What I hope to see in patch notes pt.4

Topic 4 : Cooperative Abilities and Mechanics

Woop, I found some free time again, so let’s keep this train going!

(Links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, just in case you want to catch up.)

Today I want to talk about cooperation in group play and how the game itself could encourage that and reward players for participation.

This is not a new concept at all, it’s something we’ve seen tons in the past leading up to our current gaming landscape, Chrono Trigger had itsTechs, fighting games have longsince seen group attacks, and we’ve even seen this done in MMO games like FFXI. We've also seen MMO games implement this in a way that I felt missed the mark. Put in its simplest terms it’s a way to reward people for working together. 

Having played ffxi for a few years, I’m quite familiar with their implementation of the system. This game had a third, resource called TP that was built during combat, upon reaching a set amount of TP the player had an option of spending their accumulated TP for a powerful attack called a weaponskill. After a weaponskill was used on an enemy, there was a small window where if another weaponskill (with the appropriate elemental property) were used, it would chain together and add bonus damage, then cause another window for a third participant. The more attacks that were chained, the more powerful each step became. This system was extremely rewarding and allowed for involvement from all party members, even healers and tanks could get involved in to the chain by casting spells of the appropriate element at the right times.

Chrono Trigger on the other hand was a single player game, but using the techs allowed for special abilities to be completed by having your party members attack in tandem. You could have the caster character imbue the fighter’s sword with flames and proceed to unleash a large and powerful flame attack on all of your enemies. They called them “techs”, and you’d be hard pressed to find a chrono trigger fan who didn’t have their own, personal, favorite techs from the game.

Regardless of how it’s implemented, the general concepts of “two or more people working together is stronger than a single person’s actions” remains a pretty enjoyable thing to participate in as well as being extremely rewarding to execute. So my question is, why don’t we see this in more mmo games? By their very nature mmo games seek to make group play center to their worlds. There are group activities, and a group is unquestionably stronger than a solo players. You could argue that group play by it’s very nature is creating this team work and that simply by having a healer you’re making your tank and dps classes more effective. While that is an unquestionably true statement, it’s also pretty boring. Being in a group in most modern mmo’s you’re still only really doing things that your able to do solo, you’re stabbing the boss, controlling the monster’s positioning, or keeping healt hbars in the black, all of which is general gameplay that people can and do while playing solo. What these cooperative systems add is a new layer of involvement focused around what your group members are doing and what they are capable of.

Plus, it’s awesome. It feels good to see your character doing something cool and powerful. It’s rewarding to see the completed result of something you know you contributed too. It’s fulfilling to know you’re your group couldn’t have done that without your involvement.

There are so many ways it could be implemented. Why can’t we go the chrono trigger route and have a mage jump on a warriors back and both of their attacks become enhanced for a few seconds? Why can’t a healer launch an orb of energy that attaches to a player and mimics one attack before moving to another ally at random, then after bouncing to 5 or 10 allies the healer can redirect the orb to unleash its latent energy (multiplied by number of successful jumps) on a boss? Maybe a tank opens up a “window of opportunity” debuff on a boss that only responds to a fire attack, once hit with a fire attack, the window changes itself to requiring a poison attack, if each person in the group participates the debuff explodes with a massive amount of damage.

These abilities could also be quite interesting in a pvp environment. If a tank were able to apply this “window of opportunity” to an opponent, suddenly the target’s defensive priorities change. “Oh crap, if I get hit by that mage in the next 3 seconds, I’m in trouble.” Forcing the player to reassess the threat from each member of the opponent’s team and change their play to appropriately handle the debuff. Or in the case of tandem attacks (the mage jumps on the warriors back), people are forced to go into a risk v reward decision. This could be a dangerous mave as now two members of the team are in the same place, sacrificing any ability to flank or misdirect the opponent and making your own team more vulnerable by putting two health bars in one place. But ooh that big damage might be worth it.

Put simply, I really want to be able to do some cool group moves that I can’t do while I play solo. I want to feel my group in my gameplay. I want to be rewarded for participating in group game play. I want to piggyback my classes specialties on those of my group members. I don’t want to feel like I’m playing alone, even when I’m in a group.