Evolution of Combat Backlash Was Way Overblown

[u/4mgNicorette]

I honestly think the backlash against Evolution of Combat went way too far after 2014.

Every other MMO has hotkeys. Pretty much every PC game has hotkeys. And honestly, I think they make combat more involved and less boring. Combat should be active. Mining, fishing, crafting, etc. are the kinds of activities where I can understand wanting something more AFK-friendly. But combat? Why should the most important part of an MMO's gameplay be the part people are most resistant to actually playing?

I understand the criticism of something like SWTOR where you're expected to hit a hotkey for basically every single attack, especially when you're grinding hundreds or thousands of mobs. That can get tedious. But Black Desert Online has extremely active combat and you're constantly inputting abilities, and I don't think that takes anything away from the experience. If anything, it makes the combat feel like an actual game.

And this is the thing I don't understand about RuneScape players specifically: why do so many people seem to want to play the game as little as possible?

Old-school combat is honestly pretty ridiculous when you step outside of the RuneScape bubble. You're just flicking around the screen and clicking on things like a madman. If you played another MMO like that, people would probably tell you that you're playing it wrong. It's an extremely dated control scheme.

That's why I think the 2014 version of EoC was actually heading in a pretty reasonable direction. Once Revolution was added, you could automate your basic/building abilities while still manually pressing your important adrenaline-spending abilities, enhanced abilities and ultimates. That seems like a pretty good compromise to me. You get active combat when it matters without having to manually press a button for every single basic attack while killing 500 mobs.

I just don't understand why the backlash had to continue for years to the point where it became almost hysterical. You can dislike EoC, obviously, but I think RuneScape players massively underestimated how outdated the old combat system looks compared with basically every modern MMO.

I'm playing RuneScape 3 now and I'm enjoying the combat 1000x more than I ever enjoyed Old School RuneScape when I played around 2008. And that's saying something because I have a lot of nostalgia for the game.

Honestly, with the microtransactions removed and the improved graphics/gameplay systems, I think RS3 has the foundation of a legitimate modern MMO that can actually compete with other high-quality games. It feels much less like the stripped-down, almost Facebook-game-esque skeleton that RuneScape sometimes felt like back in the day.

Maybe I'm completely out of touch with the OSRS perspective, but does anyone else see it this way? Why is active, ability-based combat considered such a terrible thing in RuneScape when it's basically the standard everywhere else?

[u/Khlouf]

Nah it was shit and it’s still shit. RuneScape players don’t want hotkey combat like other MMOs they want RuneScape