Guild Wars 2

Having played a lot of world encounters recently, and seeing people complain about their ease and lack of complexity, I’ve looked at them from a different angle to try and understand why these things are so difficult for ArenaNet to create.

It all comes down to a layer of abstraction that exists between physical actions of characters in the game and the fact these actions aren’t direct interactions with targets.

When your character swings a melee weapon / casts a spell / shoots a bow or gun, the game doesn’t behave like more sophisticated game engines like those used by Crysis or Demon’s Souls.
Note that I use “sophisticated” here purely in engine terms, not in terms of gameplay quality.
The game isn’t modelling the impact of your weapon with your target. It’s playing a fancy animation that masks a dice roll.
This is horribly obvious when fighting larger world bosses like the dragons or Shadow Behemoth, where their bodies don’t hit your character and you clip right through them.
It’s magnified by your point of attack being an empty space often metres away from the target itself.

There are very good reasons why MMOs rely on abstract representations of combat instead of trying to accurately model it. The calculations involved in modelling combat as sophisticated as Demon’s Souls in an MMO would swamp connections with positioning information, collision detection and feedback. With small multiplayer games like online FPS ones, it’s less of a problem, as the numbers involved are minute in comparison to MMOs like GW2.

This is why we’ll never see truly satisfying action combat in GW2 and why large boss encounters are a nightmare to design.
It’s also why most MMO developers save the special sauce for instanced content traditionally tailored to limited numbers of people. In such circumstances, they have defined an upper limit on the number of players involved in the encounter and can therefore script according to a bandwidth limit set in stone.

So don’t ever expect massively satisfying combat from huge world boss encounters.
The enemy will never truly be able to react to a single player’s presence and will always stay in one location running canned animations that hide generic area effects.
It’s a limitation of GW2’s engine, one that is still noticeably 2.5D in much the same way as earlier FPS games; one that’s tailored to modelling abstract dice rolls rather than actual combat.

Discuss.

Better encounters have existed in games that were even more “dice roll” based, the problem has little/nothing to do with the fidelity of the simulation, which engine is used, or how the combat system works.

The problem has everything to do with encounter design where the bosses don’t move around and don’t have any mechanics that pose a real threat or risk of failure, and allow players to win even if they are completely ignorant of how the encounter actually works.

It is possible to design better encounters in GW2, they just typically don’t. Grenth requires some level of understanding of the encounter, and can and does kill people. Pre-nerf Fire Elemental was overtuned, in the sense that his difficulty came from big numbers more so than mechanics, but even he was still more entertaining than any of the dragons are currently.

It’s just shoddy encounter design, plain and simple, no need to go looking any further.

There is nothing to discuss. You’re comparing non-MMO games to MMOs and then saying that the two aren’t the same.

Cars aren’t the same as planes because one can fly. I can drive my car off a cliff to feel airborne but it will never be the same as flying in a plane.

Other than changing the title to “The core engine design trade-offs betweeen a client/server MMO and an FPS running on a dedicted PC” I don’t have any suggestions.

All games use the same basic concept, MMOs just simplify it. In both styles, you’re nothing more than a cube hitting another cube (hit boxes).

In an MMO however, the only thing that matters is the distance between your cube and theirs. As long as you are within range, your attack will connect. Unlike most MMOs however, projectiles in GW2 are just like those in an FPS. Both are small moving cubes that hit another cube.

In more advanced games, the concept is the same except instead of a single cube, each object is made up of multiple ones. At the basic level, the cubes of a humanoid are their arms, legs, torso and head, which can then be further divided depending on how advanced you want to be. Depending on the style used, to hit the other cube, your cube simply has to be in range, just like in an MMO, or a specific cube (your weapon) has to hit their cube. Your damage is then based on which of their cubes you hit, a headshot being the most obvious. For special attacks that say, cut off an arm, impale, etc, are nothing more than animations at predefined points or within predefined areas.

Both styles are the same on their basic levels. MMOs just use simplified hit boxes.

The dragon events show a flaw with their engine or they simply forgot. The hit boxes for the dragons are fixed to the default model and don’t move with their animations. This is most notable on the shadow behemoth, with the hit box being its face when it screams. Jormag has a more advanced hit box, using 3, for the hands and head, instead of just 1 big one. Because of this, you can hit all 3 at once, doing 3x your normal damage.

They could have made the dragons solid objects, but judging by their hit box, the collision would have most likely included where it isn’t, making it seem like there are invisible walls. They would have to first fix them all. A more advanced shadow behemoth for example would have had collision on its body, and then when it screamed, it would do a frontal line AoE, knocking everyone back, which would then become another collision point. This however is usually when they have to decide if it’s worth the extra time and resources, which is usually a no for something not really needed.