Guild Wars 2

One big problem I have with the Personal Story and the Open World (Hearts, Events) is that zone pacing can easily outstrip personal level gains unless the player forcibly decides to backtrack and repeat content for 1-2 hours…every 1-2 hours. I don’t believe that leveling slowly is an issue – I grew up on Ragnarok Online – but to put it bluntly I don’t want to gather devourer eggs 5 times in a row just so I can keep pace with the game design. My solution is to compress the level requirements, without actually changing rewards or the amount of content.

One thing that I still despise about the open world is that even if I walk into a zone at parity with its lower requirement, I’m forced to hover around the start point and pray that I get to farm a rapidly recurring event. Otherwise, I’ll quickly find myself one, then two, then three, or even four levels below the area I’m standing in. And if it’s a zone with a zone boss, that boss can be up to 10 levels above the zone baseline…which means that even if I see “BOSS IS UP” in chat, I’m SOL for at least another 5 levels…if not another 8…or even another 10 due to event mobs getting scaled up. 5-10 hours of wishing that I could do the boss event without getting instagibbed by a stray AoE.

To compress the levels of an open world zone would not be to modify its recommended level range, but rather to just modify the level requirements for events and hearts, such that it starts at the same point and then only rises partway to the upper bound. In my opinion, having it sit at +5 levels would probably work well, because from my experience in the 70-75 and 75-80 zones, there is still good zone flow within a 5 level range. Therefore, my proposed level ranges would go from:

1-15, 15-25, 25-35, 35-45, 45-55, 55-65, 65-70

to

1-10, 15-20, 25-30, 35-40, 45-50, 55-60, 65-70

This admittedly leaves the issue of a lack of zones that cover the “missing” 5 level intervals, but this could be remedied by staggering a different set of maps. Unfortunately, that would also be counter-intuitive because the level ranges would entice people to repeatedly fly across the map every 5 hours for “same level content”.

With the Personal Story, the problem is that there is a TWO level gap between story steps. In other words, that’s two whole hours of not-story in between ~30 minute quests. While this isn’t a severe issue with the 1-10 arc, due to the relatively fast level gains at that point, it becomes a horrible pacing issue later on where trying to play story for the sake of story quickly and easily puts you upwards of 4-6 levels lower than recommended for your given quest. Again though, once you hit Lv70, pacing becomes far more sane as the quests are now spaced by one level, so underleveling is far less severe.

My solution here is to the exact opposite of the Open World solution – compress the level ranges into the upper half of the bracket. Therefore, this reshuffling would go from:

1-10, 10-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40-50, 50-60, 60-70

to

1-10, 15-20, 25-30, 35-40, 45-50, 55-60, 65-70

The raw time spent getting to the Lv70 point still remains the same, but individual arcs feel more continuous because you can more easily keep pace with the level ramp up. And while the overall story can be separated into 1-30, 30-50 (shared 20-30 between 1st and 2nd) and 50-80, each of these come in mini-arcs of 10 levels. This in turn allows the current design to “break up” the mini-arcs without ruining the pace of the overall story. In particular, creating the 5 level gap means that instead of instantly getting a message that “Something big is happening!” immediately after an arc ends, there is instead a pause that properly implies the passage of time. Nor do you have the issue where a story branch might say that you “need to do something quickly”, but because you’re 4-6 level behind you can’t do so without dying horribly trying.