Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO
- Thread starter Flobee
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FF 14 does the best job of making things fun and seperate "theme park attractions" as part of the game to build a whole world instead of just an endless gear treadmill of grind through leveling, hit max level, and then play the end game of raid log to chase marginially better numbers.
All the extra stuff like Gold Saucer, Crafting and Gathering Professions being their own mini games and having fun rewards beyond feeding the gear treadmill, and all the options for esoteric grindy stuff if you want, but arent pressured to do make it fun for a variety of experiences. It creates a fun and immersive world with tons of content thats easily accesable without punishing you into being a mindless time sync of plowing through your vegetables (leveling) to get to desert (end game raiding).
Kirun
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Yeah, I agree. This is one of the hardest problems to solve in MMO design, and FFXIV is probably the gold standard for how to keep older content "alive". The way they funnel everyone through the same story, jobs on a single character, and a duty finder that backfills even ancient dungeons. It's all pretty deliberate systems work to keep the world feeling populated.
MNM doesn't really have any of those levers. Instead, they've gone with a very large, very open world that already feels bigger than its population can support. Without structural systems to recycle players back through older content, I don't see how twinking or alts do more than patch the issue at the margins.
You're right that density or vertical design could help, but that would require rethinking zone philosophy in a way that I don't think they've committed to. The "tomorrow problem" framing is what makes me concerned. Because if the playerbase calcifies early, you don't get a second chance to compress the experience. By the time they realize it's an issue, the community may already be too fragmented to recover.
That's what makes the "massive world" pitch ring hollow to me. You can't spread a thin population across a giant map and then shrug it off with "we'll deal with it later." That's not a plan. That's setting the stage for your world to feel empty from day one.
Oh I know, i played quite a lot of ff14. I think it does a bang up job to keep the audience both spread out over the content and "meaningfully" engaged with it. I bowed out because of time constraints, and the semi drama of the story being bad in the latest expac. I think FF14 is the most agreeable version of that type of MMO for me at this point in time. But I'm also less interested in that type of game, and M&M isn't that type of game.
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FF14 gives you lots of alternate activities but virtually none of those are reasons why higher level players replay older content much less interact at all with lower level players. They achieve that with 2 things:
Job system ie multiclassing, which is effectively the same as encouraging "alts" which many games do now but in a worse way (ie shared banks/share rep shared etc so you aren't "punished" for rolling an alt), and this is really just a minor cliff note on why higher "level" players go back to experience low level content
But for more importantly:
Level scaling, and making running random dungeon a daily. Many/most games do this, and some do it better than FF14. Give your players a daily carrot to run random dungeon queue and allow them to get queued with any random player lvl 15 running deadmines for the first time and you'll have high lvl people doing content with low levels.
Note that that only works for the OG dungeons which happen to be MSQ locked. I forget what ex pack it is but once you can have NPCs be your party to do the MSQ dungeons you pretty much stop seeing other players until you are at level cap and doing the dailies yourself, running with fresh new trial players stuck doing their MSQ bottlenecks themselves.
Many games have full level scaling not just in random dungeon queues but also in the open world, which keeps all content relevant but in a really cockamamie and often poorly implemented sort of way, but its entirely viable (thinking of ESO, where all content is always relevant to you since it's all level scaled to you and you can group with anyone at any time). All that to say, level scaling is really just a way to circumvent levels because levels are dumb, there's far superior less arbitrary methods of adding progressive difficulty and delineating players rather than levels.
And you've got entire genre's of MMOs that don't even have levels and 10 year vets can play right next to 3 day old players all day everyday.
Anyway, all that to say this game is going old school so all those work arounds, alternate solutions, and bandaids other games have added to address the ultimate problem that levels are dumb, none of that will work here, they are designing the game to be the opposite.
again if you expect to play this game without boxing your own entire party/raid pretty much from the get go, idk what to tell you. "but if they manage to get 10x as many people to pay for something that they won't touch when its free then there will be a population!....for about 2 weeks until the sheer size of the world, number of servers planned, time zones of players, and length of time to level scatters them all to the winds and you still have the same problem. But churn will be 0% and population will double every single week! by the time we're level capped and ready to raid there will be more players than grains of sand on earth it'll be fine!"
