In defense of tab-targeting: MMO devs have been trying to put dodge rolls in their games for 10+ years to avoid WoW, and it's never worked

I think a lot about trends in MMOs. Probably because I'm being paid to do just that, but also because I think the trends are just plain interesting; we've had a golden age where everyone was trying to make an MMO, tectonic shifts in the kind of things players want to do, and ever-changing social dynamics that keep this aged genre vivid and interesting.

One design shift I will never understand, however, is the bizarre affliction that struck MMO designers in the latter half of that 2010s-2020s golden age: The sudden and irrational belief that tab-targeting MMOs (or hotbar MMOs, depending on your accent) are old news, and that every MMO had to have some sort of action combat system in it.

It's similar to the strange pall that swept over RPGs, where turn-based games were believed to be poor craft, even though these past few years have more than proven them wrong. The only real difference is we've not had our Baldur's Gate 3 or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to prove that conventional "wisdom" wrong just yet.

But first, as I always like to do, let me get some definitions going. Don't look at me like that. I know you love it.

When I say "tab-targeting", I'm using it as shorthand for games where you use the tab key to target stuff—but it also has a bunch of other connotations. Traditionally, tab-target MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 have a whole bunch of other traits.

The main one is the hotbar: Instead of having a bunch of separate inputs—say, a light and a heavy attack—your character has an array of skills, spells, and abilities; Sometimes over 20 depending on your class/job, used for everything combat related. You assign these to keys, pick a target, and hit them in the right order.

Movement is typically deliberate. Enemies don't fire off rapid attacks you need to parry or evade—instead, they'll use telegraphed abilities you need to resolve like a puzzle. Difficulty is measured by how complicated these telegraphs are to process and avoid, from 'don't stand in the bad' to FF14's infamous Limit Cut.

Games like Guild Wars 2, Tera Online, Black Desert, New World, Wildstar, The Elder Scrolls Online—they all tried to shuffle away from this system to varying degrees, sometimes awkwardly trying to make a blend of action and tab-targeting styles. And some of them even did okay! I'm not coming here to say that action MMOs are inherently bad.

But they aren't inherently better, either. And they're all trying to solve a problem that never needed fixing.

Tick, tick, tick…

When you sit down to play D&D and roll Initiative for combat, you're doing so to fix a specific problem: Combat is incredibly stressful, it's where the rules are most dense, and if you just let people talk over each other then nobody has a good time. Ordering things into neat turns helps everything go down smooth.

MMOs, believe it or not, are similar—except for technical reasons, rather than getting your jerk friend Joe to shut up so you can cast Fireball like you wanted. See, MMOs, and online games in general, function on "ticks". A "tick rate" is how many times a second a server and a client communicate, measured in hertz.

An FPS game, for example, generally needs a tick rate of 60hz or higher, that's 60 updates a second. Any lower, and your inputs on the screen stop matching your inputs in the game, which feels goddamn terrible.

MMOs, however, need massive server infrastructures just to run. You need to process character information, positioning, ability usages, and countless other systems—and while internet speeds are getting faster, the MMOs of yesteryear had to figure out how to make games that would work with simply abysmal tickrates.

In comes the tab-targeting/hotbar MMO, which grew out of the soil of ingenuity by building those slow tick rates into their combat systems. Games like FF14 and WoW typically have something called a "global cooldown", which limits the amount of inputs you can smash into your keyboard—and by designing classes around those technical limitations, you suddenly turn a technical problem into skill expression.

Old School RuneScape isn't explicitly the kind of game I'm talking about—but it's a good example, because it has a shockingly slow tick rate of 0.6hz. That's just over two updates per second, quite literally 10 times slower than most modern FPS games. For the visual learners among you, the OSRS wiki actually has a great example with this cannon, which you can see turning in rhythm to that 0.6 tick rate.

