One of the problems with WoW-likes is that leveling is seen as a means to an end. That is, after a time, you reach max level, and the only way to get people to come back and level some more is by raising the level cap, at which time you have to make them grind for replacement gear and all that good stuff. This is particularly tiresome for raiders, who really just want to get started raiding again; for raiders, the time spent leveling is wasted time that could be spent learning new raids.
As the game ages, new players have ever more ground to cover to catch up, which really discourages people from trying some older games. The only choice the game developers have is to speed up the low level leveling process.
What if… you had a different level depending on the region you were in? Let’s say there’s four countries, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. Alpha is on the ocean, and its inhabitants are very adept with water and piercing weapons. The monsters in Alpha are built around the abilties learned in Alpha. As you gain levels in the country of Alpha, more of its dungeons and adventures open to you, and the more techniques you learn. The level cap is fairly low, level 20 or so.
The country of Beta is built in a swamp, and the monsters there wield and are weakened by disease powers. You gain levels there, same as Alpha. In Gamma, its pure magic and wooden weapons. In Delta, it’s fire and blades. Levels in Alpha mean nothing in Delta, though the abilities you learned in Alpha may be effective against Delta monsters.
Between the countries lies the wilderness. You cannot gain levels in the wilderness, everyone is level 1, the only difference being the skills learned and the gear acquired. All the monsters in the wilderness range from level 1 for the smallest to perhaps level 10 for the strongest.
New expansions could open new countries with new effects or combinations of others.
Any new player would be the equal — in level if not in skill or gear — to any other in the wilderness. If a guild was raiding the stuff in Alpha, the new player could focus on that country and be ready to raid in a week or two — even if the game was quite old, because you never raise the level cap, you just open up newer places to level. The path from new character to mastery in any one country does not take an unusual amount of time. To gain mastery in EVERY country will take awhile, but all old content is equally viable — forever.
Wilderness monsters could be weak to Beta and Gamma techniques but strong against Alpha, or entirely immune to Delta, or requiring a combination of all four countries’ techniques to bring down. Then country Epsilon is discovered; they do all their battles with misdirection. Everyone who is interested starts leveling in Epsilon techniques. A new player just starting the game starts in Epsilon too, shoulder to shoulder with old vets.
It’s a game that grows horizontally, but via levels. I wish I could remember who was writing about an analogy with Magic: the Gathering yesterday, and horizontal vs vertical games. This game would be a *diagonal* game. Time spent in the game gives you mastery of many more techniques, but any given technique is open to anyone to learn, given some time.
I’ve been thinking this over for awhile. It does give a progression to work through. There are as many new character progressions as there are countries, and every expansion brings a new one. No content is ever outgrown. New characters can adventure with old ones from the start without having to do any mentoring or sidekicking. Gear is still important — Alpha gear may not be very useful in Beta lands, but perhaps a crafter could take Alpha and Beta armor and make some Alphabeta (heh) gear from it. So there’s your crafting, which would run in parallel to adventuring, but also bring the countries together with crafting learned in the inter-country wilderness areas.
Poke holes in this for me, please.
10 thoughts on “Building an MMO around leveling? A new (to me) approach.”
Comments are closed.
I like the idea, in concept at least. Another possibility would be to offer continents that can be discovered by questing in multiple tier one lands.. That would add some vertical progression to go along with the horizontal.. It may defeat your purple.. But say Epsilon is discovered by a quest that takes part in Alpha, and is completed in Gamma.. A portal could then appear in the Wilderness to get you there. A sort of a “Once per world” kind of quest like Sleeper was supposed to be.. Having opened it, though, any new player could enter as well end level shoulder to shoulder with those who discovered it… I am also a fan of the idea of persistent player made changes in world.. I have yet to see a game that pulls it off, though..
purple? GAH! Another fail at skill: Proofread.. purple – purpose..
Its a fine concept, but how is it any different than the fact that in WoW where your levels don’t mean jack if you start to play on a new server. Taken even further, Horde levels mean nothing on an Alliance character. Your concept already is in games, it just isn’t one character. You are simply saying that every time you go somewhere new you have to restart, and I am not sure there is any benefit in that system for a player.
I understand you go a little deeper into it, but I think it completely is out of the realm of “levels” and fits a skill system better. I have always been dreaming about a Star Wars RPG where you actively have to travel the universe to find trainers of sorts. I played a MUD for a long time that had such a mechanic and it was interesting to have to pick up every few weeks and move your home, spaceship, and character to a new planet or location to begin your next skill which was unlocked by attaining another skill. All while avoiding perma death 😛
It’s an interesting concept, but I’m not sure why 1.) you say content would never be outgrown or 2.) how it really solves the problem of new characters playing with old ones better than mentoring does.
