Ghostcrawler Calls Streamlined Leveling in MMORPGs a Mistake

[Lunar Ronin]

Former World of Warcraft developer Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street stated in a X/Twitter thread recently that quick leveling in MMORPGs was a mistake, one he won't repeat in his new MMORPG in development.

 

"Someone asked me if it’s a mistake to streamline the levelling experience and let players get to the endgame asap because that’s what they love. My answer is yes," Street writes. "I think it’s the levelling experience that we all fell in love with and invested in MMOs. I think getting to level cap should be an accomplishment, not a blip."

 

This is all in the context of talking about Ghost, the designer's new MMO project, which is being made by Netease's Fantastic Pixel Castle. While he maintains that nailing a good endgame cadence is vital, "I also think the levelling should be challenging and a bit of effort and not something you cruise through so you can start raiding. Even when I was on WoW I held this opinion."

 

Good on him.  I happen to concur.  Raph Koster (lead developer of Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and the upcoming Stars Reach), said recently that the concept of endgame is a relatively new phenomenon.  It simply didn't exist in the MUDs and MUSHes of the 1990s, nor even the MMORPGs of the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Before, it took you a few to several months to level your character and experience the game, and that was it.  When you reached maximum level, you either started a new character, or in some of the MUDs and MUSHes of old players would become developers.  The concept of endgame didn't really take hold until the 2000s, and didn't become the focus until the late 2000s/early 2010s.

 

As someone who played MUDs and MUSHes back in the 1990s, and played MMORPGs starting in 2002, Raph Koster is correct.  Endgame didn't become the focus of an online game until sometime after World of Warcraft became mainstream.  Perhaps with Raph Koster's Stars Reach and Greg Street's Ghost, the trend will start reversing.

[UltraAlt]

40 minutes ago, Lunar Ronin said:

As someone who played MUDs and MUSHes back in the 1990s, and played MMORPGs starting in 2002, Raph Koster is correct.  Endgame didn't become the focus of an online game until sometime after World of Warcraft became mainstream.  Perhaps with Raph Koster's Stars Reach and Greg Street's Ghost, the trend will start reversing.

 

The End-game becomes a focus in MMORPGs to keep players that only want to play one character (or perhaps a few).

They get to the end of the game, and there is nothing new for them to do. They get bored and drop their subscriptions/stop paying for micro-transactions and find some other game to play.

 

The End-game is there to keep those people busy.

 

As games get older, those people that just play the end-game start telling everyone else that they aren't having any fun if they aren't playing the End-game.

 

If population is thinning out, the DEVs have to consider some things.

The people playing the End-game need an incentive to play with new players or new players are likely not going to have anyone to team with (which I think is the whole point of an MMORPG) as the end-gamers want to be playing end-game stuff.

End-gamers need players to game with in order to keep them interested in playing and having new players show up in end-game play mixes the dynamics up to change the play experience.

A game might have divergent ways to level up characters. As the population decreases, they start trying to figure out ways to funnel the player-base so that they are trying to run the same content (increasing the chances for form teams).

 

So, basically, what I'm saying is - that this DEV is going to create a game where players can't level quickly to catch up with friends, they are going to have to figure out some way that friends/groups can team together regardless of level or the profits are going to drop as the game ages and players leave.

I can see this as good intent, but if the money is good - they will - as they say - "sell out" and start producing end-game content for the highest level players and add ways for new players to quickly level up (if they want to) in order play with the players that are already playing the end-game.

 

Sometimes the option of getting to the end-game quickly becomes a money making project all its own by allowing players to pay real world money in order to automatically advance characters to current max level/content.

 

Edited September 12 by UltraAlt

[TygerDarkstorm]

As a former WoW player, I find it odd to find myself agreeing with Ghostcrawler, lol. But I do agree with him on this. At least for me, personally. I am definitely more of a person who enjoys the leveling process of an MMO. I'm an ADHD altoholic. I did the raiding scene for a while in my WoW days; but I have a hard time spending so much time and focus on only one character.

