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Believe it or not, the controversial decision is based around play time and experience. Square-Enix wants the casual player, or someone who doesn’t have excessive amounts of time to play, to be on equal or acceptable level to the hardcore enthusiasts who will undoubtedly do nothing but play the game. To make this vision reality, they’ve effectively limited the amount of experience you can attain within a week’s time. Hang on! Before you fire off your own Mega-Flare, there’s more to it than just a flat out limitation.
Director Nobuaki Komoto defended the decision by posting a large bit on why they’re doing it along with how the system actually works. You can head over to GamesRadar to read the letter in its entirety. One of the most important parts of Komoto’s explanation revealed the inner workings of what he calls “threshold values.”
This can all be somewhat confusing so do your best to stay with me here. Experience is NOT limited to exactly eight hours of play time like some may have you think. As a matter of fact, you can still take your time going about leveling up and exploring the world like normal. Now, if you’re a power gamer and your hunger can only be satiated by the end game material, you’re in trouble. It’s here where the limitation on experience will hit you the hardest. See, you can only gain a specific amount of experience that Square-Enix has calculated for the week. For example, after being in combat and constantly gaining experience, you’ll achieve what Komoto calls “the eighth-threshold.” That threshold is the last one that allows you to receive unmitigated experience. Everything from then on gradually gives you less and less experience until you receive the cold, lonely, absolute zero of experience.
Once again, don’t blow your Hell Fire just yet. You might be wondering where your experience goes if you’re still questing at absolute zero. Well friend, that’s what I’m here for! Wisely, Square-Enix decided to store any excess experience into a surplus they label as “bonus skill points” instead of it just being lost to the void. Komoto also explained that with well over a dozen classes in the game, you can simply switch to a different class to level if you’ve already reached the maximum experience for the week. Once a switch is made, your previous class will begin resetting its threshold. In the words of Mr. Komoto, “It is worth noting, however, that the reduced rate will also gradually recover while players are engaged in activities that do not yield skill/experience points. In this manner, it is possible for the threshold value to reset completely, even before the completion of the one-week timer.”
With all of this coming to light, I definitely see how and why gamers are a little perturbed. People don’t like limitations being placed upon them, I get that. No one should be told how to play a game, especially since varying styles are what make multiplayer games interesting. But FFXIV isn’t even out yet and who knows whether this sanction on leveling will be lifted or not when launch day comes. MMOs are infamous for patching things in and out, but that’s a story for another time.
The way I see it, this “limitation” isn’t a big deal. It’s not like an unstoppable timer starts the moment you strike a boar for 15xp and once it reaches eight hours you’re locked out of leveling for the rest of the week. Komoto said it himself; it’s entirely possible that you reset your threshold even when playing a hefty amount. Besides, the idea of leveling outside your familiar boundaries sounds appealing to me. Instead of powering through that one class, the game actually makes you try something else to stretch your knowledge and your character’s reach just a bit further. This restriction also reveals something I found astonishing; a company that embraces exploration. Clearly Square-Enix wants its players to explore their brand new world, not to just have them teleport through it. I expressed my feelings toward the absence of exploration in MMOs not too long ago, and seeing this raises my hopes a little higher.
Contrary to popular belief, Square-Enix isn’t a stupid company. Limiting experience may have been something a bit more controversial than usual, but it could be for good reason. Time will tell my friends, but then again that’s exactly what got this whole debate started.
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The topic arose upon discussing a few of the most anticipated MMOs with a friend of mine. He declared that he was sick of being forced toward the end game. It wasn’t about eventually getting there; he just was perplexed as to why developers endorsed this bum-rush leveling attitude instead of taking the player through the world they’ve created. Could the content be that embarrassing and/or dated to warrant blasting through to get to the real meat of the game… at the end of it? Yeah, that makes sense.
Certainly not every MMO pushes you through the lower levels with undignified glory, but it’d be ignorant to say that they don’t care about their players reaching the end game. To me, emphasis on exploration and taking your time with the surroundings are what make the MMO an immersive and compelling experience. This way, when finally working your way up and reaching that zenith every game incorporates, it feels rewarding and just damned good. Earth and Beyond, a sci-fi, space-based MMO which is now defunct, had a defined Explorer class that felt right. They wanted you to roam about the galaxy, collecting rare materials, seeing the sights, all while experiencing the rest of the game. Unfortunately, the game ran out of content far too soon, but E&B had the right idea that, I feel, far too many developers now overlook.
Guild Wars 2 is touting a “fast xp” system that I’m still uncertain about. The first Guild Wars maxed out at 20 levels that came far too quickly and I’m wondering if in some way its successor will follow suit. Reaching the end game may have added benefits, but if you’re in such a rush to get everyone there, then why bother having levels? Do something unconventional and allow them to gather and maybe customize gear on a ridiculously intricate and broad scale. Give your players reason to traverse the environments and experience the world you’ve created. Not only is it ominous to enter a dilapidated fortress covered in the skin of your allies, it’s also fun. Well, it should be.
I think World of Warcraft is one of the games I can most related to when discussing acceleration. WoW is a tremendously accessible game that almost anyone can get into. It has enough content to keep hardcore and casual players busy for years, but like every game, it eventually runs out of content if you keep at it. To combat this, Blizzard released expansions to critical acclaim. However, with more places to see that meant a bigger world and a longer trek to reach the new content. Blizzard decided to actually double the experience earned in the “old world” to get players into the new content.
It sounds good, but by doing this it effectively voided out half of the places you would have visited if the experience boost wasn’t incorporated. Many of the neater dungeons and parts of the world would be entirely skipped by players. Not to mention, larger dungeons like Zul’Gurub would no longer serve a purpose. And it begged a question; why bother doing the old end game dungeons when you can go to the newer areas and get better stuff off a boar? Really it was too bad that the more creative side of the older content was being neglected due to not being relevant, but at least Blizzard seems to be addressing this in Cataclysm.
Perhaps the best anecdote I can give on exploration is with a title some older gamers might remember, Asheron’s Call. AC was my first MMO experience and I fondly remember exploring areas I really shouldn’t have been near. For example, in a little town called Eastham I was going about my monster killing business as per the norm, when suddenly some high-level dude manifested and casted a spell which placed a swirling vortex of energy some would call a portal in the middle of town. Having a distinct level of curiosity, I inspected the portal to find the destination listed as “???” Still, keeping my curiosity in check was no easy feat and I entered the portal.
Upon exiting, I was alone in what could only be described as an obsidian desert. I looked into the distance and observed creatures I’d never seen before and on my map I was on the other side of the world. I was only level 15 or so and these things were in the upper echelon of the hundreds. Inevitably, a creature known as a Tusker rammed right into me and promptly murdered my ass (I also lost a few items upon death). I was cast violently back to my Lifestone in Eastham and for the next 15 minutes I was shouting for help to find out where I’d been. Thankfully, the guy who cast that spell got a laugh out of my misfortune and helped me recover my body. It’s a tale of woe, but man was that one of the most exhilarating moments I’d ever had exploring.
My point through all of this is that exploring a world is important to the overall experience of a game. What comes at the end of a MMO is important, but the earlier portion of the title shouldn’t suffer for it and the same goes for conventional games. What would Gears of War or Halo be without a story mode? Marcus Fenix would just be an extremely thick dude with a chainsaw gun and the Master Chief would be known as captain space robot man. Don’t be shy developers; introduce your world to us players and the game will be all the better for it.
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