What is the purpose of leveling?

[goodgimp]

[Note: There is nothing implied in my question, it is not rhetorical, etc]

This is in reference to the following, but I had the question before these patch notes:

Enemies also have a certain amount of max health, magical/physical attack power, and so on. Their values varies based on their relative level to the civ level, however -- an enemy that is lower-level than you will have correspondingly worse stats off their baseline, and an enemy that is higher-level than you will have correspondingly better stats. But the general scale of the stats doesn't increase over time. Every time you level up the world, all the enemies stats get incrementally worse down to a floor, rather than yours getting incrementally better up to infinity.

Likewise, your equipment goes through the exact same process as the enemies do -- as your civ level goes up, your spellgems do progressively less damage down to a floor, until you craft a new one. This drop is exactly corresponding to the drop in same-level enemy health and stats, though, so you're not actually losing any ground; technically, since your stats stay the same each civ level up, you're still gaining ground on all the enemies each time you level up. But you still need new equipment every 5 levels or so to avoid losing ground against the enemies, same as it always has been.

Again, just to reiterate, don't take my question as a rhetorical "Well, what's the point?!", the question is genuine.  With items/abilities scaling downwards while leveling, necessitating that we continue to upgrade our spells (I realize that a lot of RPGs do this, like a typical MMO "level grind" where your numbers go up but so do the corresponding numbers of opponents you are facing), what is the main driver for the player to want to level? Some drivers that I could see for me would be:

- New equipment / abilities that only become available at higher levels
- New buildings/strategic options that open up
- Other new gameplay features that "unlock" the further you go in

I was just curious what Arcen's plans on were, or if there were no plans for that matter. Does anyone from Arcen or the community have any thoughts/information on the topic?

[BobTheJanitor]

Most of the discussion that led to that was in this thread. But to boil it down, there has to be some sort of relative power effect, otherwise as the levels get higher and higher the numbers get ridiculous. If the enemy has 112,312,256,000 hp and your fireball does 32,244,971,000 damage, can you tell at a glance how many you need to shoot to kill the bad guy?

Edit: Although I notice that doesn't exactly match your question. Yes, as you level up you'll start to see new areas, new enemy types, new spells, etc. At least that's my understanding. Just like right now you don't start to see tiles for The Deep or Lava Flats until you near level 20-something.

Edit edit: VVVVVV Yeah what he said. Why do I even try to ninja these responses in before the devs have their say? I don't know!

[x4000]

Oh, you better believe this is something we've had endless internal discussions about; we're not ones to do... anything... terribly casually.  The leveling serves a really large number of purposes, but among them:

1. As you noted, you get new equipment, spells, buildings, types of areas to explore, types of enemies to explore, and so on.  This basically is what gives the game a lot of its progression.

2. This also provides a reason for questing and a way to have an infinite progression in a single world.  In other words, let's say you play AI War: you start out with very little, then you gain stuff, then you win or lose as you face the AIs.  Then you start over and play again.  We wanted that same sort of flow in AVWW, but having it many times over inside the same world so that your history gets kept, etc.  Since there is inherently a finite amount of content that is genuinely new in any given game, you're either going to have to start over at some point if you want to keep playing, OR you're going to have to have your stuff become obsolete.  In AVWW there's a 5-level cycle of equipment obsolescence, which means that players are encouraged to experiment and upgrade their existing equipment, as well as finding new stuff.

3. This also lets us introduce new content that is ostensibly available to lower-level players, but which is also new and exciting and interesting to players who are at a very high civ level.  If we introduce a new spell that becomes available at level 6, but you are already level 60, you didn't miss that content -- you'll just have the first version of that spell be a much higher tier than most players, and it will still be something you can enjoy no matter how long you've been playing a single world.

4. This is also how we're able to have a large amount of choose-your-own-difficulty in the game: being able to play up or down region levels relative to your civ level is the most organic way to choose your level of challenge as you go.

5. There's other stuff too, but I gotta run to dinner and those are certainly the high points.

[goodgimp]

Cool, thanks for the replies! I have purchased the beta but I'm forcibly limiting myself to L4 or so, so I really don't have much idea of how it all fits together in the big picture. I'm "saving" the game for when Coop / Release roll around because I want it to be new and fresh for when my friends and I dive in.

It's something I've been curious about for a while so thanks for the illumination.

[mrhanman]

I wouldn't worry too much about "spoiling" the game.  It changes so much and so fast at this stage that you don't have to worry.  It's already a much different game than it was just a week ago when it released.

[goodgimp]

That's for sure, I've already noticed huge improvements. Still.. I want to be exploring everything for the first time, so I shall force myself to be patient and wait with just the occasional pop in and quick look around

[x4000]

My pleasure!  And thanks for the support.