Last week, I talked about how slow leveling design could become a problem. In that piece (and the one before it – it’s become a whole series now), I noted we’d eventually need to address the other side of the equation too. Leveling can be too fast, too, and the original discussion we were having was in fact about whether or not leveling should be slower on the basis of “slower” being synecdoche for “more meaningful.”
This is a framing that I have, very deliberately, not embraced. The thing is that “meaningful” in this case is actually talking about something that is not, in and of itself, a function of speed but rather a function of other elements. But that’s seeding discussions for the future again, and right now we’re talking about when leveling is too fast, which means that the first thing we need to talk about is the original Guild Wars as well as Guild Wars 2. They provide interesting contrasts.
The original GW had a very low level cap of 20. And leveling was not slow; it was pretty easy to get to maximum level almost by accident in basically everything other than the Prophecies campaign. When I first was playing Nightfall, I didn’t even realize that I was getting close to the cap until I had already hit it. Leveling was exceedingly fast in that game. It was part of the reason why Guild Wars 2 specifically quadrupled the leveling experience, bringing the cap to 80, which has also not changed in any of the game’s multiple expansions (and is also trivially easy to reach!).
And yet as much as it might sound like the leveling in the former was too fast, it really wasn’t. Oh, sure, it was very quick, but leveling wasn’t the point. It, like its sequel, is a game balanced more around a perpetual level cap experience, and so you looked at leveling more as a perfunctory step in the process. But the flip side is that leveling doesn’t feel too slow in the later game, even though it objectively takes a fair amount of extra time.
So what does make leveling feel too fast? I picked out the original GW because it’s a good example. That’s because when you hit level 20, you aren’t done. At all. You have a ton of skills left to get, skills that are the things that are going to determine the vast majority of what you are actually going to do in the game, both for yourself and for your heroes.
Leveling is, in no small part, about acquiring power. This means that it’s easy to understand one of the problems that leads to it being too fast: When it feels as if you’re acquiring power faster than you can use it or feel it. If you gain a new ability, and then not only do you have no time to get used to the new ability and how it interacts with your existing ones but no real need to use it, then you’re clearly going too fast. The level you just acquired is functionally worthless because what did you even gain? Skills you haven’t found a reason or opportunity to use feel overwhelming, not rewarding.
But that’s not the only way that leveling can feel too fast. There are also games where leveling feels at once too fast and devoid of power. This was a major complaint about World of Warcraft before the level squish; you were leveling up very quickly, but you weren’t getting overloaded by new abilities (indeed, you rarely gained new abilities as you went on). So how could it be both? Obviously, because there are other elements at play. In this particular case, it’s more about why you’re bothering.
I’ve talked in prior columns here and there about the concept of “empty” levels. If a level brings neither new content nor new abilities, it feels empty even if you have technically gained stats (which are irrelevant since enemies gain stats at the same rate). This is a good way to make leveling feel too fast because you’ll intuit that the levels are there only to pad out the runtime until you get to the level cap. No level means anything, so it feels as if it’s going too fast for you to care because there’s no actual point.
But there is a third case where leveling can feel too fast, and it’s something a lot of games go through with expansions and tools to accelerate leveling over time. If the most recent content is the most interesting stuff and you want to speed people to get to it and avoid all the old expansions, you can quickly just turn up leveling rates during the earlier levels, which means that players just speed past all of the earlier content in the game. It doesn’t even need to be getting you up to the level cap; if you’re going to be max level without ever needing to do any sidequests, the sidequests wind up being totally irrelevant.
This means that you feel as if you’re leveling too fast because you don’t have a choice of “speed through the zone” or “do the zone at a reasonable pace.” You have one choice, and that choice is to just get to the level cap at max speed, even if you’d rather faff about doing side activities.
And if I’m fair about it, this is not an indefensible or inherently misguided approach. There are lots of games where people just want to get to the level cap and see the cool stuff the game has to offer. Games that keep the leveling slower can often lead to people being annoyed that they have to take it slower because come on, I just want to team up with my friends and do stuff. There is no perfect gate to set up where everyone will be happy with the time it takes. Deciding to let people speed things up because they want to just to team up with friends and get to the level cap? Understandable.
The problem is that when you don’t have a choice in the matter, you’ll feel that the levels are too fast. A lot of people are going to pick a faster leveling speed anyhow when given the option, but when you don’t get an option either way, you find yourself resenting that everything is just going by so quickly. You can’t slow down and smell the roses; you are locked onto a roller coaster, and the levels themselves are secondary.
So leveling too fast becomes a problem when regardless of whether or not you want to go quickly, you have to – when you don’t get a choice of operations but are just flung forward, with no control over the process. It makes the whole experience simultaneously exhausting and superfluous. None of it matters, and it would actually be better if you didn’t have any to begin with because you know that the levels are going so quickly that they are merely padding. Which makes it not fun to experience – and not satisfying to do.
So let’s cap this out by going back to that framing I rejected. When do we get to meaningful leveling, and how does that feel different? We’ll get into that… next week.
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.