Job system ie multiclassing, which is effectively the same as encouraging "alts" which many games do now but in a worse way (ie shared banks/share rep shared etc so you aren't "punished" for rolling an alt), and this is really just a minor cliff note on why higher "level" players go back to experience low level content
But for more importantly:
Level scaling, and making running random dungeon a daily. Many/most games do this, and some do it better than FF14. Give your players a daily carrot to run random dungeon queue and allow them to get queued with any random player lvl 15 running deadmines for the first time and you'll have high lvl people doing content with low levels.
Note that that only works for the OG dungeons which happen to be MSQ locked. I forget what ex pack it is but once you can have NPCs be your party to do the MSQ dungeons you pretty much stop seeing other players until you are at level cap and doing the dailies yourself, running with fresh new trial players stuck doing their MSQ bottlenecks themselves.
Many games have full level scaling not just in random dungeon queues but also in the open world, which keeps all content relevant but in a really cockamamie and often poorly implemented sort of way, but its entirely viable (thinking of ESO, where all content is always relevant to you since it's all level scaled to you and you can group with anyone at any time). All that to say, level scaling is really just a way to circumvent levels because levels are dumb, there's far superior less arbitrary methods of adding progressive difficulty and delineating players rather than levels.
And you've got entire genre's of MMOs that don't even have levels and 10 year vets can play right next to 3 day old players all day everyday.
Anyway, all that to say this game is going old school so all those work arounds, alternate solutions, and bandaids other games have added to address the ultimate problem that levels are dumb, none of that will work here, they are designing the game to be the opposite.
again if you expect to play this game without boxing your own entire party/raid pretty much from the get go, idk what to tell you. "but if they manage to get 10x as many people to pay for something that they won't touch when its free then there will be a population!....for about 2 weeks until the sheer size of the world, number of servers planned, time zones of players, and length of time to level scatters them all to the winds and you still have the same problem. But churn will be 0% and population will double every single week! by the time we're level capped and ready to raid there will be more players than grains of sand on earth it'll be fine!"
ili
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and early EQ used to show exact active player count numbers on the server list, and then they didn't because it wasn't in their best interest
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Kriptini
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Let's please not use FF14 as a standard for anything other than Stockholming mouthbreathers into repeating the same boring junk over and over and doing everything they can to take the "multiplayer" out of MMO. If you want to talk about games that did "level scaling" right, let's talk about games like EQ2, where mentoring down to play with lower levels actually let you keep your ability suite instead of people getting a "hell level" dungeon roulette in FF14 and immediately quitting the dungeon, because AFKing in town for 30 minutes is more fun than actually doing dungeons at those level.
FF14 took the most generic route possible when it came to gear and power scaling in general. Made it really hard to stay interested when most of the gear was +2% better with the same exact grinds every time. Their version of epics was basically grind for a cosmetic slot.
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Kirun
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Nobody's out here pretending FFXIV is the "holy grail" of MMOs, but you can't deny they nailed one crucial piece: keeping high-level players cycling through older content so the world never completely dies out. Dungeons from a decade ago still see traffic because the design incentives push people back into them. That's why their world feels alive, even with how massive it is.
MnM, on the other hand, seems to be setting itself up for the opposite. Designing obsolescence straight into the core loop. Once you outlevel an area, it's basically gone for good, and in a game with giant zones and a much smaller population, that's a recipe for ghost towns. It's not just a density problem, it's a structural one.
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While I concur on your point about MnMs design failures I would hardly say ff14 "nailed it", far from it. They made equally retarded design choices in their development then tossed on a workaround to address it later.
For those who may be unfamiliar with ff14;
Imagine if your eq character was level locked, stuck at level 8 until they completed the befallen dungeon, an old world hyper under-utilized dungeon.
