What does a "traditional" combat system mean to you?

If the new combat system is a failure (I really hope not!), they said they'd fall back on a more traditional model. But traditional is a loaded word and can mean many things to different people.

What does it mean to you? Pick a game that exemplifies this the most for you and let the next fun debate begin!

 

Honestly, based on what has been shown, traditional for me would be: anything where my skill or spell is not presented in a random hotkey location.

To answer your question sepcifically, smack;
Any, some, one, or all features of the following persistent multiplayer online game combat interfaces:

Meridian 59
Everquest
Everquest2
Dark Age of Camelot
Asheron's Call 2
Star Wars Galaxies
Dungeons & Dragons Online
Lord of the Rings Online
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
Warhammer Online
Alganon
Perfect World International
World of Warcraft
Allods Online
RIFT: Planes of Telara
Guild Wars 2

 

I'd love to see memorization style spell-slotting over mana-point system, but I think I'm in the minority with this one.

So, uh .. AD&D 2nd edition!

 

I have a very love / hate with GuildWars2, because it was so close to a brilliant game, but they botched the last 20%. I loved the active dodge and weapon swaps. The fixed skills with builds controlling passive / procs was perfect. My problem (as I’ve said before) was that the 2-5 skills felt like Whac-a-mole: the game degenerated to hitting whatever skill was off cooldown.

Neverwinter is my favorite game from a camera / targeting / controls point of view. But it also has the problem of basically being cooldown Whac-a-mole.

WoW is different from these games in several ways. There’s a very strong holy trinity mechanism so everything’s min/max. There’s a steep difference in power due to gear / level. Because of these, solo PvE is ridiculously easy and raid PvE can be tuned much, much harder. To keep dps classes from falling asleep they all have these pointlessly difficult mechanic / rotations.

RIFT is probably closest in model to SotA because it creates synergy between melee, range, caster, healer, buffer, within the same class. So I can go nuker mage with pets and buffs. Or melee cleric with a few nukes and heals. As has been mentioned, there’s so much diversity that it takes very sophisticated macros just to manage the skills.

I’ve played many other games, but these more or less contain the combat mechanics worth looking at.

 

Been playing Ultima Online for a very very long time. I have quit and played other games such as WoW, Aion, GW2. I always go back to UO because combat is so much better.

To be honest I'm looking for a game to replace it......I hope SotA will be the game, but the devs must get the combat system correct to attract the player base that are of the same mindset at me.

I love what has been produced in SotA so far (except the card idea), perfect game for me would be SotA as it is with the combat system lifted from UO with a few tweaks.

 

Tank Mage is the traditional combat system for me.

 

I'm sick of MMOs to the point of almost not playing them any more as the hold really nothing new. Same mechanics different game pretty much. Hot bars, cool downs, power up combos, same old trash over and over and over.

Bring us something new to play with.

 

So basically, anything but what they've proposed with a random skill UI. But you also list a lot of games, so is there one from that list that you could call out as being most like what you'd expect?

Any single game come to mind that's implemented that system well?

Any specific game that did that well?

Fair enough. But then what about single player / non-MMO RPGs? Surely there must be some game that you'd prefer as being most fitting for a "traditional" system that they could fall back on?

 

@smack

The overall system isn't the only factor. True, I don't want a point click mash game like Diablo, nor any standard hotbar cookie cutters. Certainly nothing like the new neverwinter mmo where you've got invisible NPCs collecting crap and crafting for you, god what a bad game that is.

It is all about mechanics. I would like to see a huge part of World of Tanks included in SotA for example. Let us take Armor to the next level. You have sized weapons, blades, arrow heads, weights, swing/traverse speeds, and compared to the Armor type, thickness, whatever it has a chance to penetrate, not to penetrate, bounce off, and that sort of thing.

Including mechanics like that is what would make this game interesting.

 

Skyrim or diablo 3 i guess. You need to pick a system where either you can tie all your abilities to buttons which you can then remember or where you can predictibly switch skills (not like the current system) rapidly so you know what skills your going to have and you can change to them in real time without having to look through a menu system

maybe torchlight

 

Out of the existing combat/magic systems I have played in games, the ones I like the most are:

Dark souls
Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall
Ultima Online (prior to the inclusion of artifact armor/weapons)

If I should pick just one, I think it would have to be Ultima Online from it's days of glory. I always loved the use of reagents, as I was familiar with from the single-player Ultima's. Having a specific language/mantra's for magic always fascinated me as well.

That and the freedom of the skill-based classless characters and no cooldowns... I never liked cooldowns, feels like such an artifical limitation. We had mana, reagents and casting time/skill execution time as the limiting factors and you had to use your skills wisely. Such as to not run out of mana at the wrong time, and rather get your opponent to either die or run out of their resources first, and then die. Hihi.

