Recently, we got a very fun podcast question from Merp asking if control/debuff archetypes in MMORPGs were dead. This is a good question! It’s such a good question that I immediately stole it for a column because it ties into so many different aspects of design, and it was followed up by a question about whether or not speedrunning is the natural end point of every MMORPG. Which is also a perfect followup question, and it makes me sad I can’t grade questions. You get an A, Merp. See me after class; I am going to give you a Dunkin Donuts gift card.
Of course, here’s the thing: The question is great in part because it is making a logical leap that is at once wrong and right, and it’s a natural one. The reality is that yes, speedrunning kind of is an inevitable end state, but it also doesn’t need to be antithetical to control archetypes. But hard control archetypes are dead… but they were always going to be, to an extent. They just died as a concept before balance got weird. And also it didn’t. Let’s go on a journey of hurting things.
In the older days of MMORPGs, while there were definitely roles, the idea of a single trinity was not nearly as universal. Final Fantasy XI, for example, had healers, tanks, pullers, debuffers, damage, and support as accepted community roles, and that wasn’t even getting into party-specific composition like wanting an off-tank if you had a Ninja tank or a Thief in the party (or both). Damage was a desirable quality, sure, but it was also seen as something that everyone in the party brought to some degree. EverQuest famously inspired what some of us like to call the classic trinity of healer, tank, and crowd controller; you weren’t going to get far in content without at least a Cleric and an Enchanter, but as in FFXI, if you could grab a mana battery or buffer/debuffer, all the better – there might even have been space for some DPS after that. And even before EQ, Ultima Online required a prospective bard to devote as many as 400 skill points – more than half a character – to power just three CC and debuff abilities: a calm, a provoke, and a debuff.
This makes a certain amount of sense from a game design perspective, too, because the reality of combat in video games is just kind of built that way. You want to reduce the enemy to zero health without being reduced to zero health yourself. The point of control/debuff archetypes is clearly to reduce the incoming damage and increase the outgoing damage through various debuffs, thereby tilting the scales further. City of Heroes made this so explicit that an entire archetype (Controllers) is named after this exact archetype!
So what went wrong? Why did these archetypes go away? Well… they didn’t completely, but they got dealt a pretty serious blow because Blizzard’s design team didn’t like them. But it’s not just because of that.
Let me be clear about something: I find that there’s a pretty strong tendency for people to blame launch World of Warcraft for a lot of things, and most of those things are just wrong, but this is one of the times when it’s pretty clearly just true. When the game dialed in hard on the idea of healer, tank, and damage as the three roles people needed to fill, that was always going to have a big impact. But I also think this gets overstated to an extent because there’s an assumption that, say, control characters just naturally fare badly in any game wherein soloing is expected.
That isn’t true. It just isn’t. Again, looking at CoH, that game loves and has always loved soloing, and it launched with a control archetype! You can solo with these archetypes just fine, albeit significantly slower than most other archetypes. The problem isn’t that control (or, by extension, support) cannot be made, somehow, to solo effectively. The problem is that control is always tricky to balance.
See, remember what I said before about how combat is built? At the end of the day, it’s always a tug of war between how fast the enemy drops vs. how fast your health drops. Increasing your power is ultimately going to be about improving some element of those variables. Control archetypes as a concept are meant to push that boundary, but eventually you have to do one of two things to make a control archetype vital: Either you have to keep the value of its debuffs/control high enough that power increases don’t push it out, or you make the role outright mandatory.
The latter is also a band-aid solution. Sure, you can make sure that no enemy can die unless it suffers from Mike’s Debuff (damn it, Mike), but that’s just going to make people bias toward the most damaging build that can apply Mike’s Debuff.
Combine all of that with an increased emphasis on fights against enemies that get to do things and you start to see the problem. Sure, it makes sense on paper to have a class in FFXI that can apply Slow and Paralyze and Blind so that the boss periodically gets interrupted mid-action and never hits, but if you want the boss to actually act and force players to respond to mechanics… well, maybe you can’t Paralyze or Blind this boss. The two are at odds to a certain extent.
None of this is to say you can’t do it. There’s no reason you can’t have a damage-tilted control archetype that can hang just fine when total lockdown isn’t an option. But in those situations, when taking industry pressures into account, it kinda makes more sense to make a control-tilted damage archetype instead. Make the control the flavor instead of the main focus.
This ties into the question about speedrunning because at a certain level, yes, all of this is a concern of speedrunning. If it doesn’t matter how fast you’re killing things, who cares if bringing Controlly McControlface is technically slower? The problem is that in a broad sense, speedrunning is the natural end state just because once you’re no longer at risk of dying, “time to kill” is the only real variable left to tweak. It’s the same problem from another angle; unless you absolutely need a given debuff to solve the encounter, eventually it’s just easier to power through it, and if you absolutely need a given debuff, you’re going to optimize for the easiest path.
Can you still balance for control archetypes? Sure, of course you can. You can scale the damage of the control archetypes along with the debuffs to make it something that has a meaningful tradeoff. You can tweak debuffs so that they have a meaningful impact and are desirable even while still avoiding complete shutdowns of enemy mechanics. It’s not that any of these things is impossible to do; it’s that it is a lot of work to do that, and at a certain point it’s kind of easier to just not. The more boss-focused the game is, the sharper the problem.
It’s ultimately more straightforward to not do that and to focus on other aspects to make the game’s combat more engaging. And if you think about it, there is a logic to it. After all, a pull of six enemies is not inherently less interesting than a pull of three with three more locked in special crowd control shells that you can’t break or the party will wipe. The latter scenario involves more actions, but it isn’t inherently a more interesting encounter, just one with a different set of failure conditions.
Players are naturally going to do whatever they can to maximize success and minimize failure, and it’s always been hard to balance a category of gameplay that is definitionally off to one angle of that. It’s not even as if single-player games are immune to it; there are so many jokes about debuff spells in JRPGs being useless, for example, that I’ve been hearing them longer than I’ve been a legal adult. It’s possible to balance to keep them relevant, but that tension is always going to be there, and when a big industry powerhouse decides not to bother, others are going to follow suit.
Fortunately, games like CoH still exist. And sure, your Controller or Dominator may not be the optimal meta pick, but I have it on good authority (read: lived experience) that you can still join up in groups and have a good time. If you want something a little more recent, let me tell you about Guild Wars 2’s Mesmer. I hear fun things.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
