The gameplay of a game is what I always find to be the lifeblood of the experience. Story and visuals always supplement an experience, but can't replace it for me - plenty of games do this, be they the Uncharted Series, Alan Wake, etc - but for myself, a game is foremost an interactive experience, and those interactions are what make or break that engagement.
I write this on the wake of the release of Guild Wars 2, and weeks before the free to play rendition of SWTOR enters the hard drives of thousands. From the oldest MMOs of the form of Everquest to the most popular in the form of WoW to the more recent forrays into MMO combat such as Tera, not a single one of these games have ever done the combat right, in that someone who is still a paying customer who doesn't get disengaged enough to stop playing outright is still playing and is simultaneously decrying the combat as subpar. I lack the patience to do the full expose on what this entails, but I will just suggest my interpretation of what I want an MMO combat system to be.
Start with a one dimensional axis of gameplay. On one side, you are fully mathematical and logical, a fully "mental" experience. Turn based games fall here, and if you are using a spreadsheet to play a game, you are very far into the territory of the brain teaser. Games such as Everquest or Dungeons and Dragons occupy this space very plainly, and appeal more to the laid back experience than the adrenaline pumping spur of the moment embodiment of the opposite end of the spectrum. We can categorize that by purely physical engagements, such as FPS games, especially a game like Counterstrike, where the instantaneous mandate of response means that any professional player must develop instinctual reactions in muscle memory to master the game. While they often still require knowledge of the game to be effective, they are not a mental challenge once learned, since the headshot is all that counts, and processing the location of an enemy as fast as possible to aim a pull the proverbial trigger is what counts most.
In the MMO space, both ends of this axis are still fully represented. Any online DND experience will predominantly fall into the mental challenge aspect, while a persistent FPS game like Team Fotress or CoD will fall at the other extreme. If you want to discount non-persistent worlds, there is a paradigm shift. One of the foundations of the traditional MMO model is a fantasy setting, and there are no real big name fantasy MMO persistent FPS games. On the scale of turn based to FPS, action games fall closer to FPS, and rpgs fall closer to turn based, so we can group WoW, SWTOR, etc under the RPG banner and Vindictus, Tera, etc under the Action banner.
Guild Wars 2 is an interesting case, because it combines aspects of both in many ways, but I will argue the combination does not make for a positive experience. It is still strictly hotkey based - if you are in range of an opponent and use a single target ability, it will hit them every time unless a probabalistic random roll says you don't. But you can still use abilities out of range, or without an enemy targeted - they still go on cooldown, they just don't do anything. The gameplay is centered around all the classes having different abilities per weapon, and those abilities having few interactions and a very distinct lack of choice in engagement - since every class is built around cooldown based weapons, they are mostly spam fests since any non-auto-attack ability that deals damage usually has some complement that makes it always worth using. The only thought process is the order to spam abilities in. Without a resource system or trade off of skills in actual enagements (you still pick your weapons and 5 class abilities in advance of combat) combat becomes dull.
It stays dull because you have no active physical enagement either - your dodge ability is prohibitively hard to use and cumbersome, and the combination of auto-aimed hotkey abilities with the traditional action dodge is obtuse because it isn't about getting out of the way, but about being "immune to everything" when an ability you don't want to hit you goes off. Strafing is only effective against targeted zone abilities that can come in the form of lines or circles, but those are often long cooldowns and each class only gets a few at most at a given time. Dodging area zone effects through positioning also isn't new - it is pervasive in everything from WoW to Vindictus. In that regard, it is a good implementation - situational awareness combined with knowledge of class abilities combined with the chess like aspect of recognizing cooldowns and ability combinations can make a more skilled player apparent in how they avoid zone attacks.
So that is a good thing. The problem is everything else I outlined, so now we can get to the meat of this discourse, is the perfect MMO combat system.
There are a few tenants to a good MMO - the sense of growing power, the sense of community, the sense of an engagement with something larger than yourself, and an engagement with a world with its own mysteries and pecularities, all while maintaining an enaging and fun gameplay experience. Every game I mentioned fails in one of these critical areas in some harsh way, yet they all rarely overlap. The consequence is that most modern MMOs are pushed as revolutionizing some aspect of the genre, but forsake the other key components of a successful persistent experience, and consequently fail. WoW succeeded when it did and became as popular as it did because it was the first game to get most of them right. Let us get into detail about what each of these aspects entails in another series of blogs.
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