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Mabinogi: Design Innovation from Foreign Shores
By Cameron Sorden | March 18, 2008
I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I was intrigued by the new free-to-play game Mabinogi, by Nexon (the same guys who are famous for Maple Story). I thought that the game was done well enough that it deserved its own post, anyway. Mabinogi is one of the many free-to-play games imported from Asia, but the translation quality is much better than a lot of games I’ve tried and the gameplay feels like it has more direction and better tutorial steps than what’s considered the norm for imports. If you’ve ever tried to play an F2P (free-to-play) import, you know exactly what I mean.
The first thing I want to mention about this game is the most interesting thing about it: the combat system. If you’re a game designer, and especially if you’re an MMOG designer, you need to take an hour out of your schedule and go try out their combat system. Instead of the traditional system where the player and the monster race against each other to see who can deal more damage before going down, Mabinogi’s system is all about skillfully avoiding damage while dealing your opponent critical blows at opportune moments to win the fight. If you think about it, this is much more like what fighting actually is– preventing your opponent from hurting you until he gives you an opening to strike.
The way it works is that you wander around the world until you attack a monster or it attacks you and you both enter “combat mode.” You then engage in what’s basically a game of rock-paper-scissors, except that it’s possible to read your opponent’s next move. If you do it well and respond to their move quickly with the proper attack, you deflect their blow and hurt them. If you use the wrong skill, they either deflect your attack and hurt you or you both hurt each other. There’s a basic attack, a smash attack, a counter-attack, and a defensive move (with a few others thrown in to mix things up at advanced levels). The way that your opponent is moving gives you the clues to determine what attack they’re going to use, and the key is quickly using the appropriate counter. It’s very reminiscent of a casual game of some sort, and it’s a lot of fun. It may sound too “action-oriented” for your taste, but the pacing of the system is appropriate, and the knockback animations and attack effects are very cool. It feels like you’re actually in a pitched battle, skillfully dueling your opponent.
Most importantly, this system does two things which could help shake things up a bit in modern MMOGs. First, it provides a way for any class to effectively solo. Since the goal is playing well instead of doing damage quickly, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using a staff or a huge two-handed sword. Both of them will use their skills to deflect the blows of their opponents while hurting them. Second, it reduces the dependence on healing classes. If you turn the numbers race game into a skill game, being good at the combat game becomes more important than having a person who’s “good” at keeping your health bar full. Using this system, a traditional “heroic” battle where five PCs square off against five opponents becomes much more feasible. Since interrupts and knock-back play a large role in combat, ignoring opponents while you focus fire them down becomes a very bad way to fight– they’ll happily destroy you from behind while you try to take out their friends.
I think the basic premise of the combat system is absolutely brilliant, and needs to be adapted and used in more games. That said, I should talk about the rest of the game and the downsides a little bit now. First, the combat system as implemented in Mabinogi is very complicated to learn. It’s not well explained, the response window to use skills is short, and there aren’t a lot of places to practice it properly since failure means you die pretty quickly and have to run back from town to where you were fighting. I had to read two different guides just to start figuring out how to do it well (here and here).
Furthermore, I feel like Mabinogi suffers from the same problems that many imported MMOGs have. Despite having one of the best tutorials I’ve seen in an import, there are some design choices that just seem punishing. Obtaining new skills (many of which are critical for success in the combat game), for example, is a tedious and lengthy process which requires you to repeatedly talk to the various NPCs in town who provide you with skill information seemingly at random. Often they give you a key word that you need to go ask another NPC specifically about to receive training. Players who don’t realize this will miss critical skills. For example, I had no idea you actually had to pay the healer to heal you once in order to get her to teach you the first aid skill (your health restores painfully slowly outside of combat otherwise).
Some of the more fun skills you can get, like magic, require you to pay large sums of money up front at a specific location and return for daily “lessons” over the course of three in-game days before they even teach you the basic magic spell. You can’t fast-track the lessons (which are really meaningless lore) and you can’t do them at night (in-game). It’s a fairly large hassle.
