Should GW2 have levels?
People are used to having character levels. Even in a MMO like TSW, they have unofficial levels for the purposes of gaining additional skills and what kind of gear you can equip.
I do remember my early days of Ultima Online. A free formed skill system without levels was fun. However now we run into the modern concept of “progression”. Far too many people are still freaking out about the fact that GW2 doesn’t have a “raid progression” system (regardless of ArenaNet being up front about this from the very start). Could you even imagine what people would do if there was no “progression” in this game at all? The collective mental breakdown of Western MMO players would just be too great.
We are Test Group F. (Don’t ask about what happened to the previous Test Groups.)
The purpose in GW is to teach you the basics for the game. Low level enemies don’t leave danger zones and don’t require you to dodge that much, they don´t remove conditions either. As you progress enemies become tougher, and start doing stuff like that and you as a player have to adapt. This is called a curve of learning and prepares you for the challenges that await you in the later parts of the game.
Edit→ just to add that not everyone needs this curve, but for some of us it has to be there.
Cancer is also a Zodiac sign.
I like levels in GW2 just fine. The leveling process isn’t a grind at all, goes quickly even on my 3rd alt.
The professions gain in power as you level up, and gain in the complexity and variety of possible builds. Similarly the gear gets more important and the environment gets more challenging.
In fact, it’s the sudden stop in advancement that makes people think the game is lacking any endgame content.
The levels in GW2 are arbitrary and excessive. The cap should be at 50, tops.
People are used to having character levels. Even in a MMO like TSW, they have unofficial levels for the purposes of gaining additional skills and what kind of gear you can equip.
I do remember my early days of Ultima Online. A free formed skill system without levels was fun. However now we run into the modern concept of “progression”. Far too many people are still freaking out about the fact that GW2 doesn’t have a “raid progression” system (regardless of ArenaNet being up front about this from the very start). Could you even imagine what people would do if there was no “progression” in this game at all? The collective mental breakdown of Western MMO players would just be too great.
I think they could have used a skill based system for GW2, well, other than the 5 minutes it takes to unlock weapon abilities. The level system seems artificial, it is normally used to have a point of reference in terms of your potency vs the npc, an easy way to compare what challenge level it is. But this game takes away that need, unless you go to a higher level area.
I think the progression is a different issue. I think a lot of people, particularly ex-WoWers are accustom to raid progression as the form of progression. GW2 doesn’t really have those short, medium and long goals which is what freaks them out, they get their crafted, karma or token gear and so they are ready for the next tier of content, there is no other tier. That is a totally different discussion topic. :p
Level based system were really archaic mechanics from the old pen and paper RPG games and thus the earlier computer games which used exp/levels to track development and progress. This was important in ye olden days of pen and paper games as you didn’t want to fill your time with bookkeeping so a simplistic system was necessary. Computers can handle the complex things behind the scene, we don’t have the same need for simplistic or archaic systems.
What people do like in any RPG is character development, story development and progression whatever the form you employ..
I just don’t get why this whole level system is designed to be a factor for 2 weeks out of god knows how many years, you would think a system designed to entertain you for a long time had something more in-depth. I get to the same point in almost every MMO, the lack of character development kills my interest in the character.
No, I hate levels, GW1 was so much better with a lvl cap of 20 and hitting that cap happened before the game really started.
That said, how many threads do you see with ‘what do I do now that I’m 80?’ People seem to think that getting to the max level is the point of the game. Until people can recognize other things to do in the game aside from getting to the max level, we will be stuck with these levels.
The levels in GW2 are arbitrary and excessive. The cap should be at 50, tops.
When my wife was watching me play she said “You mean this game has three expansions worth of leveling right out of the box?”
I was amazed that the level cap was 80 LOL then again, the more levels they start with the more gems people need to buy to convert to gold to power level to max level so Anet makes more $$ its a win/win/win/lose/win/tie situation I suppose
Intell 8088 @ 7.14Mhz | 604K RAM | TCGA 16 Color graphics | TWO 5.25" 640K Floppy drives
No, I hate levels, GW1 was so much better with a lvl cap of 20 and hitting that cap happened before the game really started.
That said, how many threads do you see with ‘what do I do now that I’m 80?’ People seem to think that getting to the max level is the point of the game. Until people can recognize other things to do in the game aside from getting to the max level, we will be stuck with these levels.
I think most people see levels as a means to an end. There is an arbitrary number and you have to spend so many hours of activities to get to the magic number at the end, and that is where almost everyone will be, for a long time.
Most people like to have specific goals, be they pvp or pve related goals. EVE is a good example of a game that has no levels and your character development starts from day 1 and never ends. It’s main negative is the character development is time based and has no interaction other than picking things to train over time.