This leads to a lot of fun tech. For example, "tick eating". Say you're about to get hit by a ranged attack which would kill you. The attack fires, the damage has been calculated, but the server won't apply it until the next tick. It also won't process the healing from your food until that happens. So if you scarf something down at the right moment, the game will knock your health down, heal you, and then go 'I guess they never died at all'.

In other words, if you're on five health, scarfing a fish at the right moment can get you through a 30-damage attack. You can quite literally eat your way to victory by playing to the game's rhythm.

That's the most extreme example, but there are lesser ones. FF14 has a pretty hefty global cooldown, but there are certain abilities you can weave in between that cooldown—usually two. When you have a good ping—Square has some animation lock problems that need to be fixed—this produces a satisfying rhythm, which I honestly prefer to rolling my face along my keyboard to use all my elementalist's abilities in Guild Wars 2.

Action MMOs, however, have to fight against this limitation. Until we've invented quantum internet or whatever, they will always have to compromise more on tick rate than your average FPS does—which means they're just never gonna feel as good as a dedicated singleplayer action game.

Simply put, it's like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole: You get more 'exciting' combat, sure, but you also get combat that's more prone to breaking entirely under the strain of an MMO server—and, as discussed, those limitations can produce tech that's just as fun to pull off! Speaking of…

I [do] feel like dancing, dancing

I want to make something clear: I am not some foggy-headed old sod who is allergic to action combat. Sekiro is my favourite soulslike game, and I've gone on record to defend parries. I will always be down for a rhythm game in disguise, I will always enjoy dodge-rolling. These things are good.

Which is why you can trust me when I say that tab-targeting, just like turn-based combat, isn't boring at all. It can be boring, sure—and I think most MMOs do a bad job of showing it off, given their propensity for difficulty slopes so gradual you'd be forgiven for thinking you're on solid ground. FF14's several dozen hours of 'hope you like pressing two buttons' makes a bad first impression.

But when you're doing that endgame content, MMO combat really starts to shine. The first half of that fun is the rotation: These can take many types and flavours. Maybe your character has a rigid, strict rotation you need to hit on-beat like a drummer. Or maybe your class has a lot of procs you need to react to like you're playing DDR.

Then you have the actual fight. When you're doing hardcore content, these fights demand your full attention—giving you complex tasks that, if damage weren't a thing, would be relatively straightforward. Instead, these fights want you to pat your belly and rub your head. You are required to split your brain in two—trying desperately to keep up your character's ideal scenario stable while the game does everything in its power to mess you up.

If character action games like Sekiro and Lies of P are secretly rhythm games in disguise, then MMOs are secretly a choreographed dance. Except someone's throwing rocks at you and screaming at you to apply more DoTs. Many whelps, handle it! I've lost track of the metaphor. The point is, it's fun.

There's no real truth to the idea that action combat is inherently superior—if you like it better, I'm totally with you, you're allowed to have your tastes. But the seeming belief that tab-targeting, hotbar-based MMOs are "bad" or "boring" has led to a complete stagnation in the genre.

Take Fellowship, for example. Fellowship isn't an MMO, but it pulls out the WoW-style tab-targeting combat into its own co-op PvE game—and its developers basically solved an issue that WoW's had for years with a straightforward UI design tweak.

Imagine a world where every developer wasn't trying to fix what isn't inherently broken, and instead played in the space that MMOs gave them. Mind, MMOs are a rare bug in the industry, in that you've got one game (World of Warcraft) hoovering up all the oxygen. I don't blame devs for trying to do something different.

But still, it's not like any of those WoW killers actually, y'know, killed WoW. And wouldn't games that build on the hotbar formula be better than awkwardly trying to jam a dodge roll into a sluggish tick rate? What kinds of ingenious solutions have we missed out on for fear of the big bad wolf?

Instead, we keep getting MMOs that're trying to convince you they're something else. Lean in, I say! Make that humble server tick work for you, not against you, and you might just wind up with a more interesting game.