Ding! Now You Suck Less

[WhiteTigerShiro]

5. If done right, leveling can let players seek their own challenge level without needing to fuss with the difficulty slider. "Whew. These guys are really hard. Maybe I should level a bit before moving on." Or "Man, these guys are a cakewalk. I think I'll skip this dungeon and find something a little tougher and more rewarding."

How game designers muck this up: The biggest way to mess this up is with auto-leveling foes. Did you just ding level 7? Guess what? So did every single monster in the game world. Congratulations on gaining absolutely nothing! The other way designers mess this up is by applying hard level caps to areas of the game. Maybe you must be level 7 to enter the jungle. Maybe you can't go above level 7 until you leave the jungle.

Either that, or they add one-way doors to the game world so that you can't revisit old areas. It feels good to go back to the troll that gave you so much trouble at level 5 and give him his comeuppance when you hit level 10. When designers don't let you do this, you feel like you're running in place instead of climbing in power.

Either way, it puts leveling on rails and takes away your freedom to experience the game at your own pace and skill level.

I always thought that one compromise to this would be to have enemies level within a certain perimeter. Say a mob that would be Level 10 for example. You get to the zone where he spawns a little early, so his level is downgraded Level 8 or 9, but he won't go lower than that. Then, as you're in this area and gaining levels, he can kinda grow with you, but he'll stop at Level 12, so you can still out-power him. This would let the mobs maintain a similar difficulty regardless of whether you fight them early or later while in that zone, making it so you can't just put-off a quest until you've gained a level or two (you might have new abilities, but he'll be a little harder, too), but you can still out-pace him once you've moved-on and come back at Level 20 and he's still Level Suck.

I also feel that, done right, having enemies level with you isn't a bad thing. The problem that Oblivion had (since I know that's suspect number one for breaking this particular rule) is that they assumed you're leveling your offensive abilities first. This is the problem I ran into as a caster-type. Yeah I was leveling my Destruction some, but leveling Alchemy was so easy that how could I not power-level it? Only problem is that now I've gained 3 levels with little growth to my offensive skills and now the enemies are way harder to kill than they should be.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

In any case, I do want to comment directly on the article, because I disagreed and agreed with parts of it.

How game designers muck this up: They put in too few levels.

I disagree with this. The basic problem is hours of grinding to get to the levels, not the amount of levels themselves.

Actually, that was his point, if you go back and re-read that part. He was saying that having a leveling system starts to feel less rewarding when you go for too long without getting a level, and can start to get to a point where it can feel more like a grind. Perhaps a better wording for that particular part would have been "They make you wait too long before leveling."

 

[drizztmainsword]

In my opinion, levels are outdated. Leveling is a structure that was created from RPG's pen-and-paper origins and it places too much of a focus on grinding to get more powerful.

A beter way to approach an RPG would be to have a dynamic advancement system (do something a lot: get bette at it) that scales so that as the player adventures throughout the world, his skills progress in a way so that he or she never feels like they are just killing monsters for XP. I think part of the way to do this is to actually put a higher importance on player skill and have that be the basis.

If we were to look at the d20 system (basic DnD stuff, folks), a player rolls a twenty-sided die to find out what happens. In a pen-and-paper game, this die-roll is an abstraction for seemingly random fluctuations in a character's actions and skill level. In a real-time game, these variables should no longer be random, but should be incorporated into the player's skill. That is, instead of a random 1-20 value when a player fires a bow, the player's ability to aim the bow at the target would be used.

Without levels, characters aren't elevated to the points of god-hood either. Just because you've been adventuring for much longer than the bandit who is attacking you doesn't mean that bandit can't get lucky and shoot you in the face with an arrow. With a level structure, a player would complain: "I'm level 30! He's a crappy level 3 bandit! How did he kill me!?!" Without that level structure, the power gap, while certainly still present, is much more behind the scenes. This creates a more organic and intense experience; every encounter is dangerous.

 

[ffxfriek]

i agree leveling up needs a good DING also i hate you leveling system in oblivion

 

[Noone From Nowhere]

y is it that the last 20 lvls take a few months to get to where as the first 30 takes days...wtf (most of the fun happens in the beginning and end. the middle just sux! WHY?)

Y cant we just have a set experience bar where going from lvl 1-2 is the same as going from lvl 49-50? ::edit:: ok a bit of scaling would be necessary but like u said, an hour per lvl for every lvl would be nice (the final lvls should never exceed a days worth of straight gaming to achieve!)

I've always imagine endgame raids etc is where all the fun is. But seeing that everything i've ever played turns into work 3/4 of the way to the endgame. i've never seen the light at the end of this Lvling tunnel

This was already done in Final Fantasy 8.
It took around 1000 xp to level up throughout the game. Of course, since the enemies leveled up, too, it defeated the whole purpose in leveling up in the first place.
The far more tedious 'Junction' system and building the ultimate weapons was the real way to increase character stats.

 

[bjj hero]

snip

Shenmue did this. You want a better round house kick? Then keep throwing them. It gets more powerful and eventually the kick becomes a more advanced version of the technique. Close to real life. You never gained more hit points so you could still get a good hiding from a street thug. You improved by getting better at the game, not being made able to take more and more damage. Now there is an old school idea.