For me, I always ask ‘Am I having fun what I am dong?’ and ‘Does what I do have any real purpose other than waste time?’ I have a lot of fun just killing mobs, but if you do it over and over enough then it gets boring pretty quickly because the AI is very monotonous, so if you don’t have a purpose there is diminishing returns on the fun.
Events I enjoy, they can trigger a chain of events and they are interesting, at first. But, they are all kill X, loot Y, click Z and any combinations of those. People don’t mind the act of doing it, when there is progression.
The problems is when progression stops. Why am I doing the events?
Funny I was thinking about this earlier too. GW2 is kind of a level-less game, using levels really just as an indicator of time investment.
However, as others here have stated, it does delineate mob abilities in a way that is instructive. Level 6 mobs won’t do what level 66 mobs do. So at 66, the skill rotation you use that works well will probably utterly melt faces when downleveled to level 6.
The other way this helps is by ability unlocking. By 66 you have a lot more options becuase you need them. But those options also let you feel OP downleveled (though not completely OP so all content in lowbie zones is boring).
So it works for me. It’s just not as arbitrary as it was in earlier MMOs.
For me, the levels are a handy tool which tell me if I stand a chance entering a new area and hinting if my armor and weapons could use an upgrade, or if they still “match” the areas I venture into.
For me, the levels are a handy tool which tell me if I stand a chance entering a new area and hinting if my armor and weapons could use an upgrade, or if they still “match” the areas I venture into.
And this is a natural part of levels. Properly done, no levels means your armor doesn’t need to be upgraded. GW1 once you hit 80 all armor and levels were constant. TSW while they have no levels the gear needs to be upgraded constantly and you don’t have these clues to tell you that your gear sucks, aside form a little green or red dot.
Levels are old relic from the past. It’s one way to implement the idea of having a character that becomes progressively better over time. Guild Wars 2, however, doesn’t have that idea of progression, but still retains leveling system. For me this seems like design mistake.
Why can’t progression come in player, who becomes more familiar with game mechanics and develops faster reaction time? If there was no way to get better character, developers would have to really sit down and figure out how to make a challenging game. Challenge today is simple arithmetics. You got low number – you must slay hordes of trivial enemies until you get bigger numbers. Once you get big numbers, a new batch of enemies turns trivial and you can start slaughtering them. This is exactly how Diablo 3 views challenge. Rest of the genre is following.
There’s no cake at the end. Controls don’t just suddenly turn fluid and challenge won’t just turn non-binary. Game that was designed badly from the beginning will stay bad and no patch is going to fix the fundamental flaw.
Edit: Good example of “fluid” or well designed challenge are jumping puzzles in this game. They are about making observations and understanding character movement. Completing them really feels you’re making progress as a player.
(edited by Zenith.6403)
The levels are just there to keep a certain amount of familiarity for vet players. It’s nice to see more people recognizing that the level system is out dated. Hopefully as we move forward MMO’s will move away from the restrictive level system.
The downranking system does make levels feel less rewarding, IMHO. Part of the appeal of gaining levels is feeling more powerful, but the system is kinda badly designed and a lot of people feel LESS powerful in a level 20 zone at level 80 than they did when they were ACTUALLY level 20.
Not really. Once again I have to look back at Ultima Online. One of the first MMOs, and it did nearly everything right. No levels, and your character could be in constant flux as you participated in using different skills. It’s a shame that game kind of got ruined by later expansions.
The downranking system does make levels feel less rewarding, IMHO. Part of the appeal of gaining levels is feeling more powerful, but the system is kinda badly designed and a lot of people feel LESS powerful in a level 20 zone at level 80 than they did when they were ACTUALLY level 20.
honestly, I think the problem is that the mobs are in fact too easy that you over think and mess up. Example: They did a study on pilots who learned via procedures and those are naturally learned. When told to focus on procedures or naturally learned (the opposite) the pilots would make more mistakes.
Also the scaling down is so that you can keep your level 80 and help a friend level up without rolling an alt. Honestly, I like the system, as I have convinced some friends to join so I can keep my level 80 engineer and play that without using an alt if I want. I certainly don’t want to 1 or 2 shot something.
GW2 is a game without levels, except for when there are. This is why I was so glad to get to level 80, as I could then do whatever I wanted. You get downleveled, but never upleveled, after all. Mobs will sometimes get a huge advantage over you, but you are never allowed to have an advantage over them. Rushing to 80 and then backtracking resolves all of this.
“The downranking system does make levels feel less rewarding, IMHO. Part of the appeal of gaining levels is feeling more powerful, but the system is kinda badly designed and a lot of people feel LESS powerful in a level 20 zone at level 80 than they did when they were ACTUALLY level 20.”
this is simply false unless you made a point not equipping any gear worthy of a lvl 80 character. And what would be the alternative? Having a lvl 80 steamroll lower level content for no reward at all, effectively deleting all content below SoF and Orr areas for maxed characters? certainly not.
