Guild Wars 2: Levelling

[Chalex4]

I just read an interesting article (http://www.arena.net/blog/progression-and-leveling-in-guild-wars-2#more-2828) from the guys over ArenaNet about Guild Wars 2!

He starts with the "typical" experience:

You know that point in other MMOs when, after playing for a few hours, you look down at your experience bar and wonder, “WTF? Has my experience bar even moved at all?” Nobody enjoys feeling like they haven’t made any progress even though they’ve been playing their character all day. We hate it as much as you do; it drives us insane!


Remind you of anything?


Our goal with Guild Wars 2 is to flatten out the leveling curve, keeping progression simple and straightforward. We expect everyone to make a reasonable amount of progression with each play session. It shouldn’t take days of playing before you feel like you have made any progress, and you definitely shouldn’t have to kill a bunch of creatures or do a bunch of repetitive tasks just to see what’s over that next hill.


So what are they doing? Setting the level cap for the game at 80, but with SHORT gaps between the levels. Instead of taking longer and longer to reach each level, it should take about the same time to go through each level. Like so:

http://www.atkcommunity.com/gallery/images/2/1_LevelingCurves-600x403.jpg

In my opinion this sounds like the perfect MMO :D. This was the one reason why I stopped WoW after the trial was over.

[VoX]

Seems like a good idea, but could mean you hit the level cap a hell of a lot faster!


Is one of those situations of wait and see how it plays out I think.

[Target]

LoL you can complete the game in a day :s

[Calneon]

LoL you can complete the game in a day :s
It could still take 1-2 hours to level up...

If you're bad at maths, that's 80-160 hours to get to the cap. Hardly a day.

[D_K_Head]

dunno about you, but I don't consider leveling fun. Reaching the level cap quickly is a GOOD thing.

[Vicious Horizon]

Like Alien Swarm.

[Calneon]

dunno about you, but I don't consider leveling fun. Reaching the level cap quickly is a GOOD thing.
Indeed, providing there's enough end game content. Though to be honest, if you don't like leveling fun, there's not much point in playing an MMO. GW2 does a lot of things differently though.

[Bloo]

Well the general gist of GW2 is that at every stage of the game you should be having fun. And leveling CAN be fun as long as you get a constant stream of rewards (like Alien Swarm) to play with. As for end-game content... who knows, they haven't revealed much yet, other than dungeons only being 5-man (which to be fair, is a good thing since they want to make it play as much like L4D as they do a traditional MMO). Hopefully there will be a lot of stuff to do, the end-game area (Which is almost certainly going to be Risen Orr from how the lore is going...) better have some fucking awesome events in the event system.

Also I read somewhere that each area has a level cap (e.g. the FIELDS OF BLOODY SMURFS Level 1-20). So that if you're say level 35, your stats and skills are leveled down to that of a level 20 as long as you're in that area, as a way of promoting balance and letting high level players help their low level friends without destroying the game balance completely.

[D_K_Head]

hmm, that level cap is a really good idea. Stop powerleveling without alienating the new players...

I might consider getting this now. They seem to be addressing most of the problems with conventional MMORPGs. Anyone else feel the same way?

[Bloo]

I might consider getting this now. They seem to be addressing most of the problems with conventional MMORPGs. Anyone else feel the same way?

Considering most of their articles have a take that at the tradition MMO make-up, Id say yes they're not going for a cookie-cutter mmo.

[Chazlene]

Dayum it seems like a really obvious idea to make the game have more levels but each one being quicker, should make it a lot more fun. And level capping as well, means when you're friend joins you don't have to wait for them to reach your level, instead you can temporarily go down to their's.

[erick]

I have read this one also. They have really improve the typical leveling system common from other MMOs. But I'm still rooting for FF14 though, i'm caught in a bind here.

[Chalex4]

Lol, you can like 2 games at the same time! They are very different after all.

[Vicious Horizon]

FFXIV is a little 'meh' imo, I've not made my mind up on it... I grew up on FFVI and VII, so the newer ones just aren't as good imo..

The leveling system in GW2 looks AWESOME.....

[D_K_Head]

The only good thing in Final Fantasy is the Chocobo. Everything else in it is, as VH said, 'meh'.