The downside was that you had to spend ages practicing throwing that roundhouse, normally into thin air as all of the fights were linked to the story with no random encounters, over and over again. Thats how you do it in real life, I don't want it in games. It's a bit like playing call of duty but having to spend ages walking across fields and muddy roads. Throws and counters were even harder to improve as your friend would only spar with you an hour each morning.

I don't like games where it gets increasingly more expensive to increase abilities. eg: fable. If it costs 3 million xp to get the next dexterity bonus as I'm trying to specialise but only 200 to increase your spell casting. It makes sense to go with the magic. Unfortunately this encourages you to have the same grey allrounder style character as everyone else. Let me play how I like.

Finally everyone saying Oblivion has a great leveling system no longer remembers the first charecter they ever made on it.

 

[Arcanz]

world of warcraft gets ALL of it right, thank god, as its about two things - Leveling and gear.

it even has the DING...

The reason I played that game for so long, the ding sound is just so rewarding ^^

 

[heyheysg]

I never got why leveling up made you fight the same as always

Level 3 - 2 hits to kill the bunny

Level 93 - 2 hits to kill the dire Rhino

Wad?!?!

I have nothing against leveling if done properly though, to learn new skills instead of just gaining strength.

ICO and SOTC showed you can gain real life 'skills' instead of in-game skills, just simply get better at playing

 

[Aardvark Soup]

In my opinion a good RPG should never require you to keep killing monsters in a certain area just to grind levels (unless of course you have been avoiding most of the enemy encounters so far causing you to be on a lower level than you should be) to be able to beat one tough boss or progress the story.

An example of a game that does this very well is Chrono Trigger: there were some tough moments but I was always able to continue the story without any level grinding. Lavos was still a bit too strong for me at the end of the game but I could solve that problem by simply doing a lot of sidequests. Sidequests are a perfect alternative to level grinding because you will still be doing something interesting, see new areas and bosses, get better weapons and gain some levels along the way. Eventually I ended up being on a very high level and that allowed me to get every ending and finish all the tough bonus dungeons without wasting even a single minute on boring grinding.

Another way to prevent annoying level grinding is to simply make levels less important than skill, but still an usefull extra. In Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga for example you could dodge every single enemy attack if you pressed a button at the right time. Theoretically this allowed you to finish the whole game at level 1. Of course very few people are able to do this and gladly gain some extra levels. But when you have to fight a tough boss when you are severely underleveled you can try to memorise the boss's attack patterns and, with enough practise, beat it anyway. This is much better than having to return a few areas just to repeatetly kill boring monsters.

 

[Lyri]

If there was one sound - one solitary sound that I could hear - above the din of the crowbar, the bounce of a grenade or the screams of an ignited citizen, it would have to be the DING.

Any game that doesn't have a ding just isn't trying.

Nothing is more joyful after hours of grinding than that ding.

This is a great article though, there are many different ways to level and I must confess I hate Auto-leveling foes.
Oblivion became a snooze fest & I'm fairly certain Fallout had it too, once you get over the initial difficulty the game offers no challenge, because your skills are far superior.

For now I'm currently enjoying Aion and it's own Ding.

 

[ObnoxiousPotatoe]

world of warcraft gets ALL of it right, thank god, as its about two things - Leveling and gear.

it even has the DING...

The reason I played that game for so long, the ding sound is just so rewarding ^^

So did I. Such a sweet, rewarding sound.

 

[archvile93]

I'd be really interested in an RPG system where you don't level up per-se, but doing certain action make you better at those. What I mean is you gain stats from performing actions, rather then when your experience hits a predetermined mark. For example instead of killing a monster so you level up and all stats improve, killing that monster just made you slightly better with the weapon you killed it with. As skills improve, rather than seeing a number go up, you start to notice your character improving. For example, maybe your not so clumsy with that sword now that you have the skills to wield it. Maybe running and fighting improves your characters physical stature, thereby showing improve power and endurence. I feel that such a system (if done properly of course) would make your character and the game world seem more real.

This is pretty much what oblivion does. And it's horrific. Part of that's implementation - raising your athletics to max requires swimming (running gets you less) for something like 3 days straight. That's way way up there in "tape the key down" territory.

Admittedly, it's also what FFX-2 does, and whatever other issues the game has the leveling system is interesting (just pretend the thing isn't called a "garment grid" and everyone will be happier).

Reality isn't always a good thing. A game is supposed to abstract away things that aren't fun.

I said if it's done well.

 

[Crystalgate]

I agree with most of the points. I want to comment on one particular point though.

Why stop at 20? Why not 50 or 100?

I can think of a good reason why you don't want to have to many levels. The reason is the same as to why you don't want to few of them; they are supposed to be a reward. While to few of them means the player spends a long time unrewarded, to many of them means single level ups does little to nothing. A player who levels up from 93 to 94 is not likely to notice any significant difference.

