By Pentadact

The last post was figuring out what we all like in open world games; this one’s about how to make that stuff work together. Can you include it all in one game, and still avoid theme-park silliness and repetitive grinding? No, probably not, but the ideas that crop up when you try are interesting.

I had to pick a specific open world to talk about to prevent this from becoming hopelessly vague, so these are all ideas for how a game like Just Cause 2 could work. I chose that not because of any qualms with it, but because the first one was a classic example of a wonderful open world, gorgeous and fun to move around in, without much going on in it. The sequel’s even more inviting and even more fun to traverse, so it’s a great chassis to plug some cool ideas into.

This got long, so first I’ll summarise:

Give the player the option to set up camp in his favourite place, upgrade it with the features he wants, and liberate other areas he likes through a simple but high-level strategy game played out on the world map.

Split the main story into separate series of missions with a common theme – Sabotage, Assassination and Heroics. They have the appeal of categorised side-missions because you get to choose what kind of challenge you feel like taking on, but they’re unique and story-driven so they don’t wear thin.

Litter the world with obvious opportunities: a network of drug dealers with hugely varying prices that invite you to embark on your own travel missions, convoys carrying precious cargo that invite you to attack them, and rare assassination targets whose deaths will help you on the strategy map.

Thoughtfully place sets of collectibles that tell the story of long-dead agents like you as you collect them, encouraging you to explore, making the world feel like it has a history, and improving your character with the upgrades and unique weapons they left behind.

The first thing you do, after base-jumping into the island, meeting your handler and a short introductory mission, is choose where to set up camp. You pinpoint the precise location in-game – a secluded bay, a mountain top, a waterfall, the roof of a skyscraper – and a package is airdropped that unfolds itself into a tent. You can fast-travel there, lose your alert level, make a permanent save, or rest until a set time.

For every twenty or so locations you find – towns, islands, bases, villas, mountains, etc – you’re given the option of calling in another base of operations somewhere else.

When you get your first Revolutionary (explained next), you have to pick somewhere within a certain radius of a camp to place a comm antenna and laptop. You have to use this to issue orders on the strategic map.

You can also add other bits of equipment to any of your bases by stealing them from military bases and government facilities. These are marked with a special logo, and you can just tether one to a vehicle and drive off to rip it out. If you make it out of the area with the item intact and in tow, the agency airlifts it out and you can choose where to put it near one of your camps.

Camp bits:

Tent – pass time, save game (earned by exploring)
Laptop – strategise (unlocked by campaign)
Weapons locker – restock (stealable)
Camo net – store vehicle (stealable)
Anti-air - defense against pursuers (stealable)
Workbench – for upgrading kit (stealable)

The idea is to encourage the player to have a favourite place, and give him a way of making it significant. There aren’t many practical considerations: it doesn’t have to be near anything or easy to get to, since you can fast travel to it. So it gets you looking at the world aesthetically, something a world like Just Cause’s definitely warrants.

The extra features give an ongoing way to improve and customise your camps as you start to engage with more of the world, keeping them relevant, personal and distinct as you progress through the game.

After about five missions, you’ve stuck it to the man enough to inspire some of the locals to rebel – including a Revolutionary leader. On the map, you can send this guy to any region and he’ll Liberate it: he and his band of rebels battle any present military forces and will keep them out indefinitely, making the area a bustling and vibrant safe zone.

A few missions later, the country’s President sends an Officer to lock down the region next to his residence, putting it under Martial Law. Constant military presence, very low tolerance for misbehavior, shops, services and base camp fast-travel disabled. Each time you send out a Revolutionary, he’ll lock down more of the island in response.

If you’ve Liberated a region next to one under Martial Law, you can use your next Revolutionary to attack it. Your guy and his rebels invade, and the resident Officer emerges with his own troops. Chances of success are even, but you can join in the fight to make the odds much better. If you win and your Revolutionary survives, the region is Liberated. If both the Revolutionary and the Officer die, the region reverts to normal.

Each time you make a move on the strategic map – and the government makes one in response – you both get one new leader for every two neighbouring regions you control. So you want to keep your territories joined, and break up the enemy’s. You can pile more Revolutionaries into an already Liberated region and send them all to attack a neighbouring government territory at once, to ensure victory without having to show up in person.

