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Why Not Just Cut Those First 20 Levels?
By Cameron Sorden | August 11, 2008
In my last post I talked about how I’m having trouble rolling a new World of Warcraft character on my PvP server because I just can’t endure those lowbie levels for the billionth time. While a large part of that is simply because I’ve done them over and over (and over), there’s more to it than that: I’ve noticed my lowbie discontent bleeding into other games, as well. A large part of it is being frustrated at the very nature of being what we know as a “low-level character.”
Starting out as a level 1 nobody with only a single skill or two to your name and then growing in power and acquiring new skills is something that has deep roots in the very concept of an RPG. Low-level complexity is anathema. This is actually something veteran indie RPG game designer Jeff Vogel (who designed the Avernum series, among others) ranted about in a controversial RPG Vault article last year:
Fantasy role-playing games are unique among computer games in one thing: they are fundamentally about starting out weak and learning to be strong. And that learning process generally involves a lot of tedium.
The article is an interesting read, and I recommend checking it out if you didn’t see it last year. The leveling and growing stronger isn’t actually an issue, however. As he admits later in the article, that’s the main reason why people play these games: leveling is fun (just imagine if Diablo or EverQuest had no levels — boring). Rather, my issue is that it takes so long to get to a point where the gameplay is complex enough to start being interesting.
The fact that most games start players out slowly and unveil one skill at a time serves a very specific purpose: it allows players to learn the game without overwhelming them with too many confusing options. Mastering one skill at a time allows for a natural progression to the increased complexity of later levels (although MMOGs are notoriously bad at teaching you how to use your skills). Unfortunately, this leaves players who are already skilled at a game (and for whom the novelty of each skill is limited) with little to do in the early game except focus on leveling for a while.
Leveling might be fun, but it’s not enough on its own to make a game. There has to be a fun and exciting mechanic in place that constitutes the actual “play” of the game and sits within the leveling framework. It’s within the first 20 levels of most games where this play fails veteran players and leaves us bored. Whenever I start playing in a new MMOG, I cringe when I realize that I have hours (and more probably days) of killing enemies and doing quests before I’ll be able to start being able to do anything cool or complex. MMOGs have a learning curve, but it’s not rocket science for a veteran player. If you dropped me onto a level 20 character in pretty much any online game, I’d be able to get myself up to speed in short order.
I tend to view the first 20 levels in online games as a kind of tutorial; they’re an introduction to the basic concepts of the genre. Levels 1-10 generally serve to introduce the player to their class, teach them the basics of crafting, questing, and fighting, and help them navigate the game world. Levels 10-20 tend to introduce the player to grouping and let them tackle some more advanced challenges with their growing repertoire of skills. That’s fantastic for new players because it lets them ease into all of the fairly complicated concepts which are common in online games.
However, when you’ve played more than a few characters, or more than a few online games, that tutorial period becomes kind of tedious. Actually, it’s really tedious. Each game might be a unique play experience, but lets face it: they’re not that unique. If you know your HoTs from your DoTs and understand tab-targeting, you can pick up almost any online game and do fine. Slogging through 20 levels with hardly enough skills to fill an action bar isn’t just boring — it’s unnecessary.
This is another case where MMOGs would do well to learn from so-called “casual games,” many of which are very similar to each other (or blatant clones). Most casual games offer a pretty good tutorial, but they also expect that many players will come in knowing how to play their particular type of game. They’ll usually give you the option to jump right into the action if you like. This lets veteran players of a game type start out at their own speed, even if they’ve never played this particular game before.
If designers allowed players to start with skills and equipment equal to about what a level 20 character has in most games, that would let veteran players of other games hop right into the complex meat of the MMOG gameplay without having to put tons of tedious hours in the “tutorial” portion of a game they already know how to play (for all practical purposes). I’d also bet that it would substantially increase the ability of the game to leech off existing player bases like WoW’s however-many-million fans.
Newbies could still have their 20-level tutorial, experienced players could cut to the more complex stuff, and game companies would have an easier time converting players of other games over to their world.
It seems like one of those win-win-win situations.
Topics: Game Design, Massively Multiplayer |
August 11th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Hordes of the Underdark does this in Neverwinter Nights and it works well. I think they just gasp to think at the time they lose of someone grinding through 20 levels when in reality it gains them new customers. Guild Wars lets you start at max level with full abilities and armor if you like to just pvp and it works.
August 11th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Another option is to give players a full load of skills right off the bat but gradually introduce the use of each. In other words, you can do everything immediately, but you’re not expected to by the challenges faced.
Also, the skills a player starts with can have an increasing number of uses as gameplay progresses. For example, start a player with a fireball spell but nothing to burn but enemies; then provide flammable objects; then provide flammable+collapsable objects (start a fire to cause something to collapse on the enemy); then provide enemies with AI that causes them to run into their allies when aflame. It’s just one skill (fireball), but that skill has an ever-expanding number of possibilities.
August 12th, 2008 at 1:56 am
DAoC did this. Once you had a lv 50 char, you could create a new char, /level and go to your trainer to immediatly ding 20.
It failed. Due to this change, population didn’t grow (as people couldn’t find any groups any more, and were discouraged right from the start).
August 12th, 2008 at 2:41 am
Why stop at 20? Are you really feeling challenged by the complexity of WoW at level 21? 30? 55? 69? To me World of Warcraft appears to be rather easy and simple as long as you solo. Only by joining groups does the game get complex.
In the specific case of WoW, because of the fact that Death Knights start at level 55, any level-skipping switch would better get you directly to level 55. Only I wouldn’t offer any switch in the first year of existence of any game, and later make it work only if you already have several characters at the level cap.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:28 am
Just refer a trial account with your main, run two clients on your PC and stick the trial character on follow behind the one you’re trying to level. Level 20 takes about an hour or two with 3x experience. That should help you over the hump.
After that, you don’t even have to pay for the trial account to keep going. Leave it at level 20 (cap for trials), but summon it to you whenever you want to turn in some quests and you’ll still get the 3x experience for them.
I recently started a new Paladin and he’s now level 40 with less than 20 hours played. It’s almost ridiculous, but I’m not complaining for all the reasons you’ve brought up - I don’t really want to do all this stuff again at the old rate.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:49 am
@Tobold: I disagree, to an extent. Gameplay with many skills is far more interesting than gameplay with just a few, even if it’s still technically “easy.” The higher you jump, the more you rob yourself of the leveling experience which provides a framework of meaningful achievement to your gameplay. I just happen to think that 20 is a good middle point: past the really tedious levels where you’re weak and mostly auto-attacking, but with most of your advancement ahead of you.
@Boogie: That’s why I think it should optional for everyone (new players included). With how solo-friendly games are these days, playing by yourself isn’t as much of a problem as it was back in the day. This lets people who feel confident in their MMO skills from other games step right into the action in a new game without feeling like they have to be taken by the hand and walked slowly through a dozen things they already know. However, truly new players could still take things slower and learn the game. I think that getting through the first 20 levels is a fairly boring obstacle for people on their second or third (or fifth) MMO.
@Myrix: That’s an awesome idea. Thanks. I will seriously consider that.
August 13th, 2008 at 4:02 am
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August 14th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Let’s not forget that for non-DPS classes, skipping levels could be disaster, even if the player already has an end-game character. For example, I wouldn’t want anyone new to tanking to skip a bunch of levels wherein they’re expected to learn the basics of tanking. Same for healers, and even some of the less straightforward DPS classes for aggro-management purposes.
“You’re a level X Rogue and don’t know how to shed aggro?”
August 25th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
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