A treatise on character levels in RPGs (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, December 17, 2015, 22:13 (3358 days ago) @ Funkmon

Character level does serve a purpose in an RPG environment. It allows you to know a relative power level for your character, and for the enemies around you. They will not always relate directly (a level 1 player is often stronger than several level 1 non-players combined) but the balance should be easy enough to figure out that a player can quickly gauge, from level alone, whether or not an encounter is worth attempting.

Thus, if you are a level 10 character, and you encounter three level 5 npcs, you can quickly assume that you can dispatch all three with ease and a minimal use of skills. What if all three are level 10? Perhaps you know you need to use some ability cooldowns, but otherwise should have no trouble. Level 15 npcs? Pull out the limited use items, play to the maximum of your ability, and you have a chance to prevail. Level 20? RUN!!!

Character leveling then provides a player with a means of fine-tuning the difficulty of any game to their own personal tastes. A player looking for an easy romp can simply level past the content they are in and crush the world without fear. A player in search of a challenge can intentionally remain under-leveled and go after bigger game. Leveling generally finds its own balance for each player: As you encounter harder and harder encounters, you will eventually reach the limit of your ability, and have to go back to level up a bit before progressing onwards.

This adds to replayability, and the option to assault challenges previously to difficult to overcome remains constantly available to the player, and as player skill increases, that player can push the envelope ever further.

Of note, a game with this sort of character vs. monster level design will never require a difficulty setting.

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Which brings me to modern day RPGs. Many use "scaling monsters." If you gain level, then the monsters gain level. In these games, the player is not able to determine if enemies present a challenge or not based on level vs. level comparisons, nor is the player able to intentionally out-level content they are having trouble with or approach encounters while underleveled in order to challenge themselves. In my professional opinion, scaling monsters is a fucking awful idea. Fucking. Awful. I simply can't say it emphatically enough. Scaling monsters to character level breaks one of the fundamental and most interesting features of RPG video games: That players can set their own difficulty as they play by pacing the rate at which they level up to match their desire for a challenge.

At this point, why even have character levels? They don't allow you to know anything about yourself or your enemies. What's the point? Well, they do two things which are important in freemium and pay for play style games: They give the player a potentially addictive sense of progression, and they gate off certain items or areas from access until the player achieves a set level, artificially adding to the amount of play time that must be spent "grinding" between content areas. in short, they make you play the game more, and probably buy more stuff to do so (such as monthly subscriptions, or expansion packs, or microtransactions). But they no longer serve an actual "gameplay" purpose at this point. Rather, they serve a "gate and grind" purpose, extending gameplay past where it would otherwise terminate.

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In my opinion, the best game I've ever played in terms of monster level vs. character level comparison is Diablo 2. The worst game I've ever played in terms of scaling monsters is Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Destiny is a weird mix, because the scaling is decent while you're leveling up, and once you hit level 40, it's still not bad while you level up the light on your gear, until you hit 280 light (or the "endgame") at which point it becomes complete and utter horseshit. Because monsters of a lower level all scale up to meet you, you can never really "out level" content in Destiny, which is nice if you like a challenge but dumb if you want to just fart around for a while. The flip side however - monsters of such high level that you cannot physically ever match them, let alone out level them - is also present, and is stupid. It's artificially inflating the difficulty of a thing simply by forcing the players into an underleveled situation. Again, this undermines the basic value of character levels: if you're going to dictate difficulty, the only reason to include levels is to gate content and / or hook players based on the addictive (and false) value of "leveling up."

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All of that being said, content gating can be used in a non-abusive way. I can imagine a game where you want to force players to do the tutorial, so you gate off the main game action until you're level 2. But there are almost always better ways to do these things that are more narrative driven, or present the player with a real choice. Maybe the tutorial is optional, but provides the player with a really cool sword at the end (which you tell them about before starting it), so the player can decide if they think it is worthwhile or not. Maybe the tutorial is a small quest to get a key that unlocks the town gate, etc etc.. Level gating can also be used to prevent players from using certain powerful items, but - again - I find that it is usually better to gate content behind player accomplishments (defeat the wizard in the fire tower to learn how to equip the cloak of Aether) rather than pure player level (requiring level 100 to equip the sword of Ultimate Destruction could mean you did a bunch of awesome stuff and slew some dragons and saw great lands and did great deeds, or it could mean you killed 100000000 boars in the starting town and are a boring dick stabber).

Using leveling up purely as an addition fueling mechanic is abusive and shitty no matter how you slice it. Game designers should be better humans than that, even when their corporate overlords demand it.

Any time you can pay money to "make X happen NOW" that's the game designer admitting that the only reason X takes so long is shitty money grubbing design. And level skip items for money fall into this category. I'm sorry, but this is really putting the cart before the ox. Bungie is asking players to pay them extra in order to skip portions of the game Bungie made. Is your game so shitty that PEOPLE WILL PAY YOU NOT TO PLAY IT? I'm really sad. Why don't you make that section of the game fun, instead? That would be the good guy thing to do.