The game also does a poor job of providing incremental rewards. Despite putting more than 15 hours of playtime into the game, I received only a single armor upgrade that I didn’t buy in a store. I tried to make my own armor via the crafting system, but it’s very complicated and requires a lot of materials to get any level of skill (not to mention failure is quite common). Other than leveling and gold rewards, there was almost nothing to keep me going, other than the fact that I thought the combat was really cool.
The game does have a lot of good things going for it too, to be fair. There’s a really neat composing and music system that lets you write and play your own songs, as well as trade them to other players. The world itself is vibrant, colorful, and beautiful. Players can make their own dungeons. The aging and rebirth system is interesting– you make a starting character whose age is between 10-17. That determines your stat growth while you level. Each week, your character ages by a year and receives some new training points. That happens every year until you become 25. After that, you need to use a rebirth card on your character, which basically reincarnates your avatar into a new, younger body that can be radically different than the old one (different gender, looks, whatever), but still maintains your levels and skills. You’ll need to do this a number of times to reach the maximum level.
Those things are great, but I don’t think it’s the game for me. There’s too much frustration and complexity for me to play it casually and the problems it has outweigh the fun, for me at least. However, I think it’s got some really cool ideas that designers need to check out and draw on. I would love to see a more forgiving, better polished version of their combat system adapted for a AAA MMOG. It’s just the breath of fresh air that the industry could use right now.
Topics: Random |
March 18th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Thanks for the writeup Cam. I wanted to check this game out but wasn’t sure if it was worth the time.
I’m not sure how long ago you tried Maple Story - but I just downloaded it yesterday and played it for a bit. The combat is horrible…but man it’s a good looking game and pretty fun for the short time I played it.
March 18th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
One thing that they don’t tell you is that you can only play from NA, so us Europeans are screwed >
March 19th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Initially when I saw the big eyed cutsey avatars and saw it was another f2p, I thought “no thanks”. But decided to give it a go yesterday. Surprisingly, the download and update went pretty quickly.
As you said the combat is a bit complicated to figure out. I had one quest to defeat some spider which was immune to every attack I had and I did absolutely no damage. Obviously, I’m missing some skill somewhere but still haven’t figured that one out. I didn’t know about paying the healer so thanks for that heads up.
Surprisingly, it’s not that bad of a game, just seems to be a lot of time spent training. Kind of neat seeing those birds come flying in to drop a quest on you though. But overall, I agree with you completely on its shortcomings. Can see myself becoming frustrated quite quickly.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:19 am
Nice write-up! Will you be doing more reviews of F2P games, Cameron?
March 19th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Only the ones I can stomach long enough to give a decent review to…
So far I’ve tried Perfect World, Rappelz, Flyff, and some other game I can’t remember, and none of them held my interest long enough to dig into.
We’ll see. I’m still looking for a game to play when not WoWing, so who knows?
March 19th, 2008 at 9:00 am
The rock-paper-scissors melee combat system reminds me a bit of Savage 2. While interesting in concept, i am looking forward to a better blending of the WoW autoattack and this counter-hit-miss style.
March 19th, 2008 at 9:00 am
Oh, and Aspen, if the quest you’re talking about is the one I’m thinking of, I believe that that spider just has so many HP that it looks like you’re not hurting it, but you can wear it down with patience. Use your smash skill when it defends for big damage.
March 19th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Cameron,
Yeah, totally get what you mean. I have the same problem as you. None of the ones I’ve tried has yet to keep me interested. Seems a lot of them have nice things and equally horrible things, heh.
A sense of nostalgia has made me scour The MUD Connector site (a site for listings of online text games, like some of us used to play back in the day or are still playing), trying to find a MUD to engage myself in. I enjoy graphical MMO games and whatnot, but my best gaming memories are still from my MUD-playing days … and now that I’m somewhat -blah- about most of the MMO games, I think I’m trying to recapture the magic by going back to basics.
Not sure if I’d ever be successful. I enjoy crafting, housing, and all that fluff stuff along with adventuring, so. *shrug* And I still have the odd problem of not being able to play a single-player game for long before a sense of ‘Erm…what am I doing here alone?’ sets in.