Boring Combat

I've been thinking about open worlds, still. The 'great' Ultimas (4-7) let you go anywhere in the outerworld right from the start. Only the dungeons were restrictive. I loved the exploration aspect of the game, and I remember (back when I was a kid and probably before I knew better) not hating the combat.

Yet it's strange to me that so many people played without companions, skipping through combat. If combat wasn't fun, then wouldn't the games have been better without it at all? In the earliest Ultimas, combat was really lame, and unpleasantly unbalanced. Food was also a major distraction. Why have these mechanics at all?

Ultima would have been an adventure series without combat. Without combat, there's no reason to level your character up. And, regardless, getting some of the best weapons reduced combat to an easy win -- which was generally considered a good thing, so that the players could just skip it that much more quickly.

That sounds very broken to me. Is tactical combat fun? X-Com was critically well-received. WoW has engaging combat. Diablo sold cubic assloads of copies. Combat can be fun, right? Hmm.

Usually the first few combat encounters are a chance to get used to the combat system; to figure out what's what, how you attack, where your hitpoint meter is, stuff like that. Then, hopefully, it starts getting more intricate. I think what happened with Ultima is that it never got more intricate. You could cast more spells, but the basics of combat were the same, and almost ... robotic. Attack, move into the right spot to attack, attack again. The end.

WoW is addictive more because of item rewards than because of its combat. Combat in Diablo wasn't challenging or deep but it wasn't boring. Toon Town combat was fun in its goofy, co-op way. Tank-healer-mage is a powerful design combo because it adds a lot of depth to combat (that isn't there in the Ultimas). WoW combat is often forgettably easy, but it could also be very challenging: hamstring this guy cuz he likes to run when he's low on health, burst through the last 20% of this other guy's health because he enrages, get ready to interrupt this other guy's healing spell or else the fight takes twice as long. These are simple mechanics and simple choices, but they're much more complex than "should I use the wimpy sling or the magic bow?", or even the non-choice of "should I step left so that I can attack that guy, or should I stay here and do nothing?"

The failure is obvious, but I'm not sure the solution is easy. Diablo and WoW both have very, very long level grinds. I don't think the random-drop-magic-item mechanic fits well in a 15-hour game. The lesson is that there needs to be more than two options in combat (Move and Default attack). I'm not sure how to do that tho. I don't really want to go with the JRPG solution. There's some richness in Ultima with the variety of spells but ... it feels like standard melee combat is just broken.