Iām certainly amused about the hypocrisy Iām about to unleash. Iāve criticized hardcore players at times for complaining about nerfs that only they seem to care about. As a midcore player of moderate skill, I find it fascinating that Free Realms managed to turn the tables on me. Now I get to play the role of the crotchety person that dislikes recent MMO changes.
For Free Realms, Decemberās update brought a large number of changes. One big swath of which was a full front-to-back combat reform. I can see what the developers where trying with the update and the casual, very young, ADD audience theyāve always seemed to be targeting. To some extent I believe they have succeeded, but Iāve never been in that weird demographic they want so Iām probably a poor judge here. On the other hand, as someone that ābeatā almost every aspect to the combat system that was, I donāt think the combat update was much of a progression towards anything of interest.
I feel even more hypocritical in defending the previous combat system. It was a a by-the-numbers āliteā version of MMOās D&D and Diku-derived traditional combat systems. I complained about its grind, and wondered aloud if perhaps they couldnāt have found a more original formula somewhereā¦ But it did its job service-ably and if they had just reduced the number of classes (another Diku-ism I find odd: quantity of classes over quality) or increased the number of experience-giving quests or even just increased the speed of experience then the grind wouldnāt have felt as onerous (to those OCD enough to wish to max level all of the classes, at least).
The new system focuses on zerg rushes of mobs and obvious spawners that need defeating. The skills are all nerfed to be more powerful, faster recharging, and just about entirely AoE across the board and traditional enemy-at-a-time targeting is dropped entirely. The total number of skills that a player may deal with in the heat of combat is reduced from five to two and a half. That half skill is a skill slot devoted to single pickup, random drop-based single use skills. The energy (mana) system is vastly simplified to a constant 100 bar regardless of level and only one of the two and a half skills use it (and use it fully). Thus energy management is mostly gone and the middle, most powerful skillās original recharge timer has basically been replaced with the energy bar. (Energy (mana) drops still exist, but they might as well be recharge timer boosts instead.) Between larger health bars, more allowed player respawns in combat zones, and seemingly faster recharge rates, thereās very little mandatory downtime. Overall combat instances feel a lot less like traditional, somewhat thoughtful dungeon crawls and feel like very fast paced, short sessions in some arcade beat āem up. (Which I guess was the goal.)
As far as I can tell theyāve removed what little strategy the āDiku liteā combat had and replaced it with a bad button masher. I particularly hate it because Iāve been playing so much Guild Wars lately that I donāt understand why they just didnāt auto-spam the first, fastest recharging skill and save players from button mashing finger cramps.
Theyāve further disincentivized grouping (which already had poor incentives to begin with). Players feel like unstoppable forces. I guess players trying to play higher level than their own instances might still see some need to group, but the developers even threw in new minimum level caps. Worse, for what should be a social game I think theyāve really blown it in theyāve really lost all social-critical downtime (āsocialization requires downtimeā). Combined with chat window updates that make it all but unusable, the non-stop combat seems to have once again drained the game of any interesting chat and socialization.
Anyway, thatās my crotchety report. I think Free Realms has just about proven that Iām too talented for it and its time to move on to other games. Iāve enjoyed my few minutes to be that guy that whines about nerfs and who knows when it will happen again.