Yesteday’s post about levels has spawned an interesting and long running conversation.

Today I want to look at a related issue. Class-based vs Skill-based character systems. This question dovetails nicely with some of the side-conversation of the levels discussion.

The first “mainstream” graphical internet-based MMO was Ultima Online, and it uses a skill-based system. In case you never played it, and going from more ancient memory, every character had the same bunch of skills, all level 0 when the character was created. By doing stuff, the character would improve the skill related to that activity. So fighting with a sword would increase your sword-fighting skill a lot, and your strength skill a little. Casting spells would improve your magic skill a lot, and your intelligence skill a little, and so on. The catch was, a character could only have a set number of skill points (I want to say it was 300). A skill maxed out at 100, at which point you would be a GrandMaster of that activity. If you were a grandmaster swordfighter then spent a ton of time doing Carpentry to get that skill to rise, your swordfighting skill would slowly drop (though they later added the ability to “lock” a skill so it would never atrophy).

This was a great system because everyone could be who they wanted to be. If you wanted to be a healer/archer, you could do that. If you wanted to be a Grandmaster Carpenter and Swordfighter, you could. But you could never be Grandmaster at more than 3 things, and realistically you could only be GM at 2 things (you needed some “extra” points for other stuff, like Magic Resistance).

Anyway, after UO came EQ and that was a class-based system. And so the epic battle between skill-based and class-based MMOs began. Back in those days, the proponents of Class Based systems said they were better because they limited players (I chaffed hard against the Class-based bit back in those days) which forced classes to work together to make up for each others’ deficiencies and to prevent everyone from Min/Maxing their way to cookie-cutter characters. The forum battles were bloody, bitter fights.

Fast forward a decade or so, and it feels to me like the pendulum is starting to swing back and that folks are getting tired of class-based systems (in part because class & Level - with a capital L - tend to go hand-in-hand) and starting to want skill-based systems.

So far I can’t think of any pure skill-based MMOs beyond UO. There are MMOs with Classes which contain sets of Skills that let the player sculpt a character within pre-set parameters, but have there been any other completely classless MMOs in recent years?

Should there be? In UO, the only way to determine if you could best an opponent (be it Mob or Player) was observing gear, engaging in battle or asking people how tough an ettin really was. Nothing had Levels and I don’t remember there being any kind of Con system (though maybe I’m forgetting). And since dying meant potentially losing everything (anyone coming along could loot your corpse) the world felt very dangerous indeed.

Are we ready for that again? In a purely skill-based system, how do you determine relative strength? If you’re a master swordsman and I’m a decent swordsman and a very good mage, who wins? Do we even *need* to know this ahead of time?

I’ve noticed a growing contingent of MMO bloggers that say levels are an out-dated concept and should be gotten rid of. “Everyone races to cap anyway,” they say, “so levels are just a way for developers to slow us down and suck more money out of us.” “The real game doesn’t begin until cap anyway,” others say, “so why not let us just start at cap?”

I thought it was time I stuck my oar in for the opposition. I play these games for the levels (and my ego isn’t big enough to believe I’m unique in any fashion, this point included). There is something primally satisfying about gaining levels; its a way of building a character, and I enjoy building things, both physical and virtual. I enjoy in-game crafting too, and I wonder how much correlation there is between people who enjoying “leveling up” and people who enjoy crafting.

I should pause to point out that this is a different argument from the one between class-based and skill-based systems. I’m fine with skill-based systems, where instead of gaining levels you gain skills… same difference for the sake of today’s argument: you’re still progressing a character from weak to mighty.

This weekend in EQ2 I gained 4 levels on one character, which really clarified some of the reasons I find leveling so much fun. We generally start using skills in distinct patterns as we play these games (hypothetical example: we use a skill that debuff’s the target’s fire resistance, then follow it up with skill that buffs our fire offensive rating, and then finally a fire attack on the target) to the point where some folks actually make macros to do the same sequence of skills over and over again. But what happens when you level? You gain new skills. And that means you need to re-evaluate your ‘combat patterns’ to see if there’s a more efficient way to use those skills. It mixes things up and keeps the game interesting.

