A few weeks ago, I talked about power creep when it comes to MMOs in general, and one of the things I mentioned as an offhanded comment was that just providing horizontal progression instead of vertical progression doesn’t really work. This is a true statement, but it’s also something that is easy to misconstrue in either direction, either as a statement of “horizontal progression doesn’t work at all” or “ah, you don’t understand horizontal progression as a concept.”
The reality is that neither of these things is true. Horizontal progression is a good thing in basically every game; it’s just something that does have a finite capacity, whether you like it or not. Indeed, horizontal progression and vertical progression are best understood as parallel tracks, but horizontal progression is both not easier to manage and can actually wind up being a lot less rewarding on a whole. So let’s talk about where the problems come in, and we’re going to start with a game that had a long period of time of very horizontal progression: Final Fantasy XI.
As odd as it might sound to people who weren’t there, for a very long time the level cap in FFXI remained at 75. This, in many ways, made it a really good environment for horizontal progression in everything. For example, while you obviously could no longer level your main job, you could get horizontal progression by leveling more subjobs. So your main job might be Paladin, by way of example, but you could still level subjobs to have more options on Paladin, right?
Well… sort of, anyway. It turns out there’s only really one good subjob for Paladin for various reasons, so you kinda need to just level that. But hey, that’s all right, you can level that subjob up to 75 and that has more options! Like two or three, maybe. Hmm. This plan isn’t totally working out.
But never mind that, that’s peripheral. Let’s look at gear. Every notorious monster can drop gear that isn’t better than what you’re already wearing, but it’s a sidegrade, so that’s good, right? It’s better in some situations. And then once you camp for the monster and you claim it and you get the random drop, you can… use it to get another piece that you won’t need as often?
I’m picking on FFXI here not because it is or was a bad game with the level cap at level 75, but rather because I think it’s kind of important to understand that there was a consistent, lingering issue with the game’s progression. Theoretically, sure, all of the different pieces of equipment you could use as your Paladin’s chestpiece could offer different stat bonuses. But if you’re almost always going to be doing one thing (tanking) and you need a pretty specific set of stats to do that, one item is just going to wind up better than the others.
That’s just how the cookie crumbles. Two chestpieces with the same defense and strength but one adds HP and MP while the other adds agility and intelligence? You’re always going to pick the first one. And that means any further additions either have a better stat balance (which means they’re vertical progression) or just aren’t as good. It means that new content is functionally dead on arrival.
You can, of course, add new ways to get gear, but that also runs into the same problem. If you make something that can be easily crafted with readily available materials that has almost equal stats to the thing you can get only by running the four-hour notorious monster train somewhere, people are mostly going to use that. And adding new content that is just a sidegrade is not going to get people doing that new content. You need to offer an actual upgrade for that.
Now, I am very deliberately narrowing the scope of consideration here. The wider the field, the more you can do. If you look on sites about Warframe – a game with a very fixed level cap – there are a lot of different weapons you can use very effectively at higher levels. My quick-and-dirty count easily says that about 40% of the primary weapons in the game are in the upper tiers of effectiveness, and across that spread of weapons you can find most of the different types of guns in the game!
But that’s still 40%. If you want to use a bow as your main weapon, you have six or so different options in the upper echelons, but there are other bows that are just not as good. There is a vertical scale in place. It is possible to have better or worse options, not because some of the bows have a higher level cap but because they’re just better bows all around.
You can put a lot of effort into keeping a lot of different versions of a lot of different things close in power level. You can add a lot of different conceptual options. But something I noted a while back when talking about Incarnate powers in City of Heroes is that realistically, some options are just better than others. Any Alpha slot power of equivalent tier is meant as a sidegrade, but some are inarguably superior.
That really is the ultimate downfall of horizontal progression as the end point. You can give players a lot of different options, but even between just two options, more often than not one is going to be better than the other. You can make a more robust set of choices and it’s very possible to have lots of valid options in a wide field, but some options are still going to be the clear choice. And once players have those better options, they aren’t really inclined to go back for the worse ones.
None of this is to say that having horizontal progression is bad. Horizontal progression is good, actually. If you have four or five different ways to get good enough equipment to keep up with the game at the level cap, that’s a good thing even if one of those four or five options is statistically optimal. That gives space for people who don’t care about optimal stats to progress, and those who do to find the best options. Everyone can participate!
It’s just that horizontal progression cannot completely replace vertical progression. You cannot successfully replace things ever getting stronger by just adding in more options that are no better than the existing options because either they will be better than the existing options despite your plans or they’ll just fade into the background.
Or to put it more simply, what you want is an ascending series of options that spreads out over time but also heightens over time, so you aren’t just getting stronger all the time but you also aren’t just getting new options you won’t use because you already have the one you want. Which is, y’know… complicated! Progression is actually really complicated! It’s not just a matter of making a single number bigger all the time!
Well, it’s not supposed to be. Sometimes designers kinda screw up and it is all about one single number. That’s why it’s complicated.
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.
