Based on the fact that they are moving away from pointless grinding towards a more role playing / objective based system, I strongly disagree. In fact it looks like the most role playing game this genre has ever seen as opposed to the usual stat and level grinders.
Originally posted by evilastro Based on the fact that they are moving away from pointless grinding towards a more role playing / objective based system, I strongly disagree. In fact it looks like the most role playing game this genre has ever seen as opposed to the usual stat and level grinders.
Heh you touched base on one of the reasons RPG's and Action/Adventure games were divided into different genres: Stats/Attributes. What stats/attributes represent in a roleplaying game are the physical/mental changes that your character undergoes as a result of your "choices". Similarly to life: do I wanna work out and be strong? Study and be smart? Agile? Charming? etc etc. That's the whole reason attributes were ever put into RPG's in the first place. Your character SHOULD evolve based on how you want him/her to become. Many games simplify this concept by letting you just choose in what ways you want your character to be stronger/weaker whereas some truly great RPG's actually make your character get stronger/weaker based on every little thing you DO (like The Elder Scrolls series).
Adventure/Action games don't let you roleplay to this degree, they give you a character with a certain static physical and mental attributes and you just make use of those. You don't get to choose them or make your character your own. That's what RPG's are all about; choice. Thankfully I truly doubt they have gotten rid of differing base attributes between the 40 classes; if they did that would be very un-RPG like. Instead I think they gave us SOME form of choice by making the classes have different attributes (strengths/weaknesses) to choose from and you just don't increase them.
I can't believe some people actually think the 'role' in role-playing actually refers to character archetypes such as tanks, healers or DPS. It refers to playing a role and developing a character, which is why many RPGs do not have a trinity, or even any combat roles.
The way I understand it, and was clearly stated in the unveiling, SOE is going for a true to form old DnD style of gameplay. They want encounters that have the same intelligence as a GM, but without the need for a GM. They want characters to be remembered by their actions, they want characters to progress through the game and explore, be it crafting, adventuring or just living inside their virtual world. I see all this in the works more and more as they developers give their interviews to different gaming sites.
On the topic of the trinity. They are roles, but roles that only became because the technology required them at the time. That technology is now obsolete and no longer necessary. I don't remember ever having to use a Tank,Healer or Crowd Control during one of my play sessions in DnD, but then again, I did play in the 80's and early 90's before the term 'Tank and Spank' was even spoken. A Warrior then was just a bad ass who used any type of armor or weapon and dealt a ton of damage.
RPG has different meanings dependant on what era you began playing them. personally, I look forward to more info about EQNext, because each time the developers mention old school DnD, I get even more excited.
I don't think that's up to debate (although SoE and Arenaet might disagree)
the "role" in "roleplay" has nothing to do with tank/healer/dps. yeesh. if that were the case, any "role" in a film would have to be fit to tank/healer/dps. ridiculous to even say that.
Originally posted by evilastro I can't believe some people actually think the 'role' in role-playing actually refers to character archetypes such as tanks, healers or DPS. It refers to playing a role and developing a character, which is why many RPGs do not have a trinity, or even any combat roles.
Did you read my post above? I explicitly said that role-playing does not necessarily imply "roles". But when you are role-playing having an adventure then that DOES imply that you explore, interact and combat. As far as the combat goes, structured combat DOES require "roles". Tanks, healers or DPS are not the only roles that could exist in structured combat, but they are the most well known ones. In a hurt/kill combat scenario, DPS is the only REQUIRED role which serves as the basis for my concern when a company states that other roles are not required. Structured combat should REQUIRE all kinds of roles (if it's gonna be challenging).
DnD had structured combat and no trinity. Heals from classes that had them were limited, strategic and powerful. There were no tanks in the MMO sense. I hope EQN is channelling that.
