As I have been hunting for a new MMORPG (good ones are hard to find) and watching videos, I am once again hearing a sentiment that gets expressed in many ways.
"Why can't it just be all end-game?"
"Why won't you let players skip to end-game?"
"The game doesn't really start until max level."
Of course this sentiment isn't universal, but it is very common. The important question is why do so many players feel this way?
Considering the Obvious Answers
The first answers that probably come to most people's minds with this question would be things like:
- It's more fun when you're more powerful.
- The content is more epic.
- There are more options available to make your character(s) what you want them to be.
I mention these because I want my readers to understand that I've thought of them, but I want to focus on a factor that I believe is both more important and more subtle.
A Reversal of the Rewards System
Players tend to play to the game's rewards. Add an obscure island with boring enemies, and few people will go there. Offer a super-powerful weapon for killing 500 boring enemies, and it will become one of the game's hot spots.
So let's ask: How do you maximize your rewards during the leveling phase? And how do you maximize your rewards at end-game?
Leveling Phase: The biggest reward when you're leveling is more levels. Loot is nice, but the most power comes from filling that XP bar once again. You're rarely under-geared for content, but you're constantly under-leveled for content.
And what's the fastest way to gain experience? Avoid challenge. Hard enemies kill you, and dying is a time sink with no rewards in pretty much every game. Some single player games will give huge rewards for defeating enemies way above your level, but I've never seen that in an MMO (probably because it's hard to make it non-exploitable).
And then there's the gear. Getting good gear helps you level faster, but most games either scale the gear to your level (removing the advantage of doing harder content) or put level requirements on the gear (Making you wait until the content would have been easier before you can benefit from clearing it).
End Game: Once you hit maximum level, the best rewards come with challenge. Sure, there are still reward gained from grinding easy content, but you get the best rewards from pushing your limit. Even if you fail repeatedly at something, the rewards for finally succeeding are still great for the time spent.
The Result: Players avoid fun until they hit maximum level, particularly when leveling additional characters.
What Can Designers Do About This
As is often the case, I see intrinsic story as central to good game design (https://indulgentcreativity.blogspot.com/2019/10/intrinsic-stories-in-video-games.html). As such, I want to focus on ways to deal with the reward reversal that enhances intrinsic story instead of diminishing it. In other words, no auto-scaling (not that, in my opinion, autoscaling has even been successful in improving leveling experience, but some still try).
My proposed approach involves two separate changes that are good on their own but must be used together in order to solve this problem:
Making the world react to player's level
Making your characters more synergistic
Making the World React to Player's Level
This sounds big, but what I'm actually proposing just focuses on a few high-value changes, rather than creating a huge increase in complexity. As with many things, it's best explained with a concrete example.
Picture an instanced dungeon, designed for level 20, whose boss is the warlord of some group or tribe. Initially, you create the dungeon just as you would normally, but then you add some optional special conditions:
1. If any player in the instance is higher than level 25, the warlord simply hides. No end boss loot.
2. If all players in the dungeon are 18 or below, the warlord is so confident that he doesn't bother locking up his treasure room. Extra loot.
3. The warlord is a famous duelist. If a player at level 24 or below is able to solo the dungeon, he brings out his special dueling blade (which is added to the loot when he is defeated).
It's easy to imagine a few more. Leveling dungeons would have the option to be interesting, deep, and rewarding challenges instead of "just another way to get XP".
A few practicalities with this:
1. You would want to couple this type of thing with an easy to way to freeze and unfreeze XP, so that players wouldn't outlevel a challenge while trying to clear it. Designers could also include a limited option to bank XP, so that time spent repeatedly trying to clear difficult challenges would still offer some progress toward reaching end-game.
2. This works more easily in instanced content than open world. Too many ways to bring in high level characters to break the limitations if it isn't instanced.
3. You would want a good way to make these challenges transparent. My first thought is that it could be part of the achievement system, but there would be other ways to do it.
Making Your Characters More Synergistic
Generally speaking, MMOs are designed so that every character can do all the content. Sharing between characters is never a necessity--just a convenience (i.e. I can craft an item to give to my other character, but I could also buy that same item).
However, with the changes described above, that would no longer be true. As soon as you hit certain levels, some rewards are forever out of reach. Likewise, some things just may not be realistic with certain characters (In the duelist example above, it's likely that some classes couldn't find a way to solo the dungeon at level 24).
What you can do with these these rewards is make some of them bind-on-account and/or part of something larger. Maybe the armor you get from a super-low-level run of a dungeon is also a component for an end-game legendary piece. Or there's a fun account-wide vanity pet that requires a special low-level accomplishment.
The New Leveling Experience
What happens now? Instead of looking at the chore of grinding another max-level character, the player is getting max-level-style experiences throughout the process. Leveling an alt is no longer a long burden to let you play a different class at end-game. Instead, it's an opportunity to hit intense challenges no longer available to your top-level characters, who will then benefit from what your low-level is doing.
Another major benefit of this is keeping old end-game content alive. Any time an expansion or major content patch permits characters to level or gear past what had previously been end-game content, rewarding achievements can be added for groups to hit that content in a way that's still challenging.
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