 

And the fact that CoH practically encourages being an altoholic is a lot of the fun for someone like me. There's enough variety in the leveling path to keep things interesting, and I have very little interest in the "end game" stuff, though I am glad it's there for those who do like that sort of thing. That's one area I found superbly lacking with SWTOR when my friends and I tried that on its release; the leveling path was all the same & extremely linear.

[Lunar Ronin]

22 minutes ago, TygerDarkstorm said:

That's one area I found superbly lacking with SWTOR when my friends and I tried that on its release; the leveling path was all the same & extremely linear.

 

I played Star Wars: The Old Republic at launch.  I made a serious mistake of both playing on the wrong server and with the wrong crowd, so after about a year I left.  I gave it another go around 2016, but I was completely on my own and had no friends with me.  I found the leveling satisfying and made it to the level cap, but I made no friends during my leveling and I'm not one for joining a big guild/clan/supergroup/what have you, so I left.  I tried it again around 2019... and the leveling has been so watered down.  Leveling was both ridiculously easy and ridiculously quick compared to both 2012 and 2016.  It's obvious you're being funneled to the maximum level.  I got so bored while leveling that I left.  I tried it again last year.  Leveling felt even more ridiculously easy and ridiculously quick.  I got bored again and left.

[Techwright]

17 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

So, basically, what I'm saying is - that this DEV is going to create a game where players can't level quickly to catch up with friends, they are going to have to figure out some way that friends/groups can team together regardless of level or the profits are going to drop as the game ages and players leave.

 

 

It may be my opinion only, but I feel CoH has done a reasonably good job with this by allowing higher level characters to team with lower level characters at a security rank comparable to that lower character's one.  I say "reasonably good", not "completely good", because I'm not overly fond of having my abilities earned at higher levels blocked.  This marginalizes them, which is especially frustrating because many of them can only be acquired at higher levels.  I'd much prefer that they be present but at a proportional fraction of their power. 

 

In regards to the main topic,  I loved playing WoW without rushing up the ladder of rank.  There was so much to see and do in an open world.  (CoH has always been somewhat different due to most of the action being instanced, and lacking a PvP flag and a few other details. ) However,  I have to wonder how a game with an ever-increasing number of levels deals with a new player trying to catch up.  At some point I'd think it would take so long to reach the final rank (at least for the latest expansion) that the player with a full-time job would be hammering away for two or more years to reach cap level, and woe to the alt-holic who must do the same for each new character.

 

There's one other thing an MMO with no sidesteps to leveling should address:  those zones, events, and rewards which were endgame material for previous caps to leveling on earlier expansions.  WoW has traditionally been terrible about these, more or less abandoning them.  Ahn'Qiraj is a good example of this.  I came to the game before the first expansion, Burning Crusade, but too late to level to a point to experience Ahn'Qiraj before it was completely outdated by the expansion, including all of its rewards.  As a result, I never did more then peek into the entry area, which is sad because I'd heard it and other end game areas were a lot of fun.    A game with the full leveling experience on the mind should make a best effort to adapt and incorporate the former endgame into the expansion's heirarchy, including making the rewards matter.

 

 

Edited September 12 by Techwright
Spelling. Oops.

[Seed22]

Fast or slow is completely irrelevant. If your content is boring,  leveling is abysmal. Trying to force me to take several months to get a max level toon via boring content will absolutely result in me quitting the game or more likely not even wasting my time playing it. There are two things I don't want out of any game, a girlfriend of a game(having to log in daily, do a bunch of chores, and be inundated with a bunch of ads and nonsense marketing aspects of the game im not interested in) and a slog of a game. I will NOT waste 40+ hours playing through literal shit. I will play a 40+ hour experience if it is amazingly well crafted and enjoyable with a satisfying gameplay loop.

 

With how limited game time is, if there was a choice between what will most likely be a boring as hell shitty leveling experience in a MMO or an actually fun game on Xbox with ~25 hrs of content, I would choose the Xbox every single time. Or playstation. Either one.