 

Ya know, I actually think I agree with Jack on this point (shudder). Letting us get into DEEP customization of weapons, armor, and fighting styles would make for an awesome game. If they gave us the ability to REALLY craft weapons, instead of just dropping three iron ingots into a mold, I could probably spend many happy hours adjusting my blade length, tooling the shape of the edge, adding and subtracting spikes, counterweights, hilt size...

As far as a game that I think would be TRADITIONAL, Rifts first official release, before they did that crap with the master skill at the top of each skill tree. Or WoW from around Burning Crusade/Wrath. Both had a very acceptable SYSTEM, the thing both messed up was progression/story/PvP.

I have little fear that LB will have trouble with Story, and as long as they avoid putting in the dreaded PvP stat, (which shouldn't be hard, since gear won't give such bonuses) I think that the people who made UO will be able to offer a good PvP experience.

That leaves progression. I think having an expansion come out that utterly outclasses every spell/item/strategy so far with new versions is a VERY bad business model. We've all seen it, nobody's fooled, it's a gag to get people to spend ANOTHER four billion dollars worldwide, and such expansions rarely if ever give thier money's worth. I don't want to find that when I return to an area I've already moved through, all the enemies and quests are pathetically underpowered to me. At the same time, progression cannot be static, ever. If I cannot become stronger, better, quicker, tougher, or in some other way better, why play? I specifically don't include wealthier on that list, because I can ALWAYS add five more coins to the pile. It won't CHANGE anything, but I can do it. So making me wealthier is only relevant if there's something that I haven't bought yet, and the point comes where all you can do is sell me a beach house and an S 63 AMG. Which is what Star Wars TOR is doing, another mount and pet with every expansion, but they don't DO anything any better, just let you expand your meaningless collection of frills.

 

If I had to pick one, I'd say Allods. It was the cleanest, fastest, lowest latency UI I've every used, and had a great customizable skill/spell advancement tree. Really liked that one.
The game itself was a disaster for political reasons, but the client, server and UI code was fantastic. However, I've also written quite a bit about a customizable skill system, so nothing used so far is going to make me completely happy.

Apparently, though, Asheron's Call has/had a "craftable spell system" but I've never seen it.

 

"Boring"

 

To me "Traditional" is a skill based system such as seen in Skyrim or any of the Elder Scrolls Games....similar to what we see in most Single Player CRPG's.

 

Traditional to me today, when they use the word, means they're thinking WoW. It's the industry standard, and the one that's 'safe'.

It's hard to get away from, if I have a skill, I want to be able to use it. With a long play game like this, you need variation through progression to mark off why you're better at what you do than you were before.

My traditional combat is Ultima III-V, X-Com, AD&D Gold Box series. Weapons give you variations in range speed and damage. Spells require components, prepration and planning. Position on the field can affect all of those things. And at any point the choice of what to do next is completely mine, and not some subset of my skills based on a random roll. I can make the adjustments to get where I want. The objectives are listed, and I just need to meet them to work with that.

Random takes that option away from me. It's uninteresting. It doesn't require me to do anything to get the skills to show up, or not show up. I have no control over that. I just push buttons as they pop up like a quick tiem event or Guitar Hero. Avatar Hero doesn't sound like something I'm interested in.

My wife is hoping for Dragon age to be the traditional. I think we can do better.

And that's my point on pushing back against the deck system. It's essentially traditional combat, but it filters the decision making process down to things without rhyme or reason.

 

what is dragon age like on PC? I play it on console and I like the system but I think it will be to slow for something like this. You can't pause the game like you can in dragon age because its not a single player only game (curse of everything having to be multiplayer now)

 

Short answer: Slick. join us in the MasterRace. I can't imagine playing it on the console.

As for pausing... there is a single player component to SotA. You don't need to play it online at all, and I would hope (read: expect) that the offline part would have a pause that would let you command your companions and then return to the game.

 

Ha Ha but that really didn't help me much. I wasn't asking because I want to buy it (I am quite happy with the PS3 version) I was asking because I'm interested in seeing how it would work here

PS3 version has 6 quick use items attached to the 3 triangle, circle and square buttons and the normal attack attached to the X. All the other skills you want you have to go into the circle menu and select them out of there

It works well for single player but for a multiplayer game where there is no pause? *shrug* doubt it will work as well

 

My preferred traditional combat system is a "twitched-based" intuitive system. You can jump into the game and just "get it." The combat is second nature. The Diablo's, the Elder Scrolls, Star Wars Galaxy and WoW come to mind. I'll even throw in Borderlands 2 even though it isn't a medieval fantasy game. People can play any of these games and immediately go out and have fun. The complexity shows itself down the road when you begin pushing your character and figuring out various skills and combinations.

I know the games that I mentioned may be looked down upon somewhat on this forum for various reasons. That's fine. But I would argue that most, if not every one of them, won a "game of the year" from somebody and were all huge financial sucesses. The combat systems within these games are "traditional" for a reason...they work.