The way I understand it, and was clearly stated in the unveiling, SOE is going for a true to form old DnD style of gameplay. They want encounters that have the same intelligence as a GM, but without the need for a GM. They want characters to be remembered by their actions, they want characters to progress through the game and explore, be it crafting, adventuring or just living inside their virtual world. I see all this in the works more and more as they developers give their interviews to different gaming sites.
On the topic of the trinity. They are roles, but roles that only became because the technology required them at the time. That technology is now obsolete and no longer necessary. I don't remember ever having to use a Tank,Healer or Crowd Control during one of my play sessions in DnD, but then again, I did play in the 80's and early 90's before the term 'Tank and Spank' was even spoken. A Warrior then was just a bad ass who used any type of armor or weapon and dealt a ton of damage.
RPG has different meanings dependant on what era you began playing them. personally, I look forward to more info about EQNext, because each time the developers mention old school DnD, I get even more excited.
In old school DnD there were multiple avenues to "victory" (at least if the DM was worth his salt). In most RPG's the only way to win is hurt/kill the enemy. In such scenarios the only REQUIREMENT is to do damage and not die. If they make it so each character can avoid dieing and do DPS with their own devices then every character will have the same required "role". Stating that any kind of other "roles" (such as ones that help group members stay alive) will be "unnecessary" should be concerning to anyone that enjoys structured combat. Of course they could just make it with their AI that there are multiple ways to win other than killing but that's wishful thinking.
My biggest fear at this point is that the game will allow all kinds of strategies/tactics to be successful because the enemies are too easy or that the enemies will be strong and the only thing that anyone will care about is doing the most DPS (since that's the only part that's REQUIRED).
I don't think that's up to debate (although SoE and Arenaet might disagree)
*Sips his coffee*...*psssssshhhhhhhh*...cant be serious, I think this is sarcasm to be honest hahahaha I swear I think it is.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
The way I understand it, and was clearly stated in the unveiling, SOE is going for a true to form old DnD style of gameplay. They want encounters that have the same intelligence as a GM, but without the need for a GM. They want characters to be remembered by their actions, they want characters to progress through the game and explore, be it crafting, adventuring or just living inside their virtual world. I see all this in the works more and more as they developers give their interviews to different gaming sites.
On the topic of the trinity. They are roles, but roles that only became because the technology required them at the time. That technology is now obsolete and no longer necessary. I don't remember ever having to use a Tank,Healer or Crowd Control during one of my play sessions in DnD, but then again, I did play in the 80's and early 90's before the term 'Tank and Spank' was even spoken. A Warrior then was just a bad ass who used any type of armor or weapon and dealt a ton of damage.
RPG has different meanings dependant on what era you began playing them. personally, I look forward to more info about EQNext, because each time the developers mention old school DnD, I get even more excited.
In old school DnD there were many avenues to "victory" (at least if the DM was worth his salt). In most RPG's the only way to win is hurt/kill the enemy. In such scenarios the only REQUIREMENT is to do damage. Stating that any kind of other "roles" will be unnecessary should be concerning to anyone that enjoys structured combat. Of course they could just make it with their AI that there are multiple ways to win other than killing but that's wishful thinking.
With them removing the need for dedicated healers and dedicated tanks, they have freed up many of the players. They even said that if that was your preference you would be able to do just that. They said it in the class panel. However they also said that they want to allow everyone to enjoy the game equally. If you enjoy playing defensively, that is allowed. We haven't seen the abilities that each class brings to the table, so this entire conversation is merely speculation, you are aware of that right? I did see the wizards wall that required the monsters to break it down to reach the characters, that is a CC ability, albeit not a hard CC like a Mez.
I've played games where I was the main tank in a guild, you screw up, everyone wipes. I've played as a healer as well, if make a mistake the tank dies and you get bitched at. I've also experienced other characters that I put a lot of time into having their roles suddenly pigeon holed into the trinity where it was not before. Shaman in old EQ used to be semi-CC/semi-heals. Now they are only one role, healing, don't like it, forget about raiding. Seriously, slowing and debuffing, throwing HoT's to help and buffing the DPS in raids doesn't cut it anymore. EQNext is a breath of fresh air for me. I get to enjoy EQ without having to fill whatever role the elite player make me. I've raided more hardcore than quite a few people have, but those days are over.
