MedievaLands Forums

Another week has passed and I'm back with another post for Friday! This week I'd like to talk about character classes in Shadow of Yserbius. In this game, characters belong to a 'Guild', and a character's Guild changes their stats and limits what items the character can use. Are these Guilds 'classes'? Is Yserbius a class-based game? We might find an answer if we compare and contrast Yserbius with a different game from 1991 which is considered to be the progenitor of modern MMORPGs.

Yserbius has six Guilds in this game. These appear to be classes. The Yserbius manual notes that each Guild "indicates the career your character will follow" and "offers different initial skills and magic spells". A character's Guild sets the value of that character's initial and maximum attribute values, how quickly these attributes increase as the character levels up, which spells and skills that character gains automatically as they level up, and which items the character can use. In the game's dungeon, some doors only open for specific classes (in practice references to a character's class are very few and far between).

But compared to DikuMUD, another game released in 1991, Yserbius classes barely seem to matter. Examining this contrast that makes it seem as if Yserbius is not a class-based game at all!

DikuMUD is a contemporaneous multiplayer RPG, released in 1991, and which is widely considered to be the progenitor of modern MMORPGs. Yserbius and DikuMUD are very similar in many ways. Both games feature a dungeon composed of 'rooms' and a central 'respawn point' where players entered the game and socialized. Both games have immutable 'classes', and foc' on combat and defeating monsters for loot and experience points. Both games require players to return to the respawn point to level up their characters and unlock new abilities. And both have only a small number of quests, these being entirely hard-coded and not very repeatable.

While the game designs of Yserbius and DikuMUD are very similar in many ways, one area where they differ considerably is in their class systems. DikuMUD is said by game designers to be a "class-based RPG" where each class has a fundamentally different way of engaging in combat. Each of DikuMUD's four classes - fighter, healer, thief, and mage - had different attacks, different skills, different ways of imposing states like stun and paralyze, different 'stances' which changed what your character was doing in that moment, and different ways of "managing aggro" - that is, controlling which target a monster would attack. If these features sound familiar to you, it is because the combat in modern MMOs from EverQuest to World of Warcraft is very heavily inspired by DikuMUD's class-based game design. And compared to DikuMUD, Yserbius classes are not very different at all!

Quite the opposite in fact: by the mid to late game every character in Yserbius will have almost all, if not all, of the spells and skills in the game regardless of their choice of Guild. By the end of the game, the only difference the choice of Guild will have is the value of a character's attributes and whether that character was given enough spell points to gain maximum level in every spell. In short, the end result of the choice of Guild only determines a character's combat statistics - which are mechanically the same for every character, regardless of their chosen Guild.

The sequel to Yserbius, Fates of Twinion, made an effort to impose a more class-based design on the existing Yserbius codebase. In Twinion, a character's Guild has much more of an effect on what spells and skills you will learn. But still there are multiple ways to gain new spells and skills, and items available that will fill in the gaps where a particular spell or skill is missing.

The above gives rise to two questions.

First, is Yserbius a class-based game? Admittedly Yserbius has Guilds, which have thematic names like classes: "Barbarian", "Thief", "Cleric", and "Wizard". Guilds are immutable, like classes. The choice of guild limits the items a character can use and the maximum value of that character's attributes, like classes. But at the end of the day, because all the Guilds have the same combat abilities and thus fill the same role in combat: that of a combination fighter/magic caster. Whether a given character has higher or lower attributes or health/mana only changes the 'flavor' of fighter: Mages take more damage and can cast more spells before running out of Mana, where Barbarians take less damage and can cast fewer spells. Given that monster magic resistance ramps up in the deep depths of the dungeon and that everyone has easy access to some of the most important spells as scrolls, whether you're a good magic caster becomes less important. The end result of your choice of Guild is whether you're a good fighter. I do not think that Yserbius is a class-based game in the style of DikuMUD or modern MMORPGS.

Second - and perhaps the more interesting question - are there any opportunities to add more class-type differences to a Yserbius-style game? Would that take away from the existing game design (and the outcome where some Guild choices are just mechanically better than other Guilds). I have my thoughts.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the game forums!

I figured I would create a thread for responses to the news as Zane was requesting, hopefully this helps.

