Limiting features in games – Part 1: Levels
Before I begin, let me clarify what I mean by levels. I am talking about character progression where you gain skill-points after accumulating enough experience from killing monsters, solving quests or similar in a game. And this is my opinion, don’t forget that!
Levels in itself isn’t a bad thing, and limiting doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Having levels is a way to create a sense of progression; to make it feel like you are moving forward within a game. When you gain a level this is always clearly indicated in one way or another and you get a fixed amount of skill-points to spend on character stats and various abilities. And this is a really smooth way to make the player feel like his or her character becomes stronger and more powerful. But there is another side to this feature that a lot of people tend to forget.
A prime example of how this feature can limit a game is the way levels work in games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft in itself is a great game (There must be a reason to why over 11 million players play this game) but lets have look at what levels does for this game. The different areas in World of Warcraft such as Hellfire Peninsula, Ungoro Crater, Borean Tundra etc. have different level-requirements in the sense that it will be nearly impossible to venture into these regions if you haven’t reached a minimum level. Every beast, monster, humanoid in these areas that are unfriendly, will attack you and kill you almost instantly if you happen to cross them at a level below the minimum “requirement”.
And since character progression works the way it does in World of Warcraft, this is the way it has to be. They could scale area difficulty with you character level, but that is not optimal cause it would be very hard to give the player a sense of power if everything remained as difficult as it was the first time. I mean, if it’s hard to kill a boar with your fists at level 1, and it’s equally hard to kill it at level 85, even though you have a meteor land on its head, wouldn’t that be ridiculous?
However, what levels does in this case is rendering it pointless to go back to lower leveled areas (unless you need stacks of copper, or a thousand peace-blooms etc). Additionally, this will also “force” the developers to focus on the people who has reached the highest level. There would be no point, or no logical reason to release a max level quest in a low level area, unless part of a special event of some kind. The vast majority of new content will be aimed at the people who have reached the maximum level. This will also make it possible to clear whatever new content comes out within a day/days if you choose too. Content which took over a year to develop. Where is the sense in that?
There are cases where levels work extremely well. In games like Final Fantasy and Neverwinter Nights you get more and more powerful, and once you reached the end of the game content, it is over. You have finished the game. But games like World of Warcraft doesn’t end when you have beaten the last boss in the hardest instance. You can still log in and play and do other things than raiding.
But my issue still remains. There is rarely a point where you go back to lower leveled areas. Most people stay in the higher leveled areas to grind and what not, because there simply isn’t any point to gather a stack of copper which you for example get 2 gold for when you can gather a stack of Eternal Fire and gain 120 gold (or whatever it costs). And items that people can craft at lower levels have absolutely no impact on the game whatsoever, unless it is some sort of vanity item (which doesn’t affect game-play in the end anyway).
So, is there a solution to this? Well yes and no. Character progression is a fundamental feature in all games. Either there is none (games like Super Mario) or there is, and when there is, it automatically defines what path the game must take in terms of character progression. However, you can still have a progression similar to levels and still avoid the problems I mentioned above. As I said, character progression is a fundamental feature which could compare to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in psychology, but for videogames. Character-progression being one of the early steps. You need it to move on. And once you have moved on in the development it is nearly impossible to change this, unless you want to spend a LOT of money.
So, how could you “solve” this then? Well what I would like more games to utilize is an action-based character progression. With actions I mean, what you character does, not action a la Rambo. If I decide to chop down a tree, then I should learn how to do it better next time, shouldn’t I? Or if I make tools, I should become a better tool-maker for each tool I make. If I prefer to cast fireballs on innocent rats, then I should learn accuracy and become even more proficient in casting fireballs. I hope you see where I’m going with this. If you don’t, well the only thing I can say is that it would take longer than Galadriel’s age (Yes the one from Lord of the rings) for me to talk about everything you could possibly have in a game.
I want to learn based on what I do. If I want to chop down a tree, then I should be able to. And for me, the way professions work in World of Warcraft is illogical. If I was an immortal miner for 10 000 years and suddenly decided to try out picking herbs, how can I possibly “forget” something that I did for 10 000 years just because I wanted to collect herbs? And why can’t I pick flowers all the time?
Of course there has to be limitations. If every action you took in a game gave you a skill-point you would eventually become invincible. So there needs to be basic actions you can take which if you do them enough, gives you access to other actions that are somehow involved with the basic action you spent enough time doing.
I will go deeper into this in the next part of this blog! This part is long enough and I don't want to keep you away from gaming for too long (Oh the horror)! I hope you enjoyed reading this and I look forward to your comments!
/And
The Epic Games Store continues to dish out free games and you can add two more to your library this week.
Some Helldivers 2 players are frustrated with some content still being broken, so read this article to see what that is all about.
Some?? Try all. Mechs are bugged, many weapons are useless including the newly renewed ones, stratagems are bugged or weak, we still get stuck in the terrain with no way out, and the list goes on. Good game but they need to fix the issues before doing anything else.
