There is a major delima in the action RPG genre. Increasing enemy difficulty by making them hit harder, have more HP, move faster, etc. falsely increases a games difficulty (it only makes them frustrating and not actually hard) while making the mobs behave tactically makes the game too easy. Allow me to explain.
By increasing the difficulty of the mobs by making them do more damage, take more damage, move faster, and have more resistances (a-la Diablo 2) doesn't actually make your game harder, it just makes it longer by either making the encounters longer, making me die more, or forcing me to get better items or level up more in order to beat them. That's not good design as it forces you into long time sinks in order to be able to compete with the next tier of mobs.
By making the monsters behave tactically, you force them to behave in a certain manner. An example of this would be a monster lunging at me and having his axe stuck in the ground which he tries to pull out for 3 seconds, giving me the time needed to kill him. Once you figure this out, every time you come across this monster you've already won unless the monster has a cheap ambush mechanic which is frustrating and falsely increases game difficulty by forcing you to remember when and where a monster comes out of (or to move at a snails pace which falsely increases game length).
Things like that don't make a game good and add very little replay value to the game. Figuring out how to beat a monster means you can take him out every single time 100% of the time regardless of the situation, terrain, etc. On the other hand, increasing the difficulty of the mobs by making them harder is just frustrating.
This is a problem. You either have monsters that have a certain attack/movement pattern or you have monsters that are stupidly difficult which force time sinks in order to continue. So how do you cure this? Well, you can't, at least not realistically. You could make the AI so complex and perfect that it plays like a person would, but thats not really realistic as the point of an action-rpg is to try to put as many monsters on a screen at a time for the player to kill.
The solution has always been to give the player a plethora of items and skills to get... but does that still work? It hasn't worked for the last two companies that have released action-rpg's (the guys who did Titan Quest and the guys who did Hellgate) as those two companies have gone under. Titan Quest was (and is) a great game, yet somehow the plethora of items, plethora of skills and class combinations available just didn't work.
I don't think the typical solutions work anymore. Action-RPG's need a serious rethinking of direction in order for this genre to stay relevant. Simply giving the player a laundry list of items to go spelunking for is great as a distraction from the core of the game, the gameplay, and that seems to be the biggest issue. All ARPG's play the same to the point where there's not a damned thing different between them besides the graphics.
I dunno. I don't have any ideas to make the genre interesting. Hellgate kind of got it right by mixing in FPS elements, but the execution was done so poorly that I fear no one else will ever try to venture into this area. I don't feel D3 is going to bring anything different to the table besides another ARPG that most of will get in the hopes of it being something different like some of us did with TQ (not that TQ was bad... it just wasn't anything new).
I really like this genre, but doing the same thing in a different game is just like doing the same thing in the same game. MMO's suffer the same problem, but anything innovative usually tanks over night.
Anyone with some ideas that might give me some hope for the ARPG?
By increasing the difficulty of the mobs by making them do more damage, take more damage, move faster, and have more resistances (a-la Diablo 2) doesn't actually make your game harder, it just makes it longer by either making the encounters longer, making me die more, or forcing me to get better items or level up more in order to beat them. That's not good design as it forces you into long time sinks in order to be able to compete with the next tier of mobs.
By making the monsters behave tactically, you force them to behave in a certain manner. An example of this would be a monster lunging at me and having his axe stuck in the ground which he tries to pull out for 3 seconds, giving me the time needed to kill him. Once you figure this out, every time you come across this monster you've already won unless the monster has a cheap ambush mechanic which is frustrating and falsely increases game difficulty by forcing you to remember when and where a monster comes out of (or to move at a snails pace which falsely increases game length).
Things like that don't make a game good and add very little replay value to the game. Figuring out how to beat a monster means you can take him out every single time 100% of the time regardless of the situation, terrain, etc. On the other hand, increasing the difficulty of the mobs by making them harder is just frustrating.
This is a problem. You either have monsters that have a certain attack/movement pattern or you have monsters that are stupidly difficult which force time sinks in order to continue. So how do you cure this? Well, you can't, at least not realistically. You could make the AI so complex and perfect that it plays like a person would, but thats not really realistic as the point of an action-rpg is to try to put as many monsters on a screen at a time for the player to kill.
The solution has always been to give the player a plethora of items and skills to get... but does that still work? It hasn't worked for the last two companies that have released action-rpg's (the guys who did Titan Quest and the guys who did Hellgate) as those two companies have gone under. Titan Quest was (and is) a great game, yet somehow the plethora of items, plethora of skills and class combinations available just didn't work.
I don't think the typical solutions work anymore. Action-RPG's need a serious rethinking of direction in order for this genre to stay relevant. Simply giving the player a laundry list of items to go spelunking for is great as a distraction from the core of the game, the gameplay, and that seems to be the biggest issue. All ARPG's play the same to the point where there's not a damned thing different between them besides the graphics.
I dunno. I don't have any ideas to make the genre interesting. Hellgate kind of got it right by mixing in FPS elements, but the execution was done so poorly that I fear no one else will ever try to venture into this area. I don't feel D3 is going to bring anything different to the table besides another ARPG that most of will get in the hopes of it being something different like some of us did with TQ (not that TQ was bad... it just wasn't anything new).
I really like this genre, but doing the same thing in a different game is just like doing the same thing in the same game. MMO's suffer the same problem, but anything innovative usually tanks over night.
Anyone with some ideas that might give me some hope for the ARPG?
