Breakfast Topic: Would you play WoW if it had no levels?
by Andrew Ross 
Oct 4th 2011 at 8:00AM
A recent discussion in The Queue brought up the idea that perhaps WoW's Recruit-A-Friend could have been done differently. The point of RAF's bonus XP is to help you friend get to the max level as fast as possible to play with you. This is essentially so that they can experience endgame content, as opposed to leveling content. Unfortunately, WoW as an RPG relies on story for raids to be meaningful as anything other than a loot grind. Players who level too quickly may miss out on lore. In addition, quick leveling also means less time learning character skills needed to raid, and we've all seen the guy who bought a level 85 warrior but still didn't know how to taunt.
But what if leveling speed isn't RAF's problem? What if the problem is the concept of levels themselves? If you want to play Mario Kart with a friend, you just jump in. Skill becomes the only barrier, and fun gameplay mechanics take over the grind. It also makes it a lot easier to close the gap between you and your friend in a fun way. The same goes for most FPS, RTS and fighter games ... Only RPGs put this artificial barrier in place.
However, removing level would affect other areas of gameplay. Quests could be lore- and appearance-centric, rather than grind- and gear-centric. Since all players are at the same level, queues for instanced content would go down and it would be easier to get bodies for raids. The rest of the game world would also be easier to expand and utilize, since developers wouldn't need to worry about sheltering level 15s against level 80s. It would, though, make alts more common, which may be problematic in gear acquisition for people's mains for those who raid.
Would you play a WoW without levels, or is there something about levels that is still needed?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Big Shoe Oct 4th 2011 8:05AM
I suppose, by playing at level cap for such long streches of time, with gear being the only tangible upgrade, many of us already ARE playing WoW without levels. That being said, actually levelling up during an expansion is quite satisfying and fun, and I'm always a little sad to hit level cap and know that there are no more fun new abilities available from my trainer.
DarkWalker Oct 4th 2011 9:22AM
Abilities don't need to be tied to level.
TSW is aiming to be a MMORPG without levels, for example. Instead, players spend the earned XP to get active and passive skills.
Plus, the fact players can only "equip" 7 active and 7 passive skills at a time should make it really fast to get a character up to the same efficiency as an older character. The advantage of having an older character, with lots of skills earned, will not be power; instead, it will be the added flexibility. I.e., "leveling" after reaching the performance "cap" will still be desirable, at least for anyone that likes to vary how they play the game.
BTW, seeing what Funcom plans to do with TSW's leveling and skill system has almost guaranteed I will buy and try that game.
Krytture Oct 4th 2011 11:34AM
Gear ilvl should become the new level. It can be manipulated and controlled better then just grinding XP for levels.
Skip to page 4 of the comments.
Homeschool Oct 4th 2011 11:44AM
Consider also the "hero" class of the DKs. You have a short starter zone and earn talent points from quests, allowing you to gradually step up your abilities, without taking 55 levels to do it.
I'd love it if there was a level toggle, where starting a new character permitted you to "hero" into it, starting at a level you'd already reached on an another character. If they offered a special hero starting zone (like the DK zone) with class-specific quests to teach you about your abilities, then dropped you in at the beginning of that expansion's content, it would go a long way toward smoothing the climb.
For example, in Cataclysm your hero zone might start you at 77, with the content offering you three levels and a gradual phase of your abilities and talent points, such that finishing the zone ended with you at 80 and ready to begin the Cata zones. Hero zones could be tailored less toward a zone-specific story, and more toward a boot-camp for the faction, training experienced soldiers and indoctrinating them on the current lore. ("We'd just barely returned from Northrend when the whole world went crazy! Now we need more troops, and you're it.")
Assuming they offered it as a toggle, where you could opt to start around various levels (at least 1, 60, 70, 80), you'd still have the freedom to level up through alt quests, but if your sole interest was having a level cap alt, it wouldn't take a few weeks with sometimes-outdated content.
rayden54 Oct 4th 2011 9:29PM
@Homeschool
I've been asking for that for a year now.
