Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

It has taken a number of years, but MMOs based on skill advancement are once again forming in the core of developers' minds. Games like Fallen Earth, Earthrise, Mortal Online, and Darkfall are featured regularly in high caliber articles from every major gaming press outlet.

But why the sudden change in thinking? Why didn't the developers just stick with the systems that they knew were relatively popular among gaming fans? The leveling system obviously has limitations, but don't the perks of a simple, well-known progression feature outweigh those issues? We asked the developers to find out what they thought.

Atanas Atanasov had a fairly realistic point-of-view. Rather than claiming that Earthrise was going to be the end-all-be-all of MMOs, Atanas presented his honest argument, which seems to be fairly sound from this game journalist's opinion.

"For a long time MMORPG design has been dominated by the success of traditional titles, most of them set in the fantasy genre," Atanasov said. "As MMORPGs mature and expand into new genres and universes, it will become evident that designers are more and more willing to take risks and implement new mechanics and ideas that have long been ignored. Although we don't expect a skill-based game to become a flagship title for the MMORPG genre any time soon, we think that this type of game has a healthy and growing audience that has specific needs to be catered to."  

The CCP developer also echoed Antanasov's. Woodward again provided an insightful view into the reasons behind an expanding skill-based game market.

"[It's] possibly a backlash against the gating limitations in particular of a level-based system – stopping people playing with their friends is something of a downer – possibly simply an attempt to differentiate themselves from the market leader," he said. "EVE recently had its sixth birthday, so this isn’t a question we’ve had to wrestle with in quite some time – you’d have to go back a few years to see what the state of play was when the fundamental decisions behind near-future titles were made to get a handle on this question (or be a developer on one of those titles, of course). I suspect that the further you get from levels and classes, the harder time you’re going to have explaining your progression system to players, which makes it more difficult to achieve the same broad penetration, but I’m not sure that an inspired skill-driven system couldn’t do just as well as a level-based one."

Perhaps the most thorough answer of all came from Hammock, who definitely has a vested interest in seeing skill-based games succeed. With Fallen Earth, the player levels up and then spreads points among a variety of skills. Here was his response, in full:


But do the players really believe that skill-based games can succeed? Centrik thought that being successful as a niche game was a possibility, but he didn't seem to think that the games would ever achieve popularity over that:

"There is a very vocal group of players that are advocating skill-bases games," he said. "While they have the potential to become successful niche games, I don't think in-depth skill based games, which are usually more complicated than level-based games, can really be as popular as level-based games."

That said, our own staff writer Reuben "Sardu" Waters believed that there's certainly a possibility that a skill-based game could eventually enter the ranks of MMO popularity again.

"My own take on this type of shift comes down to a larger percentage of players wanting a more dynamic form of advancement than we've seen previously," he said. "AA points and talent trees have really just been dazzle camouflage to help give players the illusion that they control at least a portion of their advancement, when the reality of the matter is that level based games are applying a very single-player mindset to a multi-player environment. In other words, freedom comes in the environments you opt to spend your time in, rather than through advancement systems."