Terminally Online
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very personal MMORPG column. Every different week, I’ll be sharing my ideas on the style, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we have all taken without any consideration, and, sometimes, bringing in visitor writers to speak about their MMO of alternative.
I feel rather a lot about developments in MMOs. Probably as a result of I’m being paid to just do that, but in addition as a result of I feel the developments are simply plain attention-grabbing; we have had a golden age the place everybody was attempting to make an MMO, tectonic shifts within the form of issues gamers wish to do, and ever-changing social dynamics that maintain this aged style vivid and attention-grabbing.
It’s just like the unusual pall that swept over RPGs, the place turn-based video games had been believed to be poor craft, regardless that these previous few years have more than proven them wrong. The only real difference is we’ve not had our Baldur’s Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to prove that conventional “wisdom” wrong just yet.
But first, as I always like to do, let me get some definitions going. Don’t look at me like that. I know you love it.
When I say “tab-targeting”, I’m using it as shorthand for games where you use the tab key to target stuff—but it also has a bunch of other connotations. Traditionally, tab-target MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 have a whole bunch of other traits.
The main one is the hotbar: Instead of having a bunch of separate inputs—say, a light and a heavy attack—your character has an array of skills, spells, and abilities; Sometimes over 20 depending on your class/job, used for everything combat related. You assign these to keys, pick a target, and hit them in the right order.
Movement is typically deliberate. Enemies don’t fire off rapid attacks you need to parry or evade—instead, they’ll use telegraphed abilities you need to resolve like a puzzle. Difficulty is measured by how complicated these telegraphs are to process and avoid, from ‘don’t stand in the bad’ to FF14’s infamous Limit Cut.
Games like Guild Wars 2, Tera Online, Black Desert, New World, Wildstar, The Elder Scrolls Online—they all tried to shuffle away from this system to varying degrees, sometimes awkwardly trying to make a blend of action and tab-targeting styles. And some of them even did okay! I’m not coming here to say that action MMOs are inherently bad.
But they aren’t inherently better, either. And they’re all trying to solve a problem that never needed fixing.
Tick, tick, tick…
When you sit down to play D&D and roll Initiative for combat, you’re doing so to fix a specific problem: Combat is incredibly stressful, it’s where the rules are most dense, and if you just let people talk over each other then nobody has a good time. Ordering things into neat turns helps everything go down smooth.
MMOs, believe it or not, are similar—except for technical reasons, rather than getting your jerk friend Joe to shut up so you can cast Fireball like you wanted. See, MMOs, and online games in general, function on “ticks”. A “tick rate” is how many times a second a server and a client communicate, measured in hertz.
An FPS game, for example, generally needs a tick rate of 60hz or higher, that’s 60 updates a second. Any lower, and your inputs on the screen stop matching your inputs in the game, which feels goddamn terrible.
MMOs, however, need massive server infrastructures just to run. You need to process character information, positioning, ability usages, and countless other systems—and while internet speeds are getting faster, the MMOs of yesteryear had to figure out how to make games that would work with simply abysmal tickrates.
In comes the tab-targeting/hotbar MMO, which grew out of the soil of ingenuity by building those slow tick rates into their combat systems. Games like FF14 and WoW typically have something called a “global cooldown”, which limits the amount of inputs you can smash into your keyboard—and by designing classes around those technical limitations, you suddenly turn a technical problem into skill expression.
Old School RuneScape isn’t explicitly the kind of game I’m talking about—but it’s a good example, because it has a shockingly slow tick rate of 0.6hz. That’s just over two updates per second, quite literally 10 times slower than most modern FPS games. For the visual learners among you, the OSRS wiki really has an incredible instance with this cannon, which you’ll see delivering rhythm to that 0.6 tick charge.
This results in quite a lot of enjoyable tech. For instance, “tick eating”. Say you are about to get hit by a ranged assault which might kill you. The assault fires, the harm has been calculated, however the server will not apply it till the subsequent tick. It additionally will not course of the therapeutic out of your meals till that occurs. So in the event you scarf one thing down on the proper second, the sport will knock your well being down, heal you, after which go ‘I suppose they by no means died in any respect’.
