8/23/2011

I've always found it curious how we play our games, in particular mmos.
Customization has always been very important to us to cater to the way in which we play, to maximize our effectiveness.

In Warhammer Online I would end up with 5 rows of action bars to accomodate all the skills and abilities of my character. I would have the UI show all 5 bars one on top of each other in a vertical fashion so that i could have my mouse in the middle of what would look like a square/rectangle. This would allow me to access all the skills easily, going up, down, left or right.

Neverwinter Nights got it right in a way, by having hotkeys via CTRL, ALT or SHIFT buttons for numbers 1 to + (I belie
ve) since there was 'less' visible UI customization.


I look at Thrangis' pictures of the new Guild Wars 2 of what looks to be hotbars. One hotbar and skills changing, depending on what main & offhand weapons one has. Being able to assign numbers 6+ for misc/other abilities.

I truly look forward to a game where I don't have a huge plethora of skills that I need to find a place for quick access to.
Maybe something with more strategy, and body placement, rather than pressing a combination of the same keys for abilities. Where a battle will be different each time even if its against the same monster.


This kind of wish, reminds me of one of the best Wii games i've ever played: Monster Hunter Tri. (Granted the Wii didn't really have 'good' games that I liked). It was an single player game that you could play like a mmo, just think of it like Borderlands (drop in, and drop out ability). You battled big monsters all the time, and you had only a small amount of attack abilities (more like different kind of thrusts: high attack, low sweep attack, quick attack, strong attack). It didn't emphasize the many special skills you had or your level, but more of body placement, moving around, dodging and attacking weak points when presented with them. "Mini" boss battles could last an extremely long time (10+ minutes) and we're not even talking about the real bosses. Real bosses would require you to chase them across the map and sometimes require you to run away when you got overwhelmed.

From the videos that you watch in Guild Wars 2 that have released and posted recently on other sites, you see the warrior runs around alot in using his abilities, dodging, weaving, never just standing there and taking the hits except when he actively blocks. Same thing goes with pvp, it looks like there is alot more movement happening.

I'm getting more excited and looking forward to GW2 and even how SWTOR will play..

2 comments:

  1. "I truly look forward to a game where I don't have a huge plethora of skills that I need to find a place for quick access to. Maybe something with more strategy, and body placement, rather than pressing a combination of the same keys for abilities. Where a battle will be different each time even if its against the same monster."

    Might wanna look into Darkfall dude. Or here, just read anything Syncaine has to say on the MMO:

    http://syncaine.com/2011/08/26/darkfall-the-only-option/#comment-26477

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  2. @Bronte yea, i read alot of what Syncaine has to say about Darkfall, but something about it makes it sound not that interesting... ;)

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