The idea is to allow players to access all of the content upon creating a character without the leveling grind. The game itself will still offer story quests, exploration, dungeons, pvp, etc. with meaningful progression. Progression will involve strengthening existing abilities, character stats, etc. For example, more hit points, stronger heals, critical hit chance, etc. My closest reference is Dark Age of Camelot’s Realm vs. Realm (RvR) progression, where characters could gain realm ranks, but even lower rank players could participate and succeed in RvR. In this game this system will extend to PvE, which will have its own progression track with upgrades working only in PvE.
My motivation behind this is the following:
- You can join your friends immediately. It is never “too late” to start, even when your friends are already geared up and playing together. A player could create a character and immediately join their friends in the dungeons, pvp, etc.
- Players being locked out of content because they are too low level. MMOs offer a very wide variety of playstyles and very often it results in locking people out of content. For example, not being able to join an instanced War in New World or not being able to join a raid in WoW until a certain level and gear is obtained. In Echoes of Emain the goal is to have all content immediately available - the progression and skill will allow players to do dungeons of higher difficulty, kill bosses with smaller groups, or be more successful in PvP
- End game is the priority from Day 1. Too often MMOs launch with a good leveling experience but fall flat at the end game. Starting at the end game forces us to ensure it’s the best possible experience from the start.
This comes with a set of cons and things to work through:
- There is little room to learn the game, so brand new players are now trying to do dungeons, PvP, etc. The mitigation here is that instanced dungeons in PvE will have difficulty levels. The easiest difficulty will be quite simple and allow new players to learn the game. In PvP, zergs - massive groups of players taking keeps - can give new players some cover while they learn. Alternatively, dying a lot is an option too and I am serious. Some of my fondest memories of playing Counter-Strike were going 0-20 trying to learn the game.
- The leveling experience itself is quite fun. This is true and the idea is to preserve that feeling as much as possible. There is still exploration, gathering skills to level, and PvE progression and farming where it makes sense to sit at a camp for a bit and farm. Each kill still gains experience, it’s just that leveling doesn’t provide such a huge power differential and instead provides incremental gains (for example, and these are not final values: +1% crit chance, +1% hit points, etc.). One neat thing is that in Echoes of Emain PvE progress is near infinite - you always get experience and you are always getting ranks. PvE progression is meant to mirror PvP progression, which is inspired by DAoC’s RvR realm ranks. There are diminishing returns: as you fill out your build, each additional rank adds less to your overall power.
In conclusion, the main idea is to both allow players to immediately access all of the content while at the same time keeping progression and character growth the central piece of the game.