GW2 and SW:TOR at the forefront of MMORPG?

[Guided Daggers]

Best post ever. Just to actually prove Alaris is right, here's a list of some of the mechanics listed in that post and just one game that uses it that is not an MMO:

• Downed mode: Borderlands
• Dodging: Star Wars: Battlefront
• Absence of Trinity: Torchlight (or pretty much every soloable RPG)
• No sub: No need to list a game here, pretty much every non-MMO game has no subscription fee
• Conquest: Battlefield
• Map travel: The Elder Scrolls
• Aiming special abilities: Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth

[Skyy High]

Rasp is in head-stuck-up-arse mode; there's little else that can be said here. I could go through and list all the bosses in the various Zelda games that managed to feel "epic" while being completely (or even just effectively) stationary, and I doubt it'd matter much, because this is the kind of absurd reductionism we're dealing with:

Imagine you're playing a modern-setting FPS. You're in a room and a tank drives straight through the wall and aims its gun at you. Then it does nothing whatsoever for two minutes, after which it fires its gun once every 50 seconds without re-aiming or anything remotely similar. You'd be like, what the **** am I playing?

This is BS, and anyone interested rational discussion would realize that the reason this fight would be boring is because the tank isn't doing anything, NOT because it's stationary. Stationary tank shooting swarms of missiles and lasers at you that you have to constantly dodge while finding its weak spots? That's Star Fox 64. I seem to recall loving the hell out of those boss fights.

If that Shatterer seems boring to you now, that's because his rate of attack is pretty slow, he's not exceptionally deadly when he hits, and he doesn't have a huge variety of attacks (in particular, he should have one huge HOLY S*** attack that the players need to interrupt). None of these require the Shatterer to be moving in order to be corrected. Hell, two of them just require number tweaks. Notice how the Tequatl fight is pretty interesting by comparison, because we see a LOT more player interaction with the boss (the boss isn't just a damage sponge, he throws up protective walls that the players need to take down to use the heavy siege weapons) and there is in general more to think about during that fight.

Notice also how failure states in GW2's world bosses are persistent, thereby removing the need to "trap" the player into the boss fight to make it "scary". Such "trapping" is done in other games either by letting the boss move, or by actually trapping the player in a room that they can't escape until the boss is defeated (or both). In GW2, if the players fail to kill the big dragon, the entire zone is going to get invaded; you can't just run away and be "safe", you're still a part of the event and you'll still suffer the consequences if you lose. Further, how would that even work? If 1 person out of 100 ran away, is the Shatterer supposed to chase down that one player and ignore the remaining 99?

Oh, and is it even worth mentioning that Glint was only scary because she could one-shot most players, and required special planning to defeat? There certainly wasn't much movement on her part in that battle...hell, you could be completely safe from her if you stuck to the walls.

Shall we go back to what started this mess?

For most of the battle he stands still, take hits, and occasionally breathes some purple flames. Apart from his size, he is less scary than GW1's Glint! He should be killing PCs like flies, but he doesn't.

And subsequently:

He did all that, and yet for the most of the battle he was standing still. Fighting a retard isn't epic no matter how flashy that retard looks.

The first comment was pretty solidly on the money: the Shatterer fight, as we've seen it in the demo, wasn't particularly scary, mostly because it seemed pretty darn hard to fail. There are a number of explanations for why this was the case, mostly revolving around the fact that it'd be pretty stupid for ANet to throw a bunch of newbies into a mid-level encounter against an elite boss that easily wipes the floor with them. All of this trouble stems from the subsequent post, where rasp declared that all of our explanations were pointless, because the Shatterer was motionless, and therefore "retarded". The implication here is that it is impossible to make a fight "epic" if you're fighting a motionless boss, and all other factors are completely irrelevant. All that needs to be done to disprove this, logically, is to provide a single example of an epic boss fight against a motionless boss. I'm positive that every single person reading this can think of instances of epic bosses they've fought where the boss was motionless.

And yet, rasp has failed to recant this fallacious statement. Therefore, I can only conclude that logic has ceased to play a part in this argument, which brings me back to my opening sentence.

