I'm still waiting on more info on how combat will actually work. Think about it EQ had abilities then they had a spell ready bar, so what's to say that the spells won't be completely separate from the 8 abilities and usable outside of what classes you pick.
It's not the sort of thing you can quantify in my opinion. There is no hard data or scientific reasoning why x number of buttons are needed.
I've played fun MMOs that had only 2 or 3 buttons. And I've played MMOs, like LOTRO, that have dozens of skills, but only require you to use half a dozen or so per encounter. The hotbars become mainly convenient access points for lesser used abilities.
It's the MMOs that have dozens of skills that are ALL required where it gets kinda lame.
I'm fine with 8 ability buttons, which is not the same as 8 abilities. There's so much more you can do with 8 buttons, skill sequences, combos, charge skills, adapting skills based on target condition ... Having one keybind for one ability that does exactly one thing is what makes the traditional style so boring long term.
It depends on the combat system, and what it does and what it let you do.
At all, i want a flexible action combat system like it is provided by AoC, SWTOR, TERA.
You have a whole set of skills you can choose from for every situation a specific tactic.
Such systems have a high learning curve when it comes to your own skill, how you can manage the skills, that is why i call these systems skillbased action combat systems.
4-8 button fights get boring fast to me, TSW was such a game, GW2 as well.
In such systems you press the same buttons over and over and there is little room to change the way you press your buttons.
The skill comes from the theoretical research and how you progress and develop your own system, but it relays often on %-chances to trigger this and that, so you never know about when exacly what happend.
Then there is autocombat systems, like WoW, AO, Lotro where you just select your target and give a "fight" command.
Positioning doesnt matter, targeting is not needed at all and there is anyways a whole theatre of defensive, offensive and supportive skills to choose from.
A "good" MMORPG is, when YOU control your charakter and not some system - my opinion.
So the question, how many buttons a good MMORPG needs, depends on what combat system it has and what it lets you do in the world.
Enough that its impractical to port it to a playstation 4 so we won't have to worry about the game being dumbed down in any way for those using inferior hardware.
Lots of folks think that the 8 button system will be too limiting.
So how many buttons do you need?
If they said 10 would that be all right?
How about 12?
20?
How many buttons make something complex for you?
Do you believe the number of buttons is the mark of engaging combat?
Does'nt matter to me as long as they are not show on the monitor UI or i have the option to hide them then again... now that i think about it..'
30 buttons on my keyboard excluding WASD
ofc they wouldnt be just for attack skills and other useless stuff they could be used how the player sees fit
*edit and when the player hits a specific button the whole skill array can be switched to "array 2" and player could bind different skill arrays to his weapons so that when the player switches from sword to a long bow the skill array is changed automaticaly.
Old schoolers will prefer more than console button numbers, as their mindsets are still in the tactical, rotation-based, cooldown-centric combat.
Really, it depends on the combat design. For action combat, I don't mind 8...just make sure that there's permutations to it. Skill 2 should execute differently if it was pulled first, second, third, and so on. I enjoyed Darksiders and DMC combat far beyond any current MMO combat, so why not carry it over?
nah personally i want a moderate to high amount of skills and spells. complexity is king and it keeps you, well myself anyway, interested for a much longer time
I think 8 is just fine, as long as they are not static. I love GW2 but hate the fact all skills are attached to weapons, if they made it or EQN like the original GW with deck like skills I'd be all over that.
There is no set number and anyone specifying one simply doesn't know what they are talking about. The number is attributed to what you can do with those skills and how they interact with one another (or don't at all). The arbitrary number 8 could be perfectly fine for EQNext, but it will depend on what those 8 skills bring to the table. I for one do not like games with 20+ buttons because those sort of games often have poor abilities to go along with them such as a buff that last 10 seconds and can be recasted every minute or two buffs that does very similar things, but with slightly different stats or worse two skills that do almost the exact thing damage, but has a different name and animation or has slightly different cooldowns vs damage that ultimately does not affect the overall outcome.
If a game is done right with buttons/skills an 8 button limitation could be just as fun as one with 12 or 20.
A true mmorpg should have buttons and menus taking up 75-80% of the screen and have a spread sheet open in another window. Players should have to write macros and be able to walk away from the PC while it plays the game for them. Then we should be able to talk about how we have "skill". That's the ideal mmorpg.
"As far as the forum code of conduct, I would think it's a bit outdated and in need of a refre *CLOSED*"
There is no set number and anyone specifying one simply doesn't know what they are talking about. The number is attributed to what you can do with those skills and how they interact with one another (or don't at all). The arbitrary number 8 could be perfectly fine for EQNext, but it will depend on what those 8 skills bring to the table. I for one do not like games with 20+ buttons because those sort of games often have poor abilities to go along with them such as a buff that last 10 seconds and can be recasted every minute or two buffs that does very similar things, but with slightly different stats or worse two skills that do almost the exact thing damage, but has a different name and animation or has slightly different cooldowns vs damage that ultimately does not affect the overall outcome.
