Editorial Gamasutra against Ability Cooldowns

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Who cares wether it's realistic or not? I would rahter go for tomato point system as long as it would be fun. Using a cooldown system is repetative, boaring and timewasting. I know threre are a lot of simple-minded people who play games and get the feeling of genius when working out that using your superuber abilaty and then running away from mosnters is the best tactic... but what about the rest of us? gona go and bash my head against the wall - this is bound to help!
Looks like the only way to play the new diablo would be while stoned... hope it's legal where you come from. Bliz should rename the game to Stoniablo.

What about cooldowns paired with a MOTB-style spirit meter, or hunger system, or other time-based resource?

Also, if your spells are more creative than "do damage" there's tons of situations where you need cooldowns for spells. Even big heals and revives wouldn't really work without some sort of cooldown or resting system. Just look at DOTA style games.

I don't, but a lot of people here seem to care.

Cooldowns are to gameplay what Crates & Barrels are to Art Design.

There are some important differences between "power up" and cooldown that makes to former more fun, in my opinion. For example, looking at something like BG, you can only power up one spell at a time, AND you can chose to abort it. This is not only more intuitive (your mage needs to chant the spell, but can stop doing so), it also has some interesting tactical implications, like that you're telegraphing attempting to do something, and have to protect your mage while he's casting. As mentioned before, cooldowns often lead to "burn off all abilities, then kite around and wait until one is available again".

Wow... the way all of the cooldown lovers put their fingers in ears and scream blablalbbla is...
100+ posts in and all they can come up with has been said in the first few posts. My guess this is some sort of IQ test system where all the retargs defend the retard system.

For doing what? Pointing on a specific design flaw of many games and explaining it by example? I think that's a pretty good attempt at changing games for the better, even if it's not the biggest problem that's highlighted.

Who's retarded again?

So what? The problem stays the same - outside of combat cooldowns have no mechanical effect - they merely annoy the player.

In combat cooldowns can only work if they are at most as long as the longest combat and not always even that - if the battle dynamics relies on cooldowns too much it just means that running around like a retard turns into a bizarre equivalent of FPS popamole. Even if they do work, they just work like regenerating mana bar, but with only one spell worth of mana, less timing and no resource management.

Plus, most of the time cooldowns are just moronic and don't make sense.

Criticizing why cooldown timers suck is difficult unless you explain within the context of the entire system they reside in. A pretty recent terrible example of cooldown timers in videogames has to be Dragon Age: Origins. Cooldowns are lazy limitation enforced on the player, and are most likely a result of the decreased need for resource management in modern games. In DA:O, mana consumption was never much of a problem for me due to the fact it would regenerate between combat encounters. Players could make incredibly risky decisions like bombing their own party with AOEs, and spam high mana spells with little long term penalty. The only thing the developers could really do to prevent players from trivializing encounters was imposing cooldowns on the awesum button abilities(cone of cold=I win). While this system should allow for the developers to throw continuously difficult, well designed battles consistently at the player due to the lack of resource management, most opt to take the "traditional approach" of attempting to whittle the player down with a lot of trash mobs. This is contrary to the design, and makes regular encounters an exercise in patience than conservation/strategy.

Hell they could have just gotten rid of the cooldown system and removed the players ability to regenerate health/mana, and it would have been a better game if the right tweaks were made(spell cost, mana/energy pools, etc.). Cooldowns just seem like an un-nessecary addition when there are far more effective means of limiting the player. Another problem I have with these cooldowns is how the values are decided. It would be much harder to balance a game around how much time it takes to complete certain tasks/battles/dungeons versus mana pool/cost relative to dungeon length and difficulty.

Agreed. But cooldowns is still a boring and cop-out mechanic when used as statically as in WoW or D3.

D2 is a fine ARPG, but it also didn't have cooldowns. Not saying it would've been pure shit with them, but it would've been less fun.

Cooldowns are an MMO mechanic, where they do their job quite well. Coordinating cooldowns between individual players is a tactical consideration. They don't work nearly as well in SP games that have much better systems at their disposal.

Makes no sense to me to write a long piece about how cooldowns suck and then cite DA2 as an example, it just prompts "well, duh" replies.

I realise this is nitpicking, but as I mentioned previously, Diablo 2 DOES have cooldowns.

Interesting. It's still very different from what is generally meant with cooldown, and I think you can see that. In D2:

1) "Cooldown" is tied to the monster being hittable, not the skill being castable.
2) Groups of skills share timers.
3) Delays are in fractions of seconds, not in many seconds or minutes.

In D2, it's a more or less invisible (and pretty complex) mechanic to improve balance/prevent abuse (I assume). You can still use the skills you want in quick succession.

The fact that I didn't even know about it kind of proves the point that it's very different from D3 or WoW.

Some spells have a more typical cooldown. Still, never more than several seconds. But the NextDelay thing is a pretty interesting mechanic, yes. In any event it seems they placed a bit more thought into it than they're doing now.

Yes, it's a nice system, and they could even make it longer using some a animations or energy concentrations as cover-ups. Definetly a great example on how the fault is not on cooldowns, but on lazy developers chosing the easy route and poorly implementing them.

Yeah. I guess the difference between our opinions is that I have a more narrow definition of "cooldown", including the long durations with visible timer, one timer per spell, etc. Obviously I'm not against animations or delays of all kinds.

What was the first RPG to have ability cooldowns?

That's a fantastic question. As we commonly define, my guess is a MMO...the first time I saw them was in Lineage 2 IIRC (2003)...but is definetly older.

I know they were in Everquest (1999), e.g. kick, shield bash, backstab, etc.

Probably they were first implemented as an anti-lag measure, so players with faster connection woundn't be invincible spamming attacks....

That, or for balance. A party quickly raining down all their skills on a monster would require it to have tons of health for battles to last more than a few seconds (and probably huge attack power so they would have a chance of defeating the players before dying), but that would make the game unplayable if you aren't in a party.

Have some of the fundamentally anti-cooldown crowd played any DoTA-likes btw, and if you have, your thoughts on cooldowns and them?