Levels are dumb! (Especially for multiplayer.)

Okay, I will admit that levels have a degree of value. I grew up loving jrpg's, Final Fantasy and so on. Part of the reason for this was that I had a terrible fear of Game Overs in Mario types of games, so when I was 4 or 6, I remember I would ask my mom to play Mario so I could watch, rather than playing by myself. With Final Fantasy, here was a type of game that I could play with careful strategy rather than relying on twitch or jumping skills. And best of all, if I ran into a monster that was too hard to kill, I could always go back a little ways and level up, and then come back, and it would be easy. (This was before I developed much of a taste for challenge in gaming.)

Levels give you a way to represent and track character growth, as the character runs around learning to fight better (or beat challenges in a non-fighting game). This is useful, as a designer, because it gives you a way to say, "This character is level 20, so they're probably tough enough to go in this dungeon with level 19-20 monsters. Let's send them here." It's useful as a player for the same reason, and because (if you're not at a level cap) you can always get to be more powerful without becoming a more skillful player. And of course, it helps space out the rate of learning how to use new skills as a player, when you only get one every so often.

But a few years into playing MMORPG's, I finally realized: I hate levels. They are a terrible system.

Problems

The biggest reason I say this is that they prevent me from playing with the people I want to play with, when I want to play with them. Look at WoW. I have one or more max level characters, and it's all about gear. There is nothing built into the game to support me in having a challenging, fun experience working together with people still going through the level treadmill from 1-85, unless I happen to have a character close to their level to play with them. All I can do is run them through dungeons, which is only particularly interesting for the scenery and the loot, and maybe the novelty of initially learning how to most efficiently solo a low level dungeon while not letting the lowbie die too much.

So meanwhile, the person is left to gain levels alone. Or, in my case, the past few times I've leveled a character, I always have found one other person to play with constantly, because I cannot stomach grinding levels alone. It's so boring alone, when my primary goal in it is just to reach the maximum level! We agree to never get more than one level ahead of the other, if at all, and we leave most groupings of quests open to play through together. Otherwise, we cannot productively do the same thing at the same time with our characters.

Then, when the new character finally reaches max level, the (small, close-knit) guild springs into action. Dungeon time! Everyone bands together to suddenly try to drag the new character into teamwork, after levels and levels of solo work. Sure, once in a while, the new person has experience running dungeons with random groups of people as they leveled. But often it's requiring a new set of team-based skills to be learned all at once, along with suddenly being judged by min-maxers for not having optimal skill rotations. The leveling game, then, makes the social, teamwork game harder to transition into. And for some of us, the teamwork is the entire reason why we play MMO's.

But during the leveling itself, the part that makes me angry is that these arbitrary numbers tell me that even though I happen to be online at the same time as these three other friends with whom I would be ecstatic to play together, I cannot play with them.

It's not just MMO's, either. I've run into this same problem with Neverwinter Nights and Borderlands. I start trying to save extra copies of characters as I level up, so that I can always hope to be able to play with any friend who is in the middle of a campaign. (And then I overwrite my highest level character and can't find it again, but that's what I get for messing with the files.)

Solutions

Granted, there are some attempts at mitigating these kinds of problems. Sidekicking (CoH) and mentoring (EQ2) are certainly better than nothing, allowing people of different levels to meaningfully play together. But then, when I played EQ2, and had a character slightly higher level than a chain of guildmates who kept going through their 30's, so I could mentor them and play at their level, I got awfully tired of that one zone with the faeries after the 5th time playing through it on my same character. Sidekicking, or bringing a lower level character along with your high level character, might have more potential, but as long as the game is built to have a level progression, there is a danger that the low level character will skip all the low level content and be bored with high level by the time they get there.

Or, consider some of the Bioware RPGs, or Xenosaga, where monsters' levels scale with your characters. Levels are only meaningful in terms of character specialization. Can you replace this in an engaging way with increasing character specialization and NOT increasing character strength, so that there is still something to work towards, but it won't create artificial barriers to playing with friends?

A game like Dragon Age also has a benefit of being non-linear. So with a multiplayer version, there is potential to say, "I'm going to save the forest area to play together with you later -- don't go there yet!" Or, "I haven't been to the mountains yet, have you? Let's go." With a whole world (or universe) to choose from, rather than railroading players down a set track, there should be more room to create engaging experiences for groups of players who don't exclusively play together all the time. Of course, there is a challenge in making some cohesive story, so players don't feel lost and confused or forget what else they were working on -- but I get that way in WoW with its partially-linear questlines. Some kind of journal system to tell you stories recapping what you've done might help there.

Then there's games like l4d, which I haven't played yet, but I've seen played, and I get jealous of the ease with which I see people jump in and join their friends. People don't seem to mind not having levels in these games. But it's more of a skill-based game, which excludes a different set of people, and that's worth considering too -- how can you make a game that supports people who aren't as skilled working together with skillful players, because they are friends and like hanging out playing together? That may be another topic...

What if you had an MMO without a vertical leveling system?

Let's imagine a futuristic setting, with space travel and mechs. Your character can go up in military ranks, or in piloting ranks, after completing training exercises and certain kinds of missions, and then gets licenses to use different kinds of technology. Now you can control the biggest robot type allowed on the next planet over. But you still need people to sit in the arms to control them, and people to sit in the turrets on the top. Those tasks don't require as high a skill level, either in- or out-of-character. So, a beginning player can join in with the experienced one and contribute in a meaningful way.

Without working with the more experienced player, the newbie can't access the mission using the biggest robot, but there is still the hope of someday trying out something new -- being the robot pilot -- upon gaining more training and experience. Yet, without extra companions, the robot pilot is not nearly as effective, because she cannot control guns or arms. And even if characters are overqualified, they can still choose to fill the old role of gunner, when a gunner is what is needed. Perhaps highly experienced gunners can learn new tricks, too, maybe an ability to warn away less hostile creatures by shooting near them and not at them, but it doesn't mean their bullets hit massively harder -- it's still the same equipment.

All your successes can still be tracked and counted up. Consider the driving force of achievements on the xbox, Steam, WoW. Is this not enough motivation to get players to work together enjoyably to accomplish things? Consider faction increases and their shallow effect on interacting with NPCs in WoW -- it's still kind of cool to see an NPC greet you by name. Can we expand on that gameplay? And it shouldn't be hard to help the player keep track of how many times they have run through a certain type of mission in a certain location, and what role they played when they did.

Ultimately, I can see why character levels are a handy game design tool, but I believe it costs much more than it's worth to continue to allow its inclusion in multiplayer game design. It'd be nice to see some more alternatives soon.