IcyWiz on Twitter shared her Beckett Magazine EQ2 code for a Ssraezha Observer’s Staff. I happily toko it and redeemed it on my EQ2 account, only then remembering my only casters on that account were island babies — characters I kept on the island for harvesting and crafting reasons and well, there was no reason to take them on. I spent a few hours this weekend leveling one of them, Tsuki, to 20, so she could wield the staff (it being an appearance slot item). The Timorous Deep newbie zone was its same old reliable experience machine and it didn’t take me more than maybe three hours to get through it. This weekend being a bonus experience weekend helped, too.
Tsuki was 22 when she finished all the quests in TD. Progressing further would involve hooking up to other experience treadmills until she ran out of levels at 90, at which point there is little to do but do it all over again.
Levels are funny things. What they really are is permission to use some content. You can go to the store and buy EQ2’s Sentinel’s Fate and install all the content in the game onto your hard drive, but just buying it does not give you permission to use it. That permission can only be gained by doing repetitious tasks.
John Archibald Wheeler, the famous physicist, once said that “time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” Levels are time, and levels are keeping you from doing everything all at once. Take away levels, and an MMO would become “Hello, new recruit! Here’s your sword and there’s the dragon. Have at it! Well done! Game over!”
That’s what we’ve all come to accept, anyway.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have experience mean just that — the player’s own experience dealing with unusual game situations? As players go through the game and gain more abilities and better gear, they bring more options to a situation, but otherwise, what’s to stop Bilbo from crawling into Smaug’s lair and playing riddles with a dragon? If Sam were the great elf warrior as the orcs in Cirith Ungol thought he was, instead of the hobbit with a magic sword and a glass phial filled with holy light he really was, the end might have been the same (Frodo rescued; orcs dead) but the means would have been different.
We’d have to set some ground rules in a no-levels world.
First, have monsters choose from a wide pool of abilities and behaviors, at least semi-randomly.
Second, accept the no-win scenario. There will be encounters that will be easily defeated and perhaps others that will have some combination of abilities that make it impossible to manage (unless, perhaps, the player is clever enough).
Third, if your newbie player wants to go take on the gods, let ’em. Maybe they’ll be able to talk their way into Asgard and steal Thor’s hammer (good luck lifting it!). Didn’t Jack end up tripping the giant?
There is a hero’s journey, and that journey has always been about resourcefulness and bravery. Modern MMOs have neither of those qualities; without them, how can we think of our characters as heroes in their worlds, instead of cogs in a merciless machine?
If we really want to make MMOs something we would be comfortable having our children play, they must become games in which thinking is a more valuable skill than hitting the “1” key.
17 thoughts on “Levels: What are they good for?”
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Traditionally levels were a crutch for the human dungeon master who use pen and paper to bring players together, to give them an appropriate challenge for their char level. Char development through levelling was slower than nowadays.
Nowadays they have become a divisive barrier for content access and are arbitrarily preventing players from playing together.
They also serve the function of progression, players do not get all abilities at once, but learn to use them and gain new ones as they progress. Ironically, players nowadays cannot get quickly enough to the END of the game, the ENDGAME where all are on the same level, only divided by gear/”gearscore”. This is also quite arbitrary, as it is more about statistics than about the skill of the player in question.
But computers can handle so much more statistics than a human dungeon master at once – easily. More and more game companies experiment with with “difficulty” settings and mob “scaling” at the moment. They just try hard and still do not match that what a decent dungeon master could: put up a challenge for the party appropriate to their level and abilities.
We can make do without levels. We are even better off without them. There will be tougher encounters in the world, there will be easier ones, sure. No longer every world would be neatly divided in zones that we can easily defeat, following the unholy MMO rule of the lowest common denominator, aka even a dumb person should have no problems to progress without trying too hard.
Guild Wars 2 could do it. No idea if they pull it off. But skill based progression – gather new “skills” to use as you progress at max level (which could easily be NO LEVEL) and honing your player abilities and strategies, some becoming only possible through acquiring new skills, this can work.
There would be a whole world to explore. “Events” could centralize and focus players in certain areas of interest. There would be more possible content for players, not just the final areas and the latest dungeon holes of the latest expansion.
We are already in this stage. Skip the levelling game – it is great fun, but people apparently really want to avoid it at all costs, how embarrassing. Then play the endgame, lots of effort for ever diminishing gear or vanity item progression.
So yeah, we can make do without levels. We are already in a time where “levels” are either superfluous or annoying. The traditional thrill of progression can be realized without level barriers.
Interesting thoughts. To Longasc it sounds like you’ve described a traditional sandbox, with the different skills. The problem is that those skill levels are the same as “gearscore”. If some people are going to go fight these really difficult mobs, and you just started, they aren’t going to bring you anyway, just like regular levels, only a little less restrictive.
