No, seriously. You need a permit.

As I discussed in Saturday’s post, there are two main ways I can see to add an expansion onto an MMO. I covered the first last time, and so this time I’m going to focus on the second type, where you add a bunch of new content but don’t increase the level cap at all. There’s a lot to talk about with these type of expansions, so I’m going to break it in half.

The best example that I can think of for a game with expansions that don’t raise the level camp is Dark Age of Camelot, and there’s two major reasons there. One, I worked on it for five years and know a good deal about the expansions that they added and what choices they made about them, and two, because they explored a number of different ways to add expansions to a game without raising the level cap, to varying degrees of success in each case.

The first expansion to DAoC was Shrouded Isles, and was arguably the most successful expansion to the game. Shrouded Isles effectively doubled the PvE area in Dark Age for each realm – three completely new regions were added, each containing six zones and three major dungeons. It also added a new race and two new classes to each realm. This expansion was fantastically well-received for a number of reasons:

1. The new zones were designed to offer more areas for players to level up in – they weren’t all simply designed for the endgame content. They did have a bit more of a focus on endgame than the original zones did, but they also had content for players starting at level 5, I believe. It meant that players could level up in either place, so old players could roll new characters and have a much different experience leveling up.
2. New races and classes were pretty well-liked. There were a few issues with some of these looking ridiculous, but the classes were decently well-balanced after a bit (with the glaring exception of the Necromancer, which is the single dumbest class decision I’ve ever seen in any game – the class was designed and implemented based on the fact that monsters function radically differently than players, and so this brokenly overpowered and crippled-by-bugs class was implemented).
3. The new dungeons offered new items, but they weren’t that much more powerful than what you could already find. There were a few exceptions – the hardest dungeon of this new area’s loot was much better than what you could find elsewhere, but any player had a chance to get into a group and immediately go out and get it. There wasn’t any elaborate leveling required – you could immediately get the benefit and then return to the game you already liked to play.

Now, these are all good because of the fact that Dark Age was not a PvE game – the endgame focus was on RvR. What this meant is that players often viewed PvE as that thing that they did when they weren’t playing the real game, so not having a ton of endgame content wasn’t a bad thing – you didn’t really do what you already had that often, so you didn’t need to add a bunch of new stuff. For a PvE-focused game, this expansion would probably not have been as successful – the new races and classes would have sold most of it, but the lack of a lot of new content, especially endgame content, would have made a lot of players feel like the expansion wasn’t designed for them as much. It didn’t add a whole lot of new PvE to the game, and would have probably not sold as well as it could have.

The next expansion, Trials of Atlantis, was similar. It added a bunch of new PvE zones, but these zones were mirrored throughout the three realms – each realm had their own copy of the zone, and everything was the same for the three realms, but you didn’t have to worry about fighting other players in them. ToA also added the first “alternate progression” path for additional leveling beyond level 50, the level cap – Master Levels. There were 10 of these that granted you additional powers and abilities that were useful in RvR (and fantastically so). They also introduced a ton of new items called artifacts – these were items with extremely powerful abilities that started at level 0 – you had to actually level the items up by killing specific monsters or killing certain types of players or killing players only during the day or night (the in-game days are 30 minutes long, so 15 minutes of day and 15 minutes of night). There were also three new races added.

This expansion is viewed by most Dark Age players as the worst expansion ever designed for a videogame, for a few main reasons:

1. All of the content was endgame PvE content. The new races did change the endgame dynamic a little, but this content was only accessible to higher-level characters. Additionally, this PvE content was all on a very high level of difficulty – you couldn’t simply throw a bunch of people at the encounter and hope that you’d win. One encounter had been designed to require 200 people to complete, broken out into groups of 8-16 at a number of different smaller camps and probably around 50 at the largest one. Others required you to have specific items that you had to find, and others made you NOT fight certain types of mobs to allow you to kill others. This was all thrown at a playerbase that regarded PvE as boring and trivial, and didn’t want to have to think about it, and was very poorly-received.
2. Artifacts were, in most cases, ridiculously more powerful than anything you could have obtained earlier. Because of this, players felt like they HAD to have these items to remain competitive, which required them to do the difficult PvE encounters to get them, and then kill a bunch of monsters in order to get the scrolls to unlock them, and then usually kill a bunch of other monsters to level them up and unlock their full power. It was a ton of busywork for an item that you only got because you felt like you had to, and a lot of players resented it.
3. Master Level abilities required you to do a ton of smaller PvE encounters and quests, most of which required you to be grouped with other people (and often a LOT of other people), and took a significant period of time. Then, when you finally got the ability, about 75% of them ONLY worked against other players – it wasn’t even helpful in getting the next ability. Additionally, we only let players know about nine of these trials – they had to find the tenth themselves, and it was possibly the biggest pain in the ass to find – a portal would spawn, only at night, in the middle of the ocean somewhere. If you had an item, you could get a decent idea where this portal was, but that item was an enormous pain to attain itself. Players did the encounters, but they hated most of them simply because they were long, complicated, and took them away from what they actually wanted to be doing in the game.

These three factors were why most people really revile this expansion for Dark Age of Camelot. Right before this expansion launched was the point at which DAoC had a subscriber base of 250,000, which was huge for the time. After the expansion launched (which was coincidentally around the same time that WoW launched), the population plummeted.

Now, for a PvE game, a lot of the major animosity for this expansion disappears. It was a new area entirely designed for endgame PvE content, and that would be fantastically well-received for PvE players. The Master Level system would definitely need to be reworked to work for PvE, and it does offer the problem of possibly destroying class balance, but it does offer the ability for players to progress and specialize their character out in a unique way to distinguish themselves from other players of their class. The artifact system is entirely too clunky, and the items were made entirely too powerful – having powerful items is okay, but don’t make them so powerful that everything else is regarded as “completely useless.” The system for getting them was also bad, but I do like the idea of having to level up the item to make it more useful. However, it should probably start with most of its usefulness, and then unlock the special things that make it awesome, rather than starting shitty and becoming useful halfway through, and then becoming ridiculous at the end.

There were definitely some things that were done well and some others that weren’t in these two expansions, and a lot of their success / failure is based on DAoC  as a base that they were built off of. Next time, I’ll get into Catacombs and Darkness Rising / Labyrinth, and then what Dark Age has done since.

~ by Blarlack on November 16, 2011.