Frankly I think they don’t down rank you enough. If you’re 20 levels over the zone you can pretty easily steamroll the mobs. True, your farts aren’t the equivalent of a nuclear bomb but the content does become trivial.
As far as levels, I’m fine with them because they do help gate content in PvE (which helps gate the story so you don’t start the game by killing the end boss) as well as provides you the option for a challenge (e.g. higher level mobs drop better loot).
No, I hate levels, GW1 was so much better with a lvl cap of 20 and hitting that cap happened before the game really started.
That said, how many threads do you see with ‘what do I do now that I’m 80?’ People seem to think that getting to the max level is the point of the game. Until people can recognize other things to do in the game aside from getting to the max level, we will be stuck with these levels.
I think getting rid of levels could actually help with this issue. If there were no levels it would be instally obvious to people that levelling is NOT the point of the game.
Personally it doesn’t matter much to me whether it’s there or not, but then I’ve looked at it since the start as simply a way of tracking your progression – how close you are to having all the trait points and skills, what areas you can go into etc. IMO that’s all it really is in most games, so I don’t see GW2 as all that different.
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
There is a very important reason for the leveling system.
I would guess that most of the budget for creating the game is in the development of the world. A huge world. Art-people and designers must have put a lot of time in building the world. I bet more than half the budget. Maybe 70-80% of the budget went into the world, the monsters, the models, textures, etc. Therefor you want the players to see the world, and play in the world.
The leveling system is a tool to guide people to move through the world. Or if you want to look at it from a negative side, force you to move through the world.
If the fastest method to attain something would be to stand in one spot, and farm the same mobs over and over again, a lot of players would do that. They would miss out a lot of what Tyria has to offer. They wouldn’t like the game. They would get bored quickly. They would give bad mouth-to-mouth advertising. A developer wants his product to be enjoyed in a proper way. And thus he wants his customers to move through the whole world. The “100% world completion” is not there just for us, but also for Arenanet.
The leveling system is used to make you move and experience the whole world. I think it works well for this purpose. Whether Arenanet (or other companies) can improve details of the system, that’s another discussion.
Some people don’t like leveling. Some people don’t like questing. Some people don’t like nothing. Some people just don’t like MMOs. I wish companies would stop catering their games to people who don’t like their game. Put something in your game for the hardcore, something for the casuals. Something for the good players, something for the bad players. Something for the role-players. For the pvp-ers. Something for the achievers, the explorers, the social players, etc. MMOs are huge games. You can put in something for everybody. But please, don’t take out stuff, just because a few people don’t like MMOs in general …..
(edited by Gryz.8376)
And what would be the alternative? Having a lvl 80 steamroll lower level content for no reward at all, effectively deleting all content below SoF and Orr areas for maxed characters? certainly not.
Well, as this thread mentions, the alternative is not having levels. Or even just handling levels like GW1 did. Really the GW1 system was great. You gain levels through the tutorial parts of the game, but by the time you get to the meat of the content you’re max level and in maxed out gear and the only limiting factors on what you can do are the creativity of your build and your skill at playing it.
and what is different here? GW1 was an easy run to max level/max gear as is GW2 and the meat was pvp which is also in GW2. that has nothing to do with revisiting lower level areas.
I’ll add that GW1 was a very similar game in that levels were never important. Getting to 20 was easy, and even mandatory after Ascension. The purpose of levels 1-19 were in teaching the player basic mechanics. It lasted only long enough for new players to fully grasp everything in the game. A long tutorial.
The world was laid out linearly, mostly, so you had to keep seeing new challenges to train you as you progressed. You could circumvent this if you were not a new player, either by paying enough gold for a run or just by knowing the map well enough to get around it. It was a fairly convenient system.
In GW2, content is not linear, but you still get bottlenecked to starter zones for quite a long time. This can make repeated playthroughs very tiresome, as you have to do the same content to 100% or near 100% to level up. On my Warrior, I actually would complete 100% of the zones around the Norn starter areas but still would be underleveled for the nearby areas, forcing me to clear other starter areas. I have no desire whatsoever to clear these areas on new characters, as a result. (GW1 had a similar problem with new characters getting bogged down with repeating the same handful of quests constantly, although not as badly.) My solution has been to level in WvW, which is much faster and obviously is only as repetitive as players allow it to be.
I get the feeling they stretched leveling out in GW2 to unnecessary lengths from GW1 just because they knew a lot of MMO players from worse games were going to be joining the existing player base, and they wouldn’t really grasp the concept of “tutorial leveling.” The result is level drag without the reward that naturally comes from leveling in other games.
I’ll add that GW1 was a very similar game in that levels were never important. Getting to 20 was easy, and even mandatory after Ascension. The purpose of levels 1-19 were in teaching the player basic mechanics. It lasted only long enough for new players to fully grasp everything in the game. A long tutorial.
