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Parallel progression
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
People sometimes debate whether MMORPGs ought to have vertical or horizontal progression. I'd like to suggest that they're both wrong for older MMORPGs and introduce an alternative: parallel progression.
As I've played Uncharted Waters Origin, I've observed that there isn't a universal set of top players the way that there often is in theme park games. The top players at different types of content are very different from each other. For example, my server has a clear top four players at skirmish. In overall company level, those four players are ranked 4, 10, 30, and 44 on the server. The top traders or adventurers give very different lists from that, too.
That's common in sandbox games. Uncharted Waters Online had a similar effect, as did A Tale in the Desert. There's a lot of content, but not a canonical order in which it must be done. Rather, you can pick and choose what you think is most interesting and defer other parts of the game for later--or never.
This brings some considerable advantages. One of them is that if there are ten different types of things that a player could do next, getting stuck on one doesn't mean you can't progress at all and ragequit. It means you pick a different one. That makes mistakes in difficulty tuning far less punishing, and gives developers plenty of time to fix them, rather than having to make everything way too easy for fear that they'll accidentally make one little thing too hard.
The problem with such open-ended content is that it's hard to have enough content for players if they can defer or skip most of it. That's a killer problem for new games struggling to have enough content for players to have anything to do. But older MMORPGs that have had several expansions have created plenty of content. Games like EverQuest or WoW would easily have enough content to pull this off by now if they hadn't deprecated nearly everything that they ever made.
For concreteness, I'll explain what parallel content could be in WoW. Suppose that when you create a new character, you get sent to a starter zone depending on your race, as the game already does. That starter zone is still designed to get you to level 10. After that, all of the vanilla content that was originally targeted at levels 20-40 is rescaled to cover levels 10-20. Pick a zone and level from 10 to 20 in that zone.
After that, you get to pick which expansion you want to play. Vanilla content that originally targeted levels 40-59 would get rescaled to instead cover levels 20-29. The original vanilla endgame would be changed to level 30 instead, but effectively the same as it was in vanilla. Leveling content for levels 60-69 from Burning Crusade would instead also be levels 20-29. The original endgame from Burning Crusade would be level 30. And similarly for every other expansion.
A character would no longer have one universal level. Once you reach level 20, you have a separate level in each expansion (loosely counting the end of Vanilla as an "expansion", even though it technically isn't). Go straight for Wrath of the Lich King upon reaching level 20 and you could get your WotLK level up to 30, but you'd still be level 20 in the rest of the expansions. You could reach the cap in every expansion, but you'd have to level up separately for each expansion.
Gear from one expansion could be used in any other, but with considerably nerfed stats. Top tier raid epics from one expansion might be okay for the introductory level 30 content in another, but would not replace the need to gear up separately for each. Also, players should get quite a lot of bank space so that they can easily keep separate gear from each expansion.
One advantage of this is that it makes it much easier to group with other players than traditional vertical progression. Rather than needing to be at the same power tier on some universal scale, you'd only need to be about the same power in one expansion, not all of them. Rather than a high level player carrying a low level one, they'd both be able to make proper progression on their own characters without needing any sort of weird sidekick scaling.
Another advantage is that it keeps all content viable forever. Instead of being unable to play content from one expansion after the next launches, you'd be able to go back and finish it whenever you please. And it wouldn't require special consideration from "classic" servers to make this possible.
This would also make the game far more accessible to new players who want to join. They wouldn't have a very long slog through years of content to catch up. Nor would they have to fuss with content broken by years of power creep or level squishes. The starting experience could be as good for players who join today as if they had joined six months after launch, and they could quickly get to the latest endgame if they want to.
As I've played Uncharted Waters Origin, I've observed that there isn't a universal set of top players the way that there often is in theme park games. The top players at different types of content are very different from each other. For example, my server has a clear top four players at skirmish. In overall company level, those four players are ranked 4, 10, 30, and 44 on the server. The top traders or adventurers give very different lists from that, too.
That's common in sandbox games. Uncharted Waters Online had a similar effect, as did A Tale in the Desert. There's a lot of content, but not a canonical order in which it must be done. Rather, you can pick and choose what you think is most interesting and defer other parts of the game for later--or never.
