I was reading this excellent post by Rem which crystallised a bunch of ideas for me. Levels in games were first introduced way back when Dungeons & Dragons hit the market. As such they have always been a given in any RPG since that time. And when you are talking about table-top games or even single player video games, then they make perfect sense. You go up a level, you get more powerful and then the DM or game itself directs you to where would be the best place to go. But in an MMO this creates immense problems, because an MMO is supposed to be a playable world. To put it simply, your character level does not represent your power, it is your actual power. You might have a super awesome magic sword that can kill nasty undead things, but if you happen to meet an undead mob that is 10 levels above you then that sword is useless, even if the mob is a silly zombie. You are dead meat. Which means that your ability to play in the world is dictated by your level. You can only play with friends if you are around the same level. You can only go to certain zones if you are of the appropriate level or higher, although being of a higher level has its own issues as you are now a literal demi-god whom no living creature can possibly harm. It might be funny the first time to go back to Westfall and have the members of the Defias Brotherhood wail helplessly against you as your back is turned to them, but it gets old pretty quick.
Having levels also means that all the effort that game designers put into content is for the most part wasted. As soon as you begin any game which has a levelling process then the game itself turns to a mad rush to get to the level cap. Developers wonder why players blow through to the “end game” so quickly, but their own design is working against them. It is only at the level cap where players are on an even footing and able to play together, but by that time the only part of the game left to play is either raiding or organised PvP.
Imagine WoW without the levelling process, but replaced instead with skills and equipment. As you had experiences in game then your abilities improved. You could elect to put a great deal of effort into particular areas. What if equipment was actually rare itself, so that the crafting game took on a completely different importance. If the finding of a sword, any type of sword, from killing a mob was rare in itself, then that sense of gear fulfilment that presently players have to get from raiding or doing heroics could be had from the world itself. What if spells were not automatically learned but discovered in the world after killing other spellcasters? The act of killing a spellcaster could gift you with his spellbook, which would contain the spells that he would have used against you. Which would mean that some spells would be rare and not guaranteed to be had by all players.
But best of all this eliminates the end game. In this sense there is no end game as such. You simply keep working on your character, and the world itself is the game. You can go anywhere from the beginning and have a chance at killing any creature from the beginning. You can team up with anyone, and even though you may be low powered compared to others, your presence would still be a valuable asset to a group planning on taking out a creature that had resisted all previous efforts to be slain. And thus is eliminated the need for developers having to continually come up with new content. The whole wide world is the content and there is no rush to a pre ordained level cap. In this way you are truly existing in a playable world.
The Noisy Rogue 
June 20, 2011 at 4:00 am
And thus is eliminated the need for developers having to continually come up with new content. The whole wide world is the content and there is no rush to a pre ordained level cap.
Err… what? Removing the level cap does not suddenly eliminate the desire to become as powerful as possible as quickly as possible. All that sort of game design does is turn skill bars into XP bars. Grinding out Defias mages and getting Frostbolt Mk V to replace Frostbolt Mk IV would be “gaining a level.” And I have no idea what you are talking about vis-a-vis developers “no longer having to come up with new content.” Who keeps playing this game after they have killed everything? Is there no upper limit for skills? Can you literally grind forever? Is that supposed to be better?
Nevermind how asinine PvP would be in such a game. Everyone on “equal standing” aside from Bob who got an awesome weapon by pure RNG or Timmy casting Frostbolt XX compared to your own Frostbolt I.
The only games that work without levels/XP/etc are games like Counter-Strike where self-improvement is the sole difference between Player A with an AWP and Player B with an AWP. An RPG attempting to emulate such equality would fail because the type of person interested in RPGs in the first place WANT their 5 hours “invested” in the game to mean they are noticeably more powerful than someone else who did not spend the same 5 hours. The absolute last thing someone wants to see happen is a guy in greens out-perform (or kill) them in epics.
June 20, 2011 at 1:16 pm
You’re assuming a lot in saying that the type of person interested in RPGs are interested in investing their time in being more powerful than someone who doesn’t spend that amount of time. For some of us it’s about the total experience, the interaction, the pleasure of the game that is the important thing, the reward. Not the epix lewt. Call me an idealist by all means, but I’m sick to the back teeth of games in which I have to race to end game through pointless kill 10 boars, then go back, kill ten more, then kill the big one. I’d much rather reasons for doing what I want to do, a freeform game with quests with more meaning. People getting together to kill stuff because it’s fun. And being able to quest anywhere, and still have all the quests on level rather than outlevelling an area? I for one would LOVE it. And it would mean raising the quality of the quest design and story.
