Can camoflague, lay traps and use poison arrows
- Spearman: Spear, medium armour. High health, multiple target light tank / dps
- Witchdoctor: Staves, Dagger / Light shield, Light armour. Heal over times and damage over times. Can inflict sleep and paralysis.
- Guard: light spear, medium armour / shield. Single target tank, high health.
Heroic upgrade: Battle Master
Evenheart Republic:
Weapons: Light / Heavy swords, Medium Bows, Staves, light maces.
Armour: Light, Medium, heavy / Shields
- Knight: Swords, Heavy shield / armour. Tank and heavy melee support. Inspires others.
- Scholar: Staves, Light armour. Fire / Water magic damage / buff.
- Medic: Light sword / Stave / Mace, Light armour / shield. Direct healing and buff support.
- Ranger: Bows, medium armour, light swords. moderate melee / ranged damage.
Heoric Upgrade: General
Darkland bandits:
Weapons: Light swords, maces, daggers, bows
Armour, Light / Medium, Light shields
- Watchman: sword, mace, medium armour, light shield. Agile single target tanks who fight dirty
- Scout: Bow, sword, dagger, light armour. Poison and traps to avoid head on conflict.
- Warlock: Dagger, light armour. Dark magic damage, rituals to deal huge aoe damage.
- Apothecary: Mace, Dagger, Light armour / shield. Heals allies, poisons enemies.
Heroic Upgrade: Outlaw Commander
Friday, 26 June 2009
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Character Classes and why they FAIL
In recent months I've been doing alot of thinking about MMO's Im sad to admit that they are basically little more than a standard recipe for the same cupcake with a different icing on top. Sure some have those little wings stuck into the icing but when they go that far to make it look pretty it's just cover up the bland flavour.
I'll admit that games like Guildwars and Warcraft have made pretty good use of character classes, Warcraft for its raiding and PvP and Guildwars for it's widescale PvP, GvG and other initials fighting more initials.
The problem we're faced with now isn't so much new character classes as much as it is new idea's behind them. Download any F2P MMO and I promise you, you will find:
Warrior - Generic heavy armour character that can use either 2 handed weapons, dual wield 1 hand weapons or equip shields to soak up damane as a tank. Boasts high health and armour etc etc.
Healer - Be it the cleric from Fiesta or Perfect world, the priest from Shaiya or the oh so aptly named 'Healer' from Scions of fate. I think you will find the same basic mechanics - weapons consist of staves, wands or maces they can sometimes use shields in the offhand (clerics are more likely to do this as they are just light armoured healing focused paladins) and they wear cloth armour. They can buff and provide healing sometimes as direct spells other times they are Heal over time buffs or effects which tirgger when being hit or a certain other effect occurs.
Scout - The term scout isn't really a singular class but more a vague name given to the collectives of agile physical damage dealers. Rogues, assassins, thieves, archers etc. Most games will feature some degree of agility based damage which relies on other high damage to survive due to low armour or using ranged attacks (optional pet).
Mages - These can be anything that does magical damage which isn't supported by physical damage (ie paladins / shaman from warcraft), so we're looking at things like Wizards, magi, mages, etc etc. they will use some type of element to damage enemies, cause debuffs or damage over time and so on, usually relying on tanks to save them. They typically use staves and light armour to lower their survival in melee as they will be able to spit out insane damage.
So those four are what you will find in your typical MMO, there will be variants naturally but I can safely list at least 10 MMO's which have used this system and that wouldn't even been touching the surface let alone scratching it.
* * * * * * * *
Multiclassing isn't new either, Guildwars did it like 5 years ago and more recently Runes of magic used it, naturally Frogster online gaming the guys who made runes of magic weren't happy enough to have simply ripped off warcraft's UI wholesale and most of it's class dynamic's but it felt compelled to also rip off Guildwars dual class system.... and failed miserably at it.
I will say that giving the players the ability to switch to rage when your mana is down while in combat is useful and applyable in most scenario's but the fact that most of the classes use mana kind of just results in you eating your mana at double the speed.
Multiclassing if done well can make the game abit more fluid, allowing you to use a heavy armour class such as a warrior to soak up damage while having a priest as a second class giving you healing..... Oh wait that's been done, it's called a paladin!!!!!
Multiclassing in Guildwars does work very well and I should hope so because it is the pinnacle of the game, without, it it would just be another generic mmo formulae with more loading time than trying to stream youtube video's in a house full of porn addicts.
