Discussion time: Are classic tab-target MMOs with loads of keybinds going out of style?
Overview & Key Takeaways
I can feel my inner old man weeping, but the times, they are a-changing.
Terminally Online
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This is Terminally Online:PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
Ah, the tab-target MMO—multiple glorious rows of action bars, dozens of abilities, spells, and skills to use, and the demand from the game designer to play your way through your rotation like a pianist, desperately contorting your fingers into all sorts of eldritch shapes just to stay in tune with your rotation while you try not to stand in the fire.
I'm talking about needing shift AND control modifiers to hit all my buttons. I'm talking using all of my mouse's additional real estate. I ask you this: if I'm not slowly developing carpal tunnel that'll come back to bite me in my late 30s, am I really gaming?
If you couldn't tell, I like the old MMO traditions. As a matter of fact, I've defended them on this very site before! But I can't quite shake the feeling that they're going out of style. Maybe it's just because my game of choice, Final Fantasy 14, is seriously thinning its amount of keybindings with the upcoming evolved mode which, let's face it, will probably be phasing out its "reborn" counterpart in a couple years' time.
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I was raised on Guild Wars 1, in the before times when only some MMOs had jump buttons. Despite my feverish nostalgia for that game, I am tired of skill hotbars and tab targeting! I never want to look at a crowd of cooldown timers again. I want to look up from the bottom 10% of my screen to see action and backflips. Heck, I want to play with a gamepad and I'm not sorry.
Even in newer entrants to the genre, no-one's really trying to capture and perfect that keyboard-turning rhythm of eld. Even Fellowship, which emulates WoW's Mythic+, isn't a fully-fledged MMO, but a shorn-down dungeon runner with a similar meta-structure to something like Darktide.
Which I think is a shame because, as Fellowship showed us, there's still innovation to be found. Still ways to make that two-dozen keybind, tab-targeting, classic MMO feeling all the slicker without so much as a dodge roll or a dedicated block button or a third-person-shooter camera angle in sight.
But what about you? Do you wish an MMO would try and have another swing at the kind of game that makes one of those multi-button mouses real appealing? Or is it being sent to a deservedly shallow grave? Head on down to the comments and let your loyalties be known. Or if you're feeling shy, here's a poll instead.
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