One of the things that makes tactical RPGs (Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, Front Mission) so great for me is the depth of customization that I have when building and developing my party. Atlantica Online is the only MMO that I’ve played that dug into this notion of letting the player control party of adventurers rather than a single avatar. (No, Gibberling triplets don’t count as a party; I can’t tune them individually.)
FFT is especially fantastic since I can change character classes and even equip characters with certain off-class skills. The flexibility is a huge strength in the game design. I can field a monoclass team or set up a balanced mix, depending on how I play, what gear I have, or what challenges I want to tackle. The off-class skills make for even greater depth, since I can patch up holes in my battle plan or reinforce strengths. Success often hinges not only on smart battlefield tactics, but also on long-range strategies of party development.
I’ve written before about disliking rigid class-based design, but if there is flexibility to move between classes like that, where it’s easy and often useful to do so, I don’t mind classes. It’s even better if the base class design bleeds across boundaries, like the cross-class skill design of FFT or the dual-class design of Guild Wars or Runes of Magic.
A party system makes rigid classes easier to work with. Final Fantasy X, for example, has a fairly rigid sort of “class” design for the characters for a good chunk of the game. You can unlock the Sphere Grid to train characters in cross-class abilities later on in the game (which is awesome, but not necessary), but for the early game, characters have pretty clear roles that roughly parallel class design. Auron is the tank with piercing weapons, Wakka is the guy to call for aerial enemies, Rikku is a thief, Lulu is the mage, Yuna is the healer, Tidus is the fast warrior, and Kimahri is malleable. He’s sort of a blue mage (who uses skills he can learn from enemies), but he also chooses one of the other roles early on from the other character skill paths. (So you can have two tanks, two white mages, whatever.)
The combat works because you can swap characters out almost any time, tailoring your party to the tactical situation. If you need a screwdriver, you’re not stuck with a hammer. Also, you typically have three characters in your combat party, which means that you’re equipped with a variety of tools even if you’re not switching characters out.
MMOs are generally designed around the notion of people playing together, though, where “parties” are comprised of people each playing a single character. That’s not the only way to design an MMO, though, and it surprises me a little that we haven’t seen more devs work player-controlled parties into these games. Maybe that’s just not where the market is, but it does seem to me that it might be worth exploring the design concepts a bit, at least in theory.
Atlantica Online manages to let players control a party of characters but also encourages player grouping with dangerous dungeons. Attempt those solo and you’re most likely to be demolished as the enemies gang up on you. It’s also still a good idea to group up in some areas to make progress faster or more fun. Of course, combat in Atlantica is different, since it’s tactical and turn-based (with a timer). There are some different fundamental design choices being made there as opposed to the MMO mainstream, and I think it’s healthy.
Are there other party based MMOs out there? Is there much of a market for them?
A MechWarrior MMO would really work best as a single-character avatar game, but a BattleTech MMO could be party based and more tactical. MechCommander was a fantastic game. Of course, not everything needs to be multiplayer or an MMO, but there’s some potential there at least.
If nothing else, commanding a party would make for more tactical decisions, including flanking and blocking, that we just don’t get as single-character pilots. It also need not eliminate multiplayer game aspects, since it’s really just giving each player more tools. Players can still play together, and may even need to for some content. You could get some truly massive, tactical battles going on with party based design. It’s almost a middle ground between WoW and StarCraft multiplayer, if you want to frame it in Blizzard terms.
There is a diminished sense of “role playing” as you take on the role of a disembodied commander, as opposed to the very personal single avatar. That doesn’t completely preclude role playing, and modern MMO design isn’t firmly rooted in playing a role anyway… but it is still a downside of a party design.
There are also tech hurdles, especially if we’re going to allow the party to be split up. Atlantica Online parties are static in combat, but malleable outside of combat. RTS-ish tactical combat means controls and UI a step beyond hotbar Rock-em Sock-em Robot combat, and it would be more susceptible to lag.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block is the complexity. Party based design has the potential to be an order of magnitude more complex than the mainstream is used to. Still, would those players who are fussing about the “dumbing down” of the genre welcome this sort of complexity?
All in all, I’m not surprised that this sort of design isn’t the mainstream, but I do wonder why more devs haven’t tried it.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
Obviously I fail to see the problem.
Your concept is – in classic titles – Baldur’s Gate Online. Of course we could argue about, where Strategy ends and Role play starts, but from the concept it is.
Therefore I would think that the concept could be very successful.
It is not another dimension, just another genre brought to the Online World.
Well, there are always problems in making another style of online game, but I don’t mean to present them as reasons *not* to try. Rather, I think that party-based MMOs have potential, and I’m looking at aspects of the implementation, presentation and philosophy that will need to be resolved to make these games work. It’s the practical, production side of me, since I *do* work in the game industry, and have to deal with how to make things work every day.
I would really like to see more party-based MMOs, and I love that zone between strategy and RPG. BGO could be fantastic… and dare I invoke the notion of Planescape Online?
There was another game that works a lot more like Final Fantasy games do: Sword of the New World. You could build up different characters and take three of them out at a time. Each character had its own class, so you could make some interesting combinations. However, you couldn’t swap characters in and out as easily as in the FF games. The game uses microtransactions, so you can download and play the game for free initially.
