I'm poking at FF14 again and, as a very longtime MMO healer player, I keep thinking about... the fundamental friction/contradiction of support roles in these games.
That fundamental contradiction being simply; MMOs have two "modes" of operation; solo play and group play. In a group context, a support character (often tanks or healers, but sometimes other kinds) is often vital, maybe even impossible to live without, with encounters explicitly designed around their inclusion. In a solo context, a support character is often full of kit that is completely useless to them and is forced to engage in a gameplay style that bears little to no resemblance to what they do in group play. This leads to a lot of problems, but two in particular are the biggest:
- Unviable solo characters who simply can't solo anything
- A total lack of tutorialization/learning-curve for group play expectations (because most games start off with heavy solo play and focus primarily on that behaviour.)
So it's got me thinking; how have various games attempted to solve this problem? I'm going to list off a few:
No Solution, aka Too Bad, Fucker
Examples: Everquest, Ragnarok Online, WoW (partial), City of Heroes (partial), Maplestory (partial), TERA (partial)
Ah, the classic of older games that just assumed everyone would want to group up. Pretty much any MMO released before 2010 has been guilty of this at some time, in differing degrees of extremity. Trying to play certain classes solo in vanilla EQ or RO is basically an exercise in futility, and when it works it can require some very silly shenanigans (ask me about level capping a priest in RO). More recent (or recently updated) games tend to balance combat such that solo play is technically viable for every class, but merely miserable for support characters.
This, obviously, falls really deeply into both of the cited problems above - You either can't play solo at all or solo play bears no resemblance to group play. This is, arguably, THE original state of things when 'the triad' was invented and what most of the other entries on this list are trying to fix.
I wonder, more than anything, if this is a symptom, though, rather than a cause - specifically a symptom of the ways in which MMOs started out way more interested in freeform group play - why would you NOT play with others in this online game?? - and transitioned, as they became more linear, more themeparky, more about tightly balanced encounters - into something that was enough of its own genre that people were more interested in the gameplay experience than the existence of other people. The genre's developed in such weird directions over time and I still wonder what it'd look like to see a more freeform UO-y mmo in the modern day.
Everyone's a DPS
Examples: Guild Wars 2, PSO2, Destiny 2
The simple solution to teaching players multiple modes of play is to not have multiple modes of play - this is kind of the MMO equivalent of playing Left 4 Dead with your friends. You're all shooting at stuff but you're not really interacting with each other.
It definitely seems like this design style works for a lot of people, and handily solves problem 2 above - you're always learning what you're always going to be using! And I think it really successfully supports casual pickup group play in games like destiny - you'll never have to worry about whether anyone else is pulling their weight - but as a longtime healer player it feels kind of isolated compared to traditional group play; the interplay of "oh, you're in trouble, I'll help you out" is missing. It's definitely one of the reasons I didn't stick with GW2 once I hit the level cap.
I also think this causes some difficulties in introducing challenge - since "combat coordination" is an axis of difficulty that's been completely removed, generally speaking the challenges start creeping into places that entirely don't exist during normal play, like "everyone has to know to flick 3 different switches at once" - a common criticism I've heard of Destiny 2's raid content.
Trivial Solo Play
Examples: FF14, Guild Wars 2 (arguable)
The simplest solution to problem 1, of course, is to just throw challenge out the window and say "hey! everyone's welcome!" This works very straightforwardly - and I suspect it saves world designers a LOT of agony - but it definitely comes with the trade-off of making solo content feel kind of 'fake'. This is okay if you can provide really intense multiplayer fights as your climaxes (as both the games listed do) but there's something about this as a solution to me that feels... incomplete, or like giving up. Or acknowledging the degree to which world fights in MMOs are there for flavour, or filler. Idk! These are hard problems.
Role Toggle
Examples: WoW (partial), FF14, The Secret World
Need your players to be a DPS to do content? Easy! just let them be a DPS whenever they want! A targeted solution for problem 1 that runs the risk of exacerbating problem 2.
WoW does this in a more literal way than the other two games listed here, by having these be occasional in-class options; tank stances for melee classes that can DPS, for examples, or druids that can transform into different creatures to pick their style of play.
The other two simply let you have multiple classes, or specs, or etc - essentially you're never locked into a single style of play for leveling.
All these kind of fall into the same general risk, though, which is that if you're not leveling with an archetype you're not likely to know how to play it when the time comes. FF14 runs a little less risk of this than other games because you only get xp for a class when you're playing as it, but even then, I've seen people speed level healers/tanks and then faceplant. Is "just don't perform your role most of the time" really a viable solution for leveling? Hmm.
