A few days ago the last, massive patch went live with some significant changes, in particular about the newbie experience. The classes don’t branch up as you level your character, but you can choose your specialization right away, trying to make each character more unique already from the start, while still fitting it in its archetypical role.

This change doesn’t seem too bad, in particular if coupled with a new character progression system that will be added to the game later this month, with the launch of the second expansion. Taken from an interview with the ubiquitous Scott “Gallenite” Hartsman:

GamerGod:
Can you give more detail on the new Achievement system? Will this be like the AA’s from EQLive?

Scott Hartsman:
Achievements are abilities that you earn, ideally during the course of normal gameplay – things you’re already doing. You’re not diverting from primary advancement in order to invest in Achievement.

Achievements really can’t be directly compared to Alternate Advancement from EQLive. Earning them, spending them, changing them, and the way they let people specialize their characters are all handled differently.

As you’re accomplishing things in the world you’re also earning Achievement Points. Doing particularly adventurous things for the first time (such as defeating specific foes or doing a certain quest) can gain you bonus Achievement Points as well.

Achievement Points can be spent in a tree of abilities that’s based on your class. Most abilities have multiple ranks. Some people might choose to specialize by spending their points to ensure they have all ranks of a small number of abilities. Other people may choose to spend their points more broadly to gain some amount of proficiency in as many as they can.

This system isn’t about providing a never-ending path of growth – there are a set number of Achievement points that any given character can have. If you don’t like what you’ve chosen or want to try something new, you can re-specialize your character to try out a different path entirely.

This system is about doing heroic, adventurous things in the world, taking your character’s knowledge from having done them, and investing it in further enhancing your character in ways that you choose.

This is one idea I really like and one I examined during some freeform brainstorming sessions. It’s like a linear, evolutionary path.

We start with the original mmorpgs where questing was a only side activity. The main source of experience and character progression was killing repeatedly the same monsters in a zone. This is the repetitive pattern that brought to all the critics about treadmills and grinds. The quests had a purpose in the advancement but they didn’t integrate well, or tried to replace, the camping. The second step is with World of Warcraft. It streamlined the whole questing system by making it the primary focus of the character progression. Making it more efficient and worthwhile than just camping a spot. This type of questing added variation in the game, directing the players around the zones, moving between the sub-areas, each with its own mood and story. The quests become “segments” that the players reorder to create their own “stories”. The repetition is hidden or dissimulated because the attention is focused on smaller, frequent goals that break up the monotony of longer and longer levels. After WoW we have another attempt with DDO (Turbine). Camping mobs is not anymore an option. This mechanic is completely removed and replaced by a mission system that rewards the player only on its completion. The repetition is (supposedly) removed since the experience (and so the progression) is driven directly by “content”. Till there is “stuff to do” the character can progress. This step was partially flawed in the implementation but was still an attempt to find new patterns to mitigate the boredom, giving the developers a more direct control on the “flow”. Then we have the last step that is also described in the quote above.

I went with this superficial excursus because it’s how I arrived to this idea myself. The purpose was to detach the progression completely from the quest system (or mission system) so that it could have been more powerful. You could award points not only for completing quests, but for every type of activity offered in the game. So removing the strict dependence (you complete the quest and gain one point) to create a system that covers a wider range of possibilities. You could gain points for the first time you kill a particular mob type (and only the first time), for killing a named mob, for completing selected quests, discover hidden areas in the map, discovering new resources, create crafting recipes, achieve PvP goals and so on. A system not tied to a particular sub-set of the game, but embracing the whole experience in all its parts, following the character from the beginning to end and encouraging the players to explore all the game has to offer. A diversification of activities.

This was a positive goal because I wanted to fight the tendence in other games to encourage (or enforce) the specialization. In SWG, for example, you were encouraged to specialize on a combat role or on a “roleplay” role (like the politician or the entertainers) or on the crafting. Something similar is happening in WoW, where they are trying hard to force the players to specialize on either PvP or PvE. The designers try to “force” the players into player-types. This is a trend that I always tried to fight. I never believed on the “player-types” and I always fought against games designed around this concept. I believe it’s detrimental and it doesn’t help the fun.

When I play a game I never feel the desire to specialize into one activity only and I dislike the games designed to force me in that direction. Instead I like to experiment and explore what the game has to offer in all its possibilities. I think that this approach makes the game more rich and helps to push back the boredom that comes as the consequence of repetition. It feels more like a virtual world where you can access different possibilities, making the game more complete and varied. This is why I always criticized SWG specialized gameplay. What the game has to offer should be linked by “AND” operators, instead of “OR” operators. Letting the players specialize into HOW they tackle an activity, but NOT by forcing them to choose only one.

