You are now Level Kumquat
As you’re playing most role-playing games, you’re going to level up. This isn’t a new concept at all – even the earliest editions of most pen & paper RPGs had some form of leveling in them, and it’s been a staple of RPGs ever since. It’s a way to keep track of how “powerful” your character is, and to give a sense that, as you continue your journey through the game, you actually ARE getting better and learning cool new things you can do. However, when you actually think about it…when was the last time you actually “leveled up” at anything?
The concept is one that’s almost accepted, but it’s really rather strange when you think about it. It’s a good way to show that your character is getting better, but it’s also an intensely arbitrary one. Most games will let you gain a level if you simply kill enough guys…but then give you points that allow you to level up your ability to create potions or talk to people better. How does brutally removing the limbs from a thousand gnolls suddenly make you the best diplomat ever? I mean, I wouldn’t really want to argue a dude who was covered in the ichor of his enemies, but that’s hardly a reason that a storekeeper might suddenly start giving you a discount. Some games do limit this by only letting you level up the skills you’re actually using – you might gain levels that let you increase your stat bonuses, but your skills only level up if you’re using them a lot…so you level up your “talk to people” skill by, surprise, talking to people.
But this is why there’s the term “grinding” in games – you literally pick something to do, and then you do it over and over and over and over until you’re better at it. This does have some basis in reality, but it’s been massively over-simplified in games. In the real world, if you spend 30 years programming, but you only ever write the same code over and over, you’re not going to be any better at it than you were when you started. You only really get better if you start looking at some outside materials, or asking other people for help, or studying code that other people have written and seeing what solutions they’re using to overcome problems. Very rarely will you simply come up with a workable solution that’s better than what you could have found more easily, and most of the time you’ll come up with far worse code…not because you’re bad, but simply because you don’t have the knowledge to optimize it or the knowledge of specific things you can do. However, in a video game, you can get better at cooking by simply cooking potatoes for 30 years. Now, it’d make sense if you were the best potato chef in the land after 30 years, but it doesn’t make sense that because you spent all that time cooking potatoes, you are now the best seafood chef that this world has ever seen. I understand why games do it – if you had to level up everything by doing it over and over, you’d have 10 million skills and never feel like you were actually progressing any of them. But that doesn’t really remove the silly from the equation.
The other thing that’s just weird about all of this is the fact that leveling, whether it’s player or skill-based, is almost always tracked by a number, be it a percentage or a straight up number. “I just hit level 27 the other day!” This is something that people are crazy about, and it’s rather amusing. Now, if you gate your skills and abilities by level, then hitting certain levels is definitely better than others – if you get basically all of your useful abilities at level 6, then most other levels seem a lot more redundant…but by hell, people are going to be excited to some degree when they see that level number go up by a little bit. It doesn’t matter if they just hit level 726 or if they hit level 3, there’s going to be some excitement there simply because a number got bigger. That’s probably the entire reason WHY we track them with numbers, and have specified values that equal a number – it gives you something to work towards that’s not just “become a better person / thing / abomination against life.” (Some RPGs are weird, okay?)
But what’s the real problem here? I’m not entirely sure that there is one. Ultima Online is a game that doesn’t really have levels – any character can do…basically whatever he wants with his character, and if you’re willing to pay for it, you can also completely switch what your character can do, provided you’re willing to level up the next skills you pick up. It’s an interesting system, and has a fanatically stable population…but it’s also a huge turn-off for a lot of people simply because you can’t see how well you’re doing compared to other people. That’s one of the advantages of a leveling system – you can look at Bob, and immediately compare yourself to him, and that’s a reason to keep leveling in games, I guess.
But I’ve got some rather serious issues with how a lot of games handle leveling, and I’ll address those later. For now…leveling is ridiculous, but it works well enough that until I can get an idea for something better, let’s just stick with the silly that we know works.
The system of leveling which I enjoyed the most was one of the builds in WAR in which you would effectively ‘level’ 5-6 times between each numerical level. In the level itself it would unlock points which you could spend as you wished and then bigger stuff would unlock during the numerical level. It somewhat diminished the idea that you only gain skills in discreet chunks since it broke it down into finer and finer stuff. However that idea was scrapped.