* * * * * * * *
Another issue I have with Freeware, STOP MAKING RACES BOUND TO CLASSES. 2 examples of what I mean is Shaiya and Perfect world. THey give you four races and each race counts as two classes, meaning you HAVE to play a human if you want a priest or in Perfect worlds case an elf cleric. NO, I cry, I WILL NOT be subject to your nazi ways!
This is even more restrictive than being forced to play a single character class, while guildwars says you can only play humans despite them including another four races as NPC's since the relentless spam of Expanions they still gave us 6 character classes we could chop and change to begin with (at time of writing it is now 8). in all honesty I don't see the bloody point in doing this, it just lowers the games quality, one of the major selling points of MMO's these days is they're free world enough to let you do what you want, features that sell usually include dynamic crafting systems, player housing / bases and flexible classes. By telling us we can only be a priest if we play as a human is kind of a slap in the face and by restricting eight classes over four races YES SHAIYA I AM STILL AIMING AT YOU, all you really do is restrict player versus player to guild or factional battles.
* * * * * * * *
In conclusion onje of the best games which ever existed was the original Star Wars Galaxies and I bring this up now as one of Star Wars Fanboys. I love star wars universe (no jokes please) so I am slightly biast but not so much as to say the modern game is good..... It's not... The NGE ruined it but that's not on topic.
SWG in it's golden day boasted the most open and free of game environments, there were no set classes, as you gained experince you scored skill points which allowed you to modify your character and no I don't mean you choose a class at lvl10 like Flyff and so many other games Fiesta is one. Instead you got to build the class you wanted from things like medics, soldiers and bounty hunters.
Another thing SOE got perfectly right was hero classes or more to the point the Jedi. Personally I think blizzard could learn from SoE when it comes to hero classes as Death Knights in warcraft are about as heroic as punching someone in the back in a dark alley while surronded by your friends who have guns trained on the victim. There's nothing remotely heroic about death knights aside from the fact they're given an easy ride starting at lvl55 doing 2 quests to get a 100% ground mount and then spend the rest of their time trying to convince raid guilds they're useful.
Jedi were not unlocked by simply getting a character to lvl55 and then pretending your awesome. First off you had to unlock your jedi power by clicking on a skill which was randomly chosen when you spawned. It could be ANY skill in the tree's. once you found it you began converting your skill points into force sensitive skill points which cost more skill points but gave bigger bonuses. In total it took about 3 months to go from basic player to Jedi and it was a very difficult chain to do and even when you were done if you tok your lightsaber out in public you had enough bounty hunters chasing you to make Bin Laden look ignored and neglected.
* * * * * * * *
In the passing hope that Bioware, the magnificent glowing beasts that they are, read this I pray to you, DON'T use a class system in Knights of the old republic online PLEASE!!!
Open characters than you can evolve how you want is awesome, not having to choose a faction to start with but later on siding with dark or light side (SWG) as you play is also amazing!
In all honesty to ANY developer who reads this, Either start using open class development or start making new classes. These days I'll play an mmo for on average of about an hour after downloading it before getting bored and uninstalling it. Yes ok your pvp miggt be different or your characters look different but I still have to enjoy the class to actually want to pvp on it.
I'll admit that games like Guildwars and Warcraft have made pretty good use of character classes, Warcraft for its raiding and PvP and Guildwars for it's widescale PvP, GvG and other initials fighting more initials.
The problem we're faced with now isn't so much new character classes as much as it is new idea's behind them. Download any F2P MMO and I promise you, you will find:
Warrior - Generic heavy armour character that can use either 2 handed weapons, dual wield 1 hand weapons or equip shields to soak up damane as a tank. Boasts high health and armour etc etc.
Healer - Be it the cleric from Fiesta or Perfect world, the priest from Shaiya or the oh so aptly named 'Healer' from Scions of fate. I think you will find the same basic mechanics - weapons consist of staves, wands or maces they can sometimes use shields in the offhand (clerics are more likely to do this as they are just light armoured healing focused paladins) and they wear cloth armour. They can buff and provide healing sometimes as direct spells other times they are Heal over time buffs or effects which tirgger when being hit or a certain other effect occurs.
Scout - The term scout isn't really a singular class but more a vague name given to the collectives of agile physical damage dealers. Rogues, assassins, thieves, archers etc. Most games will feature some degree of agility based damage which relies on other high damage to survive due to low armour or using ranged attacks (optional pet).
