Monday, December 2, 2013

System Changes - Breakout Gameplay

Another week begins. Took care of pressing matters this morning and now it's on to the fun business of talking about Wildstar! I would like to talk about the new questing system and how that all works after the change, but they have done a fantastic job of not talking about that at all during the live streams...so it's time to talk about CC, which in Wildstar's case is kind of a nifty topic because they have Breakout Gameplay. Summary in video Dev Speak form, analysis after the cut.


Disarm

Your weapon is thrown out into the game space and you have to run to it, or wait until the timer expires. This is a crowd control mechanic that fits perfectly with the game play and combat style. In the hectic combat environment you may not notice you lost your weapon at first, and then locating it and retrieving it becomes a challenge. You have to make a judgment call on if going for your weapon or waiting out the debuff. My only concern with this form of crowd control is that balancing the duration of the debuff with the location your weapon is sent will be a huge challenge in PVP. Too short and it'll always be better to wait it out, too long and it will be unfair when your weapon is sent somewhere funny, like up to a higher than jumping platform or down into a pit...into some sort of fire trap, whatever. Cool and unique, so I like it.

Blind 

Blinds the player by obscuring the view port. This is awesome! I only worry that there will be an add on that eliminates the effect. I am pretty sure there is a statistical part of this debuff as well, resulting in higher "misses" or "deflects" as they are called in Wildstar.

Stun

Press F a lot to escape. This one I'm not a fan of, and the developers and community managers have been brought to task by many members of the community on it. Can you macro it? Can you use hardware to turbo button it? The answer is that there is an upper limit to how fast the system will accept input so mechanical enhancements will have limited value. Personally I would like to see something a little more intricate. A number code that must be entered, length determined by length of stun. Maybe type a word. Something more than mash F. That's a very console system, controller input type of thing. For a keyboard I'd like something deeper.

Knock Down

This is an interrupt with a stun component that you can mitigate by using one of your dodge counters to roll back to your feet. This is a good mechanic and allows the player to make a choice on if they want to wait out the effect or use a dodge roll. From the other side of the field the player making the attack has the ability to watch and wait, using the knock down when they know their opponent is out of dodge counters.

Tether

This is a unique type of CC for Wildstar and involves attaching a player to a physical object in the world preventing them from moving too far away. This physical object can be destroyed, and there is the mechanic. My only fear with this ability is how it works on healers? Can they destroy the object in a fair time? Can they heal their way out of it?

Other forms of CC

We have not heard about any break out game play for Snare, Slow, knock back, or grapple, but we have seen them used. It's possible that since you still have control of your character that they feel break out game play isn't needed. I remember hearing in an interview that they would allow Taunts in PVP to work in a similar way to SWTOR, where your damage to other targets will be reduced until the effect of the taunt fades. I remember them describing that it would change your view port like Bind does. In this case the taunter would glow brilliantly and the rest of the world would kind of get hazy and distant. A really cool idea, but I worry that modders will just find a way to turn off these effects.

Diminishing Returns

This was recently covered in a live stream, or one of the class AMA's on reddit. (Sorry, sometimes the information gets into my head and I forget to foot note the source. This one is marked "34325" but that footnote reads, "Am I out of peanuts?") As described, a stun may last for 6 seconds the first time, and then 4 the second, 2 the third and then the player would be immune to stuns for a period of time, maybe around 15 seconds. They explained the many of the CC types will be grouped together and share diminishing returns. This is a system of DR that players of World of Warcraft should be familiar with. They did not explain how DR would interact with Breakout Gameplay, which is where I get interested. If I have to spam 15 F's to break a 6 second stun, to I have to spam 10 F's to break a 4 second stun? 

In general, this breakout gameplay really changes the landscape and will create exciting moment to moment gameplay, which is the goal of the Wildstar team.

One final note on PVE content and Interrupt Armor. They showed this effect off with the 2nd boss in Stormtalon's Lair during the Spell Slinger livestream. The boss is casting a spell that will mostly kill the whole party, and he has 2 stacks of interrupt armor. This means that 3 different CC's need to be used on the boss in order to interrupt the cast and save the party. This means everyone needs to work together. I love this idea and find it much more compelling than a interrupt rotation used in game's like WoW to interrupt the one spell that the game lets you.


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