Editorial: Are you Experienced?

By Jeffrey Philipp | August 26, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: Editorial, Editorials, Game Design

Greetings wider world of the web.

My apologies to Jimi Hendrix and his fans for the awful pun, but today I’m going to go off for a bit on the experience level system that seems to be so ingrained into the MMO games industry.

It’s true there are a few games that have bucked the trend and went without the whole levelling structure, but they are more the exception than the rule. By and large, if you’re going to play an MMO you’re going to have a character with experience points and an experience level.

Now unless I’m very much mistaken this is a convention taken almost unchanged from the world of pen and paper RPG’s. It made a great deal of sense while playing such games, it was convenient to be able to rank players and enemies in terms of relative power. As a solution that was easy to work with for people, and if they were lucky a calculator, a highly abstracted “Experience level” was created which was intended to represent the wealth of life experience that one acquires as things happen to them.

The choice to make the one overall level is quite a sensible when considering the limitations present in the pen and paper situation. Keeping track of dozens of various skill levels for the many things that a player might be able to do would quickly become tedious and take away from the entertaining part of the game. However last time I checked, tedious data keeping and calculation is precisely what computers are best at. With that in mind, I begin to wonder why we can’t seem to migrate away from that one single number the rules all of our lives.

In all honesty it’s not a horrible thing. An experience level does perform it’s duties with great gusto and perhaps an overbearing tenacity. My only real issue is that in its current incarnation, that is the one that seems to be the most popular amongst games these days, it promotes a very homogenous type of game. One in which you run around doing everything possible to level up perhaps even to the detriment of a number of other play styles. Explorers in specific are greatly hamstrung by the nature of the experience bar, as are people who take to crafting and commerce. All of the neatest spots are almost universally infested by high level creatures, and as such it’s nearly impossible to explore them unless you’ve paid the piper and spent the time levelling up, likewise for crafting; you can’t get the best and shiniest recipes and materials unless you can kill the level eighty eight ice dragon, or whatever else it is that’s standing between you and your resource node.

I suppose what I’m generally trying to get at is that the single number denoting a characters entire life experience, to me, sort of takes you out of the game a little bit. It’s less immersive than if you had perhaps created a system where the various skills had their own levels that were applied to the various checks required in order to determine success. In all honesty I would imagine the only reason that the old pen and paper games wouldn’t have instituted a system like this is simply because of the tedium of all the record keeping that would be required, but like I mentioned above, tedious record keeping and calculation is just what computers are pretty much built for.

I personally, also imagine that switching away from the single level system would make it a great deal easier to expand the repertoire of what you can allow players to do, since now you don’t have absolutely everything that a player does tied to the aggregate number of creatures that they’ve killed, but rather more related and perhaps appropriate experiences. Simply put, someones combat experience might only be applicable only to actions that are relevant to combat in some way, however the various other actions one might undertake would be governed by their own relevant skill experience levels.

I suppose in order to be fair, and play devils advocate to my own idea, I ought to elucidate on the problems that such a system would bring up. The largest culprit clearly being the necessity now to create multiple paths of progression for disparate activities. Obviously creating the single progression line that has become a staple of the genre is work enough, and it would hardly be worth the mechanical overhaul of multiple skills if we were only going to come up with something like exists in World of Warcraft of Warhammer online, as they are exceptionally shallow systems that don’t promote a great deal of actual interation, in fact they end up being nothing more than a method to improve your combat ratings yet further through simple gathering.

I suppose I’m mostly just babbling at this point, but I feel like I ought to at least mention one more thing about this idea that I happen to like: character freedom. When characters are not shackled by a level then it is ceases to be a problem should they want to undertake a new “career path” so to speak. I suppose that this seems as good a time as any for me to mention that I also happen to be a fan of the classless model, and that overall experience levels are not exactly well suited for that particular paradigm. The benefit of these models are that a player is not making their decisions about the one single set of skills that they are going to specialize in before they are even exposed to the first of them, but rather a player can explore the mechanics of various fighting and playign styles before choosing which they are going to specialize in.

I suppose all things considered I just want experience points to equate to experience again, in whatever aspect of life that you are experiencing as opposed to simply the number of creatures you kill. But I think I’ve said most of what I’ve thought about on the subject by now, combined with a little bit that I haven’t, so I’ll let you guys decide if I’m just plain crazy or not.

Until next time!