I'm one of the people that sees leveling as a boring grind that you have to do in order to "play the game." RaF's a good start, but requiring a second person and a second account to get the real benefit of it severely limits its its use. Not to mention that you end up with a whole bunch of extra accounts clogging up your Battle.net account.
chloroformist Oct 4th 2011 8:06AM
Well for me, it definitely would be less fun. I would have less of a sense of accomplishment. Helps me learn my class, too.
parcus Oct 4th 2011 10:00AM
Leveling may help you understand how your character work, but most importantly, it teaches you how the game works, and you will learn that by leveling one or two characters. Leveling has become a burden to my wow experience, it implements a barrier between me and my friends (along with the character transfer high prices), a barrier to raid flexibility and some other issues.
So leveling a character for the first 2-3 was fun, leveling from 1-60 with the new content has been fun, but doing the same quests again from 60-80 (and 80-85 to some degree, due to the lack of quest diversity there) is not fun at all, doesn't help me play other classes and kill my alts.
I honestly preffered the attunement system with hard heroics back in TBC (though I prefer many aspects of the WoTLK/cata raiding experiences), when getting through them was already a test to your (and your friend's) skills.
People have to face the fact that wow is not a very intuitive game for the first time, it gets easier when you grasp the concepts of DPS, how fast things have to die, what the reasons for wiping are, etc.
So, some fixes to help new players would instead be:
Not favoring theorycrafting too much, some times, it's hard (and very boring) to choose between some talents that don't affect your healing/ dps/ tanking strategy in a significant way, PVP talents that are useless may be appealing to new players as well. A Pre-made builds (PVP and PVE) with some points to spare in optional talents that really affect the way people play could help players that don't really like to reasearch/ calculate those sort of things a lot.
More time spent in the new revamped content than in BC/wrath content proportianly. For those who have gone through the content already and just want to reach level cap, a increase in all the EXP earned, no matter in which realm you play as (the game needs real bind to *account* BOEs, not bind to characters in a realm).
Noyou Oct 4th 2011 11:08AM
I would still play it. Like Big Shoe said, max level is pretty much WoW without levels. I am not sure they could totally take levels out. They could make 1-10 a tutorial. A good example would be the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion game. You start out going thru a tutorial and when you come out you are leveled up a little, you know the basics of your class. They could do this with a dungeon as well. The only problem would be that it would seem forced. I suppose if you didn't want to do it there could be an opt out. They could have a tutorial quest chain every so often to get you up to max level. So I think they could cut it down to maybe 4-5 levels. Another problem would then be retuning all the mobs and dungeons. Unless they can make it automatically render appropriate level mobs when you enter a zone.
Blizzardizgod Oct 4th 2011 8:06AM
It's not that I would outright refuse, but I think without having to work your way to a level cap, there would be a LOT more noobage in raids/BGs and such, and I would have quit out of frustration.
jealouspirate Oct 4th 2011 8:21AM
Would there really, though? I seriously doubt that. What does leveling teach you about group PvE or PvP? Nothing, as far as I can tell. The leveling game is completely separate and different from everything we do at endgame. You're completely solo. It's so easy there's no reason to try and get the most out of your abilities because things will die no matter what you do.
Really, how did you learn to PvP and PvE? By leveling? I would say most people learn by reading third party resources or by practice of PvE/PvP itself, both of which you could do without leveling beforehand. People don't even learn their class by playing the game, they just look up online what their rotation should be, copy a spec, copy a list of gems and enchants, etc.
Spellotape Oct 4th 2011 8:48AM
@ Jealous
Really? Whenever I start a new class my understanding of it is based solely on any similar classes I have played before, and prior to having a max-level character I simply tried everything until people I met along the way (while randomly questing, or in the dungeons you had to travel half the map to get to etc) helped me learn what I had to do or directed me to places with more detailed guides. Aside from sites I looked to for information on quests, I didn't actually seek out any gameplay advice online for my first toon until it was on the verge of entering Northrend.
