All right. So we are here at long last, at the end of Leveling Month, although it’s actually more like Month And A Bit. But at long last, we come to the conclusion. What makes for good, meaningful leveling?
It’s when leveling means something to you.
There we go, we’re all set, and I’ve written a conclusion and about a thousand words earlier than usual! Thanks for coming, and… aw, wait, I need to say more than that, don’t I? I can’t just leave it there. We need to talk a little about what that means.
We’ve talked about when leveling is too fast, we’ve talked about when it’s too slow, and we’ve talked about how it can go wrong by just making it more unpleasant. But making it absolutely meaningful? That’s complicated because in an odd sense, leveling can’t be meaningful. Ever. Leveling is not something that happens and you make it meaningful.
For example, the leveling in Final Fantasy XI felt meaningful. (Yes, it also had issues with being too slow. Multiple things can be true at once.) I felt accomplished as I leveled up in the game. But I also felt it was meaningful when I went back and I was no longer forced to slog through finding parties as slowly as possible, when I could instead just summon Trusts and go off into zones that would otherwise never see use as leveling spots.
Why was that?
Well… I just told you. These were zones and location that you would basically never see while leveling back in the day. But they were also part of the spread of zones the game had always had available, and as you leveled you found more and more of them. More than that, though, parts of the game unfolded to players as they kept progressing. New quests. New missions. Strange little broken pieces – FFXI always scattered a whole bunch of pieces on the floor and let you later pick them up to be assembled into a coherent whole.
And that meant that gaining levels wasn’t a goal in and of itself. Gaining levels was a tool to start experiencing the things that you were interested in seeing. Gaining levels was just the step.
Leveling is, ultimately, just a mechanical process. You gain points, and then your level increases or your skill goes up to a certain level. The speed with which you do that is ultimately not what makes it matter in either direction because so long as you think of leveling as a process that needs to be worthwhile in and of itself, it will never be worthwhile.
No one’s stories about playing Ultima Online talk about the satisfaction of watching stats go up but what the raising of those stats meant for things that they could now do. That’s not to say that the leveling itself is unpleasant; look, there are people who spend ages grinding in RuneScape to watch a skill go up by one, and they’re having fun. But the point is that having that accomplishment, doing that work, making that progress… it’s part of the fun. It’s something you want to do because you see a mountain and you want it climbed because you are already having fun in this game.
I’ve leveled every single job to max in every single Final Fantasy XIV with every expansion. I don’t play every single job. (Well, crafters and gatherers, sure, but that’s a little different.) It’s a meaningful process to me because I already like playing the game. I play a bunch of dungeons; I do daily hunts, I fight things and clear quests and generally do things I already am having fun with. And when the process is done, I get to feel as if I’ve accomplished something that not everyone does.
I used to level up from 37 to 40 in World of Warcraft grinding stone elementals in the Badlands to help earn money for my first mount on each alt. Technically it was very low in the “meaning” category, I was literally grinding three levels to earn money. But it was also a tradition. It was fun. And it meant that I would have the gold to get my mount and then some spare cash along the way. It had a meaning of its own.
Would it have been more meaningful if I had leveled more slowly? Or more quickly? No. The speed was independent of the meaning. The meaning came from the goal I placed at the end. The meaning was in addition to the leveling. It was part of an overarching experience, and that was what made it a meaningful part of a larger process.
And that’s the real key: It’s not about having a big story you want to see the end of, but it can be that. It’s not about getting a cool suit of armor or a cool-looking weapon, although it can be that. It isn’t about a cool skill or a neat zone or any of those things. But it is also about all of those things. It is about having things you want, and levels are just the steps in the process.
This is one of the reasons I pushed back, almost instinctively, against the idea of making levels “mean” something. Levels are just a mechanic that you use to get to what you actually want to do. Taking five minutes to finish leveling can be a meaningful five minutes or it can be a meaningless chore. It all depends on what’s on the other side of those five minutes.
I think that it’s indisputable that over the years, a lot of MMORPGs have generally made leveling more painless over time. In FFXI leveling could be not just slow but actively upsetting as you gained levels, then potentially got killed, losing potentially huge chunks of work as you had to go back and regain whatever experience you lost before. That’s not really a thing any more, and I think that’s a good decision because making leveling too slow makes people clock out and never get to the higher levels.
But what hasn’t changed is the meaning. If all you want is the levels, then painful leveling makes just getting and keeping levels into an accomplishment, but it lessens the ability for the actual stuff at the end of the leveling to mean something. It’s why leveling in FFXI hasn’t gotten less meaningful even as it has become far, far easier to do: because the meaning was always about unlocking new jobs, exploring new areas, clearing new missions, seeing things in this big open world that always feels vaguely hostile but not personally antagonistic.
That meaning remains. It’s meaningful because of what exists on the other side of it, because of why you’re doing it, because what it means to you. At the end, time and tide erode everything you do in video games. Making a number go up to see it go up will never have much meaning to it. But that does not make the exercise without meaning inherently.
And you can’t add more meaning by playing with speed. Or difficulty. Or any of those dials. You have to make the game mean something, and the levels are the gates to reach more of it.
Vague Patch Notes: What is good meaningful leveling in MMORPGs?
Vague Patch Notes: The dark side of meaningful MMO leveling
Vague Patch Notes: When leveling too quickly becomes a problem in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: When slow leveling is a problem in MMORPGs
Vague Patch Notes: Leveling in MMORPGs is cool because it’s finite
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.