The EQNext developers want everyone to have fun, whether they play casually or everyday all day, and they want that fun to be equal. From what i have seen, they are doing a terrific job in working toward that goal. Now, I will also admit that each class needs to have a reason for being their particular class, but no one should ever be forced to give up doing something because they cannot find a tank or a healer or the proper CC.
The EQNext developers want everyone to have fun, whether they play casually or everyday all day, and they want that fun to be equal. From what i have seen, they are doing a terrific job in working toward that goal. Now, I will also admit that each class needs to have a reason for being their particular class, but no one should ever be forced to give up doing something because they cannot find a tank or a healer or the proper CC.
The argument I am making is that if you are not required to do certain things to win then the content is not difficult. Now they could make it so that multiple strategies can work but doing so would require them to have multiple victory conditions otherwise in a hurt/kill scenario the only thing that matters is DPS.
The EQNext developers want everyone to have fun, whether they play casually or everyday all day, and they want that fun to be equal. From what i have seen, they are doing a terrific job in working toward that goal. Now, I will also admit that each class needs to have a reason for being their particular class, but no one should ever be forced to give up doing something because they cannot find a tank or a healer or the proper CC.
The argument I am making is that if you are not required to do certain things to win then the content is not difficult. Now they could make it so that multiple strategies can work but doing so would require them to have multiple victory conditions otherwise in a hurt/kill scenario the only thing that matters is DPS.
Have you played the game? How is it? Because until we actually get our own hands dirty with it, this is all just speculation.
Originally posted by evilastro I can't believe some people actually think the 'role' in role-playing actually refers to character archetypes such as tanks, healers or DPS. It refers to playing a role and developing a character, which is why many RPGs do not have a trinity, or even any combat roles.
Originally posted by evilastro I can't believe some people actually think the 'role' in role-playing actually refers to character archetypes such as tanks, healers or DPS. It refers to playing a role and developing a character, which is why many RPGs do not have a trinity, or even any combat roles.
ouch
revisionist definitions !
I always saw role playing games as being about understanding the motivations of my own character and others. About creating a personality.
Having situations presented that challenged me by offering an obvious (to me - not the character) solution to a problem and figuring out how a different person, my character, would handle the situation.
Is my character a coward, foolishly brave, a jerk or a good guy, inept or skilled beyond godlike.
There are two challenges to role playing. Staying in character and completing the objective. The most important being to stay in character. Fail at that and you have eliminated the best part.
It is extremely tempting to break character and to play the meta game and to start playing by the numbers to win. And I often end up doing that, in MMOs sooner rather than later. Especially since they are poorly equipped to allow for roleplaying, having few tools to help with storytelling gameplay.
Anyway since everyone thinks its all about classes I will go into that too. A class is just a simple way of defining a role in broad strokes. And you have a more interesting group dynamic if not everyone is the same. Besides it makes tactical sense to have different people specializing in different things: Sniper, medic, commander, heavy weapons, engineer, or ranger, shaman, rogue, wizard, warrior.
These specializations can be hard or soft. But for me it detracts from the roleplaying if you can switch specialty on the fly.
I mean for me role playing is a social activity and if you can do everything without being social it defeats the purpose of the game.
That being said, I never really liked the "tank" as a role. And I never really liked the way rogues were just dps machines in stead of sneak thieves. or how simple it was to cast spells.
I mean come on.. Press a button to cast a spell? Gimme a spell casting mini game a la "Rain Dance Dance Revolution" or something I loved how EQ bards used to work compared to every other spellcaster before or since (Im happy to have someone point out good spell casting to me) (how is spell weaving working in AoC now?). I mean it could be interesting to have some action play on the back lines too rather than holding down a key or hitting a key every 3 minutes (simple game play can have its appeals too ofcourse).