Edited September 13 by Seed22

[UltraAlt]

15 hours ago, Techwright said:

However,  I have to wonder how a game with an ever-increasing number of levels deals with a new player trying to catch up.

 

Several games, Everquest 1 and 2 and DCUO offer you the option to pay to get to the highest level.

Of course, CoH has the AE  for that 😞 that it it was intended to be for that, but ...

 

15 hours ago, Techwright said:

I have to wonder how a game with an ever-increasing number of levels deals with a new player trying to catch up.  At some point I'd think it would take so long to reach the final rank (at least for the latest expansion) that the player with a full-time job would be hammering away for two or more years to reach cap level

 

How do they catch up if it is ever increasing?

By the time they catch up to where the end-gamers were another several levels have been added.

 

15 hours ago, Techwright said:

There's one other thing an MMO with no sidesteps to leveling should address:  those zones, events, and rewards which were endgame material for previous caps to leveling on earlier expansions. 

 

DCUO covers this by opening up the newest level content to all characters that have reached level 10 (level 30 is the base game cap).

All of the "open" content (newest level and events) all have a fixed CR (combat rating - which is essentially levels past 30 that are based on gear level) so that all of the characters with lower CR's are essentially leveled up to the newest level content/event base level (with all all the extra bonus that you could potentially add to a character with extra stuff that you need to farm/grind or level up with gear gained through farm/grind).

 

This essentially funnels a large number of players into the newest content that everyone over level 10 has access to.

Basically, 3 daily hunts, 2 or 3  open world content (zone mass defeats or - basically - a monster and then later - as the new content reaches a certain point - what is basically a Giant Monster is added), and a 3 queued team content - duo, alert, and raid.

The duo (2 player), alerts (4 player), and raids (8 player) have "event" (only open on newest content open to all levels 10+), normal (you have to have at least the base CR to play the content), and - I can't remember what they call the other one - Elite? (which is a higher difficulty for those end-game basically)

 

15 hours ago, Techwright said:

A game with the full leveling experience on the mind should make a best effort to adapt and incorporate the former endgame into the expansion's heirarchy, including making the rewards matter.

 

Agreed.

[Lunar Ronin]

A couple of fairly popular YouTubers have released videos this week stating that we need to slow down MMORPGs and value leveling.

 

I wonder if the pendulum is starting to swing back the other way...

 

 

 

[Seed22]

Also remember, the companies want you in game longer to peddle more microtransactions at you or boost their numbers for the bottom line. Which makes sense.

 

That does NOT mean they will provide an actually enjoyable leveling experience. They'll probably just put a bunch of busy work lukewarm quest or missions that are some of the worst aspects of gaming personified(fetch quest, kill 100 boars in a forest, more fetch quest...). So if that's what y'all want go for it. It worked for WoW apparently, all those fetch quest and boar killing.

[Triumphant]

Most people enjoy long, boring, grinds?  I'm an outlier, I guess.  I don't enjoy grinding at all.  I'd like to see an RPG with tons of options for creating a character, which you can use to make hundreds of diverse combinations of interesting and effective characters, and then a game developer that puts out challenging, fun, regular content to play, without any levelling mechanic at all.

 

This will likely not happen, because traditionalists are locked into the mindset that levels and grinding is the way that it's always been done.  But plenty of tabletop RPG's don't have levelling and plenty of non-rpg computer games don't have levelling, and both are still considered very fun to play.  No one want's to try an innovative approach with MMOrpg's, for some reason, though.  I guess it's not just D&D that has it's grognards.  🤷‍♂️

[lemming]

This seems more "Play this way".    I like CoX in that I can either do a slowish grind, or just power level up and a lot of in between.   There are days I'll go thru a bunch of grindy tasks such as some of accolades or certain arcs, and sometimes just play a few things, and sometimes just doing some boring non-thinking things in a farm fit the bill for the day.    I'm a fan of "There's more than one way to do it" which explains my like of Linux, Perl, Lego...