A friend of mine sent me a link to an article at Kotaku about forthcoming MMO The Secret World. According to the article:
[The Secret World] is a game that takes place in the real world of today, only everything is true. Aliens and demons exist. The world is hollow. There are monsters under your bed.
The portion of the article that got my attention was this:
And what of progression? The Secret World is a game without levels and experience, so how do you show the rest of the game how good you are?
This paragraph blew my mind twice.
Upon reading that The Secret World was a game without levels and experience, I exulted. Awesome! Different! Maybe everybody gets to have fun right away, and your capability for impact isn’t limited by how many bad guys you’ve killed and how many widgets you’ve crafted!
But later in the very same sentence my reaction turned to horror. (“…[S]o how do you show the rest of the game how good you are?”) Good grief, really?! Does it really go totally without saying in the videogame press that levels and experience boil down to the expensive designer jeans of the MMO crowd?
I took some heat in the comments of my recent Escapist article on the subject of narrow mechanical thinking in the evolution of game design, and it looks like the same cherished assumptions are in play here. I guess I became a jaded, fringe-dwelling game design anarchist at some point when I wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Luckily for potential players of The Secret World, the game turns out to have levels and experience after all, they’re just called other things. (You advance in rank within your secret society, and the system tracks “every statistic possible” about your performance in play, and puts them on leaderboards.) So, not to worry, MMO-heads—nothing to deliver an unwelcome challenge to your worldview here, after all.
From what I understand, players in The Secret World will earn more powers as they progress. Only a few powers can be active at a time though, so it functions almost like a hand in a trading card game, with more advanced characters having more options for their hand. It certainly sounds more refreshing than the usual level-up system.
Hrm. I’m actually ok with levels used well – they’re a potent framing and pacing mechanism, if a tad ironic in the context of ‘progress’. But they definitely invite problems, and those problems aren’t solved by changing the trappings and calling them something else. Not so say Secret World doesn’t sound fun – it’s got a great hook – but that approach to levels is a bit like fixing a flat by rotating the tires.
-Rob D.
This comes back to an old question: why do we play?
Levels and experience are either meant to be part of an answer, or an illusion that supposes so. I don’t why, exactly, that I’m interested in reaching max level in LOTRO again, except that it’s part of the deal. Level up, and you get to see the new stuff.
Levels are a nice, easy metric. I don’t need them, but I do wonder if lamenting levels (of power, of skill, of whatever) is rather like lamenting the presence of points in sports scores.
Anyway, I don’t know if that talk about showing off how awesome you are is anything worth than marketing sass or a simple statement of the meta-game: displaying hours devoted to play and, thus, what? Dedication? Nothing else going on? I’m glad I have a high-level character in my game of choice, but I’m also quietly glad it’s taken me so long to get him to that level.
I’m not quite sharp enough for a serious discussion today, though.
It sounds almost exactly like Guild Wars which was one of those games which introduced several great innovations to its genre which were then widely ignored.
I feel for your rude awakening. As I’ve understood it, WoW being the literal gold standard, the profitability treadmill for MMOs of all sorts is very much about getting players to trade their time/money for opportunities to feather their cap and make their character look distinguished or distinguishable. Even TF2 has hats now.
Honestly, an online game without levels of ability sounds less revolutionary than, say, APB, which will give you unprecedented capability for giving a character a unique look. What will people continue to play for, after they’ve done everything twice? I look forward to seeing the answer.
To start, I’m going to say I was with you on the level thing up until about a year ago. I hated them and any RPG that was using levels was a backwards trip down anachronism street and wrecked otherwise good games, but I’ve since examined things further and have come to different conclusions.
First off let’s start by establishing the following truth: RPG style games all generally have some form of character advancement integrated into their mechanics. This advancement is essentially the tangible reward for doing well, or at the very least, progressing along the story. It’s essential to the genre, because there isn’t necessarily a win or lose as you point out in your escapist article.
Levels are without a doubt the easiest most accessible way to establish that advancement. Accessibility is the hallmark of all *good* games. All successful games since the conception of play came about have had to follow the “easy to learn difficult to master” mantra, and RPG’s are no exception. There are ways to mimic that accessibility by limiting the purview of the advancement – the equipment upgrades in Assassin’s creed are an example of this – but Levels provide that nice balance of versatility and accessibility that lets players actually feel like they have some creative control of their character.
Now you can increase the complexity of an advancement system by making each individual ability have levels of advancement, or you can make the advancement entirely equipment based. WoW does a hybrid of level and equipment based, they have 60 (or 80 or however many) levels which are effectively a primer for people to get used to playing the game and understanding what works, and then once you’ve figured it out everyone is basically on the same level except for what “gear” they’ve got.
