Variety - The spice of life

[Xaine]

One of the aspects of MMOs that concern me the most at the moment is the massive lack of variety. This never used to be the case:

Take a look at the last Planetside for example, the three Empires were different. Very different. The guns handled differently, as did the viechals. In some situation the MCG would beat the Jackhammer, and vice versa.

The difference between the AV weapons was great. Three really DIFFERENT weapons that made it interesting and cool to play around with.

Taking it further and using a universal example, WoW had faction restrictions of the Shaman and the Paladin and each class brought different stuff to the table.

Now, look at WoW today. The classes have been reduced and devolved so much that there are now about 5 different buffs in the entire game.

The whole industry seems to be moving towards this culture of homogenisation, because everyone is so shit scared of everything not being perfectly balanced, or terrified that one class might be slightly better. Fairly soon we're all going to be playing grey blobs, and as we level up we'll change colour to brown or a darker brown depending on which talent tree we go down.

I'm fairly certain Planetside 2 isn't going this way, but please dear god, we want DIFFERENT tanks for each faction, and different guns and things that actually make the game interesting.

Hopefully common pool will take care of this so the ES stuff will be truly unique, i'd just hate to see the game lose one of the things that made it great.