If a game is done right with buttons/skills an 8 button limitation could be just as fun as one with 12 or 20.
My opinion is that non-casters/melee can get away with 8 choices in combat, but casters need to be more flexible and have more choices, between buffs, debuffs, cc, damage, defense, etc. 8 doesn't really give enough options. Add in 4 tied to weapons (which i don't like for casters) and you are left with 4 spells-too limiting for casters. And as for being too many buttons on screen, traditionally most casters don't need to move as much and stay back casting so can put a little more effort into navigating spell options.
What if you had only one button, but it was the ultimate button?
The staples EASY button!
I thought that's what the "E" in EQN stood for.
The joke isn't lost on me - but just out of curiosity:
How do you know how 'easy' it's going to be?
- Do you know the death penalty yet?
- Do you know how difficult mobs will be? I mean it could be D3 on Inferno for all we know?
-Do you know how difficult it will be to acquire all the skills you can?
-Do you know how careful you'll have to be when completing quests that you won't cut off your avenues to progression? (say for example, you piss off Innoruuk and now the shadow knight class is a lot more difficult to obtain - they allude to these types of decisions in the reveal.)
-Do you know how much skill it will take to set up your hot bar with the right abilities for the right situations?
-Do you know how important positioning, movement and crowd control (stacking mobs, aggro control, single pulling mobs) will be in winning a battle?
Just sayin.....there is still a lot of unknown info about this game which will determine its ultimate difficulty;
My guess is that they are in fact aiming at a more casual playstyle - but I also have a feeling it will be more difficult than WoW or EQ2 but less difficult than EVE or EQ. But it is solely a guess at this point - still too much unknown for me to make any solid judgement.
What if you had only one button, but it was the ultimate button?
The staples EASY button!
I thought that's what the "E" in EQN stood for.
The joke isn't lost on me - but just out of curiosity:
How do you know how 'easy' it's going to be?
- Do you know the death penalty yet?
- Do you know how difficult mobs will be? I mean it could be D3 on Inferno for all we know?
-Do you know how difficult it will be to acquire all the skills you can?
-Do you know how careful you'll have to be when completing quests that you won't cut off your avenues to progression? (say for example, you piss off Innoruuk and now the shadow knight class is a lot more difficult to obtain - they allude to these types of decisions in the reveal.)
-Do you know how much skill it will take to set up your hot bar with the right abilities for the right situations?
-Do you know how important positioning, movement and crowd control (stacking mobs, aggro control, single pulling mobs) will be in winning a battle?
Just sayin.....there is still a lot of unknown info about this game which will determine its ultimate difficulty;
My guess is that they are in fact aiming at a more casual playstyle - but I also have a feeling it will be more difficult than WoW or EQ2 but less difficult than EVE or EQ. But it is solely a guess at this point - still too much unknown for me to make any solid judgement.
Nobody knows anything, but I don't anticipate this game to be difficult. It could be, but the style looks like they are going after a wider demographic. They have already said they don't want to take from their existing EQ pool whic would be for the harder game player. At the same time, I also know it wont be a face roll either. There are going to be things that will be almost impossible to do/get that they'll make more convenient from the Cash Shop.
But overall, I'm calling it like I currently see it. The little info we have indicates this game is going to follow current trends. As more info filters in, my assessment can change. But for now, 1st impression is EZ-Mode.
Lots of folks think that the 8 button system will be too limiting.
So how many buttons do you need?
If they said 10 would that be all right?
How about 12?
20?
How many buttons make something complex for you?
Do you believe the number of buttons is the mark of engaging combat?
At least for 10 years i do not like to play button mashers. And having ONLY 8 buttons is to close to this criteria. When I have read for the first time about this silly limit, I already know EQN is definitively not game for me. For exactly the same reason have left TSW, otherwise i guess would be still playing it.
This is how a GW2 fight goes and I imagine its will be damn close to EQ:N *these are the key binds for offensive abilities/skills, doesnt even matter what class or weapon you have, they all end up playing the same*.
1,2,3,4,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,3,1,1,1,2,1,1,1,4,1,1,1,3,1,1,1,2....just cycle and wait for the cooldowns.
Do you think that will keep people interested in combat for more than three or four months before it becomes monotonous?
I came here just to see a post like this.
Anyone that actually played GW2 knows that most of the time you want to use the #1 button since it is generally the best damage skill in most weapons.
