The Dilemma of Level vs Skill - How Old Became New Again (Page 3)

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The Dilemma of Level vs Skill - How Old Became New Again (Page 3)

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Posted July 2nd, 2009 by Cody Bye

And why is that? Why hasn't there been a AAA type of skill-based game? Although there are a number of skill-oriented games that have been released recently or are going to be released in the near future, what has kept the market for these types of game advancement systems so small, without much love since Ultima Online?

For this answer, we turn again to EVE Online's Woodward, who surprised the Ten Ton Hammer staff with his extensive answer:

Of course, there’s also the deeper skills versus levels discussion, which is linked intimately to the skills versus classes discussion. Within this limited area, there are I think two similar separate choices to be made. Firstly, are you going to constrain the scope of abilities that a given player can possess or improve? On the one hand, you have a system similar to the one in EVE where you can acquire and train basically any skill, giving a much wider range of potential combinations, whereas on the other hand a strongly class-based system limits the available combinations to only those which a developer has explicitly approved.

The first, “arbitrary abilities”, system (I don’t think there’s any inherent need to implement this as a traditional or semi-traditional “skill system”) gives more freedom to players to choose, customize and progressively modify their roles, but by extension also in its purest implementation gives the player the ability to seriously mess up their character, and of course is significantly harder to balance as a system due to the number of combinations involved. It’s extremely hard to prevent “flavor of the month” builds from emerging: even if your title doesn’t contain any PvP, the power delta between an optimized FotM build and an unoptimized one is going to cause you significant content-balancing headaches and ultimately end up having a lot of the drawbacks of both the arbitrary abilities approach and the class abilities one.

By contrast, a “class abilities” system makes balancing significantly easier, leads to more homogenous power levels for a given amount of progression, and generally makes it easier for players to understand their progression path. The downsides are that you remove a big chunk of player agency, and also tend to end up locking characters into specific roles, which can place a player into situations where their character just isn’t very useful, and the only solution is to start from scratch.

The second set of choices is whether you allow players to progress different abilities at different rates and progress at arbitrary intervals, or clump progression into milestones – this is more the “skills vs levels” side of the debate, although it’s obviously interlinked with the above decision. Arbitrary progression generally allows a more granular power curve (as you’re improving lots of numbers by small increments on a regular basis), which usually leads to a less black-and-white “you must be this tall to kill this monster” dynamic.

However, it makes it more challenging to implement really interesting and new abilities for players to unlock unless you also build some kind of ability ladder or tree into things. It’s also much harder to mechanically assess how strong a given character is with this approach, which makes for significantly vaguer content gating – without being able to easily tell whether a given character is strong enough for a given encounter, you run the risk of generating lots of player frustration due to unexpected and unfair failures.

The level progression approach makes gating content much easier, as you have a nice clear number to tell you roughly how strong a player is (and if used in conjunction with a class system, as is usually the case, a good idea of exactly what build options they’ve had to choose from, refining the assessment further). It also makes it easier to drop in new abilities at the right point in the power curve, and makes for nice clear milestones for the player, giving something tangible to aim for. The gating that’s a characteristic strength of this sort of system is also a big weakness – by separating players in ability so strongly, and optimizing combat around specific levels, it also serves to separate players socially, making it very difficult to play with characters of higher or lower levels.

So the obvious question comes next: How does EVE solve this problem? It doesn't seem like something that could be easily remedied, but the outside-of-the-box thinking of the CCP devs has come up with a unique solution, which Matt details below:

The EVE system looks like it’s fairly strongly arbitrarily-minded in both respects, and in terms of just the progression system it is, but it’s pulled more back towards the centre by the way those skills are utilized. In particular, the various ship classes available are in fact a fairly strong surrogate for traditional classes – your choice of ship determines what role you play in a given combat. You are, however, allowed to own as many ships as you like, although flying them is gated by having trained the right skills.

This creates something of a hybrid system under the above schema, where your core progression and abilities are fairly arbitrary, but which effectively unlock different classes (which you can switch between at will) when the right combinations of skills are achieved. I think it makes a pretty good middle ground; in particular, the ability to arbitrarily switch between defined “classes” (ships) is something which I think is worthy of further thought.

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