Swarm! Swarm!

MMORPG combat is too predictable. It's such a numbers game that the only real variable is players screwing up. A certain group of characters, with certain gear, can beat a certain number of certain mobs. Take one mob away and it's a trivial encounter. Add one more mob and the fight is literally un-winnable. That's not a recipe for fun.

Now, the roots of this are largely technical - you can't have things moving too fast and the AI is very limited by server load. This has led to the current state of auto-attack and wait combat that is highly dependent on crowd control methods. Every mob you remove from the fight has an exponential impact on difficulty. It's a shallow system that has it's moments but gets repetitive very quickly. And it leads to risk averse, efficiency focused gameplay. Think about "trash clearing" dungeon design - pull after pull of the same basic fight. Do you want challenge? Risk of losing and having to start over? No, because it's a tedious activity. So you go in overpowered and plow through as fast as you can. That is not gameplay.


Well, skill-based twitchy gameplay may be an answer, as may advances in tactical AI, but here is a simpler possibility. First, lower health, more mobs. When it takes 20 hits to kill a mob, the outcome is quite deterministic. He will run up to you and you sit there trading blows and it is quite simple to calculate about how much damage you will take before he dies. The outcome is not really in question unless you screw up. However, if there are 10 mobs that each take 2 hits to kill, the variance in how many times they will hit you dramatically rises. Range matters, line of sight matters, order of kills matters, and so on. Second, replace long term crowd control with movement impairment and positioning. Slowing, knockback, actual collision detection, teleporting, short stuns, etc. Instead of removing 1 of 4 mobs from the fight, you now have a continuous challenge of keeping 20 mobs out of attack position. That is a much more dynamic proposition.

Would it really work? No idea of course, but easy enough to try and find out. If there's a drawback it might be the exponential decrease in difficulty as these small mobs are killed off. If you start with 20, the fight might be really exciting until you get down to, say, 12, and then it's trivial. But big, high health mob fights are the same really. Often once the first 2 mobs are down, the fight is won. It only stays interesting if killing those first two effectively drains your resources such that you are less capable when fighting the last 3. And of course if that is the case then adds mean death, which is why you go in overpowered and risk decreases and blah, blah, blah... A constant stream of small mobs also drains resources and is simply more interesting.

Of course, you'd have to alter traditional AoE attacks which would anger lots of mage fans. But there's lots of interesting options there. Friendly fire would change everything. And if we're exploring positioning manipulation, AoE could play a big part there.