As for tanks.. Well I always wanted to see a system that required "tanks" to physicly block the opponent from getting through to the squishies rather than a simplistic mechanic like taunt and automated blocks and intercepts.
Or maybe I like the old school slow paced system best, since it allows for more social interaction during combat.
The misnomer is that the developers have never stated the roles would not exist.
They said that the roles weren't required. I'd even go so far as to say that they stated that the roles were made obsolete by how they plan on coding the AI for the monsters, but that would be putting words into their mouths.
Most people are doing that with the developers, though, so I feel a little less terrible about making that judgement. We don't know what the plan is, so I'd hold off on thinking the roles are dead, as such.
The fact is, I've been a "healer" for MMOs since EQ1 onward. The dynamic of watching the health bars and filling them up does need to change. It's actually very trite. There were a few attempts at doing this, but I haven't seen anyone throw the HPS/DPS/Aggro mechanic out for something more organic.
Let's take an example of how an existing model could break the mold and "not require healers". As a Dic priest in WOW, we started getting abilities which did not, strictly speaking, heal the player, but were far more effective. They prevented incoming DPS from removing health. I remember for the longest time that my healing was very low, because there was no metric to measure "damage not taken".
Again, in NWO, this mechanic surfaced with the control wizard. Through many dungeons, our cleric simply DPSed, because my controls prevented damage and the healer simply wasn't required to "just heal". In one instance, I locked down 5 orc mobs on a chain whihc lasted three minutes. If each orc delivers 100DPS, over 3 minutes that was 9,000 damage prevented. You can't metric that, but that was healing the cleric didn't do. However, it was just as effective (if not more effective) than someone hitting flash of light over and over again.
And thus, trinity is no longer "required", because the role is fulfilled with a different mechanic. Was that a zerg? Was that removing a staple of the game? Not really. The requirement to keep players alive still existed, it just could not be categorized as a "healer" because I did "not-damage", and also did not have any healing abilities whatsoever.
Let me break the immersion of roles a bit more. The role of the tank is to absorb damage and control a mob which might otherwise defeat a group. What if that became five mobs? What if (as in the disc priest above) I was also able to keep a mob locked to a particular location? Am I a healer, or a tank? After all, I'm preventing damage to other players with shields (just like a tank would do) and I'm keeping the mob controlled (a la my control wizard), so, how do you categorize that?
It's time we thought outside the box on how these "ideas" are being executed, moved past the green bars and "aggro" and all that crap. We're collectively able to envision far more powerful mechanics than "I take hits, you heal me, boss doesn't hit you" and execute the same actual effect.
I for one believe that the developers deserve a chance to implement this. I don't believe that action games preclude it being an RPG, and that an RPG at it's core does embody the ideals of what the developers are attempting to do. The fact that they have only done it when there was only one factor (single player) instead of being able to execute it across an MMO doesn't make it any less valid as an MMORPG.
That's old think. It's been imposed upon us by statements like "we don't have time to implement that feature" or "market demographics show that this isn't desirable". And we've all been pissed by developers cutting features they wanted to do because a publisher said "not in the budget".
I think we need to act less like the publishers want us to in order to fit us into neat little boxes, and imagine more, so we can get the genre moving in a better direction than it has been (faster, at least) for the last 10 years. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet.
I just realized that one other core RPG element that EQN seems to be moving away from is abnegation. Abnegation is the act of "getting out of yourself" by doing something easy. For years RPG's have found a way to allow us to do this while still allowing room for challenges by making your in-game character grow to such an extent that there are things in the game world that used to be challenging but have become trivial (independently of your skill as a player). Abnegation is typically a result of built-in grind mechanics and leveling and despite of how negative it may sound on paper, it is actually a feeling that RPG game developers want us to feel and serves as one of the reasons we choose to play RPG's instead of say Platformers or Fighter games. Have you ever come home from work and really want to play a game and choose not to play a MOBA like LoL or DOTA cause you don't want the stress? You wanna get that feeling of getting powerful and getting somewhere but you wanna be able to choose how difficult the actual content you have to work through is gonna be? Then you end up loading up Skyrim to rob some mansions or do some alchemy or do some side quests or something? If you have ever done that then you as a player probably like abnegation.