The idea is to let you fight for areas you like with visible effect, to give regions strategic significance, to create a world that changes in response to your actions, and to give you something to think about while messing around. It gives a visual sense of what you’ve achieved, what you’re up against, and how each mission is getting you closer to your objective. And by linking in with Convoy and Target Opportunities, it gives those context and significance beyond fun things to do.

The actual rules of the game, particularly the reinforcement mechanic, work magnificently in the super-simple Flash game Dice Wars.

Your mission is to overthrow the President of this island state, which you go about in three different ways. These mission threads are separate, so you can alternate between them or just burn through one type that suits you.

Sabotage: A series of missions offered by your handler to cripple the local military by destroying their hardware and facilities, either strategically or with brute force. Missions typically have you taking on a large but not limitless force and culminate in the destruction of one vital asset. Eg. Fighting your way through fighter jets and boats to scuttle a battleship at sea.

Assassination: A series of missions given through dead drops by an Agency operative you never meet, to eliminate well-protected key personnel in the local military. Missions usually pit you against a vastly superior force but with a suggested way to avoid them. Eg. Hopping on top of a civilian passenger jet to fly over an island base with heavy anti-air, to drop in on a target there from above.

Heroics: A series of missions given by coded messages broadcast on the local radio, by an operative pretending to be a rebel to convince the locals there’s already an insurgency for them to join. Missions are about using carefully setting up then pulling off spectacular victories, and always have some optional bonus objective that’ll make your actions all the more inspiring to the populace. Eg. Stealing a government Death Squad’s ammo reserves the night before an attack, with the option to sneak in convincing blanks so they don’t realise until they open fire.

The idea is to give the player a clear choice of what kind of challenge he wants to take on, but without resorting to boilerplate template missions or fairground challenges. These are still story-driven campaigns of unique missions, you just get to pick what type you’re in the mood for – and even avoid some of your least favourites entirely.

Each mission series ties its jobs together into an overarching story about the atrocities the regime has committed, the corruption of its officials, and the few local heroes trying to undermine or expose it. You know your Agency wants to overthrow him partly to get their own preferred candidate in power, but since that entails overthrowing a true despot, you’re happy to oblige.

Near the end of each series, though, your work gets harder to rationalise. Destruction missions start to include facilities with hundreds of people inside, Assassinations shift from military to political targets, and the new leader your Heroics missions are promoting starts to show a darker side. The last mission in each firmly crosses the line, and you can both voice your concerns and refuse to do them without necessarily giving up the cause.

You’re after the President, and he’ll only leave the bunker beneath his mansion when he’s lost control of the island – when there are no regions left under Martial Law. That’s extremely hard to achieve: halfway through your missions the government starts locking down regions much faster than you can earn Revolutionaries. But completing any of the three mission threads gives you a major advantage.

Finishing the Sabotage missions deprives all Martial Law regions of hardware, meaning they can no longer invade your territories.

Completing all Assassinations means the government runs out of Officers, so the ones already on the map are all they’ll ever get.

And doing all the Heroics missions inspires the populace so much that you gain double the number of Revolutionaries each time you move.

With a good strategy and skillful fighting on the ground, it’s possible to win the game without completing any of the mission threads – though you’ll have to come close in at least two of them to earn enough Revolutionaries.

Finishing the game this way means you’ve avoided compromising yourself with any of the dubious final missions, so it unlocks a special Epilogue mission in which you can expose the new leader for the asshole he is, and instate one the local heroes you’ve encountered in the course of the missions – against your Agency’s orders.

Once you have freed the island of government control, the President uses every asset he has left to make a mad dash for the airport on the other side of the island. Three convoys of tanks and APCs, a squadron of attack helicopters and a fleet of gunboats all leave the palace area, and there’s no way of knowing which he’s in.

You have half an hour to do at least one of three options. You can destroy all convoys before they reach the airport, to make sure he’s dead. You can try to take back the runways: the government has their last aircraft carrier stationed off the coast there, shooting down rebel air support, scrambling fighter jets and sending in boats of troops. Or you can fight for the terminal building itself, taking control of the government’s anti-air and gun emplacements, and laying mines on the approaching roads to ensure the convoys will be destroyed on arrival.

