gamedesign.dev: Leveling up

In most stories, there's always a sense of progression as the protagonist overcomes challenges, works around their personal flaws, and basically improves themselves up until the story's end, where they've learned what they needed to know. Carried over into a game setting, this obviously should come with stronger abilities on the part of the protagonist. Hence, the game mechanic so integrated into the RPG genre that it's hard to find a game that doesn't make use of it in some way: leveling up.

Leveling up is by no means a bad thing. One of the reasons the mechanic has endured the way it has is because it's simple, satisfying, and effective. A reward for hard work, which is always welcome. However, implementing levels into a game you want to make is by no means a simple task, and requires careful fine-tuning to make it work. There's a few reasons for that, but most of them tie into the game's difficulty curve.

Every level a character gains makes the game easier. Depending on the game, a given level may have a drastic bonus or a slight one. It might even be to the point where one level is all the difference needed for a tricky fight to become manageable (or worse, an impossible fight to become at all feasible). Of course, this practice has given rise to the habit of "grinding", or putting the progression of the game on hold to fight vanilla monsters in order to gain several levels. There are also players who might dislike the fights interspersed through the game, and run from as many as possible.

The sharper the benefits of levels, the harder it becomes to balance the rest of the game. Either you anticipate the low-level players and make your fights too easy, or you anticipate the higher-level ones and force grinding from the player. On the converse side, if gaining levels doesn't give a benefit, why bother? There's no satisfaction gained if you haven't earned or accomplished anything, which in turn gives you less of a reason to go after the rank-and-file enemies.

There's also the fact that gaining levels tends to increase the number of moves you have available. Take, for example, the Final Fantasy games. The higher your mage's level, the more spells they'll know. There's a side effect to this that I don't think a lot of people see, and that is that early on, a character who gains abilities by leveling up has a limited, ineffective, and generally boring skillset. Sure, you might get the Awesometastic Bazooka of Justice spell later, but in the meantime, you're stuck using a boring Bonk spell, or worse, your physical attack. And for characters that only have one or two moves and don't get new ones by increasing levels, the system may as well not be there for all the difference it makes to them.

I think the best way to handle leveling up in games is to have the levels increase your stats by a fair amount, but to not change your character's moveset. The character should have all their moves, at least in a basic form, available from the word go, and the encounters should be designed to assume that your character fights only the battles they have to in order to get to that point. This lets players who don't mind grinding get a reward for their work in the form of ordinarily difficult fights being a bit easier, and characters who stay underleveled have to get creative with their abilities to take on foes much stronger than themselves.

One last thing that's worth mentioning: in many games that allow for leveling up, if you die to an enemy, you may lose some of the levels you've earned. Why anyone would consider that good game design escapes me. Yes, you want to punish the player for not succeeding, but causing them to lose levels just means they either have to go into a fight they've already lost at a disadvantage, or they have to grind even more levels, to make up the one they lost and then to eke out the advantage they need to win. And in that second case, if they still don't have enough, they get to do it again. Ugh, no thank you.