At the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas, Electronic Arts chief creative officer Richard Hilleman spoke about how video games today are often too hard to learn for new players. While this is the comment that has got everyone up in arms making a huge fuss about it has become too mainstream so instead I am going to make a fuss about his other comment that everyone (except myself because I am a non-conformist) probably agrees with, his comment that "every game is RPG and you would not create a game without exp and level progression". While I have no respect for the man or his opinions and usually would not give them any second thought I do have to admit that this does seem to be the prevailing opinion in Video game creation now days so I guess it is worth addressing.
Why do we need leveling up and experience mechanics? Personally I am of the opinion that even games that market themselves as "RPG" don't necessarily need an experience based leveling up mechanic, of course experience based leveling up mechanics do have their place and when used correctly they can add a lot to a game however nowdays it seems most game developers have forgotten it's purpose yet insist on having them out of the misconception that the game needs a leveling up mechanic without knowing exactly why. Back in the old days leveling up and stats were supposed to represent character growth and your character's relative power level to every other creature in the land, you knew a hill giant had a base strength of 19 and a fire giant had a strength of 25, goblins were a threat to a level 1 party but by the time you got to level 5 they were a joke and you knew that even at level 5 going up against a dragon would be suicide. Now days with all this bullshit like level scaling levels have no meaning, want to face that Dragon at level 1? Go right ahead it has been scaled down to your level so you can kill it with ease, Goblins will rise in power with you in power so they will still be a consistent threat even at level 100 and with attributes reaching DBZ levels of absurdity they have lost any real meaning or significance. Just look at the Mass Effect and tell me what purpose the leveling up mechanic serves? You are not really unlocking new skills or abilities just increasing their power each level up however since enemies level up with you and rarely change the gameplay experience remains the same, sure you do more damage but then the enemy can take more damage so it still takes roughly the same amount of bullets to kill them and vice versa, does putting points in attributes and skills for the mere sake of it actually add that much to the game?
Of course then you have Madden and Call of Duty where the leveling up systems drip feed you new unlockable weapons and items but these systems don't exist for the sake of good game design but rather to keep the player playing over longer periods of time or to ****** them off to the point that they spend money on microtransactions to speed up the process, then they come out and tell us that "games take too long to learn" while being completely oblivious to the fact that the time it takes you to learn the game is nothing compared to the time it takes to unlock all the features, then when you reach max level it resets and you do it all again to earn "prestige" levels which are just like regular levels but you get a special gold star next to your name!
Edit: whoops, the comments about leveling up were actually by De Plater, I still disagree with them
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