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Why do mmorpg have to be about leveling?
AAAMEOW
Member RarePosts: 1,617
People keep saying "it should take very long to reach max level, like those games in the old days...."
My question is why do mmorpg have to be about leveling up?
I played many asian grinders which I have been the highest level characters on the server because I'm addicted, and I kind of understand people do it to progress their characters to be stronger...
But why does it have to be that way. Why can't mmorpg make it easy for people to maximize their character stats and let people play how ever they want? Aka Guild wars? What's wrong with that?
EDIT: I logon GW2 and see if I can solo dungeon or boss. Or join a dungeon group to improve my dungeon skills.
I go to pvp to see if I can improve my pvp skills. What does leveling have anything to do with it. It can be about "getting better"at the game. Which is a much more fun of progression. Now to mention you can just play for the social aspect like many of the sandbox games.
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Well, it is all about progression.
Basically you can progress your character with increased power and better gear.
In older games like EQ you progressed both ways for a long time which means you slowly pass through all the levelzones of the game.
In newer games you first progress with levels for 1-3 weeks (caring about gear is pretty useless at that point). Here you fast pass by almost the entire game which turns grey fast. After that you start gearing up first with dungeons and then with raids.
MMOs shouldn't be all about leveling up but currently are they all about gear which is just as bad if not even worse. Since all zones in the game have levels you really fast ends up in a really small part of the game repeating the same dungeons and raids over and over.
Spawn camping werent fun or challenging in the old game but neither is doing the same instance many times in hope for the drop you need.
You should slowly increase in power as you play and both with stats and gear. The earliest MMOs had a tendency to become too grindy forcing you to spend hours at the same time which was bad but now you instead spend the entire game besides the first few weeks running a few instances. Both ways are bad but honestly is the current model the most boring of them.
Now, you can of course make an online game without any progression whatsoever but that game wouldn't really be a MMORPG, it would be a MMOFPS. Nothing wrong with that but FPS games have very different carrots and sticks than MMORPGs.
The first Guildwars was a great game and it allowed you to gain new skills instead of more power but if you think leveling a toon in GW was fast and easy then you didn't play it at launch. It was Factions that did that. GW forced you to adapt and become a better player instead of just raising your stats but it did have a problem with motivating many players.
A large group of players consider the game done when they hit max level and either start an alt or quit. The fast leveling is a large part of the reason players average only 6 weeks in MMOs today instead of months earlier.
I don't agree with you there, I think the EQ games AAs actually are a far superior way.
That have 3 ways of progressing, gear, level and AA. AA you get from doing things the first time, like achivements in other games but here you uses the points to specc yourself with powers, increased stats and so on.
And unlike level and gear you can't grind AA because you only get points for doing something one time instead of grinding the same mobs or dungeons for XP and drops.
Personally do I think they could skip the level altogether and just use achivement points instead, it constantly forces players to find new challenges instead of doing things they already know over and over.
It doesn't really need to be about leveling.
You could argue that in their current state MMOs offer a fairly easy path to max level with little resistance. Because of this leveling has lost much of it's achievement. The only achievement comes from grind items at end game and perhaps doing well in certain PvP rankings.
This whole discussion again depends on what you want out of an MMO. If you are just playing to relax you might not care if something is difficult and prefer that it is simple and offers no resistance.
Others might prefer a battle of attrition.
Some might prefer simply complex combat.
Others might be looking for something to challenge their problem solving abilities.
Likely most of this could be accomplished without levels.
I've often enjoyed the race to max level. Especially in early MMOs. I don't really play games that way anymore. I usually take my time and play them more leisurely. My dislike of current MMOs is less of difficulty and more that the combat mechanics are generally not all that different then they used to be, but the games themselves have really become a lot less interesting to me in other areas outside of combat.
The question is what would be interesting enough to keep you playin the game. Would it be exploration, problem solving, combat, interaction with others, progression through equipment, a world of contested areas where you are fighting with others to control them, building houses/towns/items, etc.
You also have to consider how to determine if someone is better at something then another person. If there is no progression then there is little way to determine if someone is better other then sheer skill at it and skills may not really require much overall skill.
Something else to consider is how realistic feeling you want the world. Do you want to allow people to hinder each other and do what they want or put each person in a bubble where they don't have to interact and are safe.
Overall there are a lot of things to consider and I don't believe I know or have listed them all. I do believe it is possible. I'm not sure how many people would enjoy it.
I agree that sort of system could work, but I'm not sure it would be very well received by some players.