[Giggles]

I don't mind fighting stationary bad guys. The thing that I'm a little concerned about is that all four bosses they've shown so far are all sit there in one place. The two started bosses for the Charr and humans, the shatterer, and taquatal (too lazy to look up the spelling). Are they all going to be like this?

[Alaris]

Chuck Norris is stationary. Yet you cannot escape his fist.

[Ringsgold]

We should compare MMOs to the singleplayer/multiplayer world, if only to show the glaring flaws that could so easily be fixed if only we had something to compare to. If our only reference is WoW and its clone army, then we set ourselves to repeating the mistakes of our history.

No, please not the singleplayer world. We need to keep quicktime events and cutscenes as far away from MMO's as possible.

[Alaris]

Well, clearly SWTOR disagrees about the cutscenes and quicktime... but yeah I agree, they shouldn't take stuff just because, but when it makes sense.

There's a lot of good stuff in single-player games that can be imported into MMOs that would make the MMOs a lot better. Refusing to even make a comparison means that you are not even looking for ideas for what could be beneficial to your game.

[RD]

Guild Wars had cutscenes...

[djacob]

I don't mind fighting stationary bad guys. The thing that I'm a little concerned about is that all four bosses they've shown so far are all sit there in one place. The two started bosses for the Charr and humans, the shatterer, and taquatal (too lazy to look up the spelling). Are they all going to be like this?

I believe they've stated that the lack of movement is partly due to the game not supporting large amounts of movement for such large models. So the bosses that are as large or larger than the shatterer and tequatl will all be fairly stationary, I'm hoping there will be quite a few smaller bosses who do move around though.

Also, I'm not sure if this limitation is in instanced areas as well as persistent. I do think the bosses in dungeons will move around more, but I'm not as sure about the ones in the personal stories.

[Ringsgold]

Guild Wars had cutscenes...

And, luckily, a skip button.

But yeah, a comparison is alright, as long as they don't become as bad as most singleplayer games these days.

[CHIPS]

GW1 and SWToR have one complete different system, not every caster relies on energy.
the bounty hunter for instance has heat, you can fend heat but i still is some kind of limit.
i agree that "some" skills have a really long recharge time but it's the same thing within GW1, compare breath of fire with ravage and you have the exact same recharge time, ravage on the other hand does not have any charge time where breath of fire has a 2 seconds charge time.

i don't know if you have played SWToR at all but if you do, you should know there is more then just senselessly spam skills in this game.
you really need tactics, if you don't even try to use tactics you're toast.


vergil can jump from one enemy to the other, kill entire groups within seconds and even use his released demon form to crush every enemy in one hit.
if i would see an enemy with such power i would report that as being overkill, it's way to overpowered even if you take GW2 in the picture.
i could understand if you said GW2-like bosses but DMC is a whole different level of action, you can't even begin to use that a an example without getting the full load against you.

To put it into prospective, with 100+ players involved, anyone that is dead can be quickly resurrected. Let's say Vergil can indeed kill players pretty fast, that gets evens out due to the amount of players involved in these world events.

Not to mention that in the GW universe, Vergil can't exactly go berserk all the time. There are many ways to counter him. Empathy, weakness, blindness just to name a few. Vergil would be balanced to the game.

I guess the point I want to bring out is game player experience. Vergil's way of fighting makes the fight much more epic than the Grey Alien. He teleports everywhere, so the players always have to be their toes and be ready to dodge. That Grey Alien on the other hand doesn't move much. So let's say you are a mage. You can just spam Fireball at that Grey Alien 24/7 and know that you will never die.

If you spam Fireball at Vergil, firstly they will not always hit. Secondly Vergil can be right next to you in split seconds, and if you don't dodge in time you are dead. This makes the fight much more intense.

Vergil is, in a way, exactly what Shiro should have been. Now Shiro fights against only 8 players, so Shiro cannot be that strong. However in GW2, with 100+ players involved, someone as strong and fast as Vergil can be added.