“I’m not writing anything, but I do it well”

A couple of days ago an article describing Vanguard’s combat mechanics was linked on FoH’s boards. You could go read it like I did but you can also spare your time: it says nothing. (btw, after the restyle Silky Venom is probably the best looking and well designed fansite I’ve seen)

I think this is a perfect example demonstrating how some words put together can fool everyone without actually saying anything. In particular on the catass guild forums, the players are easily fooled by some vapor instead of actual solid ideas. That’s the power of the hype, everything is blurred and you can define what is still isn’t the way you like. Instead of looking at the actual game you are just looking at your dreams about it. And the dreams are usually prettier than what you’ll get through the compromises of the reality. This is why I think that the most important conclusion about that article and the following reactions is that the players really want to “believe”. Like Fox Mulder. They really want to be confident and anticipate a game that will be great. What is sure is that the audience is there and that the expectations are high.

But here I’m too jaded to get fooled by some steam. I like the hype but I need something solid to support it or you won’t convince me. That article in particular is rather silly. It says nothing at all. It actually delves in the mechanics and explains them in detail, but you could take the article and replace “Vanguard” with “WoW” or “DAoC” and it would be still correct. The purpose would be to describe how great is Vanguard’s gameplay compared to other games but the result, if you look through the mist, is that it describes everything BUT what sets Vanguard apart. Well, beside the fancy figures.

General Statement: If EQ’s gameplay is considered a leisurely stroll, and WoW’s is a healthy jog, Vanguard’s gameplay feels like ice skating. It is smooth.

If you give the article a quick glance you’ll notice it starts from the “autoattack”. You would expect him to claim that Vanguard has no autoattack, in particular considering how it starts: “Prior games used autoattack.” Prior games. That means that Vanguard is obviously different. Haha, you fool. Vanguard’s autoattack not only is there, but it is also EXACTLY IDENTIC to the one in every other game. You know, weapons have a swing speed and, if you don’t press any special style, the character will keep swinging the weapon at that speed. Truly revolutionary compared to prior games. Indeed. Probably the most interesting point here is that the swing speed can be as slow as six seconds. A particularly dull wack-a-mole. But let’s glide on this for now.

The second paragraph is about “Special Attacks”, because it’s obvious, the game isn’t just about a slow or fast autoattack, sometimes you can also press some buttons for a special action. Even here you’ll try to figure out what’s different in Vanguard. In this case the claim is about having in the game not only offensive styles that increase the damage or apply effects, but also defensive styles that will require the player to pay attention (oh noes!). Well, I don’t know if this can be considered as a different trait. My warrior on WoW seems to have quite a few defensive styles. I can switch to defensive stance, the Demoralizing shout is a defensive debuff, then I have Disarm, Shield Block, Shield Bash to break spells, the Sunder Armor can also be considered a defensive style, the Thunder Clap slows down attacks, the Intimidating Shout makes multiple mobs flee and I finally also have the Shield Wall for the special occasions. I guess that’s already a fair range of defensive tools available at the right time. Or not?

But the real distinctive trait isn’t that one. It’s the fact that these special attacks… have cooldowns. Oh nice. Now if only I could remember one game where the styles DO NOT HAVE the cooldowns, it could be a nice argument. But I cannot. DAoC’s skills have cooldowns, EverQuest’s skills have cooldowns and the same for WoW. In fact all these games are designed around the good timing of these skills and in fact they all, even if in different proportions, require some strategy and timing to play your class effectively. That’s what really set the difference between a poor game and a good one. The balance with which these skills are planned, the variety of the tools you can use, the synergy with the other classes, the complexity of the multiple encounters. That’s what matters, because at the origin ALL these games reply the exact same mechanics: there are autoattacks, there are specials, some specials are defensive and they all have cooldowns. There’s really *nothing* different at this level to distinguish one from the other.

Late edit: There’s an ideal link here to something Darniaq wrote recently:

If someone stopped looking at the systems once they noted the similarities, they may not truly be able to assess the success and relevance of one over the other, nor understand where future success could be had.

/end of the late edit

On the forums someone was arguing about these points:

Imagine that in Vanguard every creature in the game has the ability to do a deathtouch, but it is easy to counter. There is nothing like that in WoW and so I don’t see how you can possibly think that reacting to something after it has happened is the “exact same thing functionally” as mitigating it with abilities.

So WoW doesn’t have that?

Just the first examples I could think:
In Zul’Gurub there’s one of the mobs who has a powerful life leech that splits and links multiple targets. If you don’t Shield Bash or stun the attack as it starts, you wipe.
In Gnomeragon there are those alarm things. If you aren’t fast to kill them, they call for some elite mobs than can easily wipe the group if you are already fighting (and if you were in beta you’ll remember how hard it was to spot them since they had no sound). This is something slightly different but that still follows the same pattern.

And there are plenty of examples like this one. If you see your target with the sparkles on the hands, you know that it is going to cast a spell. And you can stop it before it happens. All the crowd control skills are again examples of “mitigating skills”. They let you control and solve a situation. They are tools that require a proper and competent use if you want to go through some of the harder instances where you have to deal with multiple mobs. And even WoW is nowhere “new” compared to other games, it just relies more on those tools and developed more patterns to figure out and solve. The original design is basically unaffected. The difference is simply about how much a system uses these tools.