As for no levels period, the problem might be that it’s hard to keep people around when there is no sense of progression for their effort. You’d have to have more and more tiers of gear for that feeling, but then that would provide another barrier to entry because eventually people would say “We’re going to fight these guys, PST if you have Tier 45 gear only!” because players will always choose the easiest, fastest way to something even if it ruins the game for them and others.
You’ve just described Monster Hunter.
Isn’t Monster Hunter a single player RPG?
Such interesting thoughts. I remember talking to a friend about an alternative progression scheme where XP would be used to “purchase” skills and attributes (SA), with no real class distinctions limiting which SA are available, nor a particular level system other than the amount of XP spent (hello STO). He didn’t think it would be practical, as the choices would be too complex, and people would be frustrated by the system; or that people would still define SA a la “Elitist Jerks” and pigeonhole “classes” or roles. I never played Tabula Rasa, but the leveling system seemed kind of like this, from what I read; where you started with a generic soldier character and specialized as you went.
What we are really talking about is a system that reflects reality in terms of the way we think we train in real life. Expertise is important. You wouldn’t expect a peewee soccer player to make it in the World Cup. River rapids, cliff faces and ski runs are rated for the expertise required to navigate them successfully. Of course, a game is compressed in almost every way, including the time it takes to become an “expert.” But is leveling not the way we train in real life? Martial arts have a colored belt system, where participants demonstrate certain skills and are certified to have achieved a higher level. We have levels in school all the way from kindergarten to twelfth grade (in the U.S.) and then levels in college (albeit only slightly less regimented). I like the way WoW refers to the levels as “seasons of adventure,” at least in the letter you get in-game when you hit 80.
Of course, I know my own skills as a player are much improved from when I first started playing WoW about four years ago. It takes much less time to level a lowbie toon than when I first played my hunter in June of 2006. And thankfully, this understanding of game mechanics translates to new games to one degree or another. The question then becomes: how do we make the leveling process less repetitive and more like true experience? And perhaps just as important especially in our STO fleet: how do we get characters of different level playing together so that each player has a meaningful experience in the encounters?
I love those two toons in the pic, BTW.
While it does have a single player mode, the online mode lets you play in groups of four, and that’s largely where the game’s real depth shows up.
Admittedly it’s not a persistant world setup, but the persistant world element is not strictly required in an MMORPG (Guild Wars, for instance)
Advancement ties almost entirely around gathering materials and crafting armor and weapons to increase the effectiveness of your attacks and reduce the damage you take from monsters, as well as other special skills that the armors give you, such as gaining additional effects from buff items, being able to use certain items faster, or suffering less or even negated impacts from monster pushbacks.
The online mode has a “Hunter Rank” system which requires a player to gather up points from performing quests, while every so often advancement in point stops and an “urgent quest” appears in the hall, and completion permits the character to advance to the next tier of difficulty in the quests, and to resume gaining points. In practice, players should forget about the points and just do whatever quest tickles the fancy of the group, or whatever has the target one specifically desires to gain materials from.
Monster Hunter, played online, has most, if not all, of the requirements of an MMORPG. The fact that it has a single player mode is the consequence of a design that does not need to bias against the solo player, which one finds in nearly every persistant world MMO anyway.
I think your seeing a flaw in leveling because you kind of think everything there in the game is for your benefit.
No its not. Levels/repeatitive activities are there for the companies benefit. It’s there to stretch out your subscription time.
I mean, gah! Have you playing all the time with this impression you have this whole game world just for your benefit and perusal?
Any new model has to forfil both the player and the subscription companies needs (or become like guild wars, a one off purchase).
Personally I think something like this “Kill three orcs. In two days of real time after compleating it, you will become level 20. Or after the first three you can grind orcs to get to level 20 faster if you want (it’ll take roughly three hours – weve padded it out to that time)” works out better.
It’s transparently about subscription time, and perhaps would be shocking and horrible to people who haven’t, for the many hundreds of hours they have played, realised the bulk of those hundreds of hours were for padding out subscription time.
Tipa said:
“Second, accept the no-win scenario. There will be encounters that will be easily defeated and perhaps others that will have some combination of abilities that make it impossible to manage (unless, perhaps, the player is clever enough).
Third, if your newbie player wants to go take on the gods, let ‘em. Maybe they’ll be able to talk their way into Asgard and steal Thor’s hammer (good luck lifting it!). Didn’t Jack end up tripping the giant?”
If you’ve seen Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, NO one likes the “Kobayashi Maru” test. Granted, it IS a “test of character” but it’s only given once to see how you’d react in a “no-win” scenario. No one (well unless you were a glutton for punishment) would want to repeat that test again and again KNOWING you cannot win. Eventually, you’d just walk away . . . Did Mathew Broderick teach us NOTHING in Wargames? If MMO companies make the only winning move “not to play at all” . . . they aren’t going to last very long.
