Inspired by Lave's comment in the Gold Sellers thread:
Lave wrote:
There is no reason why you should fight rats to begin with. Get scale certainly. But don't start with rats.
To me it seems that subscription gaming is more like a drug than pastime. Designed to keep you hooked rather than entertained. But then I think RPG leveling is an inherently broken idea that is designed to artifically recreate the idea of playing 'progess' by increasing numbers whilst nothing actually changes
I don't think RPG levelling as a concept is necessarily broken, but certain systems for it are. And that's before the whole argument that experience points from, say, picking locks should not be able to be applied to anything else (if I pick 50 locks, I won't be any better at swinging an axe)
Oblivion's levelling in itself works fine, I reckon - you gradually increase the things you can do and the skill/power with which you do them, just like practicing in real life. A few anomalies where you have a spell or ability where the magicka cost doesn't quite jive with the resulting spell aside, it's fine. However, it all falls on its face with the fact the monsters keep pace with you, effectively rendering your progression worthless as while you can swing a bigger sword, you'll now only have more resilient things to swing it at.
Fallout's system I would say is slightly flawed, but this flaw is in no way unique to it. Basically, your skill with the gun determines the damage you deal with shooting things with it. Which is complete nonsense - a gun damage the same whether you know what you're doing or not. Otherwise, you'd have have reports of kids accidentally shooting themselves with daddy's gun, as there complete lack of skill would ensure the bullet would do no damage.
The alternative to a levelling system is naturally just to make the game itself get harder, and let the player themselves 'level' by getting better at it as they progress. To this end, Mass Effect has an interesting system which I think works well - your improving skills increase your accuracy and other subtle but useful aspects of your weapon use rather than outright changing how hard the bullets hit. After all, uses third person real-time for the combat, so hitting your enemies is down to your own ability - which can compensate for low skills. Likewise, you're not restricted from using particular weapons if your skills aren't high enough. However, this has a unique and massive downside in that there are hundreds of varieties of gun and gun upgrade, each slightly better and different from the last, which means after every mission you need to spend too much time sorting out your inventory, re-equipping your squad with slightly better guns and then even more time scrolling through the (unsortable) vendor list to sell all the stuff.
Any thoughts?