I read this morning on Keen and Graev’s blog a complaint about the lack of class diversity in MMOs. Certainly I agree with this assessment with regards to WoW’s massive class homogenisation. You could also argue that Rift only has only 4 classes since all souls within a ‘calling’ have the same base mechanism (all mages have a ‘focus’ bar alongside mana).
Some games do still have diversity though, DDO and to a certain extent LoTRO do at least within those games. I’m not suggesting that these games have classes unique within the whole genre, which is one of Keen’s points in his blog entry (using EQ1 classes as the example). But at least within DDO many of the classes have a unique playstyle. Same situation with LoTRO – playing one class doesn’t prepare you well for playing another.
I notice that these two games have only passing support for PVP, certainly no PVP-ruleset servers for instance. I think that’s no coincidence as PVP class balancing is a very difficult job and many class nerfs have come from PVP balance issues in the past. This has been an issue in Rift if you follow the forums – PVE players complaining of regular class changes because of PVP imbalance.
GamingSF 