Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Muligan · 2025-09-19T07:33:10-0400

Looking back and now looking into the hopeful future of MMO's, I think a game like Everquest could have done much better in evolving their world to keep max level/long tenured player interested in the content. I'm all for adding new content and there are expansions that I greatly enjoyed but lower level zones could have transformed into higher level zones as it followed the evolving lore of each expansion. Velious could have altered the Everfrost area zones, Luclin could have altered zones with spires, cities could have collapsed and went under siege only to be restored by the next expansion. I hate that expansions took you further and further away from familiar locations, leaving them empty and untouched for even years at times when they could have played a meaningful role in telling the story of the game. Just a thought I've had for awhile.

Pasteton · 2025-09-19T08:26:41-0400

there isn’t some need for every iota of the game world to be occupied at all times. The problem is easily solveable by going back and adding high level content to old zones once the game is more mature, like ring events or whatever else, there’s a bunch of ways to address that. But rather than cycling people thru old content that they’ve done, they’re better off having enough stuff at the high end that people are busy doing that for a long time, which seems to be their plan ,
as even in alpha there is about 20-30x more content at high levels than pantheon.

Kharzette · 2025-09-19T09:24:19-0400

Hekotat said:
@Brahma this will be on the playlist when we drag a train through the first dungeon.

That increased my strength while I listened to it, but it wore off 6 seconds later.

Sylas · 2025-09-19T11:16:02-0400

Sythrak said:
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?

There is no need for any hypothetical here. "this would work but" No, it does work, there is no "buts". These systems already exist and have existed for well over a decade and a half, many games already do this and they work great in both open world and instanced content. Now some of them do the scaling very poorly (like ESO) where everything feels very samey and you don't feel any sense of progression and some of them have clunky systems to enable scaling (like EQ2) but the concept of scaling content to the player is well established industry standard at this point, so there's no need to suggest taking a chance and "trying out something new"

Also as far as progression, first of all, all progression beyond gear is already just an illusion.

If I have to kill orcs for 2 hours before a trumpet plays a ding and now Im "strong enough" to go 500 feet that way and kill gnolls now, to earn the same % of exp per kill, deal the same % of dmg per hit, take the exact same % dmg per hit and heal the same % per spell what really changed? I have an arbitrary numerical level next to my name that says I can earn X% exp per kill on orcs until I can't and have to go somewhere else and kill something else to restore my xp rate?

You still need the "feeling" of getting stronger but you don't need the levels to achieve it. You should kill orcs until you skillup to unlock a new ability that makes the slightly harder gnolls now doable. If you wanna stick with levels to signify what percentage of your kit you've unlocked i mean that's fine but level should not factor into any combat or exp formulas and then it no longer matters and you can group with anyone. If you group with a guy they've only been playing an hour then they don't have the ++ gooder fireball of death they have regular fireball so the numbers on their screen are smaller than yours (but really it's just percentages and doesn't fucking matter, its all ego anyway)

Levels are just an arbitrary number that makes it difficult to play with others and if your game mandates that you need or want to play with other's then now you gotta design work arounds to ignore the levels.
Edit: im on mobile so can't really get into the weeds on this, and "getting rid of levels entirely" is my pet project but I understand why games have them. Its to maintain the illusion of vertical progression when its really just a treadmill.

If your game is going to have levels then you either make leveling the tutorial and let players hit max and "start" playing after a few hours thus everyone is the same level and players are only differentiated by gear, or you introduce a bunch of bandaid mechanics to let high lvl and low lvl group together which ultimately is just various versions of scaling

Kirun · 2025-09-19T12:19:56-0400

The "illusion" of progression is one of the biggest blind spots in MMO design, and it's amazing how often people treat levels as this sacred cow when, in reality, they're mostly a holdover from tabletop systems that never adapted well to a persistent online world. Levels don't actually give players depth, they just lock them out of content, fragment the population, and create friction that designers then have to solve with band-aid mechanics like scaling, mentoring, or endless catch-up systems.

What players actually care about isn't the number next to their name, it's the feeling of getting stronger, more capable, and more versatile. Unlocking new tools, new abilities, and new ways to interact with the world is meaningful. Watching your arbitrary "XP bar" inch toward a ding so you can swap out killing orcs for killing gnolls? That's just maintenance. It doesn't even feel like growth anymore now that the novelty of these worlds/games has worn off, it feels like you're just being herded along the dev "intended" routes.

Clinging to rigid levels in 2025 feels so backwards. A modern MMO that wants to lean into community should be looking for ways to bring players together. Letting a day-one player and a day-100 player share meaningful gameplay without one of them feeling useless or carried. The obsession with vertical progression does the opposite. It creates walls, divides the player base, and forces the devs to design convoluted workarounds just to let people play together.

It's not that levels are inherently evil; they can still work as shorthand for where a player is in their personal unlock path. But once you make those numbers dictate who can and can't play together, you've turned progression into a social barrier. And for a game supposedly about community, that's the most self-defeating design choice you could make.

Quaid · 2025-09-19T12:37:12-0400

Kirun said:
The "illusion" of progression is one of the biggest blind spots in MMO design, and it's amazing how often people treat levels as this sacred cow when, in reality, they're mostly a holdover from tabletop systems that never adapted well to a persistent online world. Levels don't actually give players depth, they just lock them out of content, fragment the population, and create friction that designers then have to solve with band-aid mechanics like scaling, mentoring, or endless catch-up systems.

What players actually care about isn't the number next to their name, it's the feeling of getting stronger, more capable, and more versatile. Unlocking new tools, new abilities, and new ways to interact with the world is meaningful. Watching your arbitrary "XP bar" inch toward a ding so you can swap out killing orcs for killing gnolls? That's just maintenance. It doesn't even feel like growth anymore now that the novelty of these worlds/games has worn off, it feels like you're just being herded along the dev "intended" routes.

Clinging to rigid levels in 2025 feels so backwards. A modern MMO that wants to lean into community should be looking for ways to bring players together. Letting a day-one player and a day-100 player share meaningful gameplay without one of them feeling useless or carried. The obsession with vertical progression does the opposite. It creates walls, divides the player base, and forces the devs to design convoluted workarounds just to let people play together.

It's not that levels are inherently evil; they can still work as shorthand for where a player is in their personal unlock path. But once you make those numbers dictate who can and can't play together, you've turned progression into a social barrier. And for a game supposedly about community, that's the most self-defeating design choice you could make.

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Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

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