Now I’m level 30.4! Sweet!
As I alluded to in Saturday’s post, games having a leveling system is a bit arbitrary and strange, but it’s a system that fundamentally works. It gives you a sense of how powerful you are, and rewards you for the time you’ve played the game, if only superficially. There’s nothing really inherently wrong with the system as a whole…but there are some things I’ve noticed that are a little strange. Mostly I’ve found these in video games – both single-player RPGs and in MMOs.
One of the biggest things that confuses me is the rather arbitrary leveling progression that a lot of games seem to have. I’m going to harp back on the MMO that I’ve got the most experience with on this one, because it’s one of the biggest offenders in my mind, and that’s World of Warcraft. When the game first came out, you were told that there were 60 levels’ worth of content and progression for you. You knew that when you hit level 10, you were 1/6th of the way there, and that when you hit level 30, you were getting closer and closer. It did take longer to go from 31 to 32 than it had taken to go from 30 to 31, but it was a pretty predictable curve – each level took longer than the previous by about (rough estimate) 15%. It was standard, predictable, and made a lot of sense.
The problem is that when WoW went to release their first expansion, someone decided that they wanted to make…probably 40 more levels’ worth of content, in the old system, but someone else decided that “There’s no way we’re going to let players get all the way to level 100 after the first expansion! That would be ridiculous!” So instead, they raised the level cap to 70, but raised the amount of experience you needed to level between these levels by about 400%. So if level 59 to 60 took 60,000 experience, level 60 to 61 took 240,000. It was a fantastic jump in time, and was extremely random from a player’s perspective. As such, the journey from 60 to 70 ended up taking almost longer than it took to go from 1 to 60, which wasn’t something that had ever happened before. And with their third and fourth expansions, WoW did it again. Their third expansion did the exact same kind of progression, where they added new zones and probably 40 more levels’ worth of content, and compressed it down into 10 levels. The fourth expansion was even worse – another 30-40 levels’ worth of content, compressed down into five.
The problem this has is that it makes the game feel like incredibly segmented parts. When expansion 2 was out, they lowered the amount of experience it took to go from 1-60, so you flew through the old content to get to their “awesome new stuff.” They did the same thing for 60-70 when expansion 3 came out, and I’m betting that they sped up 70-80 when expansion 4 came out. They’re devaluing their old content simply because they’re figuring that players are getting bored of it, and completely changing the progression as a result, and nothing seems like it connects to anything else.
WoW isn’t the only game to do this – Dark Age of Camelot has a radically different exp / level curve from 1-40 than it does from 40-50 – it takes as much time to go from 49 to 50 as it did to go from 1 to 40. And their Realm Points system (their PvP experience) was originally designed so that Realm Rank 11 (RR11) was the cap. However, as players got close to RR11, the team freaked out and added on another Realm Rank (RR12)…but while RR1-11 had been a graceful curve between the levels, RR12 was simply, “Okay, every 10 percent of the way to RR12, we’re going to increase the number of RP needed by 10%.” This meant that you had this nice graceful curve that suddenly turned into a linear progression that was SIGNIFICANTLY sharper than anything else. Once you hit RR11, you slammed into a wall where you basically had to get enough Realm Points to get RR12…three times…in order to get to the next major number. And then Dark Age did it again, raising the Cap to RR13. RR11 required players to get slightly over 8 million RPs. RR12 required them to get almost 24 million. RR13 is above 65 million. These values make the rest of the curve seem entirely disconnected from the rest of the game.
It’s just strange that people do this – WoW’s justification is that Level 100 is the “end” of the game, and that feels like posturing to me. Who cares if level 100 is the end? Make the end level 300, and nobody’s gonna care if characters are the same “power” as they would at level 100 of your ridiculous system. Dark Age’s choice was a bit different – every time you gain 10% of a realm level, you gain another Realm Ability that you can spend to increase the power of your character, so tripling the number of available realm levels would have drastically imbalanced RvR, but they could have worked around that by awarding points less frequently at the higher levels but maintaining the same curve. It would have felt less “hacked on” and would have greatly smoothed out the leveling curve.
Progression should be smooth – every time you randomly change something on the players, for any reason, it feels jarring and poorly-planned. And that’s not what you ever want your players to think.
well, with cata, wow revamped the entirety of vanilla content to fit with where the storyline was now, which made leveling to 60 interesting again for a minute. but they didn’t do any of that with outland or northrend, so 60 – 80 was over the same shit in those storylines which made almost no sense when the rest of the game was concerned with deathwing’s world destruction plotline. we’d already trounced the lich king and whatsisname in outland and vanilla reflected that with new content along those lines, but as soon as you hit 58, you went off to do all that stuff again.
on the other end of the spectrum, have you ever played one of cryptic’s games? they made City of Heroes/villains/moral ambiguity and set the level cap at 50, and it wasn’t until recently that there was really any point to playing your lvl 50 other than to farm. they still run Champions Online, and other than doing the occasional content updates that come out, you can pretty much shelf your lvl 40 unless you’re into pvp or have friends that need to run task forces or whatever they’re called there.
(Re: WoW) Yeah – it’s one of the pitfalls of making expansions that are wholly isolated inside of themselves but that are absolutely required as part of leveling. It makes sense that they’d want people to feel more powerful as they leveled up, and it does give them the ability to add new abilities and powers that they didn’t have before, but then when the next expansion comes out, everything you were struggling for is forgotten. I’d be willing to bet that 95% of the current playerbase of WoW has no idea what Magister’s Terrace is, where it is, or why it was significant in the story or to the game when it released.
(Re: Cryptic) I haven’t actually played any of those games, mostly because I’d heard a lot of people say that character creation is fantastic, but the gameplay usually gets stale after a while. This is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum from what you really want in an MMO – you want people to invest in their characters and want to keep playing them over and over and over. You don’t want them to get to a point where they go, “Whelp. Nothing else I could possibly be doing.” That’s just not a sustainable game.
Thanks for letting me know about that – kind of gives me more of an idea why they’re not doing as well as they could be.