Mages - These can be anything that does magical damage which isn't supported by physical damage (ie paladins / shaman from warcraft), so we're looking at things like Wizards, magi, mages, etc etc. they will use some type of element to damage enemies, cause debuffs or damage over time and so on, usually relying on tanks to save them. They typically use staves and light armour to lower their survival in melee as they will be able to spit out insane damage.
So those four are what you will find in your typical MMO, there will be variants naturally but I can safely list at least 10 MMO's which have used this system and that wouldn't even been touching the surface let alone scratching it.
* * * * * * * *
Multiclassing isn't new either, Guildwars did it like 5 years ago and more recently Runes of magic used it, naturally Frogster online gaming the guys who made runes of magic weren't happy enough to have simply ripped off warcraft's UI wholesale and most of it's class dynamic's but it felt compelled to also rip off Guildwars dual class system.... and failed miserably at it.
I will say that giving the players the ability to switch to rage when your mana is down while in combat is useful and applyable in most scenario's but the fact that most of the classes use mana kind of just results in you eating your mana at double the speed.
Multiclassing if done well can make the game abit more fluid, allowing you to use a heavy armour class such as a warrior to soak up damage while having a priest as a second class giving you healing..... Oh wait that's been done, it's called a paladin!!!!!
Multiclassing in Guildwars does work very well and I should hope so because it is the pinnacle of the game, without, it it would just be another generic mmo formulae with more loading time than trying to stream youtube video's in a house full of porn addicts.
* * * * * * * *
Another issue I have with Freeware, STOP MAKING RACES BOUND TO CLASSES. 2 examples of what I mean is Shaiya and Perfect world. THey give you four races and each race counts as two classes, meaning you HAVE to play a human if you want a priest or in Perfect worlds case an elf cleric. NO, I cry, I WILL NOT be subject to your nazi ways!
This is even more restrictive than being forced to play a single character class, while guildwars says you can only play humans despite them including another four races as NPC's since the relentless spam of Expanions they still gave us 6 character classes we could chop and change to begin with (at time of writing it is now 8). in all honesty I don't see the bloody point in doing this, it just lowers the games quality, one of the major selling points of MMO's these days is they're free world enough to let you do what you want, features that sell usually include dynamic crafting systems, player housing / bases and flexible classes. By telling us we can only be a priest if we play as a human is kind of a slap in the face and by restricting eight classes over four races YES SHAIYA I AM STILL AIMING AT YOU, all you really do is restrict player versus player to guild or factional battles.
* * * * * * * *
In conclusion onje of the best games which ever existed was the original Star Wars Galaxies and I bring this up now as one of Star Wars Fanboys. I love star wars universe (no jokes please) so I am slightly biast but not so much as to say the modern game is good..... It's not... The NGE ruined it but that's not on topic.
SWG in it's golden day boasted the most open and free of game environments, there were no set classes, as you gained experince you scored skill points which allowed you to modify your character and no I don't mean you choose a class at lvl10 like Flyff and so many other games Fiesta is one. Instead you got to build the class you wanted from things like medics, soldiers and bounty hunters.
Another thing SOE got perfectly right was hero classes or more to the point the Jedi. Personally I think blizzard could learn from SoE when it comes to hero classes as Death Knights in warcraft are about as heroic as punching someone in the back in a dark alley while surronded by your friends who have guns trained on the victim. There's nothing remotely heroic about death knights aside from the fact they're given an easy ride starting at lvl55 doing 2 quests to get a 100% ground mount and then spend the rest of their time trying to convince raid guilds they're useful.
Jedi were not unlocked by simply getting a character to lvl55 and then pretending your awesome. First off you had to unlock your jedi power by clicking on a skill which was randomly chosen when you spawned. It could be ANY skill in the tree's. once you found it you began converting your skill points into force sensitive skill points which cost more skill points but gave bigger bonuses. In total it took about 3 months to go from basic player to Jedi and it was a very difficult chain to do and even when you were done if you tok your lightsaber out in public you had enough bounty hunters chasing you to make Bin Laden look ignored and neglected.
* * * * * * * *
In the passing hope that Bioware, the magnificent glowing beasts that they are, read this I pray to you, DON'T use a class system in Knights of the old republic online PLEASE!!!
Open characters than you can evolve how you want is awesome, not having to choose a faction to start with but later on siding with dark or light side (SWG) as you play is also amazing!
In all honesty to ANY developer who reads this, Either start using open class development or start making new classes. These days I'll play an mmo for on average of about an hour after downloading it before getting bored and uninstalling it. Yes ok your pvp miggt be different or your characters look different but I still have to enjoy the class to actually want to pvp on it.
