Chicken before the Egg? Content before Combat systems?

It looks as though the devs at ArenaNet have been studying coop games and the results could be very good. No healers? No traditional tanks? Falling down instead of death? This sounds a lot more like a few recent FPS games than a holy-trinity laden MMORPG. Good.

I love how they’re shaking up the tried & tired formula. The big question: Can they pull it off? I doubt I’d be asking that question if there weren’t some glaring examples of other MMORPGs that attempted different combat mechanics and ended up falling back on the traditional holy trinity of Tank, Heal & DPS.

Champions Online tried to sideline healers and tanks, only to end up patching them back in. The problem was, they’d created content that was clearly designed the same way as any other Diku-inspired MMORPG. Understandable I suppose, since they were still tweaking their combat system right up until launch. They made much ballyhoo over shaking up the formula, but honestly they had it sitting right there on the bench waiting to get called back into the game if their plan-B failed.

Age of Conan did much the same. A unique combat system, refined right up to (and well after) launch, but content that didn’t match it. It was great in solo circumstances, you could totally imagine tanking by literally pushing back the enemy via full collision-detection. That fell down in groups as the mobs (bosses especially) adhered to the more familiar formula. The result? Combat that felt out of place with the rest of the game.

So the claim that support roles will be more cohesive with natural teamwork and assistance rather than forced roles of healing or tanking– This is something a lot of us have been waiting for in an MMORPG, but we’ve been disappointed so far. Developers have typically had a lack of foresight. Or more to the point: A lack of budget and time to implement truly different combat.

It’s this quote from Eric Flannum that gives me hope that ArenaNet just may have content they’ve created (or at least re-constructed) ~around~ these combat designs:

“One of the things we’re doing that I think we don’t see other companies doing as much, is we’re embracing the direction we’re taking. You can do it part-ways, or you can just go for it”

I sure hope they’ve planned this through– in the right order.