Feedback: The lvl 60 cap is too low, and leaves too much gameplay on the table

The journey from 1 to 60 has its interesting parts as a first playthrough but if you start another character after that it becomes a race to get to 60 to start to actually playing the content of the game.

IMO game becomes a bit too easy at that level and even more with maxed gear…

Nevertheless, i see that you are not playing on PC, what i can suggest to to expland that gap is to play singleplayer or make a server with lower experience gains so it will take longer to get to lvl 60.

1 Like

I have played vanilla (nearly one quarter of my 4000+ hours of playtime) and I have played modded. I played with the max level at 60, max level at 120, and max level of 300, all in prolonged periods of time.

I will say this, raising the level cap doesn’t do anything for the game. Not anything positive anyway. What it does do is it makes the gap between an established player and a new player wider and wider. This is NOT a good thing.

I would even argue that having levels at all isn’t really needed. But that is a discussion probably beyond the scope of the thread.

Now I do understand the OP is talking about singleplayer on console, where they don’t have access to mods. Your best bet is to post on Microsoft’s and Sony’s social media about how you’d like to be able to freely mod your games on console.

3 Likes

I always catch my self making a new character in RPGs and survivals right before i get to the end of them, i also love that feeling of leveling up from 0 again in games, the level up grind is something i never have issue with since i have a blast with it always

3 Likes

Suddenly, you’re gifted the most precious gift of all: spare free time! :stuck_out_tongue:

Sure, the dust would eventually settle down, as it always does. Personally, I’m not objecting to a raised level cap because I think Funcom would let the game stay unbalanced – I’m objecting because Funcom would have to spend time rebalancing it. There are many things on which I hope they’ll spend time and effort, but “yet more balancing that will make people cry on the forums” is not one of those.

See? That’s what I’m talking about. Would you rather Funcom did that or raised the level cap? :wink:

Yet another example of why I love you, @Barnes :grin:

2 Likes

Well the problem lies in the fact that regardless of increased levels, or additional equipment slots that affect stats or abilities, Funcom would still have to do their rebalancing. I would prefer both TBH. I want this game to have a longer play through cycle, not the current build, decorate, afk until next patch. We need long term, difficult to attain goals to keep long term interest (and servers populated).

1 Like

Hell yeah, me too! My playstyle has turned into a cycle of “start a new character, get to level 60, collect the essentials, build a nice base, lose interest, refresh for a while, let it decay”. It would be nice if I could break that cycle either by having something to keep me engaged or ditching the whole game once and for all :laughing:

That’s one way to keep engaged. Another way would be if they gave us the tools we need to make up our own ways of staying engaged.

I feel like, right now, the only game mode that gives players the tools to keep themselves engaged is PVP. You’ll always have new challenges coming from other people.

PVE(-C) players like me only have building, collecting, and hanging out in chat to keep us going – at least on official servers. Private servers are different, because they either vet their players and maintain engagement through playerbase coherence, or they have mods that give you more tools.

If we had some of the tools that mods offer, I feel like that would allow us to stay engaged in gameplay without relying so much on new content from Funcom.

All those builds that I’ve made over years are meaningless because there’s no way for anyone to interact with them. Most of them are just “theme parks”.

This post is about nothing.If you want more levels-go play on private server with mods.All is already done

That’s an interesting thought. I’d love to hear more about it.

The way I see it, the progression is merely a teaching tool for the new players. Since this is a sandbox game without any tutorials, new players need something to guide them. On a sever, you might get that guidance from other players. You usually do on PVE(-C) servers, but I don’t know what it’s like in PVP. In single-player mode, however, your only source of information is the game itself.

That’s why you have journey steps and why certain feats are gated behind levels, so that Funcom can shape your “onboarding” in a non-intrusive way. You get to set your own goals, sure, but you get the inspiration for those goals from the journeys, and the level requirements try to make sure that your path to that goal will teach you certain things.

So if we slow the progression and get rid of the level requirements, that might be more fun for us veteran players, but how do we make sure new players are still properly guided?

2 Likes

I like the idea of slower progression and fewer/no level-gating - hitting 60 and ‘stopping progressing’ always feels wrong to me (obviously - we don’t really stop progressing, at least not immediately on hitting 60) - I like to feel that I’m still moving forwards, that there’s a ‘point’ to getting into yet another fight - even if that point is relatively meaningless xp towards extra levels that give nothing. So in that sense, slowing progression would suit me ok.

But CodeMage is right about the value of the way the progression pushes you through the game, especially in singleplayer. I’d actually go further and argue that all of these existing teaching tools within the game (levelling/level-gating, journey steps, talkie stick etc) are perhaps still insufficient for many new players to the game. I don’t mind watching a couple of videos or checking the wiki if I get stuck, but a lot of players prefer to go it alone, even (or perhaps especially in many cases) players whose interest in the game is more casual. I’ve watched a few players give up on the game because they didn’t know how to do things and didn’t want to have to do ‘homework’ in order to learn - they ‘just wanted to play the game’. A friend of mine (who eventually quit, mostly over filespace, but also out of general frustration) specifically didn’t want spoilers - but it turned out he didn’t even know which questions he needed to ask. (I realised why he was having such a tough time at level 60 when he finally asked me if steelfire could be used for anything other than dragonpowder - he was stuck at iron tier and had been for the entire game…).

In some ways, speed of progression probably wouldn’t make so much difference to that sort of situation, but removing the level-gating would remove the one clue that the friend in my example actually had that he should have progressed from iron by now. And where speed of progression might make a difference is just with the casual players’ interest levels - too slow and they’re even more likely to quit before they really get into the meat of the game.

So I don’t know. It’s definitely an interesting idea, but I think there would have to be quite a lot of thought put into making it work for more than just us ‘grizzled old veterans’ :slight_smile:

4 Likes

Maybe it could be combined with @Croms_Faithful’s idea on prestige re-leveling process? Keep the level gating the first time around, but then you have the option to return level 1 and start a slower, harder, more fulfilling journey to level 60?

4 Likes

We have the solution for veterans, it is called barbaric mode :grin:. Your level up is no longer from just surviving, your level up is really hard and even if you do all the journey steps maybe you won’t go lvl 60 :man_shrugging:. I beg for official servers for veterans some time now, I guess I will have to admin one of these servers, but I see that I will Play alone :pensive:. Maybe this is the reason the company does not do it, at the beginning they will take complaints, only one server in my region, but at the end nobody will want to play in this mode, at least I will :rofl::rofl::rofl:.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.