The case against levels

Community General Discussion
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Levels are an outdated game design feature that add nothing to the modern game. Each expansion there’s a week of levelling fever, then we forget levels exist for 2 years.

In BFA the max level was 120, and we had a level squish to 60 at the start of Shadowlands. When will the next level squish be? Levels aren’t really a point of pride any more, they’re a chore to grind through and level scaling in old content means they serve no practical purpose.

What if we set every character’s level to 80 (or 20 or 60 idk) at character creation, hid the level number everywhere in the game and make the game purely about story, achievement and gear progression?

New characters would start however they start now, just with no number next to their name. Their gear would be some low ilvl. Blizzard decides how many expansions (hours) a new player should play through before engaging with current content, and abilities unlock as they progress through expansion story chapters. You could finally play through an expansion story from beginning to end without abandoning it because you need the story achievement to progress, not an arbitrary level.

New expansions would be the same as they are now, except the ilvl wouldn’t need to jump up by 150 to account for levelling gear. If 680 is the top-end ilvl at the end of the xpac, the new xpac starts with explorer gear at 680. You play through the story chapters as usual, and the end-game content unlocks when you’ve finished the story, same as now. Quests would be a source of gear, rep and crests (let’s ditch valorstones while we’re at it) instead of gear, rep and XP.

To pace out ilvl progression you could replace “This item requires level 80” message with “This item requires the [Algari Artifacts] achievement” or “This item requires [Undermine Contraptions] achievement”.

Exploration, stories, dungeons, xmogs, mounts, achievements etc are fun. Grinding to fill a bar to increase a number that does nothing is not.

Thank you for reading!

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I would note that even notoriously horizontal prog-focused ESO and GW2 actually do have a leveling experience (both go 1-80, too, iirc)

And while I like horizontal prog and was sort of hoping the squish would be a prelude to that, I think the devs firmly decided that no, actually, they would still stick to vertical even if they once reached the point where it had clearly become a problem.

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While I wish they would fix the underlying issues with levelling, as it stands now the only real purpose is to gate off how often a new character gets talent points.

You could get rid of the number but you’d probably still need to keep some kind of progress bar to periodically hand us talent points. Particularly if you wanna keep people being able to level purely by dungeon running, BGs, etc.

Also the ilvl thing would still be a problem because it’s just inherent in Blizzard’s design philosophy. They seem to love ramping up stats super fast only to need to squish them every couple of expansions.

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Related to the GW2 thing, you get skill points there by doing some exploration challenges on top of those which you get from leveling (iirc clearing the entire core regions map + hitting 80 is just enough to unlock one elite tree on top of your baseline skills)

Although I’m sure people would yell (understandably) if you needed to do that in WOW, that’s at minimum a huge change in expectations.

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Would a new player rolling their first character start off with 30-40 spells and abilities? That would be intimidating.

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Yeah I think part of the problem is that WoW has firmly established that you can level in pretty much any way you want to.

Which is, admittedly, something that I enjoy about it as opposed to something like FFXIV’s mandatory MSQ.

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WoW is an RPG. Not Fortnite. I don’t agree with how fast one can level but I am against getting rid of leveling altogether.

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I mean not every rpg is class based or level based

Shadowrun is strictly skills based, so is Vampire and they definitely made crpgs based on those

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Name an RPG that does not have a leveling system of some sort. Not talking about class.

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I mean unless by “levelling system” you actually mean “progression system” then both Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines and Shadowrun Returns/Dragonfall/Hong Kong don’t actually have levels.

They just periodically hand you skill points for doing objectives.

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“They just periodically hand you skill points for doing objectives.”

Which feels more rewarding to me. Killing a boar and having all this graphical fluff and excitement, then receiving a talent point and a new ability and the choice to fly off to a new world just because the XP from that boar tipped me over to level 20 doesn’t.

To Draentia: What is it about the levelling process that you like? By levelling I mean specifically having a number next to your name go up. I’m not arguing against having power progression btw, just assigning a number and saying “I’m a level 56 Warrior” seems meaningless these days.

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tbh would it be super different? You’re getting talent points either way, just that the skill-based system way is much more granular than the level-based system way (I almost said class-based but at least some class based systems use that kind of progression, the actual ttrpg version of Rogue Trader, for example, while Owlcat made it level-based)

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Leveling up is supposed to be the learning stage. You gradually learn your character bit by bit as you level up, with the ultimate goal of reaching max level with a full understanding of your character’s kit. Along the way you’re kept engaged by challenges and the sense of progression.

