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In my previous post about levels,
I detailed some of the pros and cons of levels. I promised that I'd
propose some solutions to the problems that levels introduce to our
games.
But, first, let's define what the goals of a replacement system are, and take a look at why we want to replace levels.
A Number is Not The Enemy
As people have pointed out in comments, it's not really the concept
of levels that we're tackling here; rather, we're taking a look at
levels as they are usually implemented in a game. There is no
fundamental problem with having a numeric value associated with a
character to represent a character like levels do. But, levels as they
are currently implemented have a specific load of baggage along with
them.
So, something that replaces levels doesn't necessarily have to shy
away from being a number. Our goal here is to eliminate specific
problems levels require.
Our Goals
As I mentioned in the first article,
levels serve three purposes: achievement, information, and pacing. A
proper system should fulfill all these purposes. For my system, I want
to focus on pacing and achievement more than information.
In the second article, I mentioned some of the benefits of levels.
Unfortunately, a new system can be neither familiar or popular, so
we're left with only being able to develop a relatively simple system.
Deeds in LotRO
Some of this idea comes from my experience playing LotRO,
so if you've played that you might understand a bit better where my
inspiration comes from. The main concept that I'm drawing upon here is
Deeds; these are a specific action you have to do, usually within a
specific zone, in order to get a reward. They're kind of like very
simple quests that don't require an NPC.
The typical reward from a deed is a title or a trait. Traits can be
selected on your character to give you a benefit; they're kind of like
specializations. For example, you might have to kill wolves in The
Shire; after killing 30 wolves you get the title "Fur-cutter". After
killing 60 more (for the "advanced" trait) you get the Discipline trait
which increases Might, Disease Resistance, and reduces incoming Melee
Damage. (You can only activate or "slot" a limited number of traits,
though. They act a lot like talents, but they're not in a tree
formation.)
Some deeds might have you find certain locations on the map, perform
specific activities in an area, or even finish a number of quests in an
area. Some deeds have multiple parts; like the wolf-killling example
above, you get a title and later a trait for the same type of deed.
Each class and race also have unique deeds that the player can
accomplish; class deeds usually require using a class ability, whereas
racial traits require killing racial enemies.
The interesting thing about the deeds is that they're a good way to
tie together a bunch of quests without requiring players to keep a
quest around in their log. Players can also choose to do a deed or not,
depending on if they want the reward. The deeds can also be useful to
do at almost any level, since the traits scale with how many times you
earn the specific trait. Finally, the deeds aren't always obvious,
sometimes you have to explore around or try things out in order do
discover a new deed; well, being an explorer-type, I find that to be a
good thing.
The problem with deeds as implemented in LotRO is that they tend to
feel like a grind. You've killed 10 wolves for a quest and 20 more have
aggroed on you. Great! But, now you have to go find 60 more to
slaughter to get your carrot. Gah! I've been told this gets worse when
you have to go find and murder hundreds of trolls in more advanced
areas. (Tell me again why trolls are so feared?)
The Proposal
So, drawing from this system: why have levels at all? Why not just
have deeds that are tied to specific locations/zones (perhaps with a
few meta-deeds to show how many zones a player has mastered)? Finish
the deed and you get a benefit for your character; these benefits would
be incremental improvements to your character, and players could choose
how they want to specialize their characters.
In essence, you're eliminating experience points from the equation
as well as levels. Quests would no longer be the main method for
advancing the character, although you might still want quests for the
storytelling possibilities, or as a way to give loot to players.
I think with this type of system you want to flatten the power curve
as much as possible. A specific trait might only give you a 5% bonus to
an aspect of your character. If you focus on a enhancing a particular
trait, you might get an overall 30% advantage over someone with no
enhancements. This means that all character are roughly equal in power,
with some of the more advanced characters having a slight advantage.
Note that this system would work with or without classes.
So, the typical player experience would be as follows:
- Get introduced to a new zone.
- Enter the new zone.
- Finish the introductory activity, such as a breadcrumb quest to introduce an NPC.
- Find some new deeds by doing the introduction.
- Finish some deeds and find new deeds along the way.
- Finish a selection of deeds in a zone, and get an introduction to a new zone.
Compared to Levels
Let's look at our goals and the advantage of levels we wanted to retain:
Achievement - This accomplishes this by allowing players to
master the deeds in a zone that he or she wants. This would be similar
in concept to how a player is "done" with a raid dungeon once he or she
has all the gear required from that dungeon.
