its a common theme, if it's horizontal or offers an AA advancement then it adds to the game then it's enriching the experience, if it's themepark and mearly adding levels and tiers then it's making all content before it redundant, and probably a net loss in terms of content.
THIS^^^!!!
I really wish game dev's would finally get this through their heads. Most expansions simply make the former end game redundant unused content. And level cap increases are not the answer. Neither are new gear tiers. There are other ways to incentivize players to want to run new content without making the previous rewards from previous endgame redundant and useless. And of course then they have to address the new balance issues this creates when they raise the level cap(assuming they bother).
GW1 is a great example. Level cap stayed 20 the whole time despite releasing 3 expansions. They encouraged people to keep playing with a combination of new gear types/skins, added new skills that could only be obtained once you hit certain points in the expansions. Added new systems like Heroes that you could gear out. Added new forms of pvp. New guild hall options. And of course new storylines to play through that continued to get better as they went on. And massive increases to the game world itself that went as far as doubling the size of the base game world each time. By the time you got all of the expansions, the game world was roughly 4 times the size it was at launch (and is still about 3 times the size of the world in GW2).
It went from a laughing stock that SE was letting people play for free to the benchmark for development quality. It's almost not fair to include it though because the fact it was SE and the Final Fantasy franchise that it was even possible.
Comments
THIS^^^!!!
I really wish game dev's would finally get this through their heads. Most expansions simply make the former end game redundant unused content. And level cap increases are not the answer. Neither are new gear tiers. There are other ways to incentivize players to want to run new content without making the previous rewards from previous endgame redundant and useless. And of course then they have to address the new balance issues this creates when they raise the level cap(assuming they bother).
GW1 is a great example. Level cap stayed 20 the whole time despite releasing 3 expansions. They encouraged people to keep playing with a combination of new gear types/skins, added new skills that could only be obtained once you hit certain points in the expansions. Added new systems like Heroes that you could gear out. Added new forms of pvp. New guild hall options. And of course new storylines to play through that continued to get better as they went on. And massive increases to the game world itself that went as far as doubling the size of the base game world each time. By the time you got all of the expansions, the game world was roughly 4 times the size it was at launch (and is still about 3 times the size of the world in GW2).
It went from a laughing stock that SE was letting people play for free to the benchmark for development quality. It's almost not fair to include it though because the fact it was SE and the Final Fantasy franchise that it was even possible.