The first is a very tough fight against vehicles, the second requires evasion and tactics, and the third mostly involves fighting a lot of infantry. None actually take half an hour, and failing doesn’t mean you have to restart, you just get a slightly different ending. But of course the player isn’t told that going in.

Dealers lurk in backalleys of major cities, huts in remote villages, villas in the middle of nowhere, boats in the middle of the ocean. Their prices for each of four or five narcotics vary by region: nearby dealers have similar values, distant ones massively different.

You can see how much dealers you’ve met are offering for what you have at a glance, on the map. But their prices fluctuate over time, so you have to move soon to get there while the price is high. They also change in response to your deals: sell a lot of cocaine and the price crashes in that area.

The legal status of your cargo and questionable ethics of trading it make a good excuse for why you can’t fast-travel while carrying any drugs: if you try, you’re offered the option of instantly dumping your stash with the nearest dealer for whatever their current price is. If you’re feeling ethical, you can buy up drugs just to destroy them at your camp. And if you’re feeling zealous, you can just kill the dealers: they’ll stay dead.

The idea is that this inspires the player to come up with his own travel missions, generated as a result of a changing system that will make different routes profitable at different times. Since the market evens out when he makes a big run, it’s not going to be lucrative to ‘grind’ trading for more than a few good deals every half hour or so, giving a natural motive to vary his activities. Embarking on a mission that was your own idea, for a reward that you’ve calculated, is much more satisfying than doing what you’re told.

You’ll sometimes see processions of vehicles of various types crossing the country – they’re always guarding something important, and you can always steal it.

Military motorcade: truck carrying weapons. Take out its escorts without destroying it and you can grab a rare weapon from it: a high-tech assault rifle, sniper rifle, missile or grenade launcher, or a powerful demolitions charge.

Police motorcade: well-guarded prisoner van. Free the prisoner safely for a free Revolutionary.

Boatorcade: (I don’t know the proper term, okay?) Well-guarded boats are carrying drugs. Nab them, and you’re free to sell them to any dealer.

Private Jet: if you spy one of these with the government flag on it, it’ll be a corrupt official fleeing the country with his cash. If you can board the plane in flight, you can choose to rob him instead of hijacking it. While you do so, though, the pilot panics and flies erratically, so you have to be ready to abort and take the controls if you’re in danger.

When a region’s under Martial Law, the Officer who locked it down is usually safe inside a building until it’s invaded by a Revolutionary. But rarely, they’ll leave and patrol the area with a team of elite soldiers. They’re tough and well protected, but if you can take one out before he gets back inside, Martial Law is ended.

The idea is to provide a rare chance to make a real difference with a relatively quick and fun type of challenge. Once a large number of regions have fallen under Martial Law, you could even patrol them with a sniper rifle, hunting Officers but staying within the law until you spy one.

I hate that term, because it encapsulates how tacky and incongruous these little scavenger hunts often feel in open worlds. But there’s definitely a large contingent of gamers who love them, and I think I’d be one of them if anyone ever did them well.

They need to fit with the fiction to feel appropriate (like Assassin’s Creed 2’s feathers), they need to improve your character to be truly worth hunting for (like Crackdown’s Agility Orbs), they need to include scraps of story to make the world feel rich (like Fallout 3’s characters), they need to include unique items to feel special (like Fallout 3’s items), and they need to be common enough that you feel there could be one just over the next ridge, nook, clearing or summit (like Fallout 3’s quests).

Here’s my idea:

Some foreign, some from your own agency, all rotting away in the most secluded and obscure parts of the islands. They’d be tough to find, except that you’ll occasionally see a coloured light flash. You’ll find it’s a Beacon, the device agents like you use to call in air support or mark targets, and this agent’s other kit will be scattered in the area. The various bits you might find are:

Beacon: its occasionally blinking light tips you off that there’s other stuff nearby
Tracker: usually close to the beacon, this small screen reveals all his other kit on your map.
Pistol: if he’s Agency, he’ll have a gun with some upgrades you can take – whether or not you’ve unlocked them.
Main weapon: These are often unique and powerful, and some even have one or two slots that can take the same upgrades your pistol can.
PDA: states his objective and any notes he took.
Phone: some agents record their conversations; you can play back his last.
Memory card: most agents keep some sensitive images with them: photos of a target, compromising pictures, facility blueprints, scans of incriminating documents.
Cash: some agents need to carry large quantities of it for their work. Others are just corrupt.
Drugs: ditto.
Corpse: dangling from a tree, crushed under a rock, half-buried in the desert, frozen in the foetal position in the snow, impaled on a branch, twisted at the bottom of a cliff – it usually gives you some idea how he died. If he’s Agency, his suit might have some upgrades you can use.

Types of agent:

Native: beacon light is green, they’ll have a main weapon but no Agency pistol or equipment. They’ll always have a PDA with some info on what they were up to, but usually no phone or memory card with full details.
Agency: red beacon, they’ll have an Agency pistol and there’ll always be at least some decent info on what their assignment was.
Foreign: beacon light is yellow, these are rare, unknown agents with little comprehensible info on them but exotic and powerful custom weapons.
Special: blue beacon, these could be any of the above three agent types, but they always have some major info on their PDA, Phone or Memory Card relating to the assassination of the last president.

The idea is that finding this stuff is a little adventure that tells a story, in the order you discover it. Most will be fairly simple stories: guy was chasing some drug dealers, drove his speedboat off a waterfall and buried it into the side of a mountain.

But some, the ones with phones, tell the stories of people who shaped the history of the place. Finding all of these pieces together a subplot about your Agency putting the current president in power in the first place, by ruthless means.

Finding this enables a special Epilogue mission after the main game is complete, to undermine the new regime before it gets started and put a local hero in power.

I mentioned both upgrades and finding special weapons above. The two don’t often work well together: if you can keep upgrading your favourite weapon, loot becomes irrelevant, and if you ever find loot better than your most upgraded thing, upgrades feel like a waste of time.

My idea is to unlock and then buy upgrades for your Agency-issued equipment, including your infinite-ammo pistol, but larger weapons are things you find or buy. You unlock one equipment upgrade after every mission, then pay to have it installed if you actually want it. Or you can find upgrades, sometimes ones you wouldn’t have earned for hours, on dead agents.

To save fussy ferrying, every larger weapon you find is automatically added to the weapons locker at your base, and you can take a freshly loaded one from there any time. You can carry two and your pistol.

You’ll unlock more upgrades for your kit than it can take at one time, but you can switch them around freely.

Specifically:

Each bit of equipment has a number of slots, and higher-level upgrades take up more of them: you can have level 2 Calibre and Accuracy upgrades in your pistol, for example, but if you want the level 3 of one, you’ll only have room for the level 1 of the other.

(+) Full List

The idea is that you customise your core kit to suit your style, but you can be free and easy with what main weapons you pick up and try. Eventually you’ll settle on one or even two you always want, and you can then reconfigure your pistol and equipment to complement it. With the above loadout, you’d probably want something with a decent rate of fire and mag size for mid-range fighting.

Earning a steady stream of upgrades – without enough slots to fit them all – is a system that works brilliantly in Dawn of War 2’s Last Stand mode. You’re always excited about what you’re going to get next, and you try it out eagrely, but the unlocks don’t have to keep getting better to sustain this. It’s just nice to get more options, play with them, then settle on the combination you like.

It felt like last year open world games took over, and stopped being high-budget exceptions to the norm. It’s now pretty commonplace for a game’s linear story to be just the main attraction in a fairground of challenges, collectibles and distractions. ‘Go anywhere, do anything’ games have been around since the eighties, but it’s only in recent years developers have figured out the hooks, tricks and bribes to get a wider audience playing them.

Most of them kinda suck though, don’t they? Not the games themselves, necessarily, but their approaches to filling these sprawling open spaces with stuff to entertain you. They know how to make a traditional game, and they know how to make an open world, but their attempts to fit the two together amount to mashing a square peg into a round hole until it splinters.

I’m interested in whether there’s a way to take the most successful of these systems and make them work with the world, and each other. To fit with the fiction rather than jar with it, and to draw attention to the world rather than distract from it.

So ignoring how much we like them as games for a moment, what do some of the better open worlds fill their lands with, and how well does it work?

Assassin’s Creed 2:

• Series of story missions that lead you through each new city
• Scattered mini-missions that conform to one of a few templates (contracts, courier, etc)
• Informal missions like chasing any thieves you see
• Isolated unique puzzle/platform levels
• Collectibles, some of which assemble to shed light on the plot

The broad variety means there’s always something you feel like doing, and most of it is integrated into the fiction – albeit by clumsily grafting two different fictions together. The informal missions feel like fun because no-one tells you to do them, and failing is no big deal. The puzzle/platform levels are usually welcome because you know what you’re getting into when you take one on.

World of Warcraft:

• Miscellaneous quests
• Large scale co-op dungeons
• Resource nodes
• PvP arenas

It’s nice that there’s stuff to do wherever you go, but the lack of a main quest and presence of other players doing the same ones makes it hard to feel like what you’re doing matters.

Fallout 3:

• Series of story quests
• Character-driven sidequests without obvious rewards
• Occasional unique locations, people and loot (Oasis, Dogmeat, Alien Blaster)

The density of hand-scripted missions to find is enough that exploring is always appealing, and the unique stuff is rare enough to feel special, but common enough that everyone finds some of it. The main story has its moments, but your motivation for it is disastrously weak.

Far Cry 2:

• Two main story mission threads that sometimes merge
• Optional extra objectives to those missions with little reward
• Template mini-missions: convoys, assassinations
• A set of FedEx missions you have to keep doing to stay alive
• Trickily placed collectibles with a material reward

The main missions feel annoyingly disconnected from your objective, and the choice between them is illusory. The template missions are excellent because the templates themselves are compelling, but they never feel like more than that. The thoughtful placement of collectibles makes them much more fun to hunt, even if you don’t need the money.

Prototype:

• Series of story missions that change the city from peaceful to wartorn
• Fairground-style challenges
• Collectibles and destroyables that grant XP

The story missions are mostly bad, and the challenges are ridiculously divorced from the fiction. The changing city would be cool if you could make any of it yours, but instead the only influence you have is deciding which of two factions that hate you control certain bits.

Red Faction Guerilla:

• Series of story missions that conquer each area, making it safe and unlocking new one
• Template mini-missions: hostage rescues, defenses
• Fairground style challenges

The mini-missions do a good job of providing a choice of fun stuff to do without breaking fiction. The fact that the story moves on from each area, though, makes it feel less like a world and more like levels.

Just Cause:

• Series of story missions
• Scattered identical mini-missions to take over settlements
• Template mini-missions
• Collectibles

Since the mini-missions keep you in a small area and are very similar to play, they don’t offer much of a break. Neither do they or the collectibles carry an appealing reward.

It seems like the things that work best, or are most needed, are:

• Informal missions – opportunities you spot rather than jobs you’re ordered to do
• Collectibles that improve you, in places it’s fun to visit
• Categorised missions, so you can choose what kind of job you want to take on next
• Scraps of story scattered about to make your adventure feel meaningful
• Unique things you can find, take and use
• The ability to change or add to some part of the world
• Variety – at every stage you should have more than two meaningfully different options for fun things to do next

Any additions? Anything you really like in open world games in general, or a specific one? The next post will be figuring out how to cram all the good stuff into one specific open world.

I cooed a little about the amount of free stuff Valve have added to TF2 since release, but it’s not purely to fix or improve the classes. They’ve been experimenting with ways to leverage this free content to add an element of persistent progress and character customisation to TF2. But their experiments have been weird, and so far the resulting system doesn’t really do its job. If you’re all too familiar with why the current system needs changing, you can just skip to how I suggest changing it. Here’s what’s wrong:

You can unlock weapons for a class by earning its achievements. That means everyone plays the same class when its new weapons are released, even before they’ve earned any of them. We’re bribed to play that class at the very time when TF2’s primary problem is inevitably going to be too many people playing that class. And we’re often bribed to play it in counter-productive ways to fulfill achievement criteria, some of which are just fun little jokes.

You can ‘find’ weapons and hats randomly. On the plus side, that sometimes gives you a weapon for a class you don’t normally play, encouraging you to try it out. On the down side, well:

• A lot of what you find is duplicates of what you already have, which means that little gold message comes to be associated more with disappointment and absurdity than excitement or pleasure.
• People’s fortunes vary wildly without any correlation to skill. Some people play for hours a night, rarely get a weapon, find only dupes, and have never seen a hat in hundreds of hours of play. Others consistently get unlocks every half hour or so, and have copious hats for classes they don’t even play.
• Consequently, very rare and exclusive class items like hats don’t signify anything when you see a player wearing them. What does the mighty Camera Beard tell you about a Spy? Nothing, he just got lucky.

You can ‘craft’ items by combining lots you have to produce one you might not. Presumably meant to tackle the dupes problem with the random drops, but what we understand of the current system is totally bizarre. If you don’t have the Eyelander, you seem to need six copies of the other two Demoman weapons, plus at least eight melee weapons, to craft one without losing anything you need. In a given time period, you’re about 13.8 billion times more likely to just find an Eyelander than what you need to make one.

For a hat, you’d have to find eighty-one weapons you don’t need just to make a random one. To have more than a 3.4% chance of crafting the one you want, it takes a hundred and twelve. At the end of which, you’ve got something a new player might find in his first hour with the game.

That’s what’s wrong with the current system. I think it needs a few changes to work as an addictive RPG, as a way of customising your characters to your tastes, and as a way of showing off your skill or dedication in the way you dress. The unlocks system ought to make the repetitive violence feel like part of a larger goal, and give you a sense of progress even if you lose. Here’s how I’d do it:

Unlockable Weapons: You’d be able to browse these from the main menu to see what’s available, and select one you want to unlock. Each requires somewhere between 250 and 500 points, and once you select it all the points you score in-game, as any class, count towards that. That’s about 2-4 hours play – the Flare Gun might be 250, the Direct Hit 500. You need to be in a game with at least four non-idle players or bots for your points to count, but beyond that anti-exploit measures are probably futile.

On top of that, every five hours or so you’ll get a random weapon unlock that you don’t already have. If it’s the one you’re working towards, points earned so far transfer to what you pick next.

The idea: Every match gets you closer to something you really want, and the items you choose first make you a different player to those around you. At the same time, you can still get something unexpected for a class you don’t normally play that might encourage you to try them.

Achievements: I think they should stay – I even think the silly ones should stay. In fact, I’d get rid of the sensible ones, and just leave the ridiculous accomplishments – taunt kills, ironic deaths, corpse dancing and tortured puns (Slammy Slayvis Woundya? That’s what you’re going with?). But they no longer earn you weapons, they’re just an acknowledgement for any time you do something remarkable.

The idea: Silliness absolutely has a place in TF2, and trying to get things like taunt kill achievements just makes the game hilarious for you and your enemies. But no-one should be bribed to go for them if they don’t want to.

Feats: This is where the sensible achievements would go. They’re things that genuinely benefit your team, so you’re rewarded each time you do them: some bonus points towards your unlock (but not your in-game score) and a little pop-up: “Medic Feat! Extinguished five team-mates, +2 points”. Things like multi-kills, capturing a point alone, setting light to a cloaked Spy, killing a fully charged Medic, or making the winning capture would always be rewarded.

The idea: By letting people know they’ll be rewarded every time they do this, it both teaches and incentivises intelligent play. Achievements already do this a little, but not reliably: plenty of the actions they suggest are actually pretty dumb.

Unlockable Hats: These are handled separately, but again you choose which you want to unlock. When you do, only points and feats earned as that specific class count towards it, and the number required is in the thousands – twenty hours’ play for most, more for some special prestige items. You still earn points towards your weapon unlock at the same time.

The idea: A hat says “I play this class, I play it well and I play it a lot”. A Camera Beard says “I am amazing or crazy.”

Crafting: No crafting. I don’t think the system is entirely unsalvagable, and Chris Livingston does a good job of salvaging it in a much shorter post than mine. But ultimately any full crafting system hinges on finding dupes, which I think ruins the “ooh, I found something!” moment by diluting it with disappointment.

Levelling up is pretty much the heart of RPGs, because it does these cool things:

• Makes you feel like you’re achieving something by playing.
• Gives you new abilities to try at well-paced intervals.
• Lets you enjoy feeling more powerful than you used to be.

All this makes repetitive tasks feel worthwhile and even fun, which is particularly useful in a massively multiplayer game, because you don’t want players to get through all your content quickly, get bored and stop paying you a monthly fee.

But it has some problems:

• It means players who’ve played for different amounts of time can’t play the same content together and still both progress.
• It makes player-versus-player combat imbalanced unless strictly and artificially organised.
• It can’t go on forever, and when it stops, even if there’s new content you haven’t seen, your game life feels empty.

All of these bother me, but the first in particular is absolutely ridiculous. If Tim and I are playing World of Warcraft at the same time, I can’t kill level 80 bears with him because I’d get slaughtered, and he can’t kill level 26 bears with me because he’d destroy the challenge and gain nothing in the process. The two activities are functionally almost identical, we don’t mind which of them we do or even if we do something completely different, but the game can provide absolutely no way for us to enjoyably play together. So I hate levelling.

Champions Online and City of Heroes get around this with a cool side-kicking system, where you can bump a friend up to your level for a bit. But it really just demonstrates that levels are meaningless anyway, and suspending them briefly shows how good life is without them. Champions has other level-related problems (I’ve run out of doable quests), and it’s that which got me thinking about what the perfect superhero MMORPG would be. This post is the first of a few about that.

What I’d like to see is a system where content – zones, quests, groups of enemies, bosses – has no level. It would work like this:

• Whether I’m new or I’ve played for a hundred hours, a single monster or thug of a type I’ve never fought before is a serious threat to me. I can’t easily take on more than one at a time.
• As I defeat more of this enemy type, I get better at fighting them. I start to do more damage to them, then learn to better dodge or block their modes of attack, then gain the ability to completely evade certain attacks or very quickly kill certain sub-types of enemies.
• Each enemy group has a series of missions associated with it, usually culminating in defeating their boss. Once I’ve completed that, I can choose a new power.

Firstly, it means me and any friend can go to a zone neither of us have done and be on equal footing. Until between us we’ve done everything the game has to offer, there’ll always be some new challenge we can take on together, have fun and make progress.

Even if we go to one that one of us has made progress through, the newer player can still take on one enemy at a time effectively. Talking to roBurky about this, he suggested the newer player could just generate less ‘Threat’ – so even in a large brawl, only one or two enemies would go for him, the others would concentrate on the more dangerous player.

The second obvious benefit is that you can start anywhere in the world and the challenge will be appropriate to you. As well as the freedom that brings and the ease of joining friends with existing characters, it means that when you start a new character yourself, you can immediately be playing stuff you’ve never played before. Starting again is as fresh an experience as continuing. That’s particularly important in a superhero game, because there’s all sorts of fun stuff we can do with alternate characters made by the same player that I’ll get into.

The third is that all new areas, enemies and quests added to the game after launch are relevant to all players. That spectacularly increases the efficiency of content creation: every little thing you work on makes every player of the game happier and gives them more and more varied stuff to do.

The fourth is that it means anyone can fight anyone in PVP and have a chance. More experienced players will have a wider selection of powers, but late-game powers wouldn’t be outright better than your starting ones, just useful in different circumstances.

Aside from the problems fixed, it also builds on all three of the key reasons levelling is fun:

• You’re making progress much faster, since a four-hour questline takes you from struggling with one dude to diving into huge crowds of them without fear.
• Gaining new powers is still carefully paced, but now coincides with a major victory against a formidable opponent and the accomplishment of your quest. Rather than just spontaneously exploding in a sudden jump of progress when the fifteenth Spider Hatchling slain tips you over the edge to level 63.
• And you’re always seeing how much more powerful you’ve become, because you regularly dive into mobs of enemies that were a problem individually not long ago. In most MMORPGs currently, there’s rarely any reason to take on enemies you used to struggle with.

The biggest potential problem with it is the notion of getting one new power per major questline completed: depending on the number of powers and zones, it might need to alternate between new powers and improvements to old ones. Adding new questlines in free updates seems like it could take as much work as raising the level cap on all classes, but whether that’s significant depends on how the end-game works, and that’s for another post.