The world was laid out linearly, mostly, so you had to keep seeing new challenges to train you as you progressed. You could circumvent this if you were not a new player, either by paying enough gold for a run or just by knowing the map well enough to get around it. It was a fairly convenient system.
In GW2, content is not linear, but you still get bottlenecked to starter zones for quite a long time. This can make repeated playthroughs very tiresome, as you have to do the same content to 100% or near 100% to level up. On my Warrior, I actually would complete 100% of the zones around the Norn starter areas but still would be underleveled for the nearby areas, forcing me to clear other starter areas. I have no desire whatsoever to clear these areas on new characters, as a result. (GW1 had a similar problem with new characters getting bogged down with repeating the same handful of quests constantly, although not as badly.) My solution has been to level in WvW, which is much faster and obviously is only as repetitive as players allow it to be.
I get the feeling they stretched leveling out in GW2 to unnecessary lengths from GW1 just because they knew a lot of MMO players from worse games were going to be joining the existing player base, and they wouldn’t really grasp the concept of “tutorial leveling.” The result is level drag without the reward that naturally comes from leveling in other games.
I actually agree with this. The level cap should have been 40. Then they could of had liek 5 or 6 level 40 zones. Not even bothered with Orr and focused on some other features like a better LFG and a ranking system for sPvP
Would be nice if there was an option to turn off/hide numbers on UI, I’m sick of watching arbitrary numbers as combat feedback…. arbitrary as the combat is always dynamically scaling to area, real lack of vision on ArenaNet’s part.
And yes, levels need to go away. Not enough ‘nads’ to make leap… again, lack of vision – GW1 was revolutionary.
(edited by Wolfend.5287)
From what I understood several years ago, Anet wanted to remove levels entirely when they started GW2. They had to keep them in though because some form of progression is just too much part of the MMO genre, and people did not respond well to them being gone.
“I care nothing for a festering industry that wantonly refuses to
provide a service that I’m willing to purchase.” – Fortuna.7259
provide a service that I’m willing to purchase.” – Fortuna.7259
The level system undermines the idea that “there is no endgame” and that “the game starts at level 1”. Thus, it should disappear. To be honest, it adds nothing to the game.
The level system undermines the idea that “there is no endgame” and that “the game starts at level 1”. Thus, it should disappear. To be honest, it adds nothing to the game.
The primary purpose is to throttle content and provide a path, to paraphrase ArenaNet lead designer.
But the GW universe no longer has the mystery of open exploration in it. I’m constantly looking at the map to figure out where I’m ‘allowed’ to play next, not very fun imo. I’ll get one or two characters to end-game 80 and call it a day, being that is how the game is now designed to be played. And then play a few extra characters to 30 for story, then delete and repeat for other story threads….
GW is now a game of restrictions rather than exploration, an amusement park feel to it – play some events here, then you qualify to play some events there. Not what drew me to gw1.
In every other way GW2 is an amazing product. I personally tried to overlook the regression to traditional levels, but it’s not what I’d consider ‘fun’. If a character had the option to advance just by following the story events/missions I’d likely play around a bit more. So now I have several characters sitting at mid and early game with little desire to ‘progress’ them. And WvW is out of reach as I refuse to participate with scaled stat/trait/skill imbalance pre lvl 80, not so fun or ‘casual’ there either.
(edited by Wolfend.5287)
What are you talking about ?..
The levels and leveling is perfect, by far the best leveling/exploring experience I’ve had on any game so far. That’s definitely not the problem on this game lol.
1-80 can be done in weeks if your exploring and doing different things, but also doable in 3-4 days lol. What’s the issue here? If you have no desire to progress your alts it’s your problem…….
Really don’t like pointless little topics moaning about stuff that is actually one of the GOOD things on this game – Leveling, absolutely everything you do make you progress further, crafting, events, wvw, hearts, vistas, poi, sp etc…
Let’s focus on something that actually need changing…………..like end-game.
EDIT: If they’d remove levels there would be a lot less people playing the game as there are now. That’s just common sense. No levels in a mmorpg is pure stupidity that’s all I can say, it’s actually hard for me to express how stupid it is……..:/
…
(edited by Aphix.9846)
having levels in a game is a way of seeing how far that player has prgressed through the game so im in favour of keeping levels. Gona re the days when you can only spend stuff when you lvel up etc.
Tis not what they can do for you
Tis only what you can do for all
Tis only what you can do for all
… Leveling, absolutely everything you do make you progress further, crafting, events, wvw, hearts, vistas, poi, sp etc.
The primary purpose of levels in GW2 is ‘hand holding’. See past dev comments. You do not need levels to do any of the above, or advance a story arc, or build an avatar… just hand-holding for WoW fans and WoW clones, hand-holding.