In different phrases, in the event you’re on 5 well being, scarfing a fish on the proper second can get you thru a 30-damage assault. You can fairly actually eat your method to victory by enjoying to the sport’s rhythm.
That’s essentially the most excessive instance, however there are lesser ones. FF14 has a reasonably hefty world cooldown, however there are particular skills you possibly can weave in between that cooldown—often two. When you could have a very good ping—Square has some animation lock issues that should be fastened—this produces a satisfying rhythm, which I truthfully want to rolling my face alongside my keyboard to make use of all my elementalist’s skills in Guild Wars 2.
Action MMOs, nevertheless, need to struggle towards this limitation. Until we have invented quantum web or no matter, they’ll all the time need to compromise extra on tick charge than your common FPS does—which implies they’re simply by no means gonna really feel pretty much as good as a devoted singleplayer motion sport.
Simply put, it is like attempting to jam a sq. peg right into a spherical gap: You get extra ‘thrilling’ fight, positive, however you additionally get fight that is extra vulnerable to breaking fully underneath the pressure of an MMO server—and, as mentioned, these limitations can produce tech that is simply as enjoyable to drag off! Speaking of…
I [do] really feel like dancing, dancing
I wish to make one thing clear: I’m not some foggy-headed previous sod who’s allergic to motion fight. Sekiro is my favorite soulslike sport, and I’ve gone on report to defend parries. I will always be down for a rhythm game in disguise, I will always enjoy dodge-rolling. These things are good.
Which is why you can trust me when I say that tab-targeting, just like turn-based combat, isn’t boring at all. It can be boring, sure—and I think most MMOs do a bad job of showing it off, given their propensity for difficulty slopes so gradual you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re on solid ground. FF14’s several dozen hours of ‘hope you like pressing two buttons’ makes a bad first impression.
But when you’re doing that endgame content, MMO combat really starts to shine. The first half of that fun is the rotation: These can take many types and flavours. Maybe your character has a rigid, strict rotation you need to hit on-beat like a drummer. Or maybe your class has a lot of procs you need to react to like you’re playing DDR.
Then you have the actual fight. When you’re doing hardcore content, these fights demand your full attention—giving you complex tasks that, if damage weren’t a thing, would be relatively straightforward. Instead, these fights want you to pat your belly and rub your head. You are required to split your brain in two—trying desperately to keep up your character’s ideal scenario stable while the game does everything in its power to mess you up.
Imagine a world where every developer wasn’t trying to fix what isn’t inherently broken, and instead played in the space that MMOs gave them.”
If character action games like Sekiro and Lies of P are secretly rhythm games in disguise, then MMOs are secretly a choreographed dance. Except someone’s throwing rocks at you and screaming at you to apply more DoTs. Many whelps, handle it! I’ve lost track of the metaphor. The point is, it’s fun.
There’s no real truth to the idea that action combat is inherently superior—if you like it better, I’m totally with you, you’re allowed to have your tastes. But the seeming belief that tab-targeting, hotbar-based MMOs are “bad” or “boring” has led to a complete stagnation in the genre.
Take Fellowship, for example. Fellowship isn’t an MMO, but it pulls out the WoW-style tab-targeting combat into its own co-op PvE game—and its developers basically solved an issue that WoW’s had for years with a straightforward UI design tweak.
Imagine a world where every developer wasn’t trying to fix what isn’t inherently broken, and instead played in the space that MMOs gave them. Mind, MMOs are a rare bug in the industry, in that you’ve got one game (World of Warcraft) hoovering up all the oxygen. I don’t blame devs for trying to do something different.
But still, it’s not like any of those WoW killers actually, y’know, killed WoW. And wouldn’t games that build on the hotbar formula be better than awkwardly trying to jam a dodge roll into a sluggish tick rate? What kinds of ingenious solutions have we missed out on for fear of the big bad wolf?
Instead, we keep getting MMOs that’re trying to convince you they’re something else. Lean in, I say! Make that humble server tick work for you, not against you, and you might just wind up with a more interesting game.