I would argue that the core doing (different from motivation, goals, or the ambiguous “experience”) of an MMORPG like WoW would be in the combat. Specifically, combat against epic enemies and dangerous dungeons with your brave buddies (ok, I’m done with alliteration). Anyway, the reason why I want to break this down is because I believe that it gives us a good idea of what kinds of play styles people are interested in and thus give us something to map our own doing in GoI:Online to. So let’s start gutting out the interiors and try to find the foundation.
There are many roles a players can specialize in when dungeon crawling. I believe the most distilled format is tank, hitter (dps), and healer where more likely than not you will have one tank, one healer, and several hitters. A tank is responsible for maintaining aggro (aggressiveness) in order to attract the various creeps and enemies. The tank is ultimately a meat shield and are aggressive in order to prevent enemies from attacking everyone else. Hitters (yes, that’s what I called them in my MUD days) are responsible for dishing out as much damage as possible and as quickly as possible, thus the Damage Per Second ratio. Healers needs to heal mainly the tank who will be taking most of the damage. If the tank is unable to maintain aggro, then the healer must also make sure everyone else is safe too.
Each role has a certain degree of responsibility. I would say that the tank takes on the most because they are in charge of what creeps to kill and committing to it. If the tank chooses are creep to hard, the party is in danger. The healer would be next since he/she needs to monitor the tank as closely as possible. This is not to say that hitters don’t need to care, they need to make sure they don’t draw aggro from other enemies.
Obviously these three roles have very different play styles. I also use the word roles and not class because the class a player chooses may not accurately map to the role they take. For example, back in my MUD days (Avatar Mud), rogues made incredible tanks. They also made incredible hitters. It all depended on the skills chosen and the equipment worn. In this same vein, I think this is what AreaNet is doing with Guild Wars 2. They don’t have a healing class like a priest. Instead, every profession they offer has their own set of healing skills. This provides a certain level of flexibility. I don’t know how many people leave up signs saying “group looking for healer” before running a dungeon. Flexibility solves this problem.
GW2 goes further and also provides skills linked to weapons. Basically AreaNet has done is provide fewer ways to fail. Imagine if you could remap all your skill points in a skill tree. However, some constraints must be put on the flexibility otherwise things will become boring if you can easily optimize. Linking skills to weapons creates a small subset or available skills that will inform a strategy and its tactics when using said weapon. We like that same kind of freedom so everyone that on an airship in GoI:Online will be able to use a gun, pilot the ship, and make repairs. However, each person will have a subset of skills they have chosen to use before a battle which are linked to the role they’ve chosen. This means we have both a level of specialization but also flexibility. I can heal if I’m in danger, otherwise I do what I specialize in.
To bring this back to the three roles, we’ve specifically been thinking about accommodating those three players: tank, hitter, and healer. Our own three roles aboard an airship, we think, map quite accurately to the norm but also provides a level of flexibility and experimentation that are not offered in traditional MMORPG’s. Like GW2, it’s about the quality of skills and the strategies and tactics that are derived from them over quantity of skills.
We’re designing a system of play (the three roles) but putting it in an atypical setting and atypical skinning. I’m thinking that after someone plays as a pilot, engineer, and gunner, he or she will find them familiar but also realize the new diversity we’re offering in terms of dynamic skill assignments and world setting. We’re gutting out the framework so we only have the foundations and then building on top of it again. The building is may be different at first but after a time you’ll realize that that pillar was there before because we’re using the same supporting structure. After our remodeling, we’ll still be able to cater to players who are used to the most common archetypes but majorly spruce things up.