Ultimate Alliance 2

[Jonathan]

Played this at a friend's house. It's nice to play a coop beat-em-up, but I dunno if this is any better than any of the dozens of entries in the genre. Anyway I had fun playing it. It's worth noting you can take points out of any upgrade at any time and put them into something else.

One thing worth noting about this game is that it uses MMORPG cliches in the character diversity. There's tanks, dps, crowd control, nukers, etc. I am a little worried that these tropes are infecting other genres (pen 'n' paper, console games) because they're not that much fun, really, at the core. Or am I hopelessly behind the times and MMORPGs have keyed in on the true essence of fun?

[Jonathan]

I think some of the tanks even have a taunt.

[George]

Well, you have noting to worry about. D&D 4 doesn't have tanks. They have "defenders", whose role is to taunt their enemies and soak damage.

Most of these things existed long before MMORPGs. I remember tank being used to describe characters in Hero System back in the early 90's. And for that matter, MMOs themselves don't generally use those terms. It's the players that classify everything that way. I think the change is that MMOs created the communities where players gathered and popularized and formalized the vocabulary.

Although, now that I think about it, I wonder if the existence of a class taxonomy is hampering developer creativity. The D&D4 game designers seem to have chosen their pigeon-holes first, and then pounded classes into them. And maybe that's happening in single-player video games too.

[Jonathan]

I'm not talking about tough guys in front, squishy guys in back which has existed since the dawn of warfare. I'm talking about mechanics that punish the tough guy for doing any damage or anything at all except soaking up the most damage possible. Classic D&D relied on weapon attacks, mostly melée, for 90% of encounters plus magic for burst damage to win difficult encounters. This differs from MMO combat where you put a tank who might as well put his weapon in his sheath while he soaks up all the damage, the healer keeps the tank alive, and someone else puts out some dps.

To contrast, Eve has range but no aggro (PVP) and healing abilities work very differently. So most combat falls into: no combat healing at all; all units heal equally; or only self healing. You can in certain limited circumstances think about dedicated healers, but the cases where these are useful are restricted and the cases where they're deployed even more so.

[Jonathan]

Thinking about pigeon holes, there's no superhero in this game who can be on the front lines taking a beating and also do crowd control.