Action Arcade MMO Combat

I used to think City of Heroes was unique. That no other game captured the essence of its fast mobile in-and-out combat, non-holy trinity reliance, with still-thrilling team synergy with a large team of 8 formed. (It’s questionable now if the same synergy applies to 4 teams of 8, but let’s not darken our discussion with that radical change just yet.)

Then Guild Wars 2 came along with their combat manifestos. And one begun to hope for another ray of light in the darkness of 1 2 1 2 3 macrospam holy trinity combat.

Time will tell if Guild Wars 2 lives up to its promises of combat focused on positioning, and less stress on the holy trinity specialized roles, but I’ve now found another game where -something- very non-MMO-y yet distinctly combat-y is going on.

(Puzzle Pirates and ATITD, while being really creative, don’t count on this front. Puzzle Pirates’ combat is a veneer over a game of puzzling success. ATITD has no combat system whatsoever.

Wurm Online and Eve Online win prizes for being the most boring as fuck, right click to autoattack and watch as it resolves combat ever – though of course your chance of success was predetermined by your gear/equipment loadout and choice to close and engage in combat in the first place. Presumably you could also disengage at a time of your choosing, and there’s strategy in that too, but really, it’s boring as fuck - click, watch, right-click menu, left-click, watch and pray.)

That game is, naturally, my new craze, Spiral Knights.

It has a distinctly unique kind of fighting strategy that is closer in style to certain Japanese console games (Zelda is the comparison used, but I honestly haven’t played it, so it is meaningless to me.)

It’s very very hard to describe. I don’t have the right comparison games.

Age of Conan stressed on action combat, in a reactive button pressing kind of way, where the goal is to first hit a key like normal MMO 1-9 hotkey combat,  and then pattern match the triggered sequence so that you do bonus uber damage (or the correct amount of non-gimpy damage, rather.) There was some positioning, but not more than commonly found in most third-person avatar MMOs where you have to move out of the fire, or laser beam, or cloud of poison or the big bosses’ cleave.

Other MMOs took a page off FPS combat. Some did it better than others. Tabula Rasa, Fallen Earth, Global Agenda and others of its ilk. Basically, point the mouse cursor, left click to shoot. Sometimes it’s hitscan, which means you hit automatically like FPSes as long as your aim is right. Sometimes they bring in the RPG element and roll to hit, even if you aimed correctly. Movement is FPS-style. Dodge and strafe so that other people’s aim is thrown off, while you can still pepper them full of holes. Take cover when needed. Positioning sometimes is copied from MMOs, where one medic healer stays far behind the big tanky object drawing fire with a big gun and pumps him full of green goodies (also known as health) and sometimes there is an engineer archetype which places turrets and things and thus has to pay a little more attention than average to the map and optimal placements.

Spiral Knights is not like that.

It is not Diablo combat either. In the sense that you do not hold  down left click (or was that right click) to automatically attack, running from place to place. (Or madly click click click on a moving object sprite – which makes use of a sort of track-the-object-with-the-mouse-cursor player minigame.) Nor do you have special combat abilities that are triggered off 1-9 hotkeys and customize skills via a build tree.

But it is sort of third person top-down combat, and it is action-RPG-y. Maybe action-arcade-y is the better word.

I’d liken it a bit closer to the top-down Alien Shooter genre, where your mouse cursor controls the direction of where your character looks, and left-click to shoot. Except guns are only one option in Spiral Knights, and most of the time, the mainstay weapon is the sword. Of course, there is flexibility in having both options open to you.

Except on top of that basic top down shooter action gameplay, you add another layer of preset combo attacks, which are triggered, not by hotkeys, not by a combo button press, but by equipping the right kind of gear to match your playstyle.

One sword may be medium speed, and pull you into mobs, while knocking mobs back. Another sword may be very fast, and do a double slash per click. Another still may be heavier hitting and slower per click.

There is only one special combo button. The hold to charge and release to attack. Champions Online did this to some extent. With varying degrees of success. The design intent behind the combo attack is still sound. Charging an attack means you give up immediate attacking power, so you have to pick the right time to do so. Champions failed to make full use of this though, because as far as I can recall, charging attacks rooted you. Which make it impossible to use unless you really lucked out on timing, or had a friendly tank attracting attention elsewhere. In Spiral Knights, you can charge and still dodge around. I think charging a gun slows you a bit, and charging a sword doesn’t. This added a layer of movement strategy I had not conceived of before.

I admit, the first time I tried Spiral Knights combat, I used the default keys. Movement is hold right click to move forward, move cursor (and knight facing) to run around. Attacking is left click. This led to a lot of accidental running into mobs, going click click click click madly like it was a Diablo clone, just sword slashing as fast as possible.