Most of the time you are just moving around while attacking, trying to make the melee swings of the enemy miss, side stepping to avoid projectiles, moving out of aoe, position yourself near combo fields so you can trigger them or receive their bonuses, dodging.
Sure, in a big dynamic even with hundreds of players, sure, you might just stand there and burn your cooldowns while praying no AoE comes your direction, but go into a dungeon or fractal and burn your skill as they become ready instead of moving around and you will die quick.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
And as a GW1 player i could say that 8 skills, when you can choose those 8 skills from a few dozends skills, is more than enough for a very deep tactical game.
In conclusion.. it is not that important how many abilities you have at any given time(5 skills could be enough), but more important from how many skills you can choose to prepare for a combat. And with that said.. i really can't judge EQN combat with the amount of information available at this point and time.
PS: And you can ask almost any GW1 player, and he will answer you that GW1 was a lot more tactical, a lot more diverse, and a lot more role based in comparsion to GW2, although you could only use 8 skills at any time in GW1 in comparsion to GW2, where you got usually anything between 10-22 abilities. And yes.. almost any GW1 player will tell you that the combat system of GW1 was superior to GW2.
So.. maybe.. all players having concerns about the combat system of EQN should play a little bit GW1 or DoTA2 to experience that a limited amount of skills at any given time is not that much of a problem.. much more concerning is the overall amount of available skills.
What most GW1 players will tell you is that most skills are outdated and useless.
"There is a massive number of skills that aren't worth using. That said, there isn't anything wrong with Cleave, it just doesn't match up with today's standard (it does deserve to be reverted to it's previous damage though). It also suffers from the fact it doesn't offer any unique functionalities that provide further awesomeness (like DSlash and 100B for example)."
Many players like woodenpotatoes will tell you GW2 combat is better than GW1 combat or even a hardcore GvG player like Ensign will tell you GW2 is a much better PvE game than GW1.
In fact GW2 problem is that goes around damage and invincibility (dodges/bubbles/blocks) that has not much counters to it.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Comments
It's not the sort of thing you can quantify in my opinion. There is no hard data or scientific reasoning why x number of buttons are needed.
I've played fun MMOs that had only 2 or 3 buttons. And I've played MMOs, like LOTRO, that have dozens of skills, but only require you to use half a dozen or so per encounter. The hotbars become mainly convenient access points for lesser used abilities.
It's the MMOs that have dozens of skills that are ALL required where it gets kinda lame.
The only true requirement is one mouse driven cursor. After that anything else is gravy.
I doubt, you can say that in general.
It depends on the combat system, and what it does and what it let you do.
At all, i want a flexible action combat system like it is provided by AoC, SWTOR, TERA.
You have a whole set of skills you can choose from for every situation a specific tactic.
Such systems have a high learning curve when it comes to your own skill, how you can manage the skills, that is why i call these systems skillbased action combat systems.
4-8 button fights get boring fast to me, TSW was such a game, GW2 as well.
In such systems you press the same buttons over and over and there is little room to change the way you press your buttons.
The skill comes from the theoretical research and how you progress and develop your own system, but it relays often on %-chances to trigger this and that, so you never know about when exacly what happend.
Then there is autocombat systems, like WoW, AO, Lotro where you just select your target and give a "fight" command.
Positioning doesnt matter, targeting is not needed at all and there is anyways a whole theatre of defensive, offensive and supportive skills to choose from.
A "good" MMORPG is, when YOU control your charakter and not some system - my opinion.
So the question, how many buttons a good MMORPG needs, depends on what combat system it has and what it lets you do in the world.
How many buttons does it take to make a good mmo?
Enough that its impractical to port it to a playstation 4 so we won't have to worry about the game being dumbed down in any way for those using inferior hardware.
Does'nt matter to me as long as they are not show on the monitor UI or i have the option to hide them then again... now that i think about it..'
30 buttons on my keyboard excluding WASD
ofc they wouldnt be just for attack skills and other useless stuff they could be used how the player sees fit
*edit and when the player hits a specific button the whole skill array can be switched to "array 2" and player could bind different skill arrays to his weapons so that when the player switches from sword to a long bow the skill array is changed automaticaly.
Action combat for LIFE
Old schoolers will prefer more than console button numbers, as their mindsets are still in the tactical, rotation-based, cooldown-centric combat.
Really, it depends on the combat design. For action combat, I don't mind 8...just make sure that there's permutations to it. Skill 2 should execute differently if it was pulled first, second, third, and so on. I enjoyed Darksiders and DMC combat far beyond any current MMO combat, so why not carry it over?
one more button than this game will have.
nah personally i want a moderate to high amount of skills and spells. complexity is king and it keeps you, well myself anyway, interested for a much longer time
What if you had only one button, but it was the ultimate button?
