MMO and Levels

I was going to post about this in an earlier post, but I decided to put it seperatly. Looking at how leveling and end game are so different. But I don't know why?

The standard RPG format is that you start off weak, and build up abilities. You can compare this to say a Racing game where you upgrade your vehicle as you advance through the game, or a FPS where you might get better weapons.

Maybe it's just because I mostly play RPGs, but I feel this is the genre that is hit most by this. Consider some RPGs you might have played, possibly the central character is some farm boy with no skills, and by the end of the game he's a power house. This seems like a large leap from say a book you might read, where the central character might take years or even decades to get his skills and abilities that high. In a film you tend not to have those years, but there still might be the impression of a long time.

In a game the entire game might seem to take a week? Maybe a month? And by the end of it, as well as doing a thousand times more damage, you can also survive a thousand times more damage.

The game is balanced around what your level is, or might be, and what abilities you might have. Sometimes a random villager will give you a run for your money at level 1 and level 30 depending on when you meet them. Elite guards could have 10 health, or a million, depending on how far through your quest you are.

Alot of this hasn't sat well with me. If I was the bad guy or whatever I'd just keep the guards with a million health and get rid of the rest, I'd own any level 1 guy trying to level up.

This annoyance is further brought forward by games where you're *not* a useless nobody at the beginning. Take for example KOTOR2 where you were a Jedi General in the War however many years ago, why do I lack the skills and feats to kill anything other than low level rubbish? It's even worse in KOTOR where you can end the game with no where near all the Force Powers you wanted, and wondering how that makes sense in the game.

An RPG is about the story, possibly you can ignore the entire levelling thing, and it might make sense to get more powerful. But with an MMO there is no story as such, fair enough The Old Republic they'rebanging on about might have alot of story and infact an arch for your character to work through, but the point is if there is *any* end game, it's just that end game. You'll want to be top level to do it, you might even need to be top level. If the leveling process takes you 2 months, you either need to level again, or you'll end up spending more than 2 months at top level, at that stage the leveling process is just to get you used to the game.

I think about world of warcraft. Would it be such a bad thing if you could start at max level? (or assume there is no level system, you start with everything) true you might get confused by the large amount of abilities you have, but is there any need to go through the leveling process apart from to learn what abilities are good? Imagine if every zone, instance and quest in the entire game was for top level people, wouldn't that have been a more enjoyable game? I think most people who enjoy leveling enjoy it because they get the lore out of the game and get to explore, why can't you do that at max level, assuming everything is tailored to you being max level?

There should be a learning curve to a game, but I haven't played an FPS (although I haven't played many anyway) where after doing your mission you feel the need to kill everything to squeeze the last bit of XP or whatever out of the level to give you a better chance in the next.

Thats when extra characters come into the mix, I've done zones in WoW often enough that alot of leveling is just a boring grind, I don't need to read the quest text, or learn anything the NPCs tell me because i've been there before, gone is the exploring as well. And i'm someone who likes reading the story in quest text and exploring, but the fact there is a leveling system means I have to repeat everything just to get to the end game.

If I were to make an MMO I wouldn't bother at all with a level system, or if I did the levels would be so close together that a good skilled low level player could kill a top level player who wasn't that skilled.

Think of any MMO you might have played, and think how much of the world they've devoted to leveling, zones and instances you visit once and move on. If there were maybe 10 levels to a character, each unlocking some new skills, and not more powerful ones, just different ones that allow for more complex rotations, or even different playstyles. Possibly any talent trees would be already filled in for you, in WoW terms you could get asked if you want your paladin to heal, tank or dps, and the talent tree would be filled in. Obviously you could change it if you wanted to.

While I might be remembering incorrectly, at level 60 in WoW your choices involved Strat/Scholo/DM/BRS. Forgetting the idea you needed 39 friends to do MC. There were basically 4 instances, with some PVP choices, but people still played them over and over.

I also know alot of MMOs fail due to a lack of end game. When you're charging £10 a month or whatever for people to just play the game, they'll stop playing if after leveling there is nothing to do, or very little to do. And they'll go do something else and forget about it, even if you do add more content, people probably won't bother coming back.

With The Old Republic I am quite worried at the fact that end game and leveling will be entirely different, and alot of the content will be with leveling.

Leveling in an MMO is like a single player RPG, after paying a subscription to get to the end game, there better be something that makes it worth while.