NPC party members
Examples: SWTOR, FF14(eventually), Everquest (eventually), Guild Wars 1 (eventually)
I think SWtor is the only game on this list that shipped with this the ability to play with a party of NPCs. All the rest had to think about it for a few years (or a decade, for Everquest). I suspect a lot of MMO designers view this as somewhat of an admission of failure; that people don't want to engage with the "M"s in MMO. But I'll give it this; it does a good job of letting support players do their damn job and learn it in a pressure-free environment. I think the biggest risk of this solution is if it becomes too successful and starts depleting the pool of players who would otherwise be seeking out group content with other real humans - but keeping those stocked can be hard anyway, and usually necessitates other countermeasures, like FF14's duty roulettes, which give endgame players rewards for rerunning dungeons with newbies.
Of the solutions on this list, I think this is definitely the cleanest I've seen.
Enforced Party
Examples: Guild Wars 1, Warframe (mostly)
Want to solve mode-switching problems with solo play? Easy! Delete solo play.
GW1's the only game I'm aware of that does this entirely (Warframe seems like it leans on it but added some solo areas eventually?), mandating that literally all gameplay in the entire game be party play from the start. It definitely solves all the issues mentioned handily, but I do think it also comes with a tradeoff in intensity; never getting time to yourself makes for a very high energy game that can be exhausting to play in long bursts. It also kind of robs away one of the core elements of fantasy MMOs (at least to me), which is the act of just wandering around the wilderness meeting people because it's fun to inhabit a space - squad mission design understandably trends very mission-y and focused (herding cats et al) and there isn't much room for 'sploring, or meeting other players casually.
I'd say "still, it worked!" but given how hyperaggressively GW2 pivoted away from this style - previously their calling card! - I wonder if they felt that it didn't.
Roles aren't a thing
Examples: Ultima Online
I'd joke that this is the opt-out, but in a way every other game on this list is the opt-in.
I'm sure there are other examples, but of the ones I've played, UO is the only one that so thoroughly defies this concept that I'm not even sure you could specify anything as "support" or "healing" or "DPS" in that game, let alone other vaguer terms. A game fundamentally balanced around roleplaying in the classical sense of the word, UO's skillsets - examples include Peacemaking, Spirit Speak, Begging, and Cartography - often have zero interest in combat utility at all, and mix and match concepts extremely heavily in a way that often defies slotting into any archetype. A character in UO certainly can make a 'build' but it's deeply unlikely to look like anything normal unless the player in question is minmaxing for the super hard fights that were added way, way later in expansions.
In this sense, UO kind of defies the entire concept we're considering: instances, "story", etc aren't really a thing. You can go visit a dungeon with friends and kill stuff, or go solo and hope to run into other people. Maybe that'll change your play somewhat and maybe it won't, but it's unlikely the developers have particularly concrete expectations for what that looks like - the tight, almost perscriptive balance of the modern theme park MMO is absent. Dungeons are just another place you can be, if you want.
Wow, this post got REALLY long. Oops.
Uh, anyway, before I wrap up I'd like to ramble slightly about some elements in this space that I feel would get me, as a healer, excited about an MMO.
Living the Fantasy
So to me part of being a healer or a tank etc is a desire of wanting to help people out, and I keep thinking about how little opportunity you get to do that in the world on a moment to moment basis in MMOs. In my fantasy world I would love to dash about the battlefield, healing the injured, ressurecting downed people, etc. I can imagine tanks would love the feeling of swooping in at the last second when someone else is in danger. I'd love these to be a core element of my class, too, viable means of progression.
The problem, of course, is that this requires a kind of big investment in facilitating that kind of play.
- Meaningful and frequent opportunities to heal NPCs and Players (in the case of players, this likely also means putting them in real danger, which contradicts with some of the above principles other MMOs do)
- Those opportunities need to award something, or else they're not viable as a regular activity. This always becomes a problem when it intersects with other players, who love to break things, but also I think many designers are very reluctant to have their core gameplay not involve killing things and that presents a real blocker.
When I think about this, I'd love to see something that takes inspiration from Fantasy Life, a game that makes logging as exciting as combat. In FL, there are rare trees that have weak points you have to seek out, regenerating health, even other attributes - to log a tree is to engage in a sort of "combat" that is definitively logging and yet as complex in design as any game's combat system. I would love to see this idea applied to support archetypes; a wide-scale fight to heal a dying elder tree as corruption sinks into its roots, a
group of tanks who herd giant goats by wrestling them. I recognize even as I say these things that what I'm asking for is a game that looks nothing like a modern MMO and is probably way more expensive to develop because it exists in that unexplored space - I'm sure that, in the end, it's far easier to simply have monsters to beat on - but this is what I think of when I think of a game that truly loves its support classes.
So that's my ramble!!! I meant this to be like a 2 paragraph post but I just kept typing and typing and this is what we have ended up with. May you all be blessed for reading this far into my hot takes. Goodnight
