No matter what you do, leveling in an MMORPG is going to be too fast. It’s also going to be slow. It is the very model of a Goldilocks problem: You will forever be pushing it hither and yon, but you will never, ever get to the point where leveling is just right for everyone. And the thing is that people who think otherwise are… gently misunderstanding the problem.
Recently, Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street had some views to share about his MMORPG that he’s developing, and one of the things he talked about was making leveling slower and more of a journey. This is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. There are ways it could become a bad idea, but that’s not what I’m thinking about here because at this point it’s a broadcast from Theoryville that has no real immediate impact on a playable game. It depends on what players are doing along the way and how much the game is designed to make that journey feel worthwhile. But the thing is that leveling is always finite. Slow, fast, no matter what – it does stop. And that is actually a good thing.
Do you need an example? Well, sure. Let’s look at The Simpsons.
The Simpsons, to an Old Person like me, was an animated sitcom that premiered in 1989 about a family consisting of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. The show was countercultural in an almost shocking way when it premiered, skewering the then-common American sitcom of the times with not only a biting and acerbic attitude toward family values but also a genuine heart that really made it connect with people for years. A lot of episodes showed a deep and unflinching love for these characters, made possible only because the show was unwilling to lean in on treacle and generic resolutions.
Of course, if you are younger than I am, this may not be the reality. Indeed, if you were born in 2000, The Simpsons is an animated sitcom that had some good episodes before you were born, but that has generally stopped being the case; indeed, the season in the year you were born had a smattering of good episodes amidst a sea of bad ones, and this has only intensified with the years. People have been talking about why The Simpsons is bad for longer than anyone agrees it was good.
But the actual answer about why the show “went bad” is… really incredibly simple. Sitcoms aren’t actually meant to last for 35 years! It’s frankly a miracle that some lasted nearly that long and stayed good!
This isn’t to say that you can establish some sort of absolute law where anything that lasts X amount of time is bad but less than X means it’s good; rather, it’s to point out that it’s not really some kind of unapproachable mystery to figure out why some things just aren’t good forever. Things need to end at some point. I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I absolutely assure you that if the show had gone for 14 seasons, we would all have wanted it to end significantly earlier. The Beatles broke up, but do you really want a world where they were still clinging to relevance like the Rolling Stones? You either end on a high note or you continue long enough to find some really bad lows.
You might argue that leveling in an MMORPG is not a scripted creative work, which is reasonable, I guess. But the thing is that leveling is, in fact, constrained – not because there’s no reason to keep levels going, but because creating an endpoint gives you a sense of being done with things. There is a certain point when you are not going to get any stronger.
I talked a couple columns back about how Ultima Online arguably has a level cap, not because it has a little number next to your head that indicates your level but because you reach a point when you cannot raise your skills or stats any higher; you can either lower your skills in favor of new ones, stone them off for the future, or equip gear to push those totals a bit higher, but all of those options still have limitations, and they don’t change the fact that there’s a hard cap for skills. The column itself wasn’t really about that, but the point remains that there has always been a pretty clear picture of reaching a certain point and accepting that this is as far as you’re going to get in terms of direct power.
People don’t always like this because in far too many MMORPGs, this is also the point when the game changes to be about something completely different from what it had been up to that point. But that’s not actually a natural function of reaching an endpoint. Indeed, that makes slower leveling actually worse. If a fun game is going to become a less fun game at the level cap, forcing you to spend forever and a day pounding your head against a wall to find out that nothing you did before will ever matter again doesn’t mean that you’ll be happier when you reach the level cap.
And to be fair, it’s not as if “I want the fun part of the game to last longer” is somehow an indefensible sentiment. But the flip side is that just making more leveling will extend the fun.
The first time I ever made serious leveling progress in basically any MMORPG I’ve played over a long term, it felt special and unique. The first time I made it through the story for Final Fantasy XIV’s expansions, it was unique and novel and it lives rent-free in my memory. But not only do I currently have every single job at the level cap, I have multiple characters who have made it through every part of the story. And perhaps surprising no one, subsequent journeys have not felt nearly as impactful.
Because… they can’t. Because I’m not going into this blind again, and I never can. You can only watch a movie for the first time once. You can only have your first leveling experience one time. No matter how you stretch it out, once it’s done, it’s done. But the weird thing is that it’s because that experience only happens once that it has merit, that it feels special, that it sticks with you.
I have memorable stories about my times in MMORPGs along my leveling path, and those stories all ended. And part of me might wish that I could have some of them back. There were unique experiences that some games have eliminated by making the game faster and more straightforward. But those changes also happened for a reason. Just like when I talked about how everything in an MMORPG is time-limited, everything is finite. You do not get to have a continual firehose of leveling, and if you did, it would eventually start to get boring as an endless march down a road you could never finish.
Now, what are the reasons for and against making a leveling experience longer or shorter? Well… that’s another column altogether. Maybe next week we’ll start in on that.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
