We’ve been in Leveling Month over here in Vague Patch Notes, and I had intended for this particular column to close off that discussion by talking about when we get to meaningful leveling after talking about both leveling that goes too fast and leveling that goes too slow. But it occurred to me before I started writing that there is, in fact, another important element to discuss when it comes to leveling because “meaningful leveling” as a statement can, in fact, mean two different things.
And one of those things is bad.
So, as I often do, I am going to start by talking about something seemingly unrelated: Gary Gygax. While Gygax is remembered as one of the two major forces behind the creation of Dungeons & Dragons, anyone who has done more research into the man would find that his legacy is complicated, to say the least. But I want to narrow the scope to talking purely about the way that Gygax designed his adventures, which was honestly just bad when you consider his most famous works like Tomb of Horrors.
That might sound uncharitable; Tomb of Horrors is a classic adventure and so forth, I’ve heard it before. But let’s take a step back. Stripped to the studs, Tomb of Horrors is an adventure that is designed to be full of traps that will kill player characters who think they are otherwise invulnerable. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing except for the fact that tabletop roleplaying games are not board games; they are collaborative experiences, and killing player characters is not hard.
I don’t mean that it’s just mechanically doable; I mean that if you’re running the game, you can literally do that any time you want. Ken, your elf wizard has 17 simultaneous heart attacks. Sandra, a volcano erupts under your feet. Mike, your wife is actually 15 demiliches in a trenchcoat. See? It’s easy. You are running the game; you can do it any time you want.
Now, as someone who as run games, I know there are certainly chances to put fun traps in the path of your players, but the goal isn’t to kill them; it’s to create complications that make the game more fun, and the game is at its best when the players knowingly walk into that trap. When the players say, “All right, this is a trap, but my character would fall for it anyway, so let’s do this thing.”
What does this have to do with leveling? Well, “meaningful leveling” can often be akin to that kind of tabletop experience, where a game pretends that if it’s difficult for players to level, somehow leveling becomes more meaningful. But when you’re talking about a game that someone is designing with intent, it’s actually really, really easy to make leveling difficult.
Things like losing experience on death, forcing people to group up to level, making experience gains low, and so forth are really easy to add from a design standpoint. And yes, it will make someone feel as if the time leveling was much more difficult to do, but it won’t make any of it more fun. It’ll just let the people who have the time and patience to jump through all of those hoops feel as if it’s something to lord over the people who do not.
In some ways, this does kind of intersect with the ongoing discussion about game difficulty and the lines between making a game challenging and rewarding or just tedious to get through. You see it talked about a lot with games like Elden Ring, with people on the one hand noting that the game’s idea of challenge makes beating it satisfying, and people on the other hand arguing that making the game more accessible would allow more people to experience the game as a whole. There’s a bad syllogism with players assuming that everything in the game is a priori good because they played the game and liked it, thus it’s all important.
But there are also people who are more interested in the fact that as long as not everyone has the patience to grind through the game’s various boss fights, being able and willing to do so makes beating the game a mark of pride. It’s not really about farming achievement so much as being able to say that I did a thing you can’t and that makes me better.
Leveling in an MMO is not an intense challenge no matter what, but it can definitely be made so slow and tedious that people lose interest in it. And for some people that is the meaningful part. The whole point is that I got to the top of the mountain, and every other person who gets to the top makes what I did less important.
The thing is that, as mentioned, it’s not an intense challenge of anything other than patience. Leveling in World of Warcraft without killing anything can be done. It’s slow, but it is possible. And it’s impressive that someone consistently does it, but it doesn’t say much about the approach being more meaningful.
In some ways, this is a case where “meaningful leveling” becomes a linked clause with people upset that MMOs make it too easy to feel special, either because the story makes you too important or you don’t have to brave random chance in a group of three dozen screaming ragemonsters to get a minor gear upgrade or whatever. If your main skill is patience, we’ve gone from a world where MMOs could reward that a fair bit more than other video games, and that has steadily changed.
That’s not to say that patience isn’t a skill, or even that older games didn’t put other player skills to the test; consider the skill required in playing a Red Mage in Final Fantasy XI, which could be extremely testing. It’s more about a division of values. A kinda bad Red Mage in FFXI at launch could still get pretty far so long as the person was moderately patient because “not an active detriment” was still providing a force multiplication effect.
But that kind of puts the lie to the whole thing. Sure, you could be not really good at Red Mage and still get to level 75. But you were going to find the game pretty closed off to you because most of the game required more than just hitting level 75 and didn’t allow you to just throw more bodies at things. And as time went by, that situation only compounded. In the game right now, reaching level 99 is an accomplishment. It’s meaningful. But it is hardly the main criterion for playing the game.
Wait – did I just say it was meaningful? I sure did, and I sure as heck didn’t mean it in any sort of exclusionary “not everyone will have the patience to do this” sense. So what does that actually mean? Well… that’s for next week. Yes. I promise, one more week of leveling month, and then I’m done. Unless I think of something more.
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.