Then there’s the aspirational issue. We see dragons and giants and we’re, yeah, killing ten rats. But to me, that’s a huge part of the satisfaction of these games. I can’t fight a dragon *now* but if I keep at it, I’ll become strong enough that I can finally get out there and fight the big dramatic creatures. If I could fight dragons the day I created a character well…that wouldn’t feel all that special.

The MMO[not-RPG] blogging community might be yelling for a revolutionary change to the DikuMUD leveling scheme in the games we play, but there are those of us who *like* things the way they are. I do believe there’re enough players to support both the evolutionary products and some hypothetical revolutionary ones, but I’m going to hazard a guess there are a lot of rank & file, non-blogging gamers that are delighted by the systems they’re enjoying today in LOTRO, EQ2, WOW, and a host of other level-based, aspirational-driven games.

Game devs, let us keep growing our characters! That’s where all the fun is!!

There’s been some talk around the blog-o-sphere about how bloggers don’t stick with any one game “long enough” (whatever that means) and I can’t deny that I’m as guilty as anyone of “game grazing.” I admit it, I get bored pretty easily.

Tonight I logged into LOTRO and did a few quests, said “Hey” to the guild, and refreshed my muscle memory on how to play the game. I did it mostly because I didn’t want to get booted out of my guild kinship, which has a policy of removing long dormant characters.

As I rambled around the hills of the North Downs I was enjoying the scenery and it struck me that MMOs don’t age like they used to. If you played EQ and then Asheron’s Call and then Dark Age of Camelot you’ll remember that once you moved on to a new game, it was hard to go back to the old one. Graphically games got dated really quickly (not just MMOs, all PC games) and the game mechanics that so many poo-poo as being ‘derivative’ today were just being layered into 3D MMOs. (UO was its own beast and still is, honestly.) I’m not saying it *never* happened, just that it was relatively uncommon to go back to an “old” MMO and stick with it. It just felt dated if you did so.

But that’s no longer true. WoW and EQ2 both came out almost 4 years ago (November 2004) and neither of them look dated today. People can and do go back to these games all the time. Warhammer and Age of Conan don’t look that much better, really. This is subjective and you can argue details, but overall if you took screenshots of WoW and War and put them side by side, you wouldn’t immediately say “Oh, this one is four years older than that one.” Same with AoC and EQ2. (I’m making these comparisons because WoW and WAR both go for a stylized, low requirements kind of design, and EQ2 and AoC both go for a more “realistic”, give us more GPU cycles kind of design.) If you look at screenshots of the Bioware/Lucasarts Old Republic MMO you won’t think “Whoa, that’s what the next gen of MMOs is going to look like!” The game looks fine, but it definitely isn’t the ‘order-of-magnitude’ jump in graphics quality that we used to see from year to year.

This is great news for those of us who are easily bored (as well as those of us who can’t afford to upgrade their systems very often. I remember a time when I’d buy a new gaming PC every 6-9 months!). I slipped into LOTRO like it was a comfortable old coat. Granted I’ve only been away for a month, but I’m pretty sure I could slip back into WoW fairly easily too, and I guess it’s been a year or so since I last played that. Going back to something like Tabula Rasa would be a bit more challenging, but I could (and might) do it. I wouldn’t log in and grimace at the low polygon models or the chunky controls.

I don’t have a big point to this long ramble, except that I find it all very relaxing. I don’t feel like I have to rush through MMOs anymore. Next month I’ll be exploring both the EQ2 and LOTRO expansions, so I might pause my Warhammer subscription while I’m doing so (I don’t want to be in a position where I’m paying 3 monthly subs!). But it’ll be nice to know that I’m doing just that: pausing, not quitting. Because as long as the servers are running, I can go back any time and pick right up where I left off. The game won’t look dated and probably it’ll be better than it is now.

MMOs, like wine, improve over time. At least until finally, far in the future, they turn to vinegar. In MMO terms, the servers go dark. I don’t think that’ll be happening to any of the “big” MMOs any time soon, though.

After Chronicles of Spellborn ships later this fall, it looks like we’ll have a bit of a drought when it comes to new MMOs. That’ll be a perfect time to go back and re-visit and re-enjoy some old friends.