 

[Irridium]

Hey in case your wondering, you can fight bosses again. The bosses respawn every new "session" which means if you want to fight Sledge again all you need to do is save and go to the main menu then go back to Sledge's hide out and beat the hell out of him. (I overleveled by about 2 levels when I fought Sledge and also had a Epic revolver that shoots 7 concentrated shots of 115 damage with a good rate of fire... basically he died in 4 seconds)

Loved the article Shamus, all of those things you mentioned have annoyed me previously. Especially having too many long-term choices early on in the game.

REally? Thanks.

Now I must go, I have a boss to destroy.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

Leveling is many things but elegant is not one of them. It adds ugly rules and administration tasks to everything in the game.

Shamus forgets to mention all of the dark sides to his positive points.

1. High granularity in numbers leads to very little sense of accomplishment or purpose when they go up. Alternatively absurd situations are set up when the designer has to make combat encounters for a level 500 character in a world where soldiers are level 50.

2. If a player expects the level system to tell them if they can beat an opponent then the combat system could possibly be simplified to summing levels of both sides and the higher number wins. What is the combat system for?

3. Start experienced players off slowly and bore the hell out of them, why not. Why not force me to play a 2 hour tutorial that teaches me how to use a mouse as well.

4. If the player demands to solve any problem however they want then why use a game system in the first place? Sometimes it makes more sense for some solutions to work better than others and for the player to work this out and plan accordingly.

5. Seek my own challenge level? You mean grind for experience and gear?

 

[baconfist]

The worst part of scaling creatures to the players level is that it takes away most of the excitement of exploring. You lose all feelings of danger since you know that no matter what direction you choose to go nothing there will be out of your league. You will never find a cool dungeon above your level and manage to sneak away with loot that you shouldn't yet posses, just generic dungeons full of moderate challenge creatures with loot that you already have.

In short Bethesda has managed to make me dislike sandbox rpg's. I'm not sure if that's the right term but anytime I read that a game lets you roam around as you please I cringe. It's also a very lazy way to design a game world.

 

[Rack]

Interesting article, but I disagreed with nearly every point

3.It lets game designers start simple and introduce new gameplay elements gradually instead of throwing new players into the deep end.

How game designers muck this up: They dump all abilities on you at level 1 or (even worse) during the character creation process.

Okay this can be an issue, but 99% of RPGs have the opposite problem. They give you one basic attack and that's it for the first 40 hours. A mage in WoW is a barely functioning character at level 40, before then he has almost nothing, and really he only becomes remotely fun to play at level 60. City of X characters don't get core abilities until about level 24. It means the first 80 hours of any character is a tedious grind.

5. If done right, leveling can let players seek their own challenge level without needing to fuss with the difficulty slider. "Whew. These guys are really hard. Maybe I should level a bit before moving on." Or "Man, these guys are a cakewalk. I think I'll skip this dungeon and find something a little tougher and more rewarding."

How game designers muck this up: The biggest way to mess this up is with auto-leveling foes. Did you just ding level 7? Guess what? So did every single monster in the game world.

That's an extreme example that pretty much only Oblivion messed up to some degree. Without some level scaling though you either force the game to be extremely linear or create a lot of tedious mucking about looking for on level content. Also there's at best a disconnect between what you need to do to adjust the challenge of the game, and at worst it's totally backwards. What if I'm a completionist who likes a challenge? Or what if I just enjoy doing the most interesting content and prefer my games to be easy. I can't help but think there's a correlation between those styles of gaming.

Game designers are always worried about calibrating difficulty, introducing complexity and offering freedom. Leveling is an elegant and rewarding solution to all of these, as long as the designer lets the system work the way it should without walling it off with arbitrary limits.

No. Honestly it's a sticky mess that makes balancing things far harder than it needs to be. You need arbitrary limits to reign it in to let the game design have a hope of shining through. In FFVII I picked up Omnislash because I was curious about the quest. As a result I defeated the end boss in a single attack. In Star Ocean the Second Story I was so underlevelled by the final boss that I never completed the game, it would be too boring or too frustrating. Games would be better without them except for that slight illusion that tricks you into think you are improving and thus having fun. As a result it's a games design challenge to present the illusion of progression without radically altering the players abilities.

 

[duchaked]

The greatest example for all is Oblivion, was you burnt by it? Anywho, I must say, Borderlands follows your rules quite nicely.

Borderlands does follow these rules quite nicely lol
the issues pointed out are some that kept me from getting into games like Oblivion

 

[Fearzone]

Levels feel too arbitrary and contrived for me to enjoy them. They are anti-immersive to me. Even back in Dungeons and Dragons I felt that way: I preferred RuneQuest, or later Call of Cthulhu, because of that. I like MMOs otherwise, so I put up with leveling, but I don't enjoy it.

The fatal flaw of leveling, as discussed on the escapist recently, is database deflation (i.e. at level 20 all content level 15 and below is meaningless, thus game content narrows as you progress).

I agree with the advantages stated and I also know leveling in computer games is not going anywhere. But there have been excellent pen and paper games without leveling and if such comes to the computer I'll be waiting.

Edit: Oh, wait, yeah, EVE... anyway...