This brings some considerable advantages. One of them is that if there are ten different types of things that a player could do next, getting stuck on one doesn't mean you can't progress at all and ragequit. It means you pick a different one. That makes mistakes in difficulty tuning far less punishing, and gives developers plenty of time to fix them, rather than having to make everything way too easy for fear that they'll accidentally make one little thing too hard.
The problem with such open-ended content is that it's hard to have enough content for players if they can defer or skip most of it. That's a killer problem for new games struggling to have enough content for players to have anything to do. But older MMORPGs that have had several expansions have created plenty of content. Games like EverQuest or WoW would easily have enough content to pull this off by now if they hadn't deprecated nearly everything that they ever made.
For concreteness, I'll explain what parallel content could be in WoW. Suppose that when you create a new character, you get sent to a starter zone depending on your race, as the game already does. That starter zone is still designed to get you to level 10. After that, all of the vanilla content that was originally targeted at levels 20-40 is rescaled to cover levels 10-20. Pick a zone and level from 10 to 20 in that zone.
After that, you get to pick which expansion you want to play. Vanilla content that originally targeted levels 40-59 would get rescaled to instead cover levels 20-29. The original vanilla endgame would be changed to level 30 instead, but effectively the same as it was in vanilla. Leveling content for levels 60-69 from Burning Crusade would instead also be levels 20-29. The original endgame from Burning Crusade would be level 30. And similarly for every other expansion.
A character would no longer have one universal level. Once you reach level 20, you have a separate level in each expansion (loosely counting the end of Vanilla as an "expansion", even though it technically isn't). Go straight for Wrath of the Lich King upon reaching level 20 and you could get your WotLK level up to 30, but you'd still be level 20 in the rest of the expansions. You could reach the cap in every expansion, but you'd have to level up separately for each expansion.
Gear from one expansion could be used in any other, but with considerably nerfed stats. Top tier raid epics from one expansion might be okay for the introductory level 30 content in another, but would not replace the need to gear up separately for each. Also, players should get quite a lot of bank space so that they can easily keep separate gear from each expansion.
One advantage of this is that it makes it much easier to group with other players than traditional vertical progression. Rather than needing to be at the same power tier on some universal scale, you'd only need to be about the same power in one expansion, not all of them. Rather than a high level player carrying a low level one, they'd both be able to make proper progression on their own characters without needing any sort of weird sidekick scaling.
Another advantage is that it keeps all content viable forever. Instead of being unable to play content from one expansion after the next launches, you'd be able to go back and finish it whenever you please. And it wouldn't require special consideration from "classic" servers to make this possible.
This would also make the game far more accessible to new players who want to join. They wouldn't have a very long slog through years of content to catch up. Nor would they have to fuss with content broken by years of power creep or level squishes. The starting experience could be as good for players who join today as if they had joined six months after launch, and they could quickly get to the latest endgame if they want to.
Comments
You could handle PVP either by having separate PVP arenas with scaled gear from each expansion, or by allowing all gear from all expansions to participate without any wrong-expansion nerfs. Crafted gear from a given expansion similarly has full stats when used in that expansion and nerfed stats when used in any other expansion.
Each parallel path would still be pretty vertical. This really isn't horizontal progression. For someone who has cleared every expansion as it launched and doesn't care to return, this wouldn't really make any difference. But someone who comes along later could play though old expansions without them all being deprecated. And someone who likes one expansion better than another could do the one he likes best rather than having the latest one as the only option.
Your motivation to clear other expansions is that it's more content for you to play through. Suppose that WoW did this and you had never played WoW, but picked it up today. You get to endgame and play through the latest expansion, and then what? Quit until the next expansion releases? With this approach, you could then go play a different expansion if you wanted to as it would still be in a playable state, and without having to level a new character through the introductory areas on a classic server.
My primary goal here is to keep old content playable forever, while still allowing players to get to the latest endgame quickly if they want to. MMORPGs perennially struggle to offer enough content, and yet older games commonly have less content in a playable state 10 years after launch than they did 1 year after launch.