Gandalf-the-Fabulous wrote...
I find myself curious, what do you think the purpose behind the level up mechanic in modern games is? In a game like Mass Effect what is its purpose? What is its purpose in the Dragon Age games? What will be its purpose in Dragon Age 3?
Personally, I think there are several purposes to a level-up mechanic. NUMBERED LIST TIME!!!!
1. It prevents you from having to build your
entire character at the beginning of the game when you have no friggin clue how the mechanics ACTUALLY work. (I don't care if you read the manual, you still have no clue of the details until you've actually thrown the fireball.) Granted, this may not be a
good thing, because if you build your entire character at the beginning, if you build a gimp character, you'll know it in the first 5 minutes of the game when restarting doesn't mean losing hours or days worth of progress. Hmm.
2. It doles out a steady stream of little rewards to help keep you engaged. Part of the Skinner Box, although by no means the only part. Personally, I prefer USING abilities to GETTING them, so after my first playthrough I generally cheat-level my character very early in the game. Then the game is all about getting the lootz and exploring and enjoying the story, which is enough for me. For some, not so much.
3. It helps explicitly present the game as a certain type of progression, with you starting out crap and gradually getting better while facing nastier and nastier foes--even though the foes later in the game may actually be substantially easier at-level than that first dungeon full of goblins you cleared out. The interaction between level and difficulty is a very strange one. It may help mask a screwed up difficulty curve. Or it may wind up creating one all on its own.
4. It gives you an option (in some games, depends on the game design) to out-level an area that's giving you trouble in order to just brute-force over it.
I think Dragon Age thus far has drawn more from the 1 and 2 aspects of leveling and not so much from the 3 and 4, although DA2 had more of 3. The level-scaling in Origins along with your ability to do the areas in whatever order you felt like made this type of progression difficult to present and to see. My characters would experience
enormous jumps in power when they picked up critical abilities, then several levels of nothing while I spent points to get the next big ability.
Part of this is that the abilities system means that there is absolutely
no predicting when you will get certain abilities (apart from the ones with level requirements, which are always fairly low). However, you do get a modest increase in power just from gaining
more abilities (until you have so many that you can't keep track of them any more, anyway).
I think I'd like to see them do kind of a hybrid system in DA3 where you just GET certain abilities at certain levels (like, say, the ability to use a new type of combo attack, or a new defensive boost, or whatever), but you also use points to select your specific attacks. I think this would allow for better scaling because they'd know at least SOME of what you had available to you. It'd also work well with the single-specialization system, because your granted and chosen and specialization abilities could all interact in interesting ways.
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