Last week, as I talked about the problems with horizontal progression, long-time commenter Rick Mills asked if I would write a column about level scaling and the problems with that. I informed him, rather impishly, that I would not do so because I already wrote that column like seven years ago. And at the time I really didn’t have any intention of writing more on the topic. But the more I thought about that old column, the more I found myself thinking that I kinda did want to say more about this. So if you don’t like this column, blame… well, me, but Rick is the reason I wrote it!
I’d still say you should read the old column, of course, because it lays down a lot of ground rules and basic concepts. The takeaway was that level scaling in and of itself is a good thing, but it becomes a less-good thing when level scaling is instead subject to wildly diminishing returns. When done correctly, levels still increase your power but don’t necessarily invalidate everything at a lower level.
But that can also raise another question of why you even have levels at that point.
Levels, as a concept, are weird. In the oldest tabletop RPGs levels were very much a marker of power. You gain enough markers of progress and then you are stronger and can do more stuff. Later tabletop designs have altered that particular equation so that more often than not, you progress in individual stuff over a period of time and that ultimately leaves you more powerful, and there are games where your “level” is a sum of your current power level rather than being just something you passively accumulate.
However, across all of this, the idea is pretty straightforward: Higher level means more power. This can lead to problems with verisimilitude and also with content; it’s hard to have a higher-level character pal around with lower-level characters, and it also doesn’t make sense for a high-level fighter to look at a dozen guys with knives and not be worried about getting stabbed. Experienced fighters still do not like to be stabbed! Hit points aren’t real!
So games that have level scaling are usually using it to both avoid making certain parts of the game obsolete as you level and enable characters of different levels to play together. But the thing that you have to start asking is what levels actually mean. If you’re always being scaled up or down as needed and your spread of abilities is what really matters, does the level actually matter at all?
The tabletop Final Fantasy XIV roleplaying game seems to bring this full circle by literally proposing the idea that maybe there shouldn’t be any levels whatsoever; you adjust based on the power level of the adventure, progression isn’t really a function of leveling up and gaining new job abilities. This is valid as far as it goes for making sure that two characters can always do things together of roughly equivalent challenge, but it also kind of raises the question of what those levels were even for. If it doesn’t make a difference, why did you want them?
But that raises the equivalent and equally important problem that MMORPGs in particular have been dealing with basically forever. If these games are designed to have a social element to them, the games work only so long as every level actually includes people. As soon as you wind up with levels empty of players, you start having a major issue with new players joining.
You don’t need to imagine this happening; it was a major problem in Final Fantasy XI, where new players would run into a situation when you needed other humans to form a party to help you level past a pretty early point but those other humans just were not playing the game. It required a lot of major changes to the game’s structure in order to actually make the game function properly and keep leveling, like, possible, culminating in the addition of Trusts to let you build your own party with AI companions.
Level scaling is, in part, an effort to address that. No longer do you have to deal with parts of the game being functional dead zones. Everyone has a reason to play together! But then you run into problems with scaling that, yes, can make gaining a level feel functionally irrelevant because you aren’t becoming more powerful and horizontal progress isn’t happening.
And therein lies the main problem. The core idea behind level scaling makes perfect sense, but it also is really hard to make levels still feel like you are making marked progress while also making sure that people can just play together. You want to make sure that levels matter. You also want to make sure that huge chunks of the game don’t become utterly irrelevant. And MMOs have been trying to square that circle basically forever.
None of this makes level scaling bad inherently as an idea. Level scaling is good because it is a genuine attempt to engage with the dual problems of obsoleted content and underpopulated lower level bands in MMORPGs as they mature. These are real things that loom large over almost every game, and the more reasons you give for players to take part in lower-level content and engage, the more new arrivals become long-term players. This isn’t speculative; it’s the sort of thing you can see in a game where you watch the well of new players dry up.
This is, in other words, why progression is actually really complicated. Just as in that previous column, the problem isn’t as simple as level scaling being bad; it’s really good at solving not just the problems of lower-level players needing others to explore the game alongside them, but it helps make more of the game accessible and relevant for longer. But it’s also a formula for making players feel like their progress isn’t “real” on various levels. It lowers the amount of effective growth you have into a narrower range.
Is there a solution to this? I… don’t know. I think that’s kind of the whole thing with every form of progression. Vertical and horizontal both create problems, and we act like either one can be abandoned at our peril. We don’t just want to have games be ever-escalating matches of ramping power levels like Dragonball Z, and we also don’t want to forever feel as if we’re just getting a new selection of slightly different tools when we already found ones we like.
The key, then, is finding a form of level scaling that strikes a balance – one where players still feel like higher-level players are stronger than their lower-level companions, but without the higher-level ones being overwhelmingly so or unable to derive any enjoyment from the process. And I think I’ll take a look at the two big methods of doing that… next week. Yeah, this one got bigger than I thought!
Blame Rick! Well, no, blame me, I’m writing it.
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.