It was an interesting game. Each “character” had 3-4 major abilities, so you could use hotkeys to fire off specific abilities. In the end, it worked like playing a typical single character, but you could respec 1/3 of your character easily.
I’d like to see more games that do something like this myself. I think it’s more fun to work up a group of characters than just one. The big problem is technology, though; if every player “character” is really three characters, that triples the polygon budget if you want comparable quality….
It might be a fun MMO game…I think I’m fine with finding other people to get together with to be in my party, usually. But this game would have a place.
Brian, thanks for the link; I’ll check it out. You’re right, though; the art asset generation and display are other tech and budget hurdles. Not insurmountable, to be sure, but not insignificant.
Anton, well, that’s the thing; it’s less about trying to make the game solo friendly, more about expanding the set of choices any give player can make, and giving the combat tactical depth.
Solo/group design intersects a bit, but you can always impose situational limitations to make grouping necessary if you wanted to, like a boss that requires tactical positioning of more than one player… or some such.
Oh, actually would love to read about your let’s call it fictional production plan.
Actually I often make up fictional business plan to figure out whether my idea is practical of Biergarten Nonsense.
Looking forward to your plan.
One of my favorite things to do in the FFTA series was abuse cross-class abilities to come up with new and interesting ways to kill people. Though I was always playing against the AI, I liked to imagine that my methods were infuriating: like having a summoner with a time mage’s teleporting ability, and putting him in inaccessible places to drop offensive summons on huge groups of badguys, or having an archer class use Arm Shot and Leg Shot, and follow it up with Death Sentence. Usually it was more efficient to just kill somebody with straightforward attacks, but it was never as much fun.
You would absolutely LOVE FFXIII then. The combat system is streamlined and based on changing Paradigm’s(basically party wide instant class changes) on the fly. One piece of basic info so you understand what follows, baddies have a stagger bar, when it’s filled, they are semi-stunned, can be juggled by certain characters completely stunning them, and they take increased damage.
You have 6 classes:
Ravager which increases the stagger bar rapidly, but doesn’t make the bar stick at the last point you hit on the bar.(Basic DPS)
Commander which deals heavy damage and makes the bar stick(think feral druid specced tankdps).
Synergist is a buffer.
Saboteur is a debuffer.
Sentinel is a tank pretty cut and dry, although you don’t need them till halfway though the game. Low damage output, lots of taunt abilites.
And last the Medic. Bet you can’t guess what Medic’s do.
The interesting part of this is that while you can choose abilities to use on the current party leader(changes a lot), you can’t choose them on the secondary characters, and most of the time you use “Auto-Attack/Heal/Hinder/etc” and let the computer pick your attacks.
Your support will automatically perform the role they are in the best they can(surprisingly well), and even will adjust attacks for weaknesses after you scan an enemy.
This really puts the focus on the paradigms that you create outside of battle, and choose on the fly in battle. They are, as a WoW person would see it, not an ability on the GCD. So if you take massive damage in the middle of an attack cycle, you could switch from Commander/Ravager/Ravager to Commander/Synergist/Medic, or whatever.
TL;DR If you like focus on class synergies and group play, try FFXII. You won’t like it at first having played previous FF’s(I didn’t really like X for the record), but I feel like you’d get into from what you said in the post.
I really would like to dig into FFXIII, actually. My lack of a PS3 is one considerable stumbling block. You’re right, the party-level command structure is very interesting to me. In the meantime, I’m happy reading about it and playing FFXII. Thanks for chiming in, Tech!
I have it for 360, but reading between the lines, you don’t have either, correct? I’m sure Square-Enix will release a PC version once they make some bucks on DLC. (Downloadable Content)
And gladly! I was a reader of your blog before, but I’m trying to be more…outgoing…in these online communities. More often than not, I have something worth saying, which I say to myself in my head, or a buddy who is around when I read it. But it makes more sense to communicate with the people actually having the discussions. 🙂 (sorry for the tangent!!)
Yeah, I don’t have a 360 either. I probably should, since the games I’ve worked on for the last three years are for the 360…
We like tangents around here. 🙂 Most of the time, I’m looking to spur discussion anyway, and good ones are better than my original blathering.
Haha, if you are helping develop on the 360, you certainly ought to have one. Personally I love the Live platform. It’s good and bad for a gamer like me who tends to buy compulsively. The downside is that there is quite a bit of money I could spend on there. The upside is that I can satiate my desire for new content for $1-$40, without driving to a store or a mall where there is added danger of more spending. (jeez I make myself sound like a women with a sugar daddy)
I do wish I could afford a PS3 just for the console specific games that have come along.
Discussion is good, discussion is fun, I’m glad to hear you are malleable to it. 🙂
Who do work for/with, if that’s a question you can answer here. Is that a question better answered by me looking at some archived posts?
Oh, it’s no secret, and I’ve mentioned it in the archives. I work for Wahoo Studios, also known as NinjaBee. (Wahoo is how we appear under publishers, NinjaBee games are our own internal designs.)
Just checked out Wahoo’s site. I’m a HUGE fan of Outpost Kaloki(and X). They are one of those inexpensive games I mentioned a comment or two back. I played through that, and all of the expansions scenarios(although I didn’t really feel like the Romance one had the same flow as the others).
I would pay $59.95 for a fully realized version of that game, and I would most certainly pay for more DLC for it.
Very cool to know your company created that. 🙂
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