The Daily Grind: Is crowd control in MMOs dead?
Crowd control used to be a major feature of MMO gameplay, so much that CC, not DPS, was considered the third element of the MMO holy trinity until World of Warcraft swept into the market in 2004 without a dedicated crowd-control class. Before that, crowd-control characters enjoyed an almost godlike status in MMORPGs. An EverQuest Enchanter was one class you never partied without, Dark Age of Camelot's RvR was infamous for its unbalanced zerg mezes, and City of Heroes embraced crowd control so closely that it named an entire archetype for it: the Controller.
Not only did WoW begin the trend of deleting pure crowd controllers from game rosters everywhere, it also downplayed the importance of crowd control in general, so much that many of WoW's modern dungeons have little to no trash that'd require control in the first place. It's dramatically different gameplay from the style of the aforementioned City of Heroes, which literally threw huge crowds of villains at you to control and subdue in order to make you feel heroic.
Are other modern games continuing the trend? Is crowd control, or at least crowd-control characters as we once knew them, dead? And are they a welcome casualty of the slow elimination of group-or-die MMO gameplay?
Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