For more info on abnegation and RPG's in general check this:
Well there are tiers of skills or something like that but no levels. They are basically going for very horizontal character development, so that players of max power are not so much stronger than newbie ones....In the end it comes down to how they design it (which we don't have too many details on) but at its core this horizontal development DOES have potential to remove abnegation from the game. Making it much less RPG'ish and much more adventure like.
And that's fine. If SOE is not targetting an RPG audience (and they would be smart not to; according to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ56Kia8dTU) then they may very well be creating a new genre here.
I actually think a 3D Castlevania:Symphony of Night game set in a mmo world and allowing people to create their own character and profession would be cool. Someone get on that. *throws money at everyone*
EQNExt is more of an RPG than most games I have seen so far in my many years of gaming.
When I started out, we would play pen and paper D&D, a proper role playing game. We would make up our character, give it a name and a backstory, and go off on an adventure. Whilst out adventuring we would pretend to be the character, and make choices based on what that character would do, and the world would react accordingly, and change because of the role we were playing.
We didn't pretend to be a tank, with a thousand skills, we just pretended to be a nasty thief with a hidden dagger and our choices would be "I pick up the statue from the altar and beat the monster round the head" or "I leg it and leave the rest of them to deal with it". That is what an RPG is.
EQNext, for pretty much the first time ever, sounds like it will let you do that. That is a real RPG.
I dont care how many buttons it has - hell, the best type of online RPG would be one with no buttons and a mic where I just say what I want to do and the world reacts accordingly!
"When people don't know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way they want them to be filled in. They are almost always disappointed." - Will Wright
Comments
Heh you touched base on one of the reasons RPG's and Action/Adventure games were divided into different genres: Stats/Attributes. What stats/attributes represent in a roleplaying game are the physical/mental changes that your character undergoes as a result of your "choices". Similarly to life: do I wanna work out and be strong? Study and be smart? Agile? Charming? etc etc. That's the whole reason attributes were ever put into RPG's in the first place. Your character SHOULD evolve based on how you want him/her to become. Many games simplify this concept by letting you just choose in what ways you want your character to be stronger/weaker whereas some truly great RPG's actually make your character get stronger/weaker based on every little thing you DO (like The Elder Scrolls series).
Adventure/Action games don't let you roleplay to this degree, they give you a character with a certain static physical and mental attributes and you just make use of those. You don't get to choose them or make your character your own. That's what RPG's are all about; choice. Thankfully I truly doubt they have gotten rid of differing base attributes between the 40 classes; if they did that would be very un-RPG like. Instead I think they gave us SOME form of choice by making the classes have different attributes (strengths/weaknesses) to choose from and you just don't increase them.
The way I understand it, and was clearly stated in the unveiling, SOE is going for a true to form old DnD style of gameplay. They want encounters that have the same intelligence as a GM, but without the need for a GM. They want characters to be remembered by their actions, they want characters to progress through the game and explore, be it crafting, adventuring or just living inside their virtual world. I see all this in the works more and more as they developers give their interviews to different gaming sites.
On the topic of the trinity. They are roles, but roles that only became because the technology required them at the time. That technology is now obsolete and no longer necessary. I don't remember ever having to use a Tank,Healer or Crowd Control during one of my play sessions in DnD, but then again, I did play in the 80's and early 90's before the term 'Tank and Spank' was even spoken. A Warrior then was just a bad ass who used any type of armor or weapon and dealt a ton of damage.
RPG has different meanings dependant on what era you began playing them. personally, I look forward to more info about EQNext, because each time the developers mention old school DnD, I get even more excited.
the "role" in "roleplay" has nothing to do with tank/healer/dps. yeesh. if that were the case, any "role" in a film would have to be fit to tank/healer/dps. ridiculous to even say that.