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Allow me to Introduce Myself
Hi there and welcome to my blog,
I'm a long time gamer aged 21 and I've played enough MMO's now in the last 3 years to know that originality has become an endangered resource. So out of disgust at the industry and out of my own creationalism I decided to share my own thoughts on these games. Alot of these games around now have good idea's but sadly integral parts of them let the main host down, as a result a perfectly good game can be massacred and it's sad because alot of them have so much potential.
Just so you don't think I played Runescape and decided I am now qualified to discuss the matter here is a list of the games I have played enough to learn the subject matter:
1. Guildwars - my 1st mmo and the game which got me hooked on the genré (all 4 games)
2. World of Warcraft - the 2nd mmo and the one I played for 3yrs on and off and the mmo which killed the genré for me, (quit at the end of TBC and start of Wotlk)
3. Silkroad
4. 9 Dragons
5. Florensia
6. Runescape
7. Legend of Ares
8. Perfect world
9. Twelve Sky
10. Neosteam
11. Tales of Pirates
12. Gunz
13. Warrock
14. Asda Story
15. Maple story
16. Entropia
17. Knight Online
18. Water Majin
19. Anarchy Online
20. Dark Age of Camelot
21. Eve
22. City of heroes / villains
23. Dungeons and Dragons online
24. Final Fantasy 11 (the nightmares still haunt me...)
25. Lord of the Rings online
26. Rising Force
27. Archlord
28. Risk your life 2
29. Star Wars Galaxies
30. Rappelz
31. Cabal online
32. Last Chaos
33. Metin 2
34. World of Kung Fu
35. Rohan online (nothing to do with Lotr)
36. Shaiya
37. Voyage Centuary
38. Fiesta
39. 2 moons
40. BOTS
41. Conquer
42. Dekaron
43. Hero online
44. Infinity
45. Cronous
46. Flyff
47. Rakion
48. Requiem
49. Trickster
50. KAL online
51. Mu
52. Martial heroes
53. Red Stone
54. Talisman
55. Tantra
56. Wolf Team
57. Holic
58. Myth War
59. Exteel
60. Corum
There's more but I think thats a healthy start ^^.
Anyway I'll be posting up my idea's on this blog so keep an eye out.
Storm
I'm a long time gamer aged 21 and I've played enough MMO's now in the last 3 years to know that originality has become an endangered resource. So out of disgust at the industry and out of my own creationalism I decided to share my own thoughts on these games. Alot of these games around now have good idea's but sadly integral parts of them let the main host down, as a result a perfectly good game can be massacred and it's sad because alot of them have so much potential.
Just so you don't think I played Runescape and decided I am now qualified to discuss the matter here is a list of the games I have played enough to learn the subject matter:
1. Guildwars - my 1st mmo and the game which got me hooked on the genré (all 4 games)
2. World of Warcraft - the 2nd mmo and the one I played for 3yrs on and off and the mmo which killed the genré for me, (quit at the end of TBC and start of Wotlk)
3. Silkroad
4. 9 Dragons
5. Florensia
6. Runescape
7. Legend of Ares
8. Perfect world
9. Twelve Sky
10. Neosteam
11. Tales of Pirates
12. Gunz
13. Warrock
14. Asda Story
15. Maple story
16. Entropia
17. Knight Online
18. Water Majin
19. Anarchy Online
20. Dark Age of Camelot
21. Eve
22. City of heroes / villains
23. Dungeons and Dragons online
24. Final Fantasy 11 (the nightmares still haunt me...)
25. Lord of the Rings online
26. Rising Force
27. Archlord
28. Risk your life 2
29. Star Wars Galaxies
30. Rappelz
31. Cabal online
32. Last Chaos
33. Metin 2
34. World of Kung Fu
35. Rohan online (nothing to do with Lotr)
36. Shaiya
37. Voyage Centuary
38. Fiesta
39. 2 moons
40. BOTS
41. Conquer
42. Dekaron
43. Hero online
44. Infinity
45. Cronous
46. Flyff
47. Rakion
48. Requiem
49. Trickster
50. KAL online
51. Mu
52. Martial heroes
53. Red Stone
54. Talisman
55. Tantra
56. Wolf Team
57. Holic
58. Myth War
59. Exteel
60. Corum
There's more but I think thats a healthy start ^^.
Anyway I'll be posting up my idea's on this blog so keep an eye out.
Storm
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