Thanks for the feedback everyone, some really good comments and insight here. Appreciate it.
This sounds like something that you can forbid the player from casting again until the original spell's duration has run out.
That's another option - "toggleable" spells which can only be cast once, until you turn them off or they run out.
Not to mention that having a bunch of helpers all the time sounds ridiculously overpowered - unless, of course, they suck, or the game gets extremely hard later on.
I think one way of limiting stuff is to use a Dragon Age-style cap on the player's mana bar when an ability is active. If you have those dudes out fighting for you, fine - but you have, say, 50% less mana. This will stop the player from spamming other skills of course, which is what I think the real issue is - Blizzard want the player to constantly be using skills because pressing hotkeys is "more fun" than pressing the mouse button over and over (see MMO "hit the icons when they light up" mindset). Their big uber summoning spell doesn't fit into their system that otherwise encourages spamming, so cooldowns are the only way they can reconcile the two.
There is a major flaw with sea's article he doesn't discuss: What are cooldowns? If I can't fire my weapon, because it's reloading, that's also a cooldown. All kind of time restriction is a cooldown. Cooldowns have always been part of games, since 10.000 BC. And there is nothing wrong with that, because managing ressources is a good thing^tm. What you are talking about sea, are artificial cooldowns that don't exist, because the simulation tries to be realistic (i.e. reloading a gun) but because the developers simply state: You're not going to use this ability in the next 30 seconds. When I read the part about D3 I realized that the initial thought for this article was born while playing D3, amirite?
This is a really good distinction to bring up. In general, long animations serve the same purpose as a cooldown. There are a few distinctions which were pointed out in the article's own comments section by smarter people than me:
- Cooldowns are invisible to other players in a PvP context, unless of course you are somehow able to mentally keep track of when the other player last used an ability
- Animations, by contrast, are not invisible - if a player shoots and has to reload, we can see (and hear) that and use it to our advantage
- Cooldowns typically can't be interrupted (some exceptions apply, like perhaps if you level up, or have another skill or item that can reduce/eliminate cooldowns)
- Animations can often be interrupted and thus tend to be more "organic" - for example, when casting a spell I can choose to stop casting midway if I need to flee
- Cooldowns happen in the period in between using abilities
- Animations usually occur before using a skill or for a short period after
I'm sure there are more differences, but you get the idea.
A high level mage should have vast mana/magic resources at his hands, so the player can create magic combos and chains with time stop, fireballs, contingencys and such. The "aweshum" factor used to come from players spending their resources to create powefull tactics, but nowadays is just handed to you, like "summons aweshum barbarians".
This is another really good point. In more traditional RPGs, the "awesome factor" comes out of the player using spells and abilities effectively to devastating results. In MMO-inspired games (and to a degree other games with cooldowns, like action and strategy titles) the "awesome" is something that seems to be built into the game itself by the designers. As I mentioned in the article's comments, this is also similar to players having to "play as the designer intended" rather than experimenting and working creatively with a system for the best results - sure, you can get through Baldur's Gate spamming Magic Missile and a bunch of other direct damage spells, but the truly creative players can do some really impressive stuff and are rewarded for it.
And yeah, the article is quite poor. Why use DA2 as the example, instead of something halfway passable?
Because a) I'm familiar with it and b) talking about games with lots of problems is usually a lot more educational and interesting than talking about games that do everything well. I agree I could have used more positive examples in more detail, but I can't really think of a ton, to be honest.