Anyway, my responses:

1: Is Yserbius a class-based game?: I'd initially say yes, and that I think was the original idea for the game at its inception, however as development progressed, it seems the game eventually moved to include all the skills and features of every class into the game. I'm not sure if that was the initial idea or not, as classes still have their individualized HP and Mana gain rates as well.

2: Is there anything that can be done to make the classes more unique?: Most definitely, I have a few ideas already off the top of my head. Bolstering Wizard's overall damage and spell success rate would be a good start; making Clerics even stronger with Defensive and Healing magic, giving Rangers bonus damage to attacking from the rear or attacking enemies in the rear row, giving Knights bonuses to overall physical defense, potentially parrying/countering? (Pg. 1)

Continuing from earlier on Question 2:

Giving Thieves a greater chance to find rarer, more valuable loot when pickpocketing as opposed to other classes. Allowing Barbarians to damage all units in a stack with a single attack rather than just going down the line of total HP (Make them more dangerous and useful for attacking an enemy stack as opposed to being single-target units all the time.)

These are just a few off the top of my head; I am not completely knowledgeable about what this game is capable of handling when it comes to complexity, but hopefully these ideas are a few that could be considered.

- Regi (Pg. 2)

Reginald! Thank you so much for your comments here. I hope you don't mind that I merged the thread you started with this one.

At the outset, everything you wrote could be implemented within the current design of the engine. At this moment, the engine doesn't really recognize classes except at character creation and when leveling up, which reflects the original game design. I enjoyed your thoughts on the original design, by the way. I think it would be interesting to talk to the original designers of this game.

I've thought about these ideas for the past few days. They all strike me as ideas that would make each class more fun to play, make the choice of a class meaningful, and would promote more diversity in party composition.

I have been loathe thus far to adjust the combat mechanics for this game - emphasizing instead a faithful recreation of the original experience. But I also recognize that the reason I have kept returning to this game is not because of a specific set of numbers or formulas...

... but rather because I enjoyed the community and the adventure fantasy. You are suggesting changes to the existing combat mechanics, but as I wrote in my original post, I think the combat mechanics as they currently exist are unbalanced.

In MedievaLands, as in the original game, there is a single best character class, a single best set of equipment. You could argue that this means there's a single "best" way to play. But given that characters differ mechanically only in their attributes, perhaps it is best stated that there is only one way to play, and your choice of class is only reflected in how well or poorly you'll be able to play.

And this, I think, gets to the heart of the ideas you've posted here: there is a real opportunity to add multiple reasons and ways to play. This is something that MedievaLands in its current iteration completely lacks. And maybe that is a good thing: it means the game as it currently stands is a gorgeous blank canvas for new ideas.

It is good to see at least that the suggestions I brought up are are least considerable; helping to better individualize the classes and eventually allow players to see an overall difference in gameplay, as well as differing options,can help lead to a more unique gaming experience.

I agree with Reginald's suggestions toward making Yserbius/Twinion a more class-based game, with specialities or mechanics in the Guilds that make choosing one a meaninigful choice and helping a player find a Guild that matches their playing style, so players that want to tank and dish physical damage can choose Knights or Barbarians, players that want to inflict status effects or attack at range could choose Rangers or Theives, players that want to primarily focus on healing and an impenetrable defense could choose Clerics, and those that want to rain damaging spells on their opponents would choose Wizards. That would give an incentive to players to party up with different types of players to try and work together against the dungeon's inhabitants and quests.

I believe the best way to make your choice of class/guild feel like it has an important impact is to make them distinct from each other in some way, as Reggie here has said. Right now, every class in the game can potentially learn the same spells and a lot of the same skills.

Within the limitations of the game engine, I think the best way would simply be to give the race and class combinations a larger impact on how the character grows in strength (not the stat Strength, just in general). Right now, our characters only grow in Dexterity, Health and Mana on each level up. If we introduced something like, say, a stat cap increase at certain milestone levels based on your race and your class, you would have a greater potential for build variety.

Of course, this would only be amplified if we had things like weapon types, enemy weaknesses and strengths, a spellpower stat similar to dexterity, and so on and so forth... But, I think a combination of the things suggested here in this thread would make for something truly great for the playstyle diversity of Yserbius AND Twinion!