This mandate to run befallen doesn't improve the design of befallen, a long avoided hazard due to huge variance in mob levels from the entrance to the bottom floor, invisible trap floors which instakill players, and locked doors requiring rogues to recover your corpse.
Sure, this mandate kinda pools players up (they all end up back logged at lvl 8 until enough people can gather together and run the dungeon)....but after the first day of launch once players get past this hurdle, nobody is going back there. Well maybe rogues responding to desperate newbies about to lose their corpse, but thats it. After that initial rush of players made their way past befallen every late comer or alt that trickled in afterwards is effectively fucked, unable to advance past lvl 8.
Now imagine there's like 10 of these progression checks where you get level locked at 15, 22, 26, 30, 34, etc until you complete some random shithole dungeon that nobody runs.
So what ff14 did to fix this dumb design was add a max level daily to run a random dungeon, and the random dungeon finder queue can potentially select befallen (or any other of the msq dungeons you are required to complete) and it auto levels the content to you so that you can now end up grouped with all the newb players stuck at lvl 8 until they completed befallen.
It's a decent fix for a self imposed problem but it certainly isn't good design.
For those who may be unfamiliar with ff14;
Imagine if your eq character was level locked, stuck at level 8 until they completed the befallen dungeon, an old world hyper under-utilized dungeon.
This mandate to run befallen doesn't improve the design of befallen, a long avoided hazard due to huge variance in mob levels from the entrance to the bottom floor, invisible trap floors which instakill players, and locked doors requiring rogues to recover your corpse.
Sure, this mandate kinda pools players up (they all end up back logged at lvl 8 until enough people can gather together and run the dungeon)....but after the first day of launch once players get past this hurdle, nobody is going back there. Well maybe rogues responding to desperate newbies about to lose their corpse, but thats it. After that initial rush of players made their way past befallen every late comer or alt that trickled in afterwards is effectively fucked, unable to advance past lvl 8.
Now imagine there's like 10 of these progression checks where you get level locked at 15, 22, 26, 30, 34, etc until you complete some random shithole dungeon that nobody runs.
So what ff14 did to fix this dumb design was add a max level daily to run a random dungeon, and the random dungeon finder queue can potentially select befallen (or any other of the msq dungeons you are required to complete) and it auto levels the content to you so that you can now end up grouped with all the newb players stuck at lvl 8 until they completed befallen.
It's a decent fix for a self imposed problem but it certainly isn't good design.
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Kriptini
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"Low level content becoming obsolete" is a foundational issue of any game with a vertical progression system. FFXIV's solution is so bad that it actually turns people away from the game. Nobody likes level scaling down to do old content, they're forced to do it for their weekly currency because at-level activities don't drop enough of it to be worth their time and there usually isn't good loot to chase in at-level activities either thanks to lockouts and most activities only having a single drop for your class.
While the game is new, a steady influx of new players and alts should be enough to keep low level areas populated. Once the game has some age, it will certainly become a bigger problem. Rather than taking the FFXIV approach of building old content into the gear progression system, I think it would make more sense to take the EQ2 approach: create a "mentoring" system that allows you to lower your level to that of another player's and then provide some sort of mechanical incentive for mentoring (like bonus AA experience, if the devs decide to implement AA) to go alongside the natural incentive players have to want to help other players. Or, in the future when the population dwindles, the devs could do a stat squish that reduce the amount of power between levels and allow players who are farther apart in level ranges to group while still getting decent XP and fighting mobs that aren't too easy or too difficult. I think there are a lot of possible mechanisms that can be used that don't depend on your players developing Stockholm syndrome.
An important clarification needs to be made here: it does NOT autolevel the content to you, it DECREASES your level to match the content... which includes taking away all of your abilities that are higher than the level you're being reduced to. FFXIV has a huge problem with classes not feeling "complete" until they approach max level, so you're stuck into these awful experiences of playing an obviously incomplete class and crawling through the dungeon at a snail's pace because of it.
