subject: World of Warcraft developer praises Call of Duty's customisation [print this page] World of Warcraft developer praises Call of Duty's customisation
Personally I think I might just be tired of RPG elements in games. I love RPGS and have been playing them since Ultima IV through all the biggies and have played D&D and the like in real life since I was a tyke. I feel like all the choices in RPGs now are just false button pressing. Everything is balanced in the end so it hardly matters what you chose. You select the one thing that is obviously supposed to be used by your class,tera goldeverything else is just meaningless filler. MMOS are the worst culprits, balance is so important that there is no way to get ahead' of the exact place you are supposed to be. And you are only rewarded for fighting the exact right difficulty of enemy. As a result combat at max level is identical to combat at level 1. 20 seconds to kill a level 1 kobold vs. 20 seconds to kill a super master ultra shadow kobold at level 100. Why did I even bother leveling up?
World of Warcraft director Tom Chilton has been talking about the mega-MMO at GDC, and has cited an unlikely title to praise: Call of Duty.
Talking about Cataclysm's Talent system, he cites it as a choice that works well for WoW, but "not as well as we intended it to when we made it.
"Are there better [choice] systems out there? In my opinion, yes," said Chilton. "A good example is Modern Warfare 2. You're not throwing as much stuff at a player. It's a very constrained set of choices, but it's much easier for players to see what their options are. You don't see a wall of text on their icons.
"This to me seems like a more intelligent choice system. Everybody seems to have very different build. Everyone seems to think their build is the best. At the end of the day, players are using a huge spectrum of different specs and choices. This system panned out better than the talent system worked out."
I think what he's more trying to get at is how the complex system WoW offers probably leads to a lot of players following a relatively small number of builds for their given class, especially relative to the number of possible builds, because of the range of options possibly detracting from how many of the combinations are viable given the synergy that may be required for an effective build (shooting in the dark here, I don't play WoW).
Playing MW2, you can slap together almost any combination of weapons and perks and your selection will have both obvious and unexpected merits (though I suspect it's also the case that your choice of perks in MW2 doesn't make anywhere near as much difference to how you play regardless of your choices, you will either shoot or avoid people who are far away, and knife people who are close). However, players can have a lot of fun trying to make the perfect build' (when, of course, the best they can do is optimise for a subset of the total possible situations in the game). Shooting in the dark a little here too I left the series after CoD4.
Simple rules can lead to wonderfully complex things. Simplicity should be valued where it is viable. See also: recursive fractal patterns.