People develop their own way of doing things, and that becomes habit. Habit become familiar and accepted, so when something new comes along it feels unfamiliar, and for some this is not a welcomed change.
I see this contradiction in myself. I want new and innovative, as long as it's what I'm used to and familiar. Obviously that doesn't happen.
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The problem is that often people just tire and quit anyways.
I think achivement would work because they are already in the games.
While only EQ 1 & 2 players might be used to becomming powerful because of them it is still familiar enough for people to at least give it a chance, other systems like increasing skills with use is miles further away.
Now, if you want traditional players to feel better of it you can just place out 60 levels based on how many AAs you got but I don't think it is neccesary.
The real problem that makes people tire of MMOs so fast right now is that they encourage players to do the same thing over and over even though there is a lot more in the game. There is nothing actually fun in killing trashmobs over and over, the fun stuff is beating a challenge the first time (how hard you want that challenge might vary).
Achivements are becomming more and more popular in MMOs anyways, connecting your power with them is a logical step and unlike other system this progression actually works very well and have excisted in MMOs for a long time even if it been used together with XP grinding until now.
Try EQ2 if you want to try out AAs.
Some of the older games actually could make you level down if you were max level due to death penalties. This wasn't very popular even back then and letting players actually loose power instead of gaining it wouldn't work, particularly not today.
RPGs need progression.
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Because game directors have very narrow imaginations when it comes to character progression.
Character progression is what keeps players in your game. Leveling is not the only method of character progression, but it's the one that game directors and players with limited imaginations can grasp the easiest.
Games which aren't about leveling (or gear) give up the short-term goal addiction factor, and must rely on social engagement to keep their players "hooked".
Social engagement is far harder to code, promote, and maintain. It requires a level of commitment from the producers that most corporations are just incapable of.
Not as profitable. Short-term carrots are easy as hell and cheap as hell (=mo money).Because that would be going against an rpg genre staple: Progression.
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Level wasn't problem in MMORPG , the problem is the design use level as lock to stop player join the contents with other.
Gears lock : you can't use the gears if you level not enough
Quest lock : you can't take the quest until you level 20
Dungeon lock : you can't enter this dungeon until you level 30
Skill lock : you can't learn this skill until you get to max level .
Until the game maker change the way thinking , level will make MMORPG boring .
I want more freedom .
If i manage to get max level armor at level 30 , let me wear it
If i manage to get a quest level 60 , let me do it
If i find a dungeon , let me enter it
If i get a skill book , let me learn it .
Games are about levelling because they are about gear. Games need a way of getting rid of old gear so players will go after new gear. You can do this by: giving gear durability or make the gear decrease in power.
For the most part durability tends to be disliked outside of a sandbox setting and clearly, most MMOs are not sandboxes. Once a player gets a purple anything, the idea of it wearing out through use provokes all manner of hysteria. Old loot and currency must have a sink of some kind and if it's not wearing out then it must decrease in power...Levelling.
As you sell/scap/salvage/smelt/exchange your old gear you are creating a market/pve pull towards going forth and getting better, stronger, shinier stuff. Even better, with levelling you can restrict players with arbitrary requirements like level gates, gear scores, rare RNG tables... All of these have the effect of slowing players down and giving game devs more time to come up with the next batch of new, even shinier gear for you to chase after.
The market has spoken
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Progression and Balancing
Players need a reason to keep playing beyond the immediate entertainment of just playing the game. "Getting Better" provides a positive emotional response in the player so RPGs offer lots of ways for players to feel like they are getting better, thus provoking lots of positive feelings and thus making people stay in game longer.
Levels are a convenient way of making people thing they are getting better.
Doesn't work on everyone though. For more hardcore players or more intelligent players, you can recognise that a number going up has zero relation to getting better, it is almost always just a reflection of time spent in game. When the content is easy then leveling up has even less meaning because you recognise that you don't know how good you are because you've never had to test yourself. This is why some people ask for alternative progression methods to leveling.
On the balance front, games are more enjoyable if you always feel like the content is challenging whilst still being able to beat it. This is, again, a positive emotional response that keeps players in game. Levels provide a convenient way to balance content in the hopes of keeping it challenging-but-beatable for most players. By manipulating quests and experience gains, you can force your players of a certain level into the right zones which are balanced correctly.
Developers need to come up with a different metric for measuring progression, other than levels, that is also easy to understand before we can dump levels. They will also need to find better ways to balance content. I sort of liked SWG in this regard, quests from terminals scaled to group size, character template and gear whilst player comparisons were also based on the same. It meant most mobs didn't have visible levels, just stats that would be compared to you. Didn't always work ofc
Would it? How many MMORPGs do you know where progression ends at max level?