A sharp armchair designer out there may say “oh great, so we will just be spamming defensive specials,” but that is not the case either…because of special ability cool-downs and the timing of autoattack, if you simply spam your defensive specials, you will not have them available for use when “the big one” occurs, because you may have “wasted” it on a lesser attack used to fake out the warrior.

And how’s this different? These games not only have the same cooldowns used by Vanguard on these specials, but they also rely on endurance or “rage”. If you waste what you have without some planning, you won’t be able to use the most useful skills when they are most needed (and I really do know this since I’m lazy and tend to reuse over and over those few skills that I can easily reach with my fingers and as soon they light up, even when I should plan my attacks more carefully).

Finally we arrive at the last paragraph, where there’s a description of something that could possibly define a difference in Vanguard. Or not. Basically Vanguard will have pop-up icons that will let you anticipate what type of attack the mob will use in the “next turn”. This means that you’ll be able to plan your tactics and the use of those specials described above considering the attacks that will come in the next turn and reacting to them in the best way possible. This is how Brad justified the slow pace of the combat since, otherwise, you just wouldn’t have enough time to see these icons and plan your reaction before the turn is over. And this is also why you’ll have to “pay attention”.

Which brings to my conclusion. All this makes sense. I’m not saying that Vanguard’s mechanics, as described, are particularly flawed (but I’ll delve even about this point below). But for sure they don’t add anything new. At all. See, these combat mechanics, in every game, work on abstractions. This is also why in Vanguard you are able to anticipate the target’s next attack, it’s an abstraction. This is why we see levels, hitpoints, statistics, icons and so on. Reacting to an icon becoming active (WoW) or reacting to an icon popping up (Vanguard) is essentially the same thing. From the player’s perspective there’s absolutely no difference. Already in WoW I cannot watch the action to figure out if my target dodges so that I can use the “Overpower”. The action on screen can be too confused and the only thing I really do is watch the icon lighting up and press it before I miss the opportunity. We play the quickbars. Still today what is going on in the graphical window is almost irrelevant. Our eyes are still locked on the quickbar and the health bars. That’s your game. It’s true that we react to what happens, but to what happens on the quickbar. The gameplay is all in the UI, this is why they are so important to make a game fun and successful. The graphical window is almost an optional, you need it to deal with the aggro and keep your character facing the target, but then you play the quickbar.

If we consider Vanguard, the underlying mechanics remain unaffected. Instead of looking at an icon lighting up as a “reaction” to an event like in WoW, you’ll see an icon popping up to which you have to react. How’s this different for the player? In one case he racts to an icon that becomes active, in the other he reacts to an icon popping up. These systems work on abstractions and these abstractions are modeling the exact same thing. Preemptive attacks or reactives are like two different skins for the same model. They don’t define a different approach, they just give a different superficial shape to the same mechanic. They are UI themselves.

What would actually matters is what in that article isn’t written: whether Vanguard relies more on these reactives or not. Because from the functional point of view those systems are IDENTIC.

The only difference is that WoW models and mixes different patterns instead of hardcoding and repeating just one. It models reactives as well as some preemptive skills and spells. Using them when they make more sense. It makes sense to see the sparkles of a spell and stop it before it is casted, and it makes sense to react to a dodge or a block after it was executed. The only thing I can see is that Vanguard’s combat is even more abstract and unrealistic. It’s more heavy on the UI to the point that we are really playing just an expensive MUD. If you can see what a mob will do BEFORE it does it, the graphical representation of the action truly becomes completely irrelevant. Why would you look at the models when the icons already describe and foretell whatever is going to happen? And I wouldn’t be surprised if Vangaurd UI will take much more space on screen compared to other games. Some players described this perfectly, it’s a direct copy of EQ2 crafting system. One of the most abstract and absurd ever created.

I already wrote at length (some ideas also here) how these games should move toward *removing* the UI as much as possible and try to simulate a realistic experience where you react to a more direct feedback instead of just to a quickbar, an health bar or a text string in a chat window. That’s what sets a graphical game apart from a MUD. That’s where its specific and untapped qualities are. That’s what would be an actual evolution. Instead Vanguard moves to rely even more heavily on the UI to the point that what happens on the screen isn’t anymore relevant. The combat mechanics become so abstract and detached that they live on their own isolated level. They are emancipated from the rest and they require a type of knowledge that is nowhere immediate and direct. Which probably fits with the “hardcore” target audience of the game but that goes right against the intuitive, accessible and smooth mechanics that made WoW successful.

I won’t argue about the goals of a mmorpg. But I still believe that the success of these fantasy worlds is more cultural than functional. It’s about their myths and what they evocate. It’s about the immersion into a believable and self-consistent world. It’s in everything BUT the overcomplicated and abstract rulesets that eradicate that immersion to show you that the game is just about math formulas, numbers and preplanned algorithms. We like what we see on the curtain, not what’s behind.

This is my opinion. These tools that Brad is developing are still abstract and a lot will depend on the final implementation. But they are more dangerous than appropriate.

Can’t you see that these games are much more than formal systems?