I just finished levelling a paladin tank having only tanked on a DK before - the next tank I'll try is a warrior and the only thing I'll do to learn that at low level is read the tooltips. Given how many paladins roll on agility leather and mages roll on spirit cloth while hunters melee mobs and moonkins try to tank, I doubt the vast majority of players look up information about how to play their class before they roll it.
jcrockettetc Oct 4th 2011 9:18AM
I have 2 kids that play on another account as me. the 16 year old hit 85 and joined the guild I am in and learning the rest of the end game of collecting justice points by doing the samething over and over and over again. My 7 year old is still lvl 40 and learning what he is suppose to be doing. I could not imagine getting him in a que for a random heroic but guess it would still be better than some I have seen. I just think it provides a curb that is needed for people to learn a bit more. I think the people taking the fast route to 85 already have a sense of what is going on from the friend and hopefully is mature enough to learn pretty quickly but we have seen the worst of them.
Jamie Oct 4th 2011 8:07AM
I don't know if I would. People like achievement, and leveling & gear is a gauge to that end.
I've played MMOs for so long now, they've effectively replaced the adventures I would have played before (see: Legend of Zelda, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger). So I can't really see a clear route back from the game we have today.
Also without gear & levels, how do you make encounters more challenging or indeed, challenging enough? So that they don't become predictable/impossible without the right tools, the game would become very linear or inclusive. Eg. You can't defeat a boss unless you have said item. You can't get said item unless you do a certain area.
I think after some thought, I prefer the current system.
Jamie Oct 4th 2011 8:08AM
The classic games, I mention all have a set path and are thus very linear. WoW has may possible ends, they might not seem all that different. PvP grinding, raiding the latest content. But on the way there you have far more choice so, that path can vary a lot.
Shrikesnest Oct 4th 2011 8:34AM
I'm in a similar boat, here. The major difference is that I would *still* spend the majority of my gaming time playing longform, classic SNES-style RPGs if they were still releasing them. They were always rare, even in the "classic" days (I get the feeling a lot of developers were uncomfortable giving away 40 hours worth of gameplay for the same price in a market where, in other genres, 4 hours of gameplay was pretty standard) but they was at least a new RPG released every couple of years. The demands of modern graphics engines have completely destroyed the classic RPG; making a huge, expansive game world with variable enemies is a lot harder now that all of them have to be 3D modeled, rendered and textured. You could probably have one guy make a dozen unique monsters for Final Fantasy VI in the amount of time it takes a whole team to render one object in Final Fantasy XIII.
And really, when was the last RPG style game released for each console? Even back in the Playstation days, a triple-A RPG title like Final Fantasy VII took years and years to make. With so few companies risking it now, it seems like the last gasp for that sort of entertainment, which is really unfortunate. I think if they did something like Disgaea and moved to sprite graphics they could do a lot more good, and the sort of people who buy and enjoy those adventures would be more than happy to play them.
DarkWalker Oct 4th 2011 9:31AM
I will say one thing: I still like Zelda better than any modern MMOs. I played each of them, and when they are released, I suddenly become unavailable for multiplayer games, including MMOs. I even did once a 0-saves full-clear run of A Link to the Past.
There's only that many times I can clear a single Zelda game before it becomes repetitive, though.
Zelda, BTW, does not have levels. Instead, the player upgrades his gear, and gets different items.
Caz Oct 4th 2011 11:03AM
I enjoy the current system, and the idea of playing without levels initially struck me as odd. However, after some thought it occured to me that levels are totally unnecessary and really quite cosmetic. Questing zone by zone can still be done without levels, and instead of earning talent points and gaining access to new spells from your trainer by gaining levels...you'd instead spend all the experience that you're earning on talents and spells/abilities in any way and order you choose.
Skeebop Oct 4th 2011 11:12AM
@Shrike
I read a great series of columns on Paste, a while back, concerning FF VII. There' s a fair bit of content in those columns that looks back at just how much of the joy of the classic JRPG has been ruined by next-generation technology. They're a great read.
First column is here: http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/03/the-final-fantasy-vii-letters-part-1-welcome-to-mi.html
terph Oct 4th 2011 11:51AM
@Shrike and anyone else longing for an old fashioned FF game. Play Lost Odyssey. All the old FF team went to Mistwalker and made it. It's fantastic.
Boreddruid Oct 4th 2011 8:10AM
I personally really enjoy levelling in any game, so I probably wouldn't play WoW if it didn't have any levels.