I will never know who it was working behind the scenes at City of Heroes who first had the idea to let players customize their powers in the game, but whoever it was deserves our gratitude. It was a huge amount of work – players have been told that for ages – but the net results of it were wonderful. Suddenly your fire-based powers could look like gouts of ethereal blue flame or cleansing superheated plasma. Whatever made you happiest. The mechanics didn’t change, but your visuals did.
Years later, the industry is still having trouble catching up to this.
In most Design Mockument columns I am proposing a very complicated or weird thing that requires some abstract system concepts in order to make it work. This week, I am doing something else by proposing something that is a very simple concept: divorcing the visuals of a character’s abilities from the mechanical effects to some extent. That’s all. It is very simple. Let’s discuss why it’s a good thing before addressing the one actual potential problem.
Now, to take a step back, I was kind of lying about CoH in the opening paragraph. There are still actually limits to visual customization for your powers. Dual Blades, for example, is a powerset that involves using two swords. You can customize it a lot and pick different swords, have them sheathed or hidden, and so forth… but you are still using two swords, limited to the specific list of weapons that count as blades in the game. You cannot visually customize yourself into using electrical punches, for example. This extends down the line: You can do a lot of customizing for your fire set, but you still are confined by the mechanics of a fire set.
However, within that field, there are a lot of choices still possible. Let’s use a different game as an example here: Final Fantasy XIV. You can say that, for instance, Dark Knight as a job has to be the job using a greatsword and tanking. You can’t just use a greatsword for DPS or healing. And that’s a limitation, which is fair.
But there’s nothing saying that Dark Knight’s visuals have to be all violent, swirling blackness. We have the Heavens’ Ward with greatsword users who have different visual effects. You could easily replace the visuals with a light theme or another element like flame or ice. Heck, you could even rework it to have minimal magical effect and mostly be about just thwacking things with a big sword!
This would seem like a pretty easy layup, and in fact there are plenty of gameplay-preserving mods that visually allow players to alter jobs like this because it’s not exactly unheard of for players to enjoy a particular mechanical aspect of a given option but not be as fond of the visuals. There are six major elements in FFXIV’s magical system, but Black Mages use only three of them in any capacity, and you don’t get to choose which ones they are – even though there is plenty of evidence that the game’s mechanics would work just fine if you used wind as your primary attack, earth to restore your MP, and water to do damage over time.
You can argue that this would reduce visual clarity to a degree, but that’s a spurious argument at best. Yes, if World of Warcraft allowed mages to visually shoot lightning or poison or water at things while still mechanically working like Fire Mages, that would be another piece of visual data to internalize. But I’m fairly certain most MMO players haven’t already otherwise perfectly internalized the visuals of 38 other specs so they know at a glance what is happening. That’s just not realistic.
You can also argue to a certain extent that it dilutes your choice or it might not make much sense if, say, you’re technically a Fire Mage but are visually throwing water at an ice monster and it’s working. But let’s face it, that’s a ship that has sailed ages ago because we all kind of collectively decided that it’s not really fun in 90% of settings to decide between What I Want To Play and What Can Actually Deal Any Damage. Elemental considerations have largely fallen by the wayside in games where you have more limited selections of abilities.
Not in every game, no, but in CoH (which does care if you’re dealing Fire or Toxic damage, say) these differences are not so stark that they change you from a wrecking ball to an incapable paper tiger whiffing helplessly. The momentary weirdness alone is not reason enough to stop you from doing it.
So why doesn’t this become a thing everywhere?
Well… two reasons. The first is that while this may in fact be simple, that does not actually make it easy. The two words are not synonyms. It is simple to achieve time dilation via traveling near the speed of light; just be traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light and it’ll happen. Simple!
If your response is “but how do I accelerate to that speed in the first place,” there you go, you got it. It is simple, but it is not easy. And the same can be the case for coding of visuals to go along with mechanical effects.
Even if you can easily lift one set of visuals and replace them with another, it still takes time to create the new sets of visuals. And you need to create a bunch because if, say, you make seven sets for Fire Mages and no sets for Elemental Shaman, some players are going to be miffed. Not to mention that the degree of what can be changed is going to vary a lot; some character abilities are just flashier than others. You can do more to alter electrical sets in CoH than martial arts, for example.
But I said that there were two reasons, and the second is that on top of all these things that make customization additions not necessarily easy, the developers might have decided that this additional effort is not actually worth the cost in time and money. You can easily look at the work that needs to be done and say that in addition to creating new enemy models, new maps, balancing damage, and so forth, adding in the option for Fire Mages to be Poison Mages is just not worth the extra work.
This is not an indefensible position, either. Most of the characters I play might have a handful of ability animations and such that I do not care for or wish were different, but those aren’t enough to actually make me play something else. While I would like to be able to change them, they aren’t dealbreakers. I can’t say that developers are wrong that it’s a lot of effort to presumably make some people (but not all) slightly happier without meaningfully moving the needle on overall play patterns.
But I also think that like almost everything, these ideas are actually moving targets, and more MMORPG designers should at least be considering the value of allowing players to customize their visuals. Sure, it’s not a dealbreaker, but it is a good thing. Good things accumulate.
Designing an MMO is hard. But writing about some top level ideas for designing one? That’s… also remarkably hard. But sometimes it’s fun to do just the same. Join Eliot Lefebvre in Design Mockumentas he brainstorms elevator pitches for MMO sequels, spinoffs, and the like for games that haven’t yet happened and most likely never will!
