Face it. You've always just been the humble Footman from WC1. Just with a shitload of upgrades.
Guild Wars 2 had big server vs server pvp but it turns out more than 15 or so people on screen turns into a clusterfuck where there's no real strategy or skill involved except spamming your biggest aoe move.
That's because most of their devs probably spent their days in Warsong Gulch bunny hopping and stunning. And to be fair, I played a fair amount of Alterac Valley where I saw real strategy and tactics at play, and it wasn't just a constant scrum.
I mean, I really do miss the time before WoW set everyone's expectations about what an MMO should be. Yeah it's the smoothest and most user friendly MMO ever made. But it also mastered the grind and drip feeding rewards to people until it all blurred into a background hum of the reward centers of your brain functioning under moderate load constantly. It's why I am still drawn to raiding, because it breaks out of that shit and asks you to use your brain and your skills in a different way, to put in real work and attention for your actually notable and memorable reward.
I'm going to sound like a masochist here but....the endless days of "grinding" in older MMOs may have sucked when you think about all the time you spent doing the same goddamn thing for chump change and experience. But when you got something, it really felt like it mattered. That new weapon, that new piece of gear, you knew every nook and cranny and stat for it. That rare drop. That rare monster spawn. That group that actually went the distance because it was both geared and competent. A lot of that was a product of those games not being user friendly. Not being streamlined. Not putting reward over challenge. I mean, before WoW, I was happy to LOSE EXPERIENCE and risk my entire character and everything I'd played for, just for a chance to see somewhere I'd never see on my own. Now? I can't even stomach losing that stuff, I can't make myself play games where all my time can just go up in smoke like that. But I'll never been as thrilled, terrified or as true a believer in a game world as when it was asking me to risk everything in the name of adventure. Maybe that's a level of gaming and obsession that's a little too intense. But WoW made everything so safe and bland and predictable and easy that it never, ever felt like a living world to me. The scariest prospect in WoW was aggroing some shit during a raid and embarrassing yourself.
Hence why I tend to be a bit disappointed when an MMO goes "Everyone is DPS! Everyone!! This is the Future!"
Yeah. When I started playing roleplaying games and always choosing rogue, it was to be a dagger wielding badass. But it was always more about being invisible and undetectable. That's what I figured my job was in Everquest, was to scout around, go places other people couldn't, drag their bodies out so they could recover their shit and oh, backstab.
Then Rogue essentially turned into Ninja and I got to be one of the privileged few who had one very simple, self-involved job. Wizards had all sorts of other shit to do besides DPS and usually were the first to die when anything went wrong. Rogues? We were the ones that got to hide and save our asses, and crack-wise over the corpses of less savvy individuals. I always like saluting the rogues that survived a wipe while were were stealthing around. Until Blizzard started making it a point to have raid bosses and mobs see invis/remember their aggro so you had to wipe out along everyone else, so the fight reset cleanly.
And now, yeah. Everyone thinks the Trinity is bad to greater or lesser extents and everyone is DPS. Maybe they self heal, maybe their heals do damage. And the Trinity does kind of suck because it's hard to make a good solo game as well as MP game that relies on it. But it enforces teamwork and coordination and specialization, which I like a hell of a lot more than everyone being interchangably generic. I'm playing The Division right now with my roommate (which is basically an MMO-lite console game at its heart) and even IT has the Trinity.....but in a very generic "pick whatever skills you want and swap them around, I dunno, whatever, go fuck yourself" sort of way.
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Topic: MMORPGs? (Read 8833 times)