That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the speed and difficulty of leveling. You now just breeze through the levels at such a rapid pace, with very few, if any, challenges along the way, that it feels empty and meaningless. You don’t even get to learn your kit as you race through the levels, not properly anyway, and you reach max level in a state almost as bad as if you just bought a level boost, having to learn your entire character.

That is the real problem. Leveling as a concept is still fine. Just the actual leveling process has changed from an engaging and fulfilling way to learn your class and progress towards something, into an empty annoyance to be bypassed as quickly as possible, simply because Blizzard actively encourages endgame activities only, especially with time limited events that only max level players can do, and the only thing they ever do for the leveling up process is throw out an XP buff event and say “Hey, you want an alt? Now you can get through that horrible leveling process even faster!”

The worst thing is, they’re going to look at the resistance against the Timewalking changes and take the wrong lessons from it. “Oh, they don’t want a more engaging and challenging way of leveling up, they just want to speed through it”, even though the real problem is that Timewalking always comes with that weekly quest for raid gear and obviously max level players just want to get their 5 clears done for the free raid gear asap when there’s nothing else in it for them…

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For what it’s worth those games can get away with it because they’re much tighter experiences, and single-player ones.

Everybody who plays VtM:B is going to go through the main questline which gives you a minimum amount of skill points. On top of that it’s single-player so it’s not a huge deal that there’s a pretty big gap in power between a character who only does the main quests and one who went out of their way to get as many skill points as physically possible.

It becomes a bit trickier to apply to WoW which has an existing expectation that you can get all your talents/abilities by doing just about any kind of content you want. Unless all you want is exactly what we have now except a little number isn’t put next to your name.

It could still be done but for all the work it’d take I think I’d rather they just fix the underlying issues with levelling.

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Funny, I’ve been thinking about this exact change all week, though more from the perspective of my recent return to Classic (Anniv) for the first time from Retail.

I’ve played “Retail” from Vanilla, and despite enjoying the various activities in Retail through all xpacs, the game feels so easy that socializing seems entirely optional - which is the whole reason I played WoW from the beginning.

After playing Classic for the past 1-2 months and having so much more fun - directly due to the necessity to cooperate and collaborate with other players constantly - the experience has led me to want to play all of WoW’s content as my level 60 with current-max skills and abilities. In this way, the progression would/could be exactly as you described: story driven and achievement-based from zone to zone. The focus would be on that and simply upgrading your gear as you go.

This is obviously a simplistic view of the idea, but the point is I agree with you that stripping away the leveling concept and just gaining more gear as you go (thus determining which dungeons you could do in the progression from Vanilla >>> TWW) would be wonderful. (So, I suppose this would be ilvl focused rather than level focused.)

Mobs would just be stronger in stats from zone to zone, and accessible to anyone who simply has the gear to handle it. Maybe some simplified normalization mechanic for zones and/or dungeons - like a high-low range - kinda like Normal, Heroic, etc. but so the gear differences weren’t so pronounced. This might help to compensate for the TWW-geared player 1-shotting Raid bosses in Vanilla (which is basically how the game has been for all content for geared players just ~two xpacs later) with a scaling ilvl with a specific range (min ilvl 60 and max scaling of ilvl 80, even if you have ilvl 100 gear, to put it arbitrarily). Like how the Mage Tower normalizes all current gear to the Legion level.

Time-walking sorta attempts to do this for replayability, which is another main theme I’m getting at, but it feels no different than any other Retail LFD/R.

The intentional goal here is to keep old/earlier content relevant in perpetuity with a simple progression of the original lvl 60 Vanilla game mechanics.

I just want to play all of the content and storylines in the game as my lvl 60. Classic+ style. This seems relatively easy to implement, but what do I know? This isn’t a fully fleshed out idea, but the desire is clear. Removing levels entirely is an intriguing and fitting concept.

Thanks for articulating this so well. Whether any changes are made in these regards seems unlikely, but I appreciate your mentioning this because I agree and think it’s worthwhile to explore, especially given the genuine renewed focus on community feedback with the devs regarding Classic+/SoD.