Did you read my post above? I explicitly said that role-playing does not necessarily imply "roles". But when you are role-playing having an adventure then that DOES imply that you explore, interact and combat. As far as the combat goes, structured combat DOES require "roles". Tanks, healers or DPS are not the only roles that could exist in structured combat, but they are the most well known ones. In a hurt/kill combat scenario, DPS is the only REQUIRED role which serves as the basis for my concern when a company states that other roles are not required. Structured combat should REQUIRE all kinds of roles (if it's gonna be challenging).
In old school DnD there were multiple avenues to "victory" (at least if the DM was worth his salt). In most RPG's the only way to win is hurt/kill the enemy. In such scenarios the only REQUIREMENT is to do damage and not die. If they make it so each character can avoid dieing and do DPS with their own devices then every character will have the same required "role". Stating that any kind of other "roles" (such as ones that help group members stay alive) will be "unnecessary" should be concerning to anyone that enjoys structured combat. Of course they could just make it with their AI that there are multiple ways to win other than killing but that's wishful thinking.
My biggest fear at this point is that the game will allow all kinds of strategies/tactics to be successful because the enemies are too easy or that the enemies will be strong and the only thing that anyone will care about is doing the most DPS (since that's the only part that's REQUIRED).
*Sips his coffee*...*psssssshhhhhhhh*...cant be serious, I think this is sarcasm to be honest hahahaha I swear I think it is.
I might get banned for this. - Rizel Star.
I'm not afraid to tell trolls what they [need] to hear, even if that means for me to have an forced absence afterwards.
P2P LOGIC = If it's P2P it means longevity, overall better game, and THE BEST SUPPORT EVER!!!!!(Which has been rinsed and repeated about a thousand times)
Common Sense Logic = P2P logic is no better than F2P Logic.
With them removing the need for dedicated healers and dedicated tanks, they have freed up many of the players. They even said that if that was your preference you would be able to do just that. They said it in the class panel. However they also said that they want to allow everyone to enjoy the game equally. If you enjoy playing defensively, that is allowed. We haven't seen the abilities that each class brings to the table, so this entire conversation is merely speculation, you are aware of that right? I did see the wizards wall that required the monsters to break it down to reach the characters, that is a CC ability, albeit not a hard CC like a Mez.
I've played games where I was the main tank in a guild, you screw up, everyone wipes. I've played as a healer as well, if make a mistake the tank dies and you get bitched at. I've also experienced other characters that I put a lot of time into having their roles suddenly pigeon holed into the trinity where it was not before. Shaman in old EQ used to be semi-CC/semi-heals. Now they are only one role, healing, don't like it, forget about raiding. Seriously, slowing and debuffing, throwing HoT's to help and buffing the DPS in raids doesn't cut it anymore. EQNext is a breath of fresh air for me. I get to enjoy EQ without having to fill whatever role the elite player make me. I've raided more hardcore than quite a few people have, but those days are over.
The EQNext developers want everyone to have fun, whether they play casually or everyday all day, and they want that fun to be equal. From what i have seen, they are doing a terrific job in working toward that goal. Now, I will also admit that each class needs to have a reason for being their particular class, but no one should ever be forced to give up doing something because they cannot find a tank or a healer or the proper CC.
The argument I am making is that if you are not required to do certain things to win then the content is not difficult. Now they could make it so that multiple strategies can work but doing so would require them to have multiple victory conditions otherwise in a hurt/kill scenario the only thing that matters is DPS.
uuuhhh EQN has classes, those are roles. Not tank, dps, healer.
Have you played the game? How is it? Because until we actually get our own hands dirty with it, this is all just speculation.
The thought of an MMO adventure game sounds fantastic.
ouch
revisionist definitions !
EQ2 fan sites
I always saw role playing games as being about understanding the motivations of my own character and others. About creating a personality.