The staples EASY button!
I thought that's what the "E" in EQN stood for.
There is no set number and anyone specifying one simply doesn't know what they are talking about. The number is attributed to what you can do with those skills and how they interact with one another (or don't at all). The arbitrary number 8 could be perfectly fine for EQNext, but it will depend on what those 8 skills bring to the table. I for one do not like games with 20+ buttons because those sort of games often have poor abilities to go along with them such as a buff that last 10 seconds and can be recasted every minute or two buffs that does very similar things, but with slightly different stats or worse two skills that do almost the exact thing damage, but has a different name and animation or has slightly different cooldowns vs damage that ultimately does not affect the overall outcome.
If a game is done right with buttons/skills an 8 button limitation could be just as fun as one with 12 or 20.
A true mmorpg should have buttons and menus taking up 75-80% of the screen and have a spread sheet open in another window. Players should have to write macros and be able to walk away from the PC while it plays the game for them. Then we should be able to talk about how we have "skill". That's the ideal mmorpg.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My opinion is that non-casters/melee can get away with 8 choices in combat, but casters need to be more flexible and have more choices, between buffs, debuffs, cc, damage, defense, etc. 8 doesn't really give enough options. Add in 4 tied to weapons (which i don't like for casters) and you are left with 4 spells-too limiting for casters. And as for being too many buttons on screen, traditionally most casters don't need to move as much and stay back casting so can put a little more effort into navigating spell options.
The joke isn't lost on me - but just out of curiosity:
How do you know how 'easy' it's going to be?
- Do you know the death penalty yet?
- Do you know how difficult mobs will be? I mean it could be D3 on Inferno for all we know?
-Do you know how difficult it will be to acquire all the skills you can?
-Do you know how careful you'll have to be when completing quests that you won't cut off your avenues to progression? (say for example, you piss off Innoruuk and now the shadow knight class is a lot more difficult to obtain - they allude to these types of decisions in the reveal.)
-Do you know how much skill it will take to set up your hot bar with the right abilities for the right situations?
-Do you know how important positioning, movement and crowd control (stacking mobs, aggro control, single pulling mobs) will be in winning a battle?
Just sayin.....there is still a lot of unknown info about this game which will determine its ultimate difficulty;
My guess is that they are in fact aiming at a more casual playstyle - but I also have a feeling it will be more difficult than WoW or EQ2 but less difficult than EVE or EQ. But it is solely a guess at this point - still too much unknown for me to make any solid judgement.
Nobody knows anything, but I don't anticipate this game to be difficult. It could be, but the style looks like they are going after a wider demographic. They have already said they don't want to take from their existing EQ pool whic would be for the harder game player. At the same time, I also know it wont be a face roll either. There are going to be things that will be almost impossible to do/get that they'll make more convenient from the Cash Shop.
But overall, I'm calling it like I currently see it. The little info we have indicates this game is going to follow current trends. As more info filters in, my assessment can change. But for now, 1st impression is EZ-Mode.
At least for 10 years i do not like to play button mashers. And having ONLY 8 buttons is to close to this criteria. When I have read for the first time about this silly limit, I already know EQN is definitively not game for me. For exactly the same reason have left TSW, otherwise i guess would be still playing it.
8
i dont like watching ui more then world.
I came here just to see a post like this.
Anyone that actually played GW2 knows that most of the time you want to use the #1 button since it is generally the best damage skill in most weapons.
Most of the time you are just moving around while attacking, trying to make the melee swings of the enemy miss, side stepping to avoid projectiles, moving out of aoe, position yourself near combo fields so you can trigger them or receive their bonuses, dodging.
Sure, in a big dynamic even with hundreds of players, sure, you might just stand there and burn your cooldowns while praying no AoE comes your direction, but go into a dungeon or fractal and burn your skill as they become ready instead of moving around and you will die quick.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
What most GW1 players will tell you is that most skills are outdated and useless.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/cleave-t10486804.html
"There is a massive number of skills that aren't worth using. That said, there isn't anything wrong with Cleave, it just doesn't match up with today's standard (it does deserve to be reverted to it's previous damage though). It also suffers from the fact it doesn't offer any unique functionalities that provide further awesomeness (like DSlash and 100B for example)."
Many players like woodenpotatoes will tell you GW2 combat is better than GW1 combat or even a hardcore GvG player like Ensign will tell you GW2 is a much better PvE game than GW1.
In fact GW2 problem is that goes around damage and invincibility (dodges/bubbles/blocks) that has not much counters to it.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin