TOM FRANCIS
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A Different Way To Level Up

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.

More Game Design Ideas