A question to help direct the discussion a bit:
What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?
For me, Final Fantasy Tactics is one I loved, where I was able to continue to unlock new jobs and advanced professions for my characters, as well as level up their abilities within those professions. It remains one of my all time favorite games, and one of my favorite systems of progression in any game. I’m also pretty darn fond of that Guild Wars game and skill collection.
Hi!
I absolutely loved the system of progression in FFXI. It’s similar to the one you mentioned in that as you advanced in the game you unlocked new jobs (classes). Each of the these jobs had an exciting quest to unlock, some of which could be quite engaging. For example, the summoner job quest required you to visit an area of the game that experience different weather effects. The entire quest was driven by a strong story that tied in directly with the game world.
Within each individual job, there was armour that took on the “classic” Final Fantasy appearance of the job. White mages had the white robes with red triangles, summoners the green robes with the horn, etc. The quests to obtain these relic armour sets were amazing, as they were challenging and really explored the lore of the individual jobs, i.e. the summoner relic armour story focused on an insane summoner and that summoning magic was outlawed, white mages had to face a powerful undead.
It would be really neat if each class in GW2 had such armour. In some ways we do – human thieves can wear the T3 armour, and this is quite “thief-like”. Still, it might be nice if there were cross-racial class gear that had engaging quests to take part in, each of which could discuss how the class has shaped modern Tyria. Maybe thieves could explore how their class derived from assassins in Cantha, engineers could help develop some anti-dragon machine. There could be unique titles to be unlocked (I think titles are a great horizontal progression idea!). These quests could have challenging but not grindy content, like Liadri.
Also, I loved the housing system in FFXI. This was a mostly horizontal progression that doubled as a gold sink and a trophy display. Players with too much gil on their hands could buy some luxurious bed or table, etc, while more casual players like myself could build their own (cheap, yet practical!) bed in the crafting disciplines. There were activities like gardening. I think GW2 could use something like this (I know housing has been discussed), and this would be a neat prestige system. It would allow dedicated players to show off their accomplishments to their guild/friends while also not having more particle effects everywhere. The FFXI system also saw that each piece of furniture had a very small bonus, and you could only have one such bonus active on you at a time. Beds, for example, increased experience gain by some small percent.