Combat Pacing

One discussion that comes up from time to time when talking about game design for MMOs is about combat pacing.  That is, how long should a fight last, and how “active” should the player be?  In fact, just last week a thread about this showed up on the forums over at Nerfbat.

Because I’m more interested in group play and social interactions, obviously my stance is to make fights longer and reduce the need for button pushing.  I’m extremely fond of the old EverQuest design where fights were counted in minutes and players often had between 3 and 10 seconds between actions.  In my opinion, this allowed for more tactical play, allowing you to see what was happening and consider your response as opposed to faster games where you tend to approach the fight with a plan and execute it, the individual fight lasting 30 seconds or less (excluding boss and raid encounters, which are obviously tuned to large groups and to last longer).

I also like slow combat because currently, unless you are playing exclusively with friends and using voice chat on a Ventrilo server or similar service, social interactions have to occur through the same keyboard that controls game play.  If you are hitting a key to perform a combat action every 1 to 2 seconds, that doesn’t give you much opportunity to chat.  The more “intense” the combat, the more “quiet” the game gets, and you have to practically stop playing the game in order to be social.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, also expressed in the thread.  If you want to join in the discussion, I encourage you to sign up at the Nerfbat forums and do so.

FreeRealms Freeloading

So I have joined FreeRealms.  If you want to find me in game, I’m Jhaer Buegren.

Thus far, I’m entertained but disappointed.  As many people across the blog-o-sphere have pointed out, the game is fun.  Or rather, the games are fun.  I put it that way because the individual mini-games in FreeRealms for each of the classes are fun.  However, “the game” as a whole, to me, isn’t.

What’s lacking are the social aspects.  Finding your friends and getting them on your friend list is far too poorly implemented.  Its hard.  As of yet, I have none of my friends on my friend list because I haven’t been on at the same time as them, in the same place, so we can do that.  With my Xbox360, I can add friends from the webpage.  Why can’t I do that here?  Also, no one talks.  They are far too busy playing mini-games, which says something about the mini-games, but it also makes the game feel like I’m playing next to people rather than playing with people.  I quit WoW because all of their social interactions take place in guild/group, auction, or Chuck Norris jokes (not really, but the innane quality of the general chat when it does exist floats around that level).  FreeRealms won’t be really appealing to me until that changes.  Puzzle Pirates has more social interaction than FreeRealms.

In any event, seeing as how, for now, FreeRealms is not something I’d be willing to put a single dollar into, I’ll be freeloading.  I’ll keep posting about what its like to play a game with a velvet rope and RMT when you don’t participate in either.  In Puzzle Pirates, I play on a doubloon ocean which allows me to do “everything” for free as long as someone buys doubloons and sells them to me for pieces of eight.  So far, FreeRealms doesn’t offer a way I can grind past the monetary restrictions of the game.  At least not one I’ve seen.  We’ll just have to see how it goes…