Today I woke up to a rather distressed post by Syp, who is confuzzled about the recent Thief class in Guild Wars 2 being not the class he was expecting when invoking the iconic master of stealing and stabbity goodness. He admits a bit of difficulty in reconciling the two, seemingly clashing images.
I too was a bit surprised at the idea that Guild Wars 2′s Thief would be a dual pistol wielding bunch of blammity goodness, but then again, I have to applaud folks for coming up with classes that are new, interesting, or even an alternative look at a traditional class. We’re quite far from the old days of warriors, clerics, mages, and thieves, so I’d say anything that takes a different tack on things is definitely a refresher for the class itself. If there wasn’t a modern sort of take on these classes, pigeon-holing would be more of a problem than it is today. While deviating from the norm is a calculated risk, sometimes you end up with a couple of new hotness classes that people tend to love.
There’s a couple of outcomes from thinking of the box when it comes to your MMO classes. One is the hybrid. We’ve seen these applied to varying degrees of success in other MMOs (WoW’s multipurpose Druid, WAR’s melee healing Disciple, Guild Wars’ buffing, attacking Paragon) but the more than people have to play with in a hybrid, the more interesting the traditional class roles become in terms of dimensions. Sure, there’s a lot to balance when it comes to a class with a dual role and at times, you might even see it as a bit overpowered, but when it works, it works extremely well as a new choice for prospective players. The other is brand new classes – RIFT is perhaps the most recent example of people taking a class system and running with it to create different, interesting, and innovative builds that can work for what’s needed. Anything new and interesting that works, is discovered by the players, and is used to great effect is a potential template for a new class in another game down the line. It’s definitely something that lends itself towards taking a fresh look at what people want to play.
Still, I do think Syp does not need to worry as much – despite hybridization and the creation of new classes that seem to be a departure, most of the classes made do tend to have a core and archetype in the expected, traditional roles that people tend to put themselves in. There are elements of warriors, thieves, mages, and clerics in tons of other classes, and looking hard enough you can see the influence those archetypes have on the class that comes out. I think that we are all going to be understandably jarred at times like Syp has been, but I think once we’ve seen what’s fleshed out in a “new hotness” class, we’ll be believers, too.