DIKU games have been in existence for a long time now and have reached it’s most mature and accessible form with World of Warcraft. Every DIKU game starts you off at level one where you begin your journey to Max Level. As the genre matures and expectations of games change, the leveling process has become more and more of a burden and hindrance than a fun game element. So why have levels at all?

In recent history we’ve seen a few games launch post World of Warcraft, but for the sake of this article lets take a look at Warhammer and Aion. Both games hit the scene with amazing initial sales, Warhammer had 800+ thousand boxes sold in the first month or so, and Aion has kicked off pretty well in the western market. Where do they stand now? Warhammer is all but canceled. Their retention rate was dreadful. Nothing official has been released about Aion, but if you take the pulse of a few online communities you’ll notice people quitting in large numbers. What was a huge complaint about these games?

The grind.

Both games were PVP oriented games. The draw for the game was the battle of territory and other things but all the “meaningful” fights were at the maximum level range. Many people left these games because the leveling content “got in the way” of the fun. This led to a lot of cancellations. Would these games have kept players longer if the leveling content was taken out?

If leveling content was taken out, what you would need in it’s place is a sort of build up period. Most players, given a max level character with a ton of abilities and other mechanisms, would be overwhelmed; especially new and intermediate players. A partial example would be what Blizzard did with Death Knights. They basically eased you into the mechanics and abilities of a Death Knight while allowing you to skip over a large portion of the game getting you to max level quicker. This was easier because only players with other max level characters could create them so you had a built in knowledge of outlier game mechanics already.

So where do we stand? We’ve taken out levels but we can just give people a full character. We need a way to introduce the game mechanics, class mechanics, lore and everything else to a brand new player without overload and make it fun at the same time. You also need to be able to give a player a sense of advancement.

I’m not going to write out a full design document (even if I knew how to do that) from my armchair but here are some things you need to tackle. You have to determine how old a given character needs to be before they are plopped into “max level” content. Is it 1 hour? 5 hours? Maybe it’s 20 hours? Regardless of what time you think it should be, but once you find out you have divide up that content into phases.

First phase would be a instanced tutorial that teaches you about the menu system, combat, and all the other newbie shit that you come across in most games. You can use LOTRO as an example.

Second phase would be using your character and completing a few objectives. If your game is PVP oriented perhaps these are a series of battlegrounds that you have to compete in while running around playing part in some story element getting you immersed in the world. This whole area is just another small instanced world with everyone the same “age” as you. In order to prove that you’re the right age to move on you can come up a few different achievements that you must complete. These can vary between classes or skillsets. But the one key thing is that advancement can not rely on other players. Remember, as a game ages, less and less players are in the earlier parts of the game.

The third phase can be just a larger version of the third phase. This is where the character gets all of it’s abilities, full masters all the combat and game mechanics and ultimately feel like you’re a fresh Max Level character.

To use an vanilla WOW as an example, the first phase would be your first 10 levels. You enter the newbie are and work your way through combat and other game elements. The second phase would be like levels 10 through 50. You learn about talent points, mounts, professions and other things like the auction house, guilds. The third phase would be levels 50 through 60 where you learn how to group up, fill up your talent trees and get all of your abilties. Toss in how to group or raid and you’re done.

This takes you from noob status to max level in X hours and now your read to raid/pvp until your heart is content. Now the real kicker is that once you complete one phase you can skip it with any other new character. It happens to me every game that I play, and I’ve seen it happen to everyone else, once you get halfway through your leveling curve you finally realize you hate your class and you want to start a new one. You usually groan because you’ve already invested so many hours already and you’re going to be behind all your friends and they’ll get to the fun part before you. You can alleviate this by allowing players to skip each phase.

In the end this allows developers to create more content for the “end game” which is usually very bare in most games these days to begin with. This gives players a sense of quick advancement and a better chance of getting hooked into their character and keep playing.

What’s leveling anyway? It a way to measure your characters growth usually over a long period of time. Kill the long period of time, grow your character quickly, then spend the rest of the time playing the game you bought in the first place. This might even save costs and time in the developers world by getting the leveling part out of the way and spend more time on the content players will spend the most time with anyway.