Pacing - This is also partially accomplished. Once a player
has mastered the deeds of a zone, there is no further benefit to
"bottom feeding" in that zone. However, the concept of a "high level"
zone is less distinct in this system; restricted entry to a particular
zone would need another reason besides just level; perhaps you need a
specific key to enter the area, or you need specialized equipment with
certain resistances to survive.
Information - This needs more work. Specific deeds completed
might be displayed in an examination window, just as talents are in
WoW. Titles earned from accomplishing specific deeds might also be used
to judge how experienced a character is.
Simple - It's hard to make a system that is quite as simple
as levels, but I think this one is almost as simple. As I said above,
deeds are kind of like very focused quests in the game world. My better
half picked up the concept of deeds quite quickly, even though she's
not an experienced MMO player.
What disadvantages typically associated with levels have we avoided?
Segregation - This is a big one. Since we don't have level
requirements for zones, players can pick from a much wider selection of
zones. Someone who has just started playing could easily tag along with
a friend who has been playing for a few months to explore a new zone,
assuming there are no special requirements. Instead of the new player
feeling isolated, he or she could get the benefit of playing with their
friend without the friend feeling like he or she is slumming, or just
rushing the new character through content as fast as possible.
C*ckblocking - This is reduced unless specific restrictions
are introduced in a zone. A player who is clever enough to survive in a
harder zone can face the challenge when he or she wants to, instead of
being required by game mechanics to attain a specific level. However,
you might still have players putting limits on who they will take along
to an event like a raid (or its equivalent).
Oversimplification - If monsters in every zone are roughly
equal in power, then advances I gain with my character are meaningful.
I can also pick and choose how I want to upgrade my character for the
most part.
One big advantage for development is that you worry less about
"level-appropriate zones". Instead of adding content and having to
focus on low-, mid-, or high-level zones, you can add a zone and
players of all experience levels have an incentive to visit it.
New Issues to Consider
A game using this system needs to educate its players about the new
system. It's definitely not a familiar system, so you can't expect
players to compare it to other things they are familiar with, outside
of LotRO. Even LotRO had the advantage of also using levels, so players
were motivated to gain xp from the system they were familiar with, and
were introduced to deeds along the way.
The other tricky thing here will be to make sure that you give the
players proper motivation in the game. Instead of seeking bigger
challenges to get more experience, players will need to have a reason
to go to new areas. I don't think this is too much of a challenge,
since directing characters to new zones is already part of what a good
MMO is expected to do.
You also have to worry about power inflation with this system, too.
If you already have 10 zones that give bonuses to stats, adding another
zone means you'll be increasing the maximum bonus by 10% of its old
value, assuming the bonuses in all areas are roughly equal. Now
consider adding 5 new zones in an expansion area and say hello to our
old friend "mudflation".
(This post originally appeared at http://www.psychochild.org/?p=608)
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First, c*ckblocking. If your story is paced a certain way, like WoW putting a quest like "Kill Arthas" or "Capture Illidan" or something toward the end of the game, then those quests will need to be unachievable by normal players. Approaching Arthas should require that the player is very powerful, so he should be gated by a series of challenges that are impossible for players who don't have a ton of Deeds finished and the associated high-level traits acquired. You shouldn't be able to log on, day one, and go kill Arthas. I don't even think you should be able to roll a new character and immediately go kill Arthas. Each character should have a long journey to get there, aside from the "sidekicking" system.
As for oversimplification, you still need monsters to be more powerful in areas where you expect super-powerful players. If you make all monsters equal in power, then players who can complete one zone (and thus have proven they can beat these monsters) become more powerful and can beat a second zone even more easily, and a third, and so on. The player's power will snowball quickly. If you do make zones where monsters are balanced on the assumption that players have a few special traits under their belts already, then you've created a de facto high-level zone by filling it with monsters who starting players shouldn't be able to beat. In order to make those zones attractive to the people who can handle them, the traits they offer have to be better than the traits those people already have, so now we have a "tiered" system where players progress through higher and higher level zones, except we don't call them "high-level" anymore. This preserves the story progression and avoids the c*ckblocking problem, but it also takes us right back to level-based advancement.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the ultimate issue with making the player more powerful, through levels or not, is that more powerful players actually need more powerful monsters in order for the game not to be boring. And on the other hand, you obviously can't scale monsters to player level automatically ("This monster hits you harder if you are higher level") because that eliminates the value of being powerful.