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Most the mmorpgs ive played stop the characters progression at max level, The characters stats are locked and used as a baseline.
Then comes the endless gear grind which augments said stats. i don't know how you can consider that "progression" when
there is a very specific spectrum of "power" allowed for any given content cycle which then gets reset or normalized for the next cycle.
Which of course usually means the level cap is increased to make it even viable.
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In short: They don't.
Long:
While levels where used for seperating content, to provide a gold sink why obsolete equipment and as general progression, many, if not most people burn through the game until they are max level and then ask "where's my game", so level have become pointless. In fact, people spent way more time acquiring gear once they are max level, and people *compare* gear, so gear is the progression, levels are just a relict of the "early" days, like from EQ etc.
And "level" is just one mechanic of doing said things. You can just hand out skill points every x kills or every x minutes, or for each quest, and you provide the same mechanic, just without levels. Heck, The Secret World is actually using a level mechanic (you gain a new level with a set amount of experience) without calling it either level or experience and people fell for it!
And games like UO work fine with a set progression and hard locks. If you managed to get your hands on a gold armor or a +5 sword 10 minutes after creating your character, you could use it. Well okay, there are attribute requirements, but they are the same across all varations. Enhancing (so magic) didn't change that either. You probably didn't keep it for long because you would get killed, which was kinda easy since you had no skills, but you could wear it.
Also, you gain both attributes and skills by using something related to it. So you can not magically wear a new armor because you killed 10 goblins.
That is real progression. Levels always have been a short cut to that, and today they are useless.
There are also still (or again?) games that do have durabilitiy etc. Vindictus uses a soft version of it as your gear gets damaged during missions and becoming less effective. It won't get destroyed though. They even have appropriate damaged looks for armor, something many games miss. Given that it's from Korea and F2P, many people will not even look twice at it, just assume it's another mindless korea grinder, despite it doing a lot of things different and (imho) better than many so called AAA games.
It has it's faults, but those are basically due to Nexon not caring about those enough due to getting enough money anyways. Like any other publisher does..
To sum it up: It all has been done before and some less known/less popular games still do it, but in a few years, some big publisher with announce they'll "revolutionize" the genre by gettting rid of levels and making your actual actions determine what you progress, and introducing durability as "an awesome mechanic to visualize your skill in combat". And many will even claim that it "has never been done this way", including lots of magazines, and rate it 11/10.
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I've often thought about what a zero-progression MMO would be like.
The gameplay would have to be so good that the fun of beating PvE challenges and/or the fun of PvP combat would be enough to sustain the population long term.
I mean, you could do territorial style control/capture RvR whatever PvP I think without character progression.
I think there is intrinsic value and fun in that style of PvP.
But on the PvE side, you'd have to adopt a "because it's there" atmosphere for the game's challenges.
Like, why raid the castle of Doom and vanquish the Dragon of Malice if there is no reward?
Because the reward is in the act of defeating this challenging content.
Because it's there.
I think for some gamer's it would work, as long as the content was VERY plentiful - as replaying end-game content tends to be primarily focused on the rewards not the completion.
There would have to be a lot of differentiation and limits on the character building.
That way a player could just choose their preferred style, like picking a fighter in a game like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat.
But you could pick to be the "shield tank" vs "avoidance tank" or the HoT healer vs. the big-nuke healer etc.
The fast/poison DoT assassin DPS vs the big nuke wizard DPS etc.
Would it be enough?
I don't know. What do you think?
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The lock on gear do make some sense, you need some kind of lock or players who alt or have friends who give them stuff will rule the game.
Now, level is not the best lock, Diablo (1) introduced a better lock: Stats. With the right specc could you equip a specific cool item very early but you would still not be able to equip all the stuff someone who played a lot longer could equip.
Dungeon and quest locks are in the game because noobs would try them and die otherwise, and those people would quit the game (yeah, hand holding for morons is a standard MMO feature).
Skill lock is a balance thing, particularly for PvP. It is also about making the leveling a long tutorial so you can play your class once you hit the top. Giving everyone access to all skills from level 1 would mean many very confusing noobs.
With skills I have to agree with OP though: Guildwars had a great system there even if 8 skills were too few. Same mechanics to gain skills and 12 or so skills at the same time would be really good.
There you stole the skills from bosses, as soon as you can get the skill cap you can steal any skill a boss have (that you have the right main or secondary class for).