When World of Warcraft launched fifteen years ago (dear lord,) the level cap was 60. At the time, this was seen as a massive climb for your character. You didn't even get your slow, 160% speed mount until level 40 (and that was only if you had the gold - I had to bankrupt my Horde characters to get my Rogue his and was immensely grateful that my Paladin Alliance-side got to summon his class mount only for doing a brief quest.)
In Battle for Azeroth, the level cap has climbed to 120 - fully twice its original amount.
When you start a new character today, that means you have twice the levels to go through than you originally did.
For I believe the first time, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas has talked about the possibility of doing a level squish - much like the stat squishes we've gotten in Warlords and BFA, this would keep us functionally just as powerful, but lower the numbers, possibly making our level 120 characters now level 60.
I see positive and negative consequences of such a change, but it also depends greatly on implementation and intention. Is, for example, the intention to make leveling a faster process? Would one have to do less content in order to hit the level cap? In other words, is the hope that you'll be able to hit the cap, or at least the current expansion's level range, faster that you do now?
In the past, they've lowered the amount of experience required to level up with the intention of allowing you to hit the cap from level 1 in roughly the same amount of time. The original negative consequence of this was that you would outlevel zones in the old world practically right after you started them. Level scaling has, for the most part, solved this problem, at least until you hit a zone's scaling cap, though as a result I think you can sometimes outlevel a continent before you might be ready for it.
Having places like Outland scale to 80 or Cataclysm's zones scale to 90 gives you a little more time to do those quests (likewise allowing you to start Northrend and Pandaria at 58/80 respectively,) so perhaps one could expand on this "parallel expansion" idea by allowing greater overlap in level scaling.
Anyway, let's talk Pros and Cons:
Pro: Leveling goes faster. While I think level scaling has made the process of leveling a character more fun than it used to be, I also think that most players (especially those who have done even the Cataclysm-revamped zones many times - they are nine years old at this point) are eager to get their characters into newer content, both to participate in the "current" stuff and also enjoy the polish that questing has received over time (though to be honest I liked Legion's questing content better than BFA's - it's still an upward trend though.)
Con: The feeling of loss. With the item squishes, we've seen our health and damage plummet, and even if it's proportional to the content we're doing, it can be sad to go from doing millions of damage every second to only a couple thousand. Psychologically that's not great. And it might feel even more intense when you have something like level - a far less fluid measure of character power than DPS - reset to where it was in 2004.
Pro: Each level becomes more meaningful. In the original game, you would get a talent point to invest in your trees every level starting at 10, and that meant that even if you didn't get a new ability (or rank of an ability - which used to be a thing) you still saw your player power get slightly higher. Now, especially with level scaling (which I still think is a good feature,) you actually get slightly less powerful when you level up as your secondary stats depreciate, and while they have (wisely) shifted most important abilities to earlier in the leveling process, it means that those later levels feel rather empty. By reducing the number of levels you climb through, you might start getting something - or even multiple things - every time you ding.
Con: The danger of squishing things together. With the item squish, we've had times when there's no meaningful upgrade even when leveling to another expansion's content. I remember still using stuff from Northrend that was better than stuff I was getting out of Pandaria, and that was before level scaling applied to those zones, so there had been all of Cataclysm's content between them. If we divide levels in half, it means that one could go from Outland to Draenor in only five levels - it would be pretty strange, I think, to replace gear from one Shadowmoon Valley with stuff from the other.
Pro: Numbers don't get as ridiculous. Given the sort of "rule of twelve" thing with numbers, 120 feels like a decent number to strive toward. But 130, 140, 150... at some point the ratio of levels gained to levels you end up with feels weirdly small. If WoW survives for an absurdly long time (which it has already,) would you find the difference between 260 and 270 all that compelling?
Con: This just pushes the problem down the road. The Warlords item squish was good for a whole two expansions before they had to implement another. I imagine we can expect the next one to come after whatever expansion follows BFA, because the ultimate truth is that we've got potentially 15-year-old characters who have had to get more powerful over that stretch of time because that's the way the game works. Now, WoW is certainly nowhere as popular as it was in say, Wrath of the Lich King, but given that even some of its predecessors like Everquest are still around - and that never reached anywhere near the popularity of WoW - we can probably assume that even with a fraction of its current playerbase, they'll keep it running. So what happens if, twelve years and six expansions from now, they hit 120 again? I guess that's future-Blizzard's problem.
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