Having situations presented that challenged me by offering an obvious (to me - not the character) solution to a problem and figuring out how a different person, my character, would handle the situation.
Is my character a coward, foolishly brave, a jerk or a good guy, inept or skilled beyond godlike.
There are two challenges to role playing. Staying in character and completing the objective. The most important being to stay in character. Fail at that and you have eliminated the best part.
It is extremely tempting to break character and to play the meta game and to start playing by the numbers to win. And I often end up doing that, in MMOs sooner rather than later. Especially since they are poorly equipped to allow for roleplaying, having few tools to help with storytelling gameplay.
Anyway since everyone thinks its all about classes I will go into that too. A class is just a simple way of defining a role in broad strokes. And you have a more interesting group dynamic if not everyone is the same. Besides it makes tactical sense to have different people specializing in different things: Sniper, medic, commander, heavy weapons, engineer, or ranger, shaman, rogue, wizard, warrior.
These specializations can be hard or soft. But for me it detracts from the roleplaying if you can switch specialty on the fly.
I mean for me role playing is a social activity and if you can do everything without being social it defeats the purpose of the game.
That being said, I never really liked the "tank" as a role. And I never really liked the way rogues were just dps machines in stead of sneak thieves. or how simple it was to cast spells.
I mean come on.. Press a button to cast a spell? Gimme a spell casting mini game a la "Rain Dance Dance Revolution" or something I loved how EQ bards used to work compared to every other spellcaster before or since (Im happy to have someone point out good spell casting to me) (how is spell weaving working in AoC now?). I mean it could be interesting to have some action play on the back lines too rather than holding down a key or hitting a key every 3 minutes (simple game play can have its appeals too ofcourse).
As for tanks.. Well I always wanted to see a system that required "tanks" to physicly block the opponent from getting through to the squishies rather than a simplistic mechanic like taunt and automated blocks and intercepts.
Or maybe I like the old school slow paced system best, since it allows for more social interaction during combat.
The misnomer is that the developers have never stated the roles would not exist.
They said that the roles weren't required. I'd even go so far as to say that they stated that the roles were made obsolete by how they plan on coding the AI for the monsters, but that would be putting words into their mouths.
Most people are doing that with the developers, though, so I feel a little less terrible about making that judgement. We don't know what the plan is, so I'd hold off on thinking the roles are dead, as such.
The fact is, I've been a "healer" for MMOs since EQ1 onward. The dynamic of watching the health bars and filling them up does need to change. It's actually very trite. There were a few attempts at doing this, but I haven't seen anyone throw the HPS/DPS/Aggro mechanic out for something more organic.
Let's take an example of how an existing model could break the mold and "not require healers". As a Dic priest in WOW, we started getting abilities which did not, strictly speaking, heal the player, but were far more effective. They prevented incoming DPS from removing health. I remember for the longest time that my healing was very low, because there was no metric to measure "damage not taken".
Again, in NWO, this mechanic surfaced with the control wizard. Through many dungeons, our cleric simply DPSed, because my controls prevented damage and the healer simply wasn't required to "just heal". In one instance, I locked down 5 orc mobs on a chain whihc lasted three minutes. If each orc delivers 100DPS, over 3 minutes that was 9,000 damage prevented. You can't metric that, but that was healing the cleric didn't do. However, it was just as effective (if not more effective) than someone hitting flash of light over and over again.
And thus, trinity is no longer "required", because the role is fulfilled with a different mechanic. Was that a zerg? Was that removing a staple of the game? Not really. The requirement to keep players alive still existed, it just could not be categorized as a "healer" because I did "not-damage", and also did not have any healing abilities whatsoever.
Let me break the immersion of roles a bit more. The role of the tank is to absorb damage and control a mob which might otherwise defeat a group. What if that became five mobs? What if (as in the disc priest above) I was also able to keep a mob locked to a particular location? Am I a healer, or a tank? After all, I'm preventing damage to other players with shields (just like a tank would do) and I'm keeping the mob controlled (a la my control wizard), so, how do you categorize that?