Everyone’s currently stuck in this mindset of getting better, getting more powerful as it’s been the only option available for so long that there doesn’t seem to be any alternative. Even idealistic me. When I started to play LotRO, the whole gaming thing was new to me, it was enchanting, levelling was slow and fun, and the world was immersive. Somehow I’ve become the player who eyes up her experience bar and gear, and it’s sucking all the joy out of things for me. I’ve fallen completely for this, and I don’t like the gamer I’ve become. I’ll be first in the queue when a true levelless game hits the market.
I’ve played tabletop games in which skill levels rise by only a couple of percent over each campaign, a very minimal amount indeed. The Call of Cthulhu percentage roll sytem does this really well for example. There are so many skill options available, and the percentages given as “rewards” don’t actually matter. No-one feels hard done by because they’re doing less damage than another, because it just doesn’t work that way.
Whether there are enough like me in the MMORPG world to make a truly levelless game which isn’t based around gear and being better than everyone else is viable remains to be seen. I at least can hope.
Sorry if my argument’s a bit…argumentative and waffly, I don’t mean it as such, I just wanted to put across that there are some of us out there who don’t enjoy the fast levelling to end game and the limitations that come from being at level cap!
June 21, 2011 at 9:09 am
I think that there are a lot of us who don’t enjoy the fast levelling to end game, Alq.
Azuriel said, “… Who keeps playing this game after they have killed everything? Is there no upper limit for skills? Can you literally grind forever? Is that supposed to be better?…”
Grind forever? Isn’t that what we’re doing now? How about creating a character that is interesting enough to you to want to devote time to its development, not as a vacuous never ending power base, but as an interesting individual in of itself.
June 20, 2011 at 8:50 am
Also liked Rem’s post a lot. And I agree that levels in the way they are used today, are problematic. They do a lot of good, but they also do a lot of bad. The WoW-like leveling/endgame separation is not mandatory, in my opinion. Rift, for example, might be much more fun without these kinds of levels.
June 20, 2011 at 6:10 pm
Sounds like the game I’ve been envisioning. You learn skills as you go. You gain experience from completing quests. The experience is divided up among your stats depending on which skills you use. This is how the players get stronger. All enemies, except those in specifically marked areas of the world, would start as their most basic form and would be defeatable by players as soon as they roll the character. As players gain power through playing the game, the enemies will scale in power along with you (though after a certain point, they begin to scale at a lesser rate so the player overtakes them in power eventually). Players who increase their damage will face enemies with higher health or greater defense and so on.
Players would be able to go anywhere in the world and enemies would always provide an appropriate challenge level (and players could perhaps change the difficulty, scaling mobs up or down along with rewards they potentially provide). There would never be anywhere the player couldn’t go and adventure (though I would institute some areas which are dangerous where enemies are tuned to be a challenge).
Group content such as raids and dungeons would adjust themselves to the average capabilities of the group. Certain classes could have buffs which raise the abilities of lower progressed characters up to the average. Everyone would be able to play together at all times. You would be able to roll a fresh character and after getting a basic sword from a vendor go and join a raid on a dragon’s keep.
As far as your original post goes, I don’t know if developers not needing to create additional content is necessarily true. Players will eventually grow tired of older content and need fresh material to replace it.
June 21, 2011 at 12:01 am
I have often pondered how you could successfully build a world where levels aren’t a focus, or don’t exist. At their core, they’re an arbitrary score system for MMORPGs. However, as Azuriel points out, if it’s just about upgrading your skills, for example, leveling still exists. It just shifts one bar to another.
The real goal is to create a realistic and interesting approach to character building that doesn’t generate huge power differences between players with less play time and players with more play time. Right now, the motivation is to become powerful. However, I’d love to see a game where the motivation is instead to become unique. Where there exists a thousand ways to defeat a problem, instead of just a couple (i.e. tank/heals/dps formula).
Figure out how to do that well, and I’d drop my Warcraft subscription in a heartbeat.
June 21, 2011 at 9:06 am
Play planeshift, that is basically an mmo following this. some things are implemented slightely differently, but all in all pretty much the same concept as you describe.
And it gets old real fast. The only draw into planeshift is the full immersion you get from the mandatory role playing.
June 30, 2011 at 12:45 am
It’s been done – “WHAT!” you say? Yes, it’s been done, the games were MASSIVE flops… If I can remember the names of the games I’ll repost here – but they just completely failed.
June 30, 2011 at 7:28 am
This is me not saying “What!”