Is levelling in MMO's a tired old system than needs to go?

[Zarc]

I can only speak for myself when concluding that leveling is essential to an MMORPG. No MMORPG has lived up to vanilla WoW for me, and the leveling is a big part of that. Classic delivered, but it was always a limited offering. If I had my way WoW would have built on top of Classic and delivered more of the same, instead of constantly re-inventing itself and make past content obsolete. Including bumping every raid tier to max level any time the level cap is increased, so everybody has to start from the beginning - attunements and all. Which would inevitably mean that getting to max level and to the latest raid tier would be an ever-increasingly daunting task. But that is kind of the point. An MMORPG should feel endless. That is important. That every player is engaging with "current" content is not. Modern WOW has become way too much of a story-telling vehicle - with phasing, cut-scenes and whatnot - to a point where it almost feels like a single-player RPG where you don't really feel the presence of other players in any meaningful way. Things like mob tagging and not being able to fly above content is a good thing, because it causes human interaction, good and bad, just like in real life - other people can be obstacles in your way, or they can be allies in a common struggle. The world must feel alive, populated by other people, and seamlessly connected and vast, it can't be like SWTOR where every planet feels like an instance rather than as part of a shared world. Things like the hassle of travel is a great way to make the world feel vast, flying makes it feel small and reduces interaction with players - whether those interactions makes you feel a positive or negative emotion they are essential.

[shimerra]

I can only speak for myself when concluding that leveling is essential to an MMORPG. No MMORPG has lived up to vanilla WoW for me, and the leveling is a big part of that. Classic delivered, but it was always a limited offering. If I had my way WoW would have built on top of Classic and delivered more of the same, instead of constantly re-inventing itself and make past content obsolete. Including bumping every raid tier to max level any time the level cap is increased, so everybody has to start from the beginning - attunements and all. Which would inevitably mean that getting to max level and to the latest raid tier would be an ever-increasingly daunting task. But that is kind of the point. An MMORPG should feel endless. That is important. That every player is engaging with "current" content is not. Modern WOW has become way too much of a story-telling vehicle - with phasing, cut-scenes and whatnot - to a point where it almost feels like a single-player RPG where you don't really feel the presence of other players in any meaningful way. Things like mob tagging and not being able to fly above content is a good thing, because it causes human interaction, good and bad, just like in real life - other people can be obstacles in your way, or they can be allies in a common struggle. The world must feel alive, populated by other people, and seamlessly connected and vast, it can't be like SWTOR where every planet feels like an instance rather than as part of a shared world. Things like the hassle of travel is a great way to make the world feel vast, flying makes it feel small and reduces interaction with players - whether those interactions makes you feel a positive or negative emotion they are essential.

Yeah classic quests were a nightmare in terms of witting and design. Nothing like 90% quests telling you to pick through boar shit that half the time barely tells you were to even find the boars or to find some lost diary for some random housewife because it's the last thing her husband wrote. Thottbot and wowhead and eventually quest mods were what made it palatable and the newness of the world and most of Vanilla's quest was pointless filler that could be deleted or replaced with 0 impact on the story. Not every quest has to be you saving the world, but Vanilla definitely isn't the epitome of RPG leveling and a lot of it was poorly written and designed. And it didn't feel endless. It felt tedious and honestly I can see it was only the novelty that kept it interesting.

Making travel a hassle isn't how you make the world feel big. I can make a 1 meter by 1 meter room feel "big" according to your logic by jamming your movespeed down to an inch an hour for a human sized character. It'd sure be a hassle, but the world really wouldn't feel big. WoW has always been a themepark MMO. The type of game you're describing sounds more like SWG. About the only thing I'd say I agree with your post is flying allowing you to skip over every obstacle or world feature makes the world smaller.

[Theangryone]

Leveling being seen as unnecessary is a direct result of Blizzard giving a fuck all about the rpg side of mmorpg. The story is generally a mess and too many of the beats take place in media outside the game. What we have now is basically a dungeon simulator and if that is what you are looking for cool, but the lack of good story and leveling experience mixed with dumb systems is why I am currently not.

[Rogalicus]

I can only speak for myself when concluding that leveling is essential to an MMORPG. No MMORPG has lived up to vanilla WoW for me, and the leveling is a big part of that. Classic delivered, but it was always a limited offering. If I had my way WoW would have built on top of Classic and delivered more of the same, instead of constantly re-inventing itself and make past content obsolete. Including bumping every raid tier to max level any time the level cap is increased, so everybody has to start from the beginning - attunements and all. Which would inevitably mean that getting to max level and to the latest raid tier would be an ever-increasingly daunting task. But that is kind of the point. An MMORPG should feel endless. That is important. That every player is engaging with "current" content is not. Modern WOW has become way too much of a story-telling vehicle - with phasing, cut-scenes and whatnot - to a point where it almost feels like a single-player RPG where you don't really feel the presence of other players in any meaningful way. Things like mob tagging and not being able to fly above content is a good thing, because it causes human interaction, good and bad, just like in real life - other people can be obstacles in your way, or they can be allies in a common struggle. The world must feel alive, populated by other people, and seamlessly connected and vast, it can't be like SWTOR where every planet feels like an instance rather than as part of a shared world. Things like the hassle of travel is a great way to make the world feel vast, flying makes it feel small and reduces interaction with players - whether those interactions makes you feel a positive or negative emotion they are essential.

Making leveling daunting will mean nobody would roll alts and new players are going to be spread so thin they actually won't see a single person during leveling. If leveling content won't be soloable and there's no one to do it with, you'll have huge swaths of content unused and people annoyed by skipping content. In the same way having 20 tiers of content in endgame with increasing requirements would guarantee lack of population in all tiers and lack of fresh blood.

[PACOX]

I suppose it depends on how mundane the quests are for me. If it's something like fetch 10 asses that refuse to drop, pick or collect ingredients or deliver this to such and such. Then yeah, they should probably go. Could never get into FF14 levelling, don't think i got too far before i got super bored, long ass cutscenes didn't help imo, although i know people appreciate them for heavy story telling, but should be skippable for people who don't want to sit through them.

However i really liked SWTOR's Class missions for levelling, and the standard quests were made interesting with the voice acted dialogue and choices. Same can be said for ESO, to a lesser extent but still enjoyable.

The problem with FF14s leveling is how they tell its story. Sure the story might be cool but you only get a sense of it through cutscenes and now actual gameplay. There is very little story being told through gameplay where in other games players can get a general idea through dialogue/visuals e even if they skip all text. Time is money in a sub based game and a super long mandatory quest chain makes you wonder how much of its designed to prolong a sub. Are hour long cutscenes really necessary when you are paying by the minute?