I'm curious about your MMO-experience though as it sounds like you're mainly from the EQ-like games (EQ, WoW, LotRO). Have you spent a significant amount of time playing skill based games like EvE, UO, and Darkfall? If not I'd recommend it as it does give you another perspective on advancement in MMOs.
Another interesting concept is group advancement as seen in Warhammer Online, A Tale in the Desert, and several city building MMOs. While those games still have individual advancement they also feature a group component where multiple players work together to advance their guild. As the guild grows so does the benefits fed back to the player. This creates a system where a newbie player can contribute to he efforts of an experienced one while still providing some means of pacing. The main drawback to advancement like this is the risk of uber-guilds or new players joining experienced guilds and missing out on the feeling of progression by bettering their guild.
I'd also love to hear your thoughts on levels in a more PvP or sandboxed environment. Typically in more sandbox-like MMOs the character advancement in power isn't as important as the character's accomplishments. This allows for these MMOs to have more flexibility in keeping players of roughly the same strength rather than dividing them out on level.
Having read all three of your articles on this, the one thing that kept standing out to me is that you didn't always differentiate between "Levels" and "Improving your character".
Segregation, for example, is a natural consequence of any game that allows significant improvement to your character. Some games do make it worse by using your level number as part of the combat calculation, but many others make calculations entirely based on stats, even if you still have a level.
Looking at your solution, the thing that needs to be clear is how big of an effect deeds (and gear, for that matter) are going to have. If these will mega-improve your character then you have many of the issues that levels have. If they are only minor bonuses and most of your character's power comes in at the beginning, then the real discussion isn't about "levels". It's about pros/cons of allowing substantial increases to character power.
I am in full agreement that the level system as it exists in most RPGs has a lot of room for improvement, but to be able to nail down the manner of improvement, I think there needs to be some clarification on what I've mentioned above.
However, one thing that I think is being missed is that adding an element of Strategy. Introducing more choices for how a player can deal with enemies opens up a new world of dealing with some of these items. Even if a new player can't do as much damage as a more advanced player, if the player learns to be more tactical as they progress, then the power of the enemy means that there is simply less room for error. Advanced players will clearly dispatch enemies more quickly but a less advanced player can still perform fine given they are tactical enough.
It's an element that has been used in various single player RPG's, but as far as MMO's are concerned (and I'm not terribly familiar with very many) this would be similar to how Monster Hunter: Frontier works. There are still Ranks based on which parts of the game have been cleared, and open up new parts as you advance. Avatars however, progress mainly in the area of weapons and armor, relying on the player to develop the skill to deal with enemies.
The biggest weakness in all these games is how skills or levels serves to separate players. Particularly in WoW, the difference in only a few levels between players is nearly insurmountable. Games like these should be fostering player interaction, but instead, their fundamental design serves to separate players, and in the long run limits player use of the world. By level 80, much of the WoW world is useless to an advanced player, leading players to complain about 'endgame' problems. No kidding. When 95% of the game world is below your level, it kind of limits your options. You can only go on so many 40 man raids to the same dungeon before you say like I did, 'screw this'. WoW has tried to address this by adding expansions, but the fundamental problem remains: levels, skills, and other mechanisms of player advancement, by design, render parts of your world useless to players as they progress.
Perhaps a way out of this is to design a game like a first person shooter, only this would be a persistant FPS. Heresy!!??! Perhaps. However, for the most part, you don't have the balancing issues in a FPS that you have in your typical MMO, or if you do, they are orders of magnitude easier to resolve. What you do still have is player skill.
I haven't played many shooters recently, but at one time I did play a lot of Battlefield 1942 online. After playing the single player campaigns, and feeling very competent indeed playing agains bots, I jumped online and promptly got schooled by virtually every other player I encountered. Single player and multiplayer were almost like two completely separate games, and it took a while to learn to be effective in the new environment.
So, build a world, and get rid of artificial player advancement. Suddenly, the entire world is of equal value to your players, not just the zones that fall within thier 'level'. If one area is too congested, all one has to do is keep moving over the next hill until they find a population density that they are comfortable with, be that a part of a crowd, or by themselves off in the wilderness. Some things can be handled solo, some things require groups, but you are not limited by level. Of course, you may still suck, but that will not be because your skill/level is too low, but rather because you need to become a better player.
From my experience with multiplayer BF1942, that may be more rewarding that hitting lvl 80 in WoW.