It's time we thought outside the box on how these "ideas" are being executed, moved past the green bars and "aggro" and all that crap. We're collectively able to envision far more powerful mechanics than "I take hits, you heal me, boss doesn't hit you" and execute the same actual effect.
I for one believe that the developers deserve a chance to implement this. I don't believe that action games preclude it being an RPG, and that an RPG at it's core does embody the ideals of what the developers are attempting to do. The fact that they have only done it when there was only one factor (single player) instead of being able to execute it across an MMO doesn't make it any less valid as an MMORPG.
That's old think. It's been imposed upon us by statements like "we don't have time to implement that feature" or "market demographics show that this isn't desirable". And we've all been pissed by developers cutting features they wanted to do because a publisher said "not in the budget".
I think we need to act less like the publishers want us to in order to fit us into neat little boxes, and imagine more, so we can get the genre moving in a better direction than it has been (faster, at least) for the last 10 years. But hey, I'm just some guy on the internet.
I just realized that one other core RPG element that EQN seems to be moving away from is abnegation. Abnegation is the act of "getting out of yourself" by doing something easy. For years RPG's have found a way to allow us to do this while still allowing room for challenges by making your in-game character grow to such an extent that there are things in the game world that used to be challenging but have become trivial (independently of your skill as a player). Abnegation is typically a result of built-in grind mechanics and leveling and despite of how negative it may sound on paper, it is actually a feeling that RPG game developers want us to feel and serves as one of the reasons we choose to play RPG's instead of say Platformers or Fighter games. Have you ever come home from work and really want to play a game and choose not to play a MOBA like LoL or DOTA cause you don't want the stress? You wanna get that feeling of getting powerful and getting somewhere but you wanna be able to choose how difficult the actual content you have to work through is gonna be? Then you end up loading up Skyrim to rob some mansions or do some alchemy or do some side quests or something? If you have ever done that then you as a player probably like abnegation.
For more info on abnegation and RPG's in general check this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8aiEsIW9IM
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Agreed, why design a game world with thousands of real players in it but only have content built around solo play or very small groups.
There is not trinity based roles, but you can play whatever role you want. So, yah it still fits as an RPG.
@OP
Wait, so there is no leveling?
Worst decision ever for an MMO!
Well there are tiers of skills or something like that but no levels. They are basically going for very horizontal character development, so that players of max power are not so much stronger than newbie ones....In the end it comes down to how they design it (which we don't have too many details on) but at its core this horizontal development DOES have potential to remove abnegation from the game. Making it much less RPG'ish and much more adventure like.
And that's fine. If SOE is not targetting an RPG audience (and they would be smart not to; according to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ56Kia8dTU) then they may very well be creating a new genre here.
I actually think a 3D Castlevania:Symphony of Night game set in a mmo world and allowing people to create their own character and profession would be cool. Someone get on that. *throws money at everyone*
EQNExt is more of an RPG than most games I have seen so far in my many years of gaming.
When I started out, we would play pen and paper D&D, a proper role playing game. We would make up our character, give it a name and a backstory, and go off on an adventure. Whilst out adventuring we would pretend to be the character, and make choices based on what that character would do, and the world would react accordingly, and change because of the role we were playing.
We didn't pretend to be a tank, with a thousand skills, we just pretended to be a nasty thief with a hidden dagger and our choices would be "I pick up the statue from the altar and beat the monster round the head" or "I leg it and leave the rest of them to deal with it". That is what an RPG is.
EQNext, for pretty much the first time ever, sounds like it will let you do that. That is a real RPG.
I dont care how many buttons it has - hell, the best type of online RPG would be one with no buttons and a mic where I just say what I want to do and the world reacts accordingly!
"When people don't know much about something, they tend to fill in the blanks the way they want them to be filled in. They are almost always disappointed." - Will Wright