“Power creep” is a nasty term when talking about video games, and usually whenever it gets brought up, it gets brought up as a bad thing. In fact, I would venture a guess that just the words up there in the headline made you recoil a little bit. Power creep is a bad thing, right? The answer is yes.
The answer is also no and also that it doesn’t matter, though. And to prove it, I want you to think of an online game that has run long enough to get at least one major update that has in no way been affected by power creep. You don’t have to tell me your answer. I can’t hear you anyway; just keep it in mind.
In order to understand why people don’t like power creep, of course, we first need to understand what it is and why it is happening. But we need to start doing so not by talking about game design. No, we are going to start by talking about something that you have absolutely never thought of in connection to power creep. We’re going to talk about James Bond.
Even if you have never seen a James Bond film, you understand the basic formula. An English spy is given a bunch of unusual spy gadgets in order to undertake a dangerous mission and uses those gadgets while sleeping with women and killing a large number of henchmen. Pretty basic, right? So it might surprise you that the first Bond film features a grand total of zero gadgets; he gets given a new sidearm by a character that would later be established as Q, but that’s it.
But the second film had to be bigger, and so he gets weird and unique gadgets, and that becomes a running thing. In every film he gets a new set of gadgets, and then later on they get pulled out because they’re basically hand-signed by Anton Chekhov to come up later. Oh, sure, being a horny superspy is great, but a horny superspy with cool toys makes people want to see the next movie even more!
That’s power creep. It means that you increasingly wind up with a version of James Bond who feels like more of a superhero, and then eventually you can gain new appeal just by stripping the concept down to the studs with Daniel Craig. That metaphor got lost in the weeds, but you get it.
In video games and MMOs in particular, power creep is usually far more overt. You need to make sure the new batch of levels and expansion content is appealing to players, and so players get some new expression of power. Suddenly your World of Warcraft character doesn’t just get new weapons but a new incredibly unique artifact weapon with its own distinct powers. You know the new Final Fantasy XIV job is cool because it has a scythe and it summons a voidsent helper, and isn’t that the coolest thing ever?
And along the way it has become clear that everyone prefers using AoE to chew down mass packs of enemies, so now everyone has a solid AoE rotation even at low levels and a dungeon that used to not be quite as easy to play is now a matter of pulling big packs and then whittling them down in a few seconds, simple as. You couldn’t do that back in the day. Power creep has hit.
Power creep isn’t just that the new thing is stronger than the old thing; it’s that the old things are the baseline, and so you need to make the new things be bigger and cooler and that includes the old things you still want to get played. Abilities get consolidated and your characters or weapons or whatever get stronger, and eventually what seemed strong at one point has become the new baseline and everything from more recent times is balanced around that. Designers do their best to fight against this, but it is kind of inevitable.
This is a bad thing because it means that whatever is great today might not be so great tomorrow and may, in fact, be kind of basic. It means that values keep going up and you need to chase new stuff. But… think about that for just a second. The biggest problem of power creep is that getting the Perfect Sword of Ultimate Destruction in 2024 will not mean you have won forever; it’ll mean that you have a good sword until the Perfecter Sword of Ultimater Destruction gets released in 2026.
Isn’t that kind of what you want? Don’t you sort of want to have something new to do in the game? If the new content being added to the game cannot give you any sort of rewards, why would you want to do it? And it’s all well and good to say, “Well, it could give parallel rewards that are equally good but not better,” but even if that were easy to do (it’s not), isn’t that just a reason to… not do anything?
More importantly, remember how I asked you to think of a game that hasn’t undergone some level of power creep? I would venture a guess that you struggled to really come up with anything. I sure do. And sure, some of that might just be it’s a common problem, but the thing is that looking at most MMOs at launch… a lot of them launch at a pretty unpolished power level.
To be clear, that’s fine. Every single game that launches has taken a lot of work, and no one should be blamed for it not being perfect. I do not think that it is some kind of conspiracy that it took the Warframe developers a little while to make really fun frames, or that FFXIV needed until Stormblood to really settle into its full content groove or whatever. But that’s kind of the point. Power creep happened, but it’s fine. It mostly resulted in a better overall game, and it’s not as if every new thing is automatically thousands of times better than every old thing.
In fact, what more often results in a problem isn’t actually power creep but a fear of players being bored, which results in a different set of incentives. The problem isn’t that the game has gotten too powerful; the problem is that no balancing has been done for older content because the developers are terrified that asking players to exist in a balanced place will lose an audience. So the game becomes… well… this.
And that is a problem, but it’s not a problem because the new thing has been made too powerful or because power creep has destroyed the game’s previously unimpeachable balance. It’s a problem of developers intentionally borking their balance in order to promote a feeling of power. Never mind that it’s tangibly inauthentic because we as human beings are at least moderately capable of knowing when we’re being coddled or mocked.
That’s not to say power creep can’t be a problem; it’s just not the apocalyptic, consistent problem for ongoing games. It can happen, and it can be bad, but sometimes it’s just a thing. And talking about intentionally ruining a game’s balance is a different discussion… albeit one that’ll have to wait for another 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.