All these ideas bring back to the progression system defined above. Since the game should encourage the diversity of the gameplay, there was the need to design a progression system that could be used in all these cases, uniformly. Hence the idea to detach the “experience points” from the quest system to create something more malleable where you could flag every kind of activity. Each new type of interaction added in the game should be implemented with an “hook” that you could use for the flag system so that the game was designed from the ground up with that idea in mind.

This is pretty much what suggests the idea of “Achievements” described in the quote, even if it misses my design reasonings and purposes. It’s not used to encourage the players to discover the qualities of “sandbox” game (that is founded on a variation of activities instead of a focus on combat), but instead to complement what EQ2 is.

Despite my ideas and goals diverge from those of this game, I still think this is a truly solid mechanic even for EQ2. With the removal of the branching classes system there was the need to add some specialization to the characters. In DAoC we have points to spend on specialization lines (directly as “skills”), in WoW we have the talent system that “bends” a class toward a more specialized role, by adding incentives and perks. In EQ2 (if I’m not wrong) this design role was implemented through the branching classes. You started the game with one of the basic archetypes (useful as an accessible learning mechanic for the new players and to keep the game balanced) and then progressively specialized your character by selecting sub-classes as you levelled up.

All these systems are never unambiguously good or wrong. The old system used by EQ2 achieved those goals but felt too generic for the first twenty levels or so. The new decision to remove the branching and let the players select their class right as they start the game solves the generic feeling, but probably reintroduces the other two problems: accessibility and balance. Actually the first is a special case because the original design didn’t achieve the intended goal and the new system was designed to reiterate on that problem. In fact what was intended to be an aid for the players in the old system (letting them choose just a general archetype so that they could make the more meaningful choices later on) revealed to be a problem (it was hard for the players to pick up an archetype so that they could “land” on a specific sub-class they liked later on. It was just too hard to figure out how a class would play in the longer term). So still forcing the “blind decision” that they were supposed to counter.

Now if you follow this line of thoughts and if my assumptions are correct you’ll probably arrive at my same conclusions. Imho this just BEGS to be transformed into a completely different system. It’s the same concept of “permeable barriers” that I repeated many times in the last months. It’s the natural, spontaneous drift of this type of system. The next step: the characters should just not be locked into a class. They shouldn’t be locked at level 1 as they shouldn’t be at level 70. This is how you directly remove the “blind decision” both at character creation and later on. Letting the player experiment, similarly to what already happens in FFXI or SWG (old style). The classes should become “permeable barriers” that, while defining a role, still allow the players to go back on that choice and experiment something else, retaining the character’s identity and social ties they already build, if they wish.

EQ2 didn’t arrive at this point and still sticks to the standard commonplaces of a class-based game. With the removal of the branching classes the game loses its specialization system and I believe that the new “Achievements” system to be introduced with the expansion was built with the purpose to fill that precise role. It should mirror more or less what the talent system represents in WoW. This is why I said that it complements the design of the game. It goes to fill that particular function that was lost with the recent changes. It re-adds the customization to the classes without creating the same design inconsistences of the AA points in EQ1 (nor trying to achieve the same goals since it’s not a “never-ending path of growth”):

GamerGod:
How extensive are Achievements going to be? Are they designed to cater to the power gamers that are wanting more, and are they trying to keep the game gear towards the casual player? The adding of AA points may make balancing the mobs so high that you have to have so many AA’s to be the right “level,” making the game geared more to power gamers.

Scott Hartsman:
You’re exactly right. That’s why we don’t think of Achievement as a system in the same way as EQ’s Alternate Advancement. They’re a fun new dimension for everyone’s character development, not the sole domain of the power gamer.

If we made a system that caused characters to grow infinitely, without changing their level, and characters advanced down it by spending time that was an addition to the time they had already spent leveling up, we’d end up in a situation where we had to make content for any given level progressively harder, until having tons of Achievements became a requirement of basic gameplay. Over time, the game would get progressively less approachable, which isn’t the direction we’re choosing to take EverQuest II.

This further confirms that the functional role of this system is identic to the talent system in WoW. The only element to differ is about how these specialization points are awarded. In WoW they are a byproduct of the levelling system (you gain one point for each level above the tenth), while EQ2 they’ll be linked to a flagging system that may be tied to specific quests or specific mobs, as explained above. Since the focus of the game is on the “killing” it makes sense to grant points in those cases.

I don’t criticize EQ2’s design. In fact I still find this idea solid and fitting the purpose and functional role.

I just find fun that, after this long journey and experimentation, they could only arrive at the conclusion that the system used by WoW is actually the best one ;)

Which leads me to the “Part 2” (that I’ll try to write later)