Then I got tired of running into poison thorns, mobs, and other shit on the ground like fire and sharp spikes. So I relooked at my controls and took ‘move forward’ off the right mouse button, and went back to WASD movement. This led to a bit more strategy in my movement, Alien Swarm and Shadowgrounds style, where one could dodge around mobs, not step into yucky things, and still left click to attack.

One additional bonus was that I could shield with more frequency, because it was now bound to my right-click. Hunting for a Z or X key meant I simply couldn’t hold it up quickly while moving with WASD keys. Shielding is essential for blocking attacks you can’t dodge, and for getting out of crowd situations, because the shield knocks back mobs at a certain point (which I haven’t clearly identified yet.)

Being able to dodge meant that one could time and control one’s sword swings with more finesse. One could even kite mobs by backpedaling and shooting. I was even starting to master dodging behind slow mobs and stabbing them in the back. Except I kept being dragged around by the sword every so often, seemingly unpredictably, which was very puzzling and sometimes infuriating, especially when sword swinging near spike traps.

While partied up with other players, I discovered the combo attack from watching others. Oh hey, you could charge up and glow bright yellow to do a special attack! Which from a standard sword happens to be a 360 degree swing with big knockback and damage. To my amazement, this player kited around a horde of mobs, charging up his sword and running into them every so often to unleash, before running the hell away again. This was crazy awesome to watch, because my prior solo tactic had been to pull out my gun and run screaming round and round in a circle kiting like an underequipped MMO hunter doing pathetic damage. This was sorta like watching a spines scrapper jump -close- to the mobs but not quite, spine burst, then run away over and over. (It works here because not all mobs do ranged damage, and they don’t autohit, they fire in arcade-like patterns.)

In the midst of reading up about desirable swords of higher star grade, it suddenly dawned on me that not only were they dissimilar in terms of power and elemental damage capacity and speed of attack, they had different combo attacks, and what’s more, a predictable basic attack pattern.

Really?! It didn’t seem that predictable to me on first glance. After some practice at the level depth of 1,  fighting the wussiest monsters ever, I reached another breakthrough. Turns out that my clicking was initially too irregular.

If I clicked with a regular rhythm quickly, the sword I was using attacks once, pulls you forward to attack twice, and pulls forward again to attack thrice, before the pattern stops. It was the irregular hack and slashing I was doing that caused the unpredictable pull forwards.

Suddenly it became yet another layer of strategy. If I just want to hit something and stay put, I run up to the mob, and click, and wait a half sec, before clicking again, and wait, and click. That becomes slash, slash, slash.

But if the mob is a little too out of the way, clickclickclick pulls me forward. The first hit will not hit the mob, but the second or third hit might. Presumably, you can even dance between mobs with this sort of playstyle, given the right sword and perfect timing and mouse aim.

My sword also knocks back while doing this pull forward thing. So something that originally made the beginner huff and pant like an overweight scrapper running to reach the mob he inadverdently knocked back because he hit the ‘wrong’ skill button in enthusiasm, can become a mob positioning knockback skill challenge. One can knock a mob in a corner, where it can’t run away from you. One can knock a mob away from you, if it’s getting way too crowded to breathe in here. One can presumably knock mobs to another player or away from, being helpful or a hindrance in context.

Besides the weapon fancifulness, the mobs themselves are arcade-like, in which they attack in predictable patterns. So there is a lot of pattern recognition involved, and reacting appropriately to that. It’s very atypical MMO combat, in other words.

To make my first time more interesting, I have to share that I first delved into Tier 2 during a time where Spiral Knights is bugged, and fire spewing enemies are using more advanced styles of attack than normal. This blew my mind when my prior experience with a turret was one shooting a dinky little yellow ball of flame, and then this flame turret shot a LONG THICK stream of flame. Screaming and shielding in shock, my desperate dodging revealed something even more mind blowing. The flames BOUNCED off walls, ricocheting back. (This is apparently something only Tier 3, or the last big bad boss Lord Vanaduke should be doing.) Things get really interesting when 8 flame turrets pop up in an arena room, or you meet a bunch of flamethrowing enemies like below: 

This is not my screenshot, but I think it captures the idea pretty well.

The only thing that Spiral Knights doesn't have, is clear cut class specialization and division of roles. Most knights work as a self-contained unit carrying a sword and a gun for both melee and ranged work. This is the standard soloist survival tactic.

I am going to presume that as we get closer and closer to Tier 3 and "endgame," and in organised guilds and people playing together at random times, the choice to give one's character a distinct specialist role such as bomber, or sword-user, or gun-user will emerge.

Thankfully, there are no such things as healers. Everyone heals themselves with a limited number of potions, picked up from the dungeon floor, or with hearts, also from the dungeon floor.