Thomas Mortensen at MMORPG wrote up an article discussing classes in MMOs. He immediately gets off on a wrong foot.

The MMORPG genre has changed a lot since the early days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online, but the games still relies on the basic classes introduced back then.

Pssst. Neither UO nor Meridian 59 HAD classes. Both were tankmagalicious.

The comments are hysterically biased against classes, unsurprisingly. A good example:

the skill system of “The Elder Scrolls” serie and it’s leveling system is the best I’ve seen.

The skill system of “The Elder Scrolls” series has consistently been the most broken, unbalanced RPG systems I’ve ever seen. In a single player game, this is fine – you can let your players become minor gods quite easily. It is, in fact, great fun. In a multiplayer environment, none of those systems would have come close to cutting the mustard.

There are certainly problems with classes, and I’m sure that this thread will get quite a few responses attacking them. But here are some of the advantages that classes bring to the table over freeform character building.

  • Easier to balance. It’s much easier to balance 10-20 strongly unique classes than an infinite realm of possibilities.
  • Stronger power differentiation. Yeah, you heard me. It’s much easier to, say, make powerful ‘from stealth’ attacks for a rogue class if you know that rogue class can’t also mix that with godlike healing or invulnerability tanking. If anyone can do anything, you’re forced to water down all the powers, and everyone ends up somewhat alike.
  • Stronger player differentiation. There were an infinite number of possible character builds in UO, SWG and M59, but all of them were dominated by ‘flavor of the month’ builds that completely overshadowed all of the flexibility players could have. There was tons of variety, but truly ‘competitive’ builds tended to be quite limited.
  • Easier to fill parties. It is tremendously easier to say “Need a level 40 cleric” than to say “Need someone with 95% healing, 95% buffs, 95% resurrection and 95% anti-undead”. And much easier to make that information searchable on a ‘looking for group’ list.
  • Tactical transparency. Player vs. player is a much more interesting and tactical experience when you have some idea going into a fight the approximate limits of your opponents. Imagine playing WoW where anyone can blink, stealth, firestorm or invuln bubble. Fighting ceases to become tactical, and instead becomes pure twitch.

Does this mean I think a pure EQ/WoW-style class-based system is the way to go? Not necessarily. I think you can do a lot with combinatorial systems. The dual-class systems in TitanQuest and Guild Wars were interesting in that regard. City of Heroes also does something similar, with a primary class and a secondary class.

I also have quite a soft spot for Shadowbane’s system, where you can mix and match base and elder classes (so you could have, say, either a Rogue Ranger or a Fighter Ranger), and can further mix it up with disciplines to add capability (although, we probably should have toned down the depth and complexity of the system). Still, make no mistake about it – these are all class systems, designed specifically to constrain player choices.

Original comments thread is here.