And as a personal preference, should any aspiring developer decide to run with this idea, make your world free-for-all PvP with no restrictions. In my experience, any time a game has tried to implement PvP with a bunch of rules and limitations, people just end up finding loopholes in your system that they use against other players, contrary to your best intentions. This would be a kind of persistant FPS, remember. Nobody should ever accuse anyone of being a 'griefer' when playing a shooter, even if you use swords instead of machine guns.
PERHAPS you could come up with a ranking system based on kill ratios, but players would only abuse that to run up artificially high scores anyway, which defeats the purpose of having the ranking system in the first place.
Another example from ancient history. Ultima Online had a variety titles, both skill based and reputation based. Nobody cared if you were a GrandMaster Swordsman, because it was assumed that if you were active in PvP, you'd be a GM something or other, which is why most player macro'ed their skills up as quick as they could before fighting other players. Besides, everyone and their dog were multiple GMs in a variety of skills, so who really and truly gives a sh*t about that?
They also had titles like Lord so and so, or Great Lord so and so, or Dread Lord whoever, but those were granted for killing mobs for positive titles, so nobody cared if you had killed 10,000 mongbats. All that proved was that you could grind a zillion kills against the AI. Big whoop. The Dread titles were equally meaningless, because all you had to do for that was go out and kill wandering healers in the wilderness. Again, anyone who was proud of that nonsense was a source of ridicule, not respect.
Don't waste development effort on artificial titles that competent players don't give a crap about anyway. The players know which players are the gimps, and which players are the 800 pound gorillas in the game. That is the only ranking system anybody cares about, and you can't design that into the game.
Keep it simple. Players know who the gimps are, and who are the 800 pound gorillas. Don't waste devel
Bob McIntyre wrote:
"[Y]ou still need monsters to be more powerful in areas where you expect super-powerful players."
One of the assumptions I made was that you wouldn't necesssarily have "super-powerful" characters. Gains in power are incremental, focusing on giving a player more options rather than simply more power. As Joshua McDonald mentioned in his comment, this is related, but not necessarily the same as talking about replacing levels.
In the second article of this series, I said that casting a fireball that cost 30% more mana for 30% more damage on a monster has 30% more hit points doesn't really make the player feel powerful. Why increase everything by 30% when you can increase them by a smaller amount and let everyone have fun everywhere? I lump this in with the concept of levels, because many games use levels as a gating mechanism to make sure players stay in the right area for their character. Going somewhere too advanced results in guaranteed death, whereas going someplace not advanced enough means that you'll probably not gain much from "trivial" monsters.
One benefit of getting rid of levels, in my opinion, is that we might start thinking about advancement that doesn't have a steep power curve. I'm hesitant to put specific numbers on this as Joshua wanted, because this was more for inspiration instead of a "how-to" post.
Jonathon Walsh wrote:
"I'm curious about your MMO-experience though as it sounds like you're mainly from the EQ-like games (EQ, WoW, LotRO). Have you spent a significant amount of time playing skill based games like EvE, UO, and Darkfall?"
If you look at my profile, you'll see I worked on (and currently own ) the classic MMO Meridian 59. That game is heavily skill based and came out before any of those games. One of the reasons I bought the game and saved it from oblivion is because I wanted people to see that there are alternatives to DIKU (EQ-like) games. While characters do increase in power tremendously in M59 from newbie to advanced stages, it's not unreasonable that someone that has mastered a few skills could play with someone who has mastered several dozen skills and is nearing the "maximum" of their character's ability.
Brent Glines wrote:
"[M]ake your world free-for-all PvP with no restrictions."
Despite running a fairly open PvP game, I disagree. You might be interested in another discussion on my blog (http://www.psychochild.org/?p=618) that covers some of the problems you have with PvP beyond the usual problems of unstable technology and poor game design decisions. There are some serious, fundamental reasons why free-for-all PvP doesn't work too well.
While the system isn't perfect I find it a vast improvement on the leveling system implemented by games like wow. With a much greater emphasis on all players being equal in all but skill and appearance.
It was 100% based on skills, more skills than even character "points" and equipment. You increase your points in skills using them, and increase proportionally parent skills groups and archetypes. You could learn new skills from other players, enemies, sometimes just watching them execute various times till your char feel able to "try", or being directed teached, or something else. But the point was that every skill had offensive and defensive points, so a commonly used skill is widely known and, almost everybody is able to avoid or defend it. Some skills to hide, fake, hide equipment and it's defenses where there too.