Activision and Raven Software's 2006 action role-playing game, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, has found its way to the Xbox Store.
Used to love this one, but X-Men Legends 1 and 2 will always be my favorites, especially Rise of Apocalypse. Would pay some good money to play it today with online multiplayer, back then I had no way to get a modem
I remember buying them dirt cheap on the PS4 and then a few days later I read they were delisted. I was wondering why the bundle was price so low and got my answer when that happened.
Sad to say this is one game franchise next to the Xmen that needs a sequel. I use to play the hell out of Xmen Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. Was great when my cousin had the OG Xbox play with four other people and then playing online. Great games glad to see it reappear even though I own the discs love the mechanics of this game.
I get what your saying, though I've never played World of Warcraft, I understand the general idea. Borderlands did leveling extremely well, you may want to look into that. How that game works is once you beat the game, you can continue to play that playthrough, or start the game in playthrough 2 to level up more. Once you finish playthrough 2, you can't do another playthrough, and every enemy in the game jumps up to your level, and even above your level, and will continue to go up levels as you level up towards the maximum level. So the game never gets stale, or ridiculously hard to level up. Borderlands is a great game, and even more so once you buy the DLC for it.
Didnt oblivion use this idea? You only leveled what you used. I remember jumping and running alot to level and swinging my ax a ton of times lol. I liked the idea because it means you create your character by doing what you like to do, how you chose to play. I remember there were some problems with it though. I like leveling and getting new skills. That made games like divinity 2 really fun for me. I also liked how certain areas were IMPOSSIBLE untill you got more powerful. Felt good to come back with a bada** new sword and skill and kick the crap out of whatever killed you. I dont genrally like scaling enemies because it kind of takes the fun out of leveling. Its not too bad if they still give you perks, skills, better gear, and better weapons though. New Veagas and Borderlands handled this really well.
A well-written article, but I have to disagree with you on a few points. In your WoW example, you stated that the level system kept you from going back to old territories. I think that is exactly the point. When you've played a level for enough time, you want to move on to something new and experience something different from the same thing you've been with for the past while. It wouldn't be enjoyable to stay in the same village for a year; eventually a desire to find new things sets in. Which brings me to my second point- the leveling system is what makes people continue to want more. It gives you a clear goal that defines why you are playing the game. The sense of accomplishment achieved when you've spent several hours doing stupid things like gathering random items and finally cash in and get the prize is awesome. I remember in pokemon on the gameboy color, I had to run around the grass battling stupid wild pokemon in order to get my ivysaur to evolve so I could beat a gym. I had that goal to win, and upon winning a new portion of the game was unlocked for me to check out. I didn't have any desire to stay in that old town, it was on to the next.
While I completely understand where you're coming from, I think you kind of have to take it as a fact that most MMOs are going to focus on the end content after release because that's where everyone (even the casual players) will end up. I totally agree that there needs to be more focus on keeping the lower level areas fresh, but honestly you can only expect so much out of a dev team who is already taxed with keeping up with or ahead of the masses who have already reached the end game content and will leave if they don't have something to do. But then again, you can't complain much when Blizzard gave about 90% of the old levels a face lift with Cataclysm.
And not all MMOs focus on end level content all the time. I can't speak for a lot of other titles, but I know City of Heroes has done a lot to keep their lower level stuff filled with new stuff to do. You can even team up with a friend on a lower level character while using your high level character and basically make yourself fight at their level. In my opinion every MMO needs a feature like this.
The scaled level system like what was used in Oblivion is a good idea on paper, but in practice it really kind of takes some of the danger out of the game, as well as the desire to take a risk and do some treasure hunting. Granted, having the ability to walk around and explore without having to worry about a giant minotaur walking up to you and smashing you into the ground like a tent post is nice, but I'm kind of a fan of that "Oh shit" moment when you see the minotaur coming and realize you don't have a chance.
I do like the idea of using your skills to increase their skill level. In fact, one year in college our computer science professor offered an intro to video game development class. Mainly it was designed to introduce us to basic programing, basic 3d modeling, and creative design. For our final we were paired up and had to create the basic outlines for a video game, detailing the plot, perspective, controls, etc. My roommate and I came up with a first person shooter MMO/space combat sim (kind of like Star Wars Galaxies with the Jump to Lightspeed expansion except FPS game play) where instead of leveling and getting skill points that you manually spent to increase a skill, you had a point allotment that would increase every time you leveled, and your skills were spent based on what you did. If you wanted to be good with assault rifles, start using assault rifles. The more you use it, the better you get. The downside is that if you don't have any available skill points from leveling up, it will force other skills you have points in to deteriorate. So if you were using assault rifles all the time, but never used pistols, your skill in pistols would start to go down in order to make points available for assault rifles. We decided we would make it possible to lock skill points so you could choose what skills would decrease, but of course if you locked all of your skills then nothing would decrease and you couldn't generate skill points to raise anything else.
But yeah, enough of my rambling.