A treatise on character levels in RPGs (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, December 17, 2015, 23:12 (3358 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Character leveling then provides a player with a means of fine-tuning the difficulty of any game to their own personal tastes.

You could have just done that with a difficulty selector. Very easy, easy, normal, hard, very hard. This already gives you the ability to pick your difficulty. This of course requires the game designers to make sure their range of difficulties is appropriate, so really you are saying that the players should be tasked with the job the developer is supposed to do.

Eh... no. Cody. Come on, man! The point is that character vs. monster level provides moment to moment "feel" based difficulty tuning rather than requiring gameplay pausing menu searching. At the same time that it keeps difficulty tuning within the confines of actual live gameplay, it also provides a metric for emergent competition ("clear the sewers before level 10" or "wow, this guy in chat cleared the tower before level 60. He must be awesome.") that's more varied and tangible to the average player.

If a video game only had 4 character levels, then I guess it would be an analogue to the old difficulty selector, but having upwards of 50 levels in most games gives you a far finer scale for tuning difficulty.