(Also, as a veteran Beta-WoW player, pleeease Remaster WoW with something like UE5. I genuinely don’t understand why so many people don’t want WoW to improve from the cartoon graphics. It’s inevitable… and the jump after that would be VR. This would actually increase the nostalgia imo, not ruin the game and betray WoW’s artistic theme like so many vocally exclaim. I feel the gfx improvements like this would enhance the immersion by magnitudes! My $0.02.)

Thanks!

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ESO goes to max of 50 - then there’s champion points which there’s over 2000, but you get them very very quickly and are used for character bonuses

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I think a level squish is likely as soon as we get to 120 again, or just 100

besides. You can turn it off for the vast majority of the game. I turned it off for my warrior so then I can experience the story from Cataclysm and onwards

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“I think a level squish is likely as soon as we get to 120 again, or just 100”

Right, so we’re already aware that these levels we’re trying to burn through so quickly are temporary/disposable.

You raise a good point that we can already lock levels to experience an xpac’s story. My point is that people don’t do that because they’re focused on the level number. New players get rushed from story fragment to story fragment and never really experience anything coherent.

There is this idea that there are two games. Levelling, and endgame. I would say there are three. There’s endgame, there’s adventuring and there’s levelling. Adventuring is experiencing a story, gaining and learning to use new abilities and getting more powerful. Levelling is “I want to play end-game because it’s fun so I have to grind these levels as fast as possible”. One of WoW’s big problems is that adventurers and levellers get thrown together. Levellers don’t care about levelling, they care about running keys and raids with their friends. The current game’s adventure experience is extremely poor, because Blizzard is trying to cater more to the practical needs of levellers. The recent Timewalking changes are a move to try and make the adventurer experience better, but that conflicts with the needs of levellers.

To levellers: Let’s hide that level number and forget about it. Once your main has finished the story quest of an xpac/patch, your new characters can jump right in and start gearing. No levelling! You never have to do another TW dungeon, unless you want to do it for a weekly, in which case it’s gonna be a challenge.

To adventurers: Let’s hide that level number and forget about it. Here’s 9 different stories you can play through to experience the World of Warcraft and prepare you for the challenges of endgame. You don’t have to do all nine! Do one, and if you want to do more, go for it. If you feel ready for endgame after finishing your first adventure(xpac) then do that! And if you want to come back to the other stories at any time, you can.
(Because you won’t have outlevelled “old” content when you hit end-game because everything is secretly tuned for lvl80).

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Excellent example about the boar and simply hitting an xp bar to ding and unlock a new skill. This also feels totally arbitrary.

I’d be very much for requiring new skills/talents - maybe even all of them, at least to some degree - to be unlocked through extended, lore/purpose-based quest chains that take time and effort to obtain. This would feel like a major achievement each time.

Consider two same-class level 20’s for the example, where one chose to take the time to complete the skill quest chains for three separate Talents, whereas the other player didn’t - maybe not out of laziness, but because there were also other reasonable interests to pursue like weapon skills training campaigns (think 1-300 Skill levels), or say Stats boosting activities and point-based allocations like Diablo 2 - that result in the one character having obtained powerful and impactful abilities that help the group in a dungeon, whereas the other focused on the skills mastery to gain more HP or strike the enemy harder and/or with more precision.

Each character would have its sub-mastery of the class with each achievement being equally impressive and celebratory. The goal being to obtain all of the Talent abilities, Skill masteries, and Stat points for the end-game content (generally speaking)(maybe for which there is no end, again like the Diablo Paragon system).

Just like gaining Levels, WoW’s talents and skill points are currently just given to the players with minimal consideration to allocation (there is no choice to put more into defense, hp, agil, etc.) upon killing that last boar to ding up a level. It requires zero thought once “earned”.

At this point I feel like these are fundamentally game-changing mechanics (and I’m basically describing the D2/3/4 stat and paragon systems) that won’t ever be integrated into WoW, so maybe I’m just dreaming now.

But these basic progression mechanics would feel so much more valuable and rewarding, especially when tied in with a competent quest-based system.

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There is a massive gate against levels being removed and that is character power progression tier to tier.

They need power levels on gear between each season to increase somewhat so it’s noticeable so that the new season content is worth doing as opposed to just going back to the previous tier of gear for upgrades.

By the time you reach the end of the expansion where effectively your secondary stat budget has doubled from the start, you need a hard reset to this scaling so that gear doesn’t keep scaling to the point where all your secondary stats are at 100% or higher which would be ridiculous.

You can’t really compare this system to other games as they don’t rely on the same systems at all or build upon them with each update.