11-03-2009, 10:18 AM
Arsilon Wrote:I think what you gain in keeping things "fresh" you replace with either percieved or real "grind". I'm not sure I'd like the idea of not only do I need to kill 10000000 orcs, I now have to go do that "grind" all over again in order to be good at killing vampires.I would actually suggest that if someone is tired of "the grind", then they are really saying that they're tired of MMORPGs in general.
No matter what you do, any action oriented RPG is based around defeating hordes of pretty generic enemies. Even if you're in a regular MMORPG and you've obtained max level, you're still logging in every day and killing 500 more orcs, usually for loot or whatever other objectives the game has.
The problem I'm thinking about is that when you reach max level in a typical game, then the game world holds no real adventure for you anymore. You're already as good as you can be at killing anything, anywhere. If we're inventing a pure wargame (similar to FPS style) then maybe that's fine. If it's going to be an RPG, though, then there should be room for your character to always encounter new things and always require a new degree of skilling up.
This isn't to say that every monster type should be like leveling from 1-50 again. You shouldn't need to kill 10,000 orcs in order to figure out how to kill orcs, but I also don't think the expert orc killer should automatically be an expert at killing, say, pixies, since pixies fight in a completely different way than orcs. There would be a sense of "oh shit, what the hell is this thing" rather than "I'm level 50, I can beat anything in the world (just like everyone else)".
Basically I think the standard leveling system stomps on a good opportunity to put some "RP" back into the "MMORPG". If everyone is equally good at killing everything then I feel like we've really created a flat, potentially bland world, at least in RPG terms.