1.) I’m assuming the game will have item progression and better loot will be awarded as each new area is released. This would be the only way to keep people interested, really. So how does it keep the content from being outgrown if the raiders have all the abilities and loot they need from it? They would move on and have no desire to go back to the older raids, even if newer players were joining them that needed things from those raids. It would be especially annoying to them if some ability were absolutely crucial and they had to go back to Delta to raid to get their new guys this ability. That’s going right back to flagging from Planes of Power in EQ. Maybe I’m not fully understanding the concept though.
Looking at it from the perspective of a new player rather than a raider, If they can just focus their leveling on the specific area that is being raided by the guild they want to join, why would they bother with the previous zones? Though this is where I get confused, because you state that this would make it easier for the player to catch up to raiding, but also talk about how abilities gained in one zone might be useful in another one. It sounds like all that is happening is you’re cutting down leveling, meaning they could technically join in on these level 20 raids in Delta rather quickly, but they wouldn’t necessarily have the best abilities that other people who have been to other zones have. Eventually, I think guilds would simply require certain abilities to join and then you are right back where we are with the raiding scene today, only new guys have to gear up with “abilities” instead of actual gear.
It sounds nice being able to start in the new expansion zone Epsilon with the vets, but the same issues arise here. Are you penalized for not having the abilities from previous zones? If not, why would you ever go back to them? Just play from there on. I just don’t see how it keeps the old content alive.
2.) Even if everyone is the same level in the wilderness, if they don’t have good abilities it may not even matter. People would be forming groups saying “Must have xxx ability” and so on, similar to my example above. It sounds like your character would be defined by the different abilities and gear they have moreso than level, so I’m not sure how reducing everyone to the same level in this zone really matters.
You could design it to where even a level 1 with minor abilities is effective in a battle, but by doing so you would have to lessen the amount of power gained by the abilities that could be earned, and the players who spent more time on their character may feel cheated when that effort is not properly rewarded.
Heartless, it would only be similar to WoW and other games if the only perceived value of a character for a player was their “level”.
A better comparision would be the FFXI jobs. If I level to 30 as a red mage and then switch to the bard job, I would start from level 1 with bard if I have not leveled it before, but it is still the same character – same housing, same “guild”, same item storage – just a different skill set.
FFXI did not have any separation of areas like in this concept, but it would be a somewhat better comparision I think.
—
What if you remove your levels entirely as absolute entities and introduce an individual relative “level”?
Enemies/mobs would have a relative level (-1, 0, +1, +2) etc to the player characters. As a player character obtains skills in some area he/she may choose to change the relative level for that character, e.g. lower it one step. A +1 enemy becomes +2 to that character – it would still be the same relative level for other characters who have not changed their relative level.
Rewards would be modified accordingly, perhaps to get a greater chance for some drops and/or more points to “buy” skills or whatever it may be.
It made me think of GW, where it’s worth taking an existing character through and expansion to get new skills, and FFXI (for the reason you mention). Definitely an interesting concept.
Why not make a Star Trek game where as an ensign, you can take over the harmonics on the shields. By playing a little mini-game you can boost the shields while the captain is in battle. You can get your own ship, and have lower level players play as your support roles, phaser/torpedo shooters etc. The ship’s computer does this automatically if someone is AFK, and the Captain can kick you off the post if you’re a griefer/suck.
Levels wouldn’t exist, you’d have ranks if you were starfleet, or a wealth based system if you were a Ferengi, and your character would not be immortal. If you died in game no big deal, but after you get to a certain age your character would die or have a chance to retire. After your character dies/retires you’d pass down your legacy through some sort of crazy reincarnation mumbo jumbo that doesn’t make any sense so that you could start again with special skills/bonus/money as a different race.
And not all of the game would be killing stuff in the enterprise, why not have the game be during Deep Space 9’s war against the Dominion, and you could have a wow like horde/alliance faction thing. You’d be able to communicate, group with and spy etc.
What couldn’t you do in that Star Trek time frame?
I’d include trade, spy missions, grinding random beasties missions, diplomatic missions (think Mass Effect convo style but way more complex), farming, entertainment (like dancing/music in SWG) etc.
To address player effects on the environment, you could let players make mistakes, kill key characters, blow up stations, win/lose the war, etc and the game would reset for some bull reason at the end of the war, like someone shoots a torpedo at the wormhole and everyone gets sucked into a black hole which leads them to an alternate universe, 6 months in the past.
I don’t know, I have way more ideas in my head right now for a Star Trek mmorpg, but the amount of time spent on the project would be epic, along with the cost to develop it.
You almost described the approach Guild Wars takes to leveling. Your idea definitely has my vote 😉
Tipa,
http://soagcure.blogspot.com/2008/08/horizontal-vs-vertical-game-design.html
This is what I found on the topic. Was this the article you were refering too?