So I concluded that attacking “levels” is really just a symptom of a deeper dissatisfaction with the way MMO’s are being designed. So I guess my question is, what is it you’re really after in an MMO?
“This paragraph blew my mind twice.”
I was kind of excited when I read that myself. I would love to see an MMO that did well without levels. The core concept would have to be very different from what MMOs are offering today, and that might just get me to play an MMO. I was sad to read the part where it said that they called levels and experience limits something else.
Levels always feel like such an arbitrary meter, but it depends on exactly what game you are there to play. If one of the reward factors of the game is progression based, then you want to have milestones as a player. If it is designed for much shorter play or a reward other than progression (such as the game itself, a particularly unique mechanic, or roleplaying) then I don’t even see levels as necessary to the mechanic.
I’d love to see an MMO that didn’t require levels, but I don’t think it would work. Part of the reward factor of a continually perpetuating experience is the achieving of milestones, and levels fulfill that in an incredibly Pavlovian way in an MMO.
People like achievements. (Thus, Achievements.) Levels are a type of achievement while a low implementation cost that simultaneously separates the player base into more manageable chunks (geographically, in WoW’s case).
This reminds me of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. It’s an MMO (they called it an “MMOArrrPG”) where the main gameplay consists of action-puzzle games along the lines of Dr. Mario, Super Puzzle Fighter, and so on. Most activities in the game require you to do the puzzles, e.g. swordfighting, sailing, repairing the ship after battle.
There are two visible stats for every puzzle type: overall experience with the puzzle, and puzzle skill rating. The first goes up as you keep playing puzzles, regardless of performance. The second goes up based on how well you do on the puzzle compared to everyone else. If you play the same puzzle enough times, you’ll get better and your skill rating will go up. So it’s like levels in that regard, but different because it’s an indicator of skill.
Other than giving people goals and progress markers, the skill ratings are necessary for teaming up. If you’re sailing dangerous waters, you want to make sure your ship is crewed with plenty of highly-skilled people, and public ratings give you an objective measure.
So, first, just so that I don’t sound like a total Secret World piss-monster, the thing I found cool about the description in the article was the idea of a PVP area where resource zones must be held over time against other groups in order to achieve highly in the rest of the game. That’s a clever way to tie those elements together, and reminds me of what I’ve read about the Eve-related Dust 514.
My horror, I guess, was as much at the article’s treatment of a lack of traditional levels than their actual lack (or, as it turns out, their alternate framing and labeling). The shock, the horror, the “How will others players know how awesome I am?” This goes, I suppose, to Will’s question: Why do we play? I’m not playing games to impress.
Although, that turns out to not be true, either. I’m not playing games to impress people with my prowess in play, or dedication to spend raw time grinding. It turns out that I’m playing most games to impress people with my creativity. How can I solve that problem differently and interestingly? How can I make an awesome character who evokes some interesting reaction or emotion? How can I craft an interesting resource? As a related “Why,” I’m also interested in a game’s creative setting and its creative solutions to the game design problems it faces.
So you can see where traditional levels push my buttons going both ways. It doesn’t measure anything that I find particularly worthwhile, and to see more or less the same mechanics in yet another game… ugh.
I love to see games try crazy, completely different stuff. Puzzle Pirates is a pretty good example. Cash and Guns is another. This is the kind of thing I was trying to do with Pieces of Eight: not just think outside the box, but blow the box up. Of course, it turns out that wildly innovative thinking is a dicey financial proposition, so it’s not surprising that incremental innovation—and flat-out mimicry of whatever was popular last month—are the order of the day for those who want to be more conservative with the investments. But those in the latter group ain’t getting no extra love from me. They’ll have to console themselves with their money.
Uru Live, the MMO by the Myst people, was an MMO that had no notion of levels, or even any sort of grind (with one possible exception). The closest it had was having a variety of customizations (Clothing and things that could be added to your “house”), some of which you got by just exploring nooks and crannies and some of which you got by solving the puzzles in the “main quest”. So if you drop by someone’s “house” and it’s raining, you know they got to a certain point in the game; I don’t know if anyone thought of them as achievements at the time, but that’s kind of what they were.
The vision was, I think, to base the game around puzzle worlds and solving the puzzles there, either individually, in small groups (Some puzzles required multiple people to solve), or as a community (With ARG-like aspects that required a lot of observation and data-combining to make sense of), with a story around them and driving them. The problem is, of course, that I say “was”. It didn’t get enough players to remain stable, and even died again after another publisher picked it up.
I’m pretty sure the biggest issue was that grinding forces players to replay your content. If your players only get to play through everything you create once, you can’t create fast enough to keep up with them.