EQ2's system also reduced your level, but instead of taking away your abilities, they scaled down their power. You would still have your "complete" class, but your damage output and tankiness would (roughly) be on par with other characters at that level.
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Yeah EQ2's mentor system was 100% better. You may keep the FFXIV world alive by forcing people to do lower content but it doesn't mean it was fun. People were always willing to take that 30 min cooldown hit if the dungeon was ass.
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as i recall not only did you get your full skill asortment, but your AA represented, and your gear counted as being the "highest tier" of the level you shrink to. or maybe it mimicks the tier of what you have (common rare epic etc). it DID lead to you having some steamroll power if you had your combo wombo in full force. though i was an sk proccing self heals and effects. maybe not all classes do.
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Yeah FF14's deleveling system was ass, but EQ2's system was also just a different flavor of ass with less calories. Having to manually "mentor" and delevel isn't needed in 2025, hasn't needed to be a thing since like 2010 actually.
Even 2 man private servers are smart enough to code it so that the world and dungeons will just auto level the content to the player so that all players can group with one another without any special systems needed or mechanisms needing to be activated, it's all just automatic and seamless. if i'm level 15 then i see the mobs as lvl 15 and the trash does 5% of my health per hit, the heavies do 10%, and the boss does 20%. If i'm a tank it deals less. Heals on me heal % based on cast time/resources alotted/etc the design/mechanic of the class healing me. It doesn't matter that I am level 15 or you are level 40, all dmg/heals/etc is all just fuzzy percentages anyway, and the truth is, it always has been, the numbers that show up on your screen in your client or combat log are just fluff. it doesn't matter if my level 10 ass got hit for 10 dmg or 10% of my 100 hp and your lvl 50 got hit for 100 dmg or 10% of your 1000 hp, only way to even see it would be if you're using a parser.
levels are just artificial barriers you end up spending all your resources designing a way to circumvent anyway.
Now all you need to do is take that final plunge and remove the concept of levels entirely. They haven't been needed for a long, long time, and aren't even used in many games and entire genres of persistent online character or skill based advancement.
playing longer > (insert levels here) > more of your kit unlocked/rotation available > more enjoyable gameplay/combat so you can stomach the gear/raid grind > increases your actual performance/capabilities vs designed content > can tackled more advanced content tuned for that increased performance > repeat.
the level part can easily go away.
Even 2 man private servers are smart enough to code it so that the world and dungeons will just auto level the content to the player so that all players can group with one another without any special systems needed or mechanisms needing to be activated, it's all just automatic and seamless. if i'm level 15 then i see the mobs as lvl 15 and the trash does 5% of my health per hit, the heavies do 10%, and the boss does 20%. If i'm a tank it deals less. Heals on me heal % based on cast time/resources alotted/etc the design/mechanic of the class healing me. It doesn't matter that I am level 15 or you are level 40, all dmg/heals/etc is all just fuzzy percentages anyway, and the truth is, it always has been, the numbers that show up on your screen in your client or combat log are just fluff. it doesn't matter if my level 10 ass got hit for 10 dmg or 10% of my 100 hp and your lvl 50 got hit for 100 dmg or 10% of your 1000 hp, only way to even see it would be if you're using a parser.
levels are just artificial barriers you end up spending all your resources designing a way to circumvent anyway.
Now all you need to do is take that final plunge and remove the concept of levels entirely. They haven't been needed for a long, long time, and aren't even used in many games and entire genres of persistent online character or skill based advancement.
playing longer > (insert levels here) > more of your kit unlocked/rotation available > more enjoyable gameplay/combat so you can stomach the gear/raid grind > increases your actual performance/capabilities vs designed content > can tackled more advanced content tuned for that increased performance > repeat.
the level part can easily go away.
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This would work for instance games but I don't see it working well for open world games. Also makes any progression pointless but end game if you can group 10's with 50's for anything, or am I misunderstanding and this is only for low level content?
Kriptini
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Have you tried Fellowship? I think they're doing exactly what you talk about (except there is substantial vertical progression through gear).