The One Rule

[Slamz]

Pure open world pvp fails for too many reasons. The primary reason for this imo is that successful pvp boils down to numbers or ambush style game play, neither of which are that intellectually engaging.

I can't disagree with you enough there, especially for ambushes. Pistols at dawn, sir!

Ambush PvP is my favorite type, both sending and receiving. Being able to stalk someone and ambush them at exactly the wrong time and knowing that someone can be doing the same to me is a real thrill, and not having this was definitely a contributing factor in me quitting WAR. I think I would have lasted longer had we chosen a PvP server. (But in my defense(!) I was mislead by the dev team's videos into thinking the game would be almost entirely open PvP, especially in the last two tiers, which turned out to not be true.) This kind of ambushing was a huge part of my gameplay in EQ, Planetside and EVE, as well as in WOW at least until the instanced endgame basically took everyone out of the open field combat.

The fact that a level 80 can ambush level 30s and murder 20 of them with no risk is a failure of the game design, not a failure of ambushing as a concept.

"Blob combat" of masses versus masses I think is more a failure of a game system than anything else as well. Planetside and WW2O has some pretty good design decisions that greatly reduced the advantages of numbers and I think those designs could be carried forward to other games for the same effect.

The third reason pure open fails is because of the lack of a satisfactory resolution. Most open world encounters seem to go back and forth for hours without any score being kept. It definitely becomes a battle of attrition where attrition is brought on by boredom or real life obligation.

Here again I think you're arguing against poorly designed systems rather than the concept in general. "Open world PvP" isn't bad, but WOW and WAR open world PvP were bad implementations of it. Open world encounters in WOW/WAR go back and forth for hours with no score being kept because they simply didn't design anything to govern it.

Planetside had complexity in spawning rules and base design that kept open world PvP fun and interesting.
WW2O had a whole logistical sub-game that kept things balanced between two unbalanced teams.

WOW and WAR simply dropped you in a pit and said, "Okay go fight" and did nothing to mitigate the problems of blob vs blob warfare and they additionally created gear/level issues that made one player exponentially more powerful than another. EVE has this problem too, though it's less of an issue in EVE because the universe is so massive, so you can usually avoid the blobs and the overpowered people.


So in conclusion, I think Planetside stands as proof positive that you can design a fun open world PvP game.

Now if they could just not build it on top of a pretty shitty FPS engine, they'd really have something.