People need to know there is a chance they can win. Yes, you said IF they are clever enough, allow them to beat it, but that, in and of itself, is not a “no-win” scenario. One can only lose so many times before getting bored and not wanting to play. Of course, everyone would ALSO get bored if they always WON every scenario without much thought or effort. AND, even if it WAS challenging, if you just started playing and you take on the gods and win (no matter how hard it was) . . . what do you do after that? Uhh . . . I have a quest to kill ten rats, wanna help with that? That’s the challenge with MMOs and the balance that levels bring.
Having levels is an in-game way to show that your character is improving and becoming stronger. We are playing a role, yes, but there needs to be some way to show the experience of your character. They can do things I, in my ordinary life, cannot do. Levels are a way to show how much my character, itself has learned and hopefully, along the way, the player’s “experience” allows them to take any new abilities of the character, as well as old ones, and use them in new and interesting ways. As was said, you CAN make a “skill-based” game, in fact, I used to play one that was HIGHLY skill based: DragonRealms (a text-based MUD). EVERYthing there was skill based and, though there were levels, you could only level based on your primary skill set and all levelling REALLY did was grant you more points to increase your base stats. But even there, it was just a long, slow, and often painful grind to level up each skill you needed to handle different situations.
I DO understand your longing for “something more” though. But a system you (and I) desire would almost have to be tailor made for each and every individual. Unfortunately, these companies need to make a “generic” system to cater to the most people out there with as minimum effort possible (not that they don’t spend thousands of hours making content, but I’m sure they’d rather spend thousands of hours than millions). It all (and always) boils down to the bottom line: profit. If these games are not making a profit, they won’t survive. And some of them I’d really hate to see go (I’m looking at you, Hellgate: London) . . .
Callan beat me to it.
It’s worth noting that Guild Wars and offline RPGs still have levels, though. They can be useful as a pacing mechanic if the story the devs are trying to tell is important.
If the game is about the stories that *players* tell, though, that changes a lot of things.
…and now you’ve got me wondering when exactly in the LOTRO novels one might find the “dings” for the characters. Is it terrible of me to think of rereading the book and arbitrarily assigning new levels to characters as they adventure? Say, Sam dings 50 after chasing those orcs?
…now I feel dirty.
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I don’t think so — a collection style mechanic (like Magic the Gathering, or Guild Wars skills) could allow for constant character growth without the drawbacks of leveling (such as forcing new players to repeat the same activity over and over for a month before they can catch up with and play with the rest of the server).
Well, it’s not about the players story – it’s about the company soaking in subscription time.
But lets say it’s a guild wars model/once off purchase.
Okay, if you really want to write a story, you don’t write stories by moving a little figure around a landscape – particularly a landscape someone else made entirely. You need actual authorship tools – the ability to write out scenes. You don’t need purple swords.
Granted you might want to write out most of the scene then start playing it out within the scene you’ve made, rather than write every bit.
But even then making a story first and foremost isn’t about collecting kewl gear. Or atleast look at the long, long history of story writing in human history – point out the ones where the only events are gear collecting. None, I’d say. You have to let go of gear collecting or realise what your calling story has nothing to do with stories as they have been made through human history.
You not only ditch levels, you ditch a any priority on collecting shiny objects.
If you are looking to mimic extent real life to some, you can’t just disregard collecting shiny objects. That is a very real world event that many people do every day and boast about it. Getting a hold of that big screen TV that just happens to be bigger than your friend’s, owning a 1st edition comic, etc. Some people even let that define them in the real world more than their personality. Getting rid of levels will not eliminate that need.
In terms of story, I like the idea of growing skills based on use / experience that then allows you to use better equipment more effectively (kind of like the Morrowwind series if I recall). You could even add a bonus for how long a person has used a given item. For example, they’ve been using a certain sword for a long time and are very comfortable with it. They understand the weapon’s strengths and limitations. Then they get a brand new sword and lose their bonus as they have to refamiliarize themselves with the weight and feel of the weapon. This mimics some of real life because you hear all the time how baseball players, golfers, or whoever prefer certain bats or clubs over others.
Just a thought.
I just like levelling up. Doesn’t really need the character to get stronger or more powerful. I just like seeing the number change. My favorite progression system is still original EQ, where you only got new spells every 5 levels or, for most melee characters, a lot farther apart than that.
I hope it goes without saying that what my character does while levelling up has to be entertaining, too. Preferably entertaining enough that I’d do it even if there weren’t any levels. But having that little number change adds some value in itself.
I think there’s plenty of room for games/MMOs that don’t involve levelling up, and I might even enjoy some of them, but levelling is just plain fun so why do without it?
OMG, I just found out age of conan gives you a level up every four real life days, which completely matches my suggestion from above!
They need to extend that to all the other games were leveling has just become a pointless grind designed not to give y ou fun things to do, but to slow you down.