Last week I talked about how MMORPGs use level scaling to accomplish actually useful and important goals. In short, there is an issue with making sure that newer players and higher-level players still have some use for content, and you also want to make sure that players have more opportunities to play together. But at the same time, you want to make higher levels feel like an actual benefit, which means that you have to come up with ways to make leveling matter while keeping some form of scaling around.
There is, unfortunately, no absolutely perfect way to make this work, but there are two broad approaches that have been tried multiple times in games with some success. We’re going to call these approaches the lateral spread and the temporary shrink. And they’re both good, but they also both have drawbacks, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. Real simple-like.
The lateral spread
In games like Guild Wars 2 or The Elder Scrolls Online, you’re not going to be able to outlevel zones as you go. Zones in GW2, for example, will always scale you appropriately when you enter them. Map completion even kind of relies upon that. So if your gear and your stats are always scaled to the zone, how do you make levels mean something? (Leaving aside that the game’s leveling is so straightforward that in the time it took me to write this paragraph I reached level 80 on a character.)
You use the lateral spread technique. In short, leveling up doesn’t just provide you with a new level; it provides you with points that you can invest into abilities, new gear slot unlocks, new tiers of equipment, and so forth. While the actual stat increases might go away, those abilities don’t go away.
The bright side to this is pretty obvious. Even if you don’t see your HP or Strength or Armor or whatever go up, you have more abilities to use that can have new synergies, which means that a higher-level character is more powerful than a lower-level one but not necessarily the only one capable of having a meaningful impact. It helps create a world where everything can scale with your character because you are, in fact, still progressing even if some topline numbers don’t seem to change much.
On the other hand, this also kind of raises the question of why those topline numbers are even there in the first place. If what you’re really getting are skill points, why do you have a separate level in the first place? It seems kind of redundant, especially if everything scales to your expected stats anyway.
Equally troublesome is the fact that in some games, if you know what you’re investing in early on, you might wind up in a game with 60 levels to unlock all your skills but you can unlock all the ones you’ll use by level 20. That means a long stretch of time in which leveling is essentially meaningless. You already have your tricks! Nothing new is going to be added!
Last but not least, it’s worth noting that allowing players to pick between skills freely means it’s harder for designers to build bespoke interactions between abilities; you can’t be sure that players will have abilities A, B, and C, and so instead of building mechanical interactions directly between them you just have to make abilities A, B, and C have independent effects that will hopefully benefit one another. Which can also lead to some problems if it turns out A doesn’t work nearly as well as Q and Q, B, and E together result in absurd damage that deforms the meta. It’s not a problem or a drawback, just worth noting.
The temporary shrink
In games like Final Fantasy XIV and City of Heroes, under normal circumstances levels are real. Well, they’re not real real. They’re still fiction. But a max-level character can go back to a starting zone, yell really loudly, and end the lives of a dozen starter enemies without even noticing. However, you can opt to lower your level to sync down with your fellow lower-level players, and your abilities scale down so that you likely don’t have access to all of them either.
Why would you do this? Well, usually because there are still rewards to get while grouping with lower-level players that make it worthwhile. The higher-level players still have more power than the lower-level ones, but doing a mid-level task force as a level 50 character in CoH results in you getting some merits and completion while still helping your friends level.
Here, the bright side should again be fairly obvious: It solves the problem of needing to let players team up without making the leveling itself pointless. Syncing down to a lower level does mean that you’re weaker than normal, but it also doesn’t mean that you’re stuck there. From a design standpoint, it lets a whole range of content be evergreen instead of just the endgame content. You still have a reason to go back, and you also don’t have to worry about low-level players being stuck with high-level players pulverizing the lower content out of an obligation to routine.
The down sides are similarly obvious, but let’s not leave it merely implied: Going down in levels and losing your abilities sorta blows! It’s not the best feeling! In CoH my main character had electrical powers that only really came out in her higher-level form; getting synced down to a lower level meant losing all of those tricks to my significant consternation. Sometimes it means whole chunks of your play pattern get yanked out when you sync down.
There’s also the natural problem of making lower-level content evergreen. If your game has 100 levels and a dungeon every 10 levels, for example, players will be seeing the level 10 dungeon from level 10 through to 100, but the level 100 dungeon will only be right at the very end. People in FFXIV who have played for a while are very, very tired of Sastasha because they have seen it many, many times before.
So which one is better?
Neither! And both. They both accomplish different goals.
The lateral spread is a good way of having a majority open-world game where everyone gets to take part. It’s a way of making world events and exploration continue to matter even as it gradually funnels people toward the upper side of leveling. The temporary shrink, meanwhile, ensures there are ways for players to play together while also making the leveling experience still produce a meaningful sense of progression.
Where things get wonky is in MMORPGs that implement these elements without understanding what they’re trying to do. A game that wants to have a progression from lower zones to higher zones is a bad choice for a lateral spread, especially if its individual levels tend to be kind of empty. But there are MMORPGs that have done this, and it doesn’t work out well and tends to produce a lot of player frustration, for example.
Could I get another column out of this? Maybe. But I think we’re going to leave this one here for now.
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.
