The Secret World Lead Designer Interview

[Therumancer]

*snipped*

In defense of the "decks". I played MMO since UO times. Played pretty much every major release up to date (and several minor ones). Big problem with how most MMOs do handle classes is that one - They are stuck in single role form start to finish, and two by mid way through You end up with more skills than You have fingers.
Sure it looks nice with press releases to say "Over 30 skills per class" but how many of those You really use? How many of them are just slightly altered version of different skill You have? (quick heal, mid heal, big heal, heal over time, preemptive heal for eg.) How often will You use all those untalented/not improved DPS skills when You are healer and vice versa?

With decks being 7 active/7 passive You choose what You use, what suits the job the best. You need AoE oriented skill - You pick those. Next encounter You might need single target or over time skills - pick those.
You end up with manageable pools of currently available skills that are specialized for given task.

Fact is MMOs will not be able to get rid of the trinity design unless You alter the core of gameplay. Even in open games like UO or EVE Online You have people that take on roles. Some guys are kitted out to take damage, other's are kitted out to dish it. It happens in traditional PnP RPGs as well. After all the cliche fantasy RPG party is Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Cleric.
Without that You can't really create encounters that are more complex than "everyone attack the big thing and hope for best". Imagine allowing players to play Jack-of-all-trades characters. Should You then balance the encounters to make them viable? Should They be viable in PvP against specialized characters? How much variety in mob abilities You can have before the character becomes simply useless?

Even in real life we specialize. One guy is good at math other is good at arts. Someone is sharpshooter while another is master of martial combat. People good at everything are very rare.

To be fair we're talking about games that emulate heroic fantasy of one sort or another. Like it or not, the protaganists in such stories are rarely defficient in every area except for one in which they excel... and to an extent that's the problem with such a focused system especially when you go into a genere that is based around polymaths by definition. To an extent the standard "roles" can be defended in sword and sorcery (but only to an extent), they really can't be within this genere.

That said a big part of my disappointment was simply that I thought Funcom was going to be brave enough to break the current model and had come up with something new that they wanted to try rather than using the same focused character trinity (Tank, DPS, healer) games had been built around to this point.

When it comes to balancing games, I tend to look at it from the perspective that trash mobs are intended to lose to begin with, hence why they are balanced so even the most pencilnecked healer can solo them doing regular world PVE quests. At that point it kind of defeats the purpose. Later when you get to high end play where the roles allegedly matter, it's increasingly no longer about those roles anymore. To beat bosses in WoW you rarely tank and spank them for example, it's all about mobility, coordination, and gimmicks. If the boss can even be tanked consistantly it's largely a nod to giving the tank something to do because he's there for example, rather than anything fitting the fight. Indeed in many cases phases where a boss suddenly becomes tankable can be jarring as they make no sense in the bosses' strategy in many cases, and at the very best work simply to test how well the group can transition from one pattern to another. Really, there is no need for the roles and if anything they seem to be holding game design back, especially at the high end, as developers have to work around that format in the sense of "well, let's give the tanks something to do, or design the fight so the healers have to move and are a little less bored" rather than just having the fight flow.

That's my opinion, I know many people disagree. In some games the trinity works, and I understand why it existed, I was just hoping this would be one of the games that would try and break that system, and I'm disappointed to see that they hadn't done so.

As far as abillities that duplicate each other in function, you have a good point, but at the same time I was hoping that they had actually come up with several hundred unique skills, which would be quite a feat, the reality in comparison is quite disapppointing. There are various PnP RPGs and such that have that many distinct abillities with uses for all of them, so far we haven't seen a computer game pull that off, which is why it would have been incredible.

I'll also be blunt, the deck system isn't really defendable in that it can be changed, because it apparently can't be changed on the fly such as in the middle of a fight or dungeon... which would defeat the purpose. Despite the way it's termed it's really not all that differant from games that allow free character respecs, or you to change character classes (ala Final Fantasy Online) between events. That's really not all that impressive.

It's kind of like how in a hero game you might pay a trivial amount of money to re-do all your power (well before they went FTP) where say someone might choose to re-do their character to fill a specific role but isn't going to be able to change back to what they
were before in the middle of a dungeon.

Basically Funcom has gone from implying they had something really incredible and innovative for the genere, something like we haven't seen before, and instead is simply turning out a fairly generic game in a modern fantasy setting. Sure they call it "decks" but that's just like saying "we don't have character classes, we have archetypes!" or how White Wolf claims they have been making classless systems, yet their WoD games require you to pick a clan/bloodline/whatever that determines access to abillities, sure in WW's games you might be able to purchuse outside of your focus but that's mostly an excuse for giving NPCs odd abillity combos as it really screws PCs on their exps and winds up gimping them (which is a whole differant discussion that involves a lot of differant levels).