The name of Brian Holinka will very likely be familiar to MMORPG fans, primarily for his work as lead combat designer for World of Warcraft, so naturally it stands to reason that combat design would be one of his major foci as the gameplay design director for Fantastic Pixel Castle and its developing MMO Ghost and that it’s his main topic of discussion from the studio’s latest dev podcast.
As readers have already seen, prototyping is the name of the game for the MMO’s current development track, and that’s obviously where combat is right now, as Holinka and his team are trying to ensure combat feels familiar to MMO veterans without requiring players to “take a three-hour course” on the model.
Holinka also talks about making combat approachable – “not simple, not easy,” as he put it – with an approach that should be immediately recognizable to gamers of all types, while also considering bringing something new to combat. Holinka brings up action games as a main source of inspiration so long as they work well in an MMO, but he also admits he’s less sure of what those sources can actually bring to an MMO’s combat from a mechanical standpoint.
There’s also a bit of discussion about PvP, with Holinka first mentioning that development is focused on getting combat functional first before building PvP, so the discussion centers on “philosophical points” rather than hard design. That said, the team is considering making PvP more objective-based rather than a form of deathmatch, creating “blue zone” battlegrounds that feature randomly generated capture points, and offering a different reward track for PvP versus PvE.
The podcast also takes some time to talk about making sure “button presses feel good,” creating dynamism for combat visuals, control systems, trying to balance classes in order to encourage player power fantasies, and reminiscing about his time in Blizzard. The full podcast can be listened to below.
