Some thoughts, then some questions for all you DBOers (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, March 31, 2016, 23:29 (3252 days ago) @ Cody Miller

In short: Levels are how RPGs can automatically adjust difficulty to individual players' skills.

This is tangental, and not the original intent of leveling.

In tabletop games, your character would, in terms of the narrative, get stronger and better over time. But you as a player aren't shooting bows or swinging swords, so levels were used as a way to indicate that. The system of interaction was abstract, such that what you as a player do has no bearing on what your avatar does.

Fast forward to early RPGs. Leveling was necessary for challenge, because without leveling they'd be dead simple strategy games. This holds true for all JRPGs and MMOs to this day. Remove leveling, and it would become instantly apparent every one of these games sucks. So leveling was necessary, or else players would master your simple shitty systems in like two seconds.

But action games like FPS have a continuity of action between the player and the avatar. YOU large determine your success in an FPS for example, by getting better at moving and aiming. Your skill, not the avatars. Thus, leveling is not needed because the progression comes from you.

This is why action games had a selectable difficulty setting, and not leveling - they were not simple shitty games.

There are games that do avatar progression well. The secret is that progression makes the game more challenging. You acquire new abilities, and so can face more challenging scenarios. This is in contrast to games with leveling, in which you are simply facing more difficult situations that are no more challenging.

All true, but I'm referencing leveling in terms of how it applies to almost any video game that is not turn-based. Real time player skill interacts with levels in a way that creates dynamic difficulty adjustments automatically. Fighting weak enemies? You'll blow through them until you reach enemies that are high enough level to challenge you and stall your progress. Fighting hard enemies? You can back-farm a bit to level up and make the next portion of the game easier for you.

The original intent doesn't apply for exactly the reasons you described. It's fine to say leveling isn't needed (it's not), but when you have leveling, you also have the opportunity to allow dynamic difficulty scaling, which is - as far as I'm concerned - the only real reason to include leveling in a game (other than "leveling up" triggers a dopamine response and breeds addictive gameplay in your consumers).

Really, as you unlock more powers or weapons, the designer is adding complexity to the way in which the player can interact with the game. Destiny is a bit of an enigma in that regard since complexity theoretically caps out fairly early on in your character's "progression:" You have one fully unlocked subspec, three weapons, a speeder bike, and some armor. Since you're limited to a single exotic weapon and single exotic armor, you're also limiting complexity in those arenas. Because of RNG loot, however, the complexity of available choices for which weapons to bring and what armor to wear is nearly infinite, and at the same time will greatly favor some players while greatly limiting others, which seems fairly detrimental towards the overall sense of progression for both groups of players (players in the middle should still feel decently challenged and that they are decently progressing.

All of that, however, begs the question of why the game includes levels at all. The levels in the game don't serve any purpose other than, as I said, to further reward the high skill players (who don't need the help) and punish the low skill players (who do need help), and begs the question as to why levels are in the game at all.