July 10, 2024 11:09 AM PDT
Creative Director Chris “Joppa” Perkins has been opening the development of the world of Terminu;s to the community through his streaming of his worldbuilding and testing session a few times per week. This has been a huge hit with the community, not in small part due to the conversations he has with chat on the development of systems for the game.
In recent streams, there has been a lot of discussion about playing with friends that can’t play with the same frequency as others. A level gap starts to form and then how do you group together? It’s a problem that has been tackled different ways with different games. But Pantheon is its own game with its own idiosyncrasies that need to be considered. Tackling the level gap. Let’s go.
You have a buddy you like gaming with. Let’s call her Margaret. Hey, girls are gamers, too, you misogynists. Anyway, Margaret doesn’t have a job and lives in her parent’s basement. Hey, girls can be slackers, too, you feminists. Margaret plays at least twice as much as you do, which means it didn’t take long for her to level too far for yall to group together. So, now what?
The three most prominent offerings from the streams were a mentoring system and a “catch-up” system, basically bonus exp for lower levels.
One at a time, the mentoring system would work approximately like this. Margaret joins your group and has the ability to adjust her level down to your level to enjoy the content you are currently fighting. This allows for some replayability in lower zones for folks progressing beyond that and trying to keep the player count up in lower level areas. There are issues that arise with this. None of the loot is beneficial to her at all. If you change the level, do you change Margaret’s base stats too? What about her OP gear? What about her OP abilities, and abilities are affected by base stats? Basically, how much of a twink do you make Margaret while she plays, trying not to trivialize the content.
As an aside, trivializing content has been another big topic targeted by VR’s giant problem killing laser gun. The current changes to exp, mob leveling, and fight time upcoming have partly been about dodging the trivialization of content problem. The new system of debuffing much harder to kill mobs thru new abilities across classes is another way they are tackling the issue. As long as you balance all these variables for higher level friends joining your group, it’s a viable option to get higher level chars to revisit lower level content.
The other option is to have exp bonuses for lower level characters. This helps Margaret’s friend to catch up with her when they are on. This option has major issues. This would lead to the meta path thru the game being just grouping with as high a level as you are allowed and exp bonusing your way through the content. This is also detrimental to the content as everyone rushes through leveling.
The other other option is to do nothing and let people twink chars that help power level you to catch up with your friends. This is the least effective in solving the problem of the level gap, but more in line with the “actions have consequences” tenet of Pantheon. Tell Margaret to stop playing that toon, or you need to quit your job to play more with her.
These three options have taken few considerations of the other systems Pantheon leans on to set their vision of what this game is. One of the biggest issue VR is trying to address in this next-gen MMO is the stale regions of the game from characters moving to higher level content and fewer low level toons playing. Down-leveling a player in a group does get them playing lower level content, but once their friend levels up, then what?
There is another way to think of this that follows on with the “do nothing” track. Adding systems like this to solve an issue is like taking medicine for an ailment. Most of them have side effects that then have to be addressed until you are taking 8 pills a day and feel worse than you did before treating the first problem. Doing nothing also has the upside of spending that time on other systems that are core and not medicinal.
I propose doing nothing to handle the level gap, BUT providing the systems already proposed by VR to handle the issue organically. These include Perception System, limited crafting specializations, “actions have consequences” policies involving faction and content gating, and progeny.
Here’s how it works. Margaret is playing a lot on her favorite char, a dwarf pally. She used to be able to group with you, but she’s been laid off from The Gap and her dwarf pally is just too high now to group. The time she has spent on that pally has produced decisions that have affected her faction. Her ventures all over Tenebrous have led to some interesting story lines through the Perception system and those branches have led toward and away from different storylines and/or abilities to get to certain content. She obviously went into smithing for crafting, but can only specialize in making platemail. But she really likes the character.
But what Margaret doesn’t know is that if she re-rolled a paladin, or even a warrior or a dire lord, that was a different race and spent time leveling on a different continent, the Percaption system would branch in new and exciting ways, open up different content and storylines. Her faction would allow her to get into different areas and new content. Her new char could take her smithing to weapon specializations which helps her main. This new character can now be the char she plays when you are playing so yall stay around the same level. She has been properly incentivized to alt.
There are only two options to retain players in an MMO. One is to continue to create higher level content, new zones, new raids, and continuously expand the game world. This has the detrimental effect of diluting the populations in the rest of the game world. That is how zones or regions of the game world die. This also minimizes the access to lower level content. If VR is committed to having raids in content as low as the teen levels, why would anyone develop other systems in the game that steer away from that content?
This new option is to make rerolling a character a fun and exciting experience. This requires enough content and incentives to play in areas you haven’t before. The content also has to stay fresh. But this cuts down on creating new game world (a large piece of dev time), and only needs updated content. If you spend time, making new quests for low level areas, removing old quests after some length of time and replacing it with new quests, changing where certain mobs spawn. How about your old favorite spot to kill bandits in a patch turned into an area where griffons spawn where they came and wiped out the bandits, and now the bandits had to move somewhere else. To where? Go explore and find out. Maybe there is a new set of racial armor that is a level 20 quest line. You don’t feel so bad about rolling a new character and getting it, especially if you have another system also pushing players to start over: progeny. Progeny has the ability to open new class/race options, carryover of certain abilities from one class to another class for the progeny, giving some new emergent flexing options for characters who sacrifice a max level character to create their progeny.
Joppa mentioned during one stream his concern that, in reality, people can’t help but play that alt they made for playing with their friends because they have so much invested in that toon. But if that is the case then why is VR even trying to make areas that people keep coming back for? That is giving up and saying the only way forward is to continue increasing the size of the game world and amount of content and max level range ad infinitum. It is a reality that the level cap will need to rise and new game world will need to be made, but not that couldn’t be slowed way down. If they were to lean into creating new content (already needed for the other option anyway) and deleting old content in the current game world and incentivizing players to re-roll new characters, promising that fresh feeling because of the Perception systems broad branching ability, different and unpredictable content at lower levels with new challenges, progeny incentives, and maintaining crafting specialization, the problem of level gap disappears completely. Half of the systems VR is building into Pantheon already skew in this direction. If they leaned in, we could see the first MMORPG to solve the empty zone, no low levels to group with, and forgotten content problems. Because, come on yall, Margaret needs a friend right now. You know she do.
