Skip to main content

Designing Better Leveling and Skill Progression Systems

Watching numbers go up is boring.

In a lot of games, the player's character starts from Level 1 and, after accumulating enough experience points, gets to be a Level 2 character. Big whoop! You've killed some monsters, or you've completed a quest or task and you should be rewarded for your efforts, right? Your character is rewarded with some shiny new stat points and/or skill points to be spent on new abilities or upgrading existing ones. It sounds great if you've never played any kind of role-playing game before, but this kind of progression system dates way back to when RPGs were still played with pen and paper, and the use of an efficient system like this allows for a quick measurement of a character's relative skill level. Due to the turn-based nature of pen-and-paper RPGs, player skill had to be abstracted into some arbitrary stat points and acquired abilities. Well, it's 2019 now and games haven't stopped pumping out more and more action, and leveling systems just seem kind of old and out of place. They've become the pair of old boxers that you don't have the heart to throw out so you use them as a rag to clean your toilet with. 

Level up text in Final Fantasy XIV Online

Traditional leveling systems used in many MMOs and RPGs allow the game designer to balance player power so that low level players are discouraged from wandering into high level areas where the enemies are designed to be a much tougher challenge only to be defeated by players at the max level. This allows the designer to be able to focus on balancing the high level enemies for players with high level stats and abilities, rather than having to include low level players into the overall balancing act. The act of leveling up also feels rewarding for the player, hearing that ding when you max out the experience bar is typically designed to make you feel satisfied and that you really have been rewarded for putting in the effort. It motivates the player to keep grinding forward to the next level, and to the next level, until they finally hit the level cap and get to the endgame. Progression systems like this also allow the player to have a rough estimate of where they stand on the overall power curve: a level 50 character would be much more powerful than a level 10 character without having to go into the details of different stat points and abilities. Knowing that one day you'll be as strong as that level 50 character you saw the other day allows the player to feel more attached to their character, and that their character really has come a long way from when they started at level 1.

While leveling systems have been the cornerstone of these kinds of games, more and more games from other genres where player skill is more of a factor have been adopting this system. You can pretty much expect most modern triple-A action game to integrate RPG mechanics through some form of skill tree along with character levels. Anything from whatever's the latest Assassin's Creed game, to God of War 2018, to Red Dead Redemption 2 or the Tomb Raider reboot series. These skill trees typically give the player the choice of personalizing their experience of the game and shaping the character the way they see fit, but this is contingent on skill trees that provide meaningful and engaging skills. Having a branch on a skill tree that just gives the character more health points or increase their base damage is plain boring, and is no different from just increasing stat points. Skill trees should exist to give the player a means of customizing their approach to gameplay loops, be it empowering the sneaky, patient player with more tools to stay concealed, or giving the kill-everything-in-sight player more explosive means of doing what they love to do. This works pretty well but sometimes this breaks down from a narrative perspective when games reward you with experience points for doing something trivial relative to the character. 

Skill trees in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

On the other hand, you have The Elder Scrolls games, famous for their leveling system that's designed to allow the player's playstyle to give experience points towards skills relevant to that playstyle. This means that sneaking around a lot and performing stealth kills would lead to the character's Stealth skill to level up, and so on and so forth. This brings narrative cohesion to how the character gets better and better in specific skills, but this system is prone to abuse depending on, once again, how experience points are given out. In Oblivion, you would be given experience points in the Acrobatics skill for just jumping, and a little more if you took damage during a fall. The obviously optimal way of playing the game for teenage me was then to jump around whenever I could and take as much fall damage as I could without dying and in no time, my character was a Master Acrobat without having done anything truly challenging to have earned anything close to actual mastery. In Skyrim, you could grind away at your Smithing skill by crafting exactly 570 iron daggers (and yes, someone did actually do the math) to get from level 15 to level 100. Something something 10,000 hour rule for mastery, I guess? Unfortunately, this was patched out of the game and the final number sits somewhere around 2,300 iron daggers. This is obviously not an optimal way of increasing your Smithing skill level, but the method still exists and it means that if you wanted to spend hours just crafting iron daggers, you could still, in theory, get to max Smithing level. 

Frozen enemy platforms in Super Metroid

Platformers typically don't have to deal with the leveling problem. In most old-school platformers like Celeste, Super Meat Boy and Mario, the player progresses by completing the level. It's a pure translation from the player's skill to going up a level, as there is no other way of progressing besides beating the level. Along come the Metroid and Castlevania games that define the Metroidvania subgenre. These platformers layered on RPG elements, often without leveling systems, where exploration and backtracking are strongly encouraged in order to fully traverse their interconnected worlds. In these games, the player gains new tools, skills or abilities from exploring the world and figuring out how to combine all the abilities they've acquired in order to get to an area that was once blocked off in some way. This is not only a great way of engaging the player to go out and explore the game world but also to encourage the player to explore the possibilities and the various nuances of the abilities that their character has. A famous example of this is the Ice Beam in Metroid games, which, when used to freeze enemies, allows Samus to use the frozen enemies as platforms. Exploration-driven skill progression leads to a strong sense of accomplishment when the character obtains a new ability, or when the player figures out how to get past a locked door with their current set of abilities.

However, if done wrong, designing levels in this way might lead to player frustration and confusion. As such, careful level design and smart signposting becomes paramount to give just enough hints that the player is able to figure things out on their own without just dumping the solution onto the player. It becomes really important for the level designer to design levels that challenge the player into finding the limits for how a new ability can be used. Ori and the Blind Forest does this beautifully with its Bash ability, which allows Ori to launch in one direction off a projectile or an enemy, sending the bashed object in the opposite direction. It becomes an elegant tool for combat, exploration, and puzzle solving and just overall feels amazing to use because time slows down during the Bash, allowing you to strategize on where to send Ori hurtling off to. Because of how versatile this ability is, it becomes important to challenge to player to explore all these different uses, which is exactly what the Ginso tree level is designed for. Upon obtaining the Bash ability, Ori has to complete a series of challenges designed around Bash, ultimately leading to an action-packed crescendo of pure platforming in which Bash is headlining, lasting a full minute and 10 seconds during which Ori has to escape the Ginso tree, all while an ever-increasing column of water threatens to swallow your cute little protagonist. A much more in-depth video on this sequence by GMTK here.

In my opinion, this is the path that more triple-A games should be taking instead of relying on the tried-and-true leveling systems and overgrown skill trees. I might even wager that MMOs and RPGs could stand to take a leaf out of the exploration-driven progression book. However, I believe that we can take it a step further. Instead of challenging the player immediately after acquiring a new ability, what if we borrowed a little from The Elder Scrolls and made it so that players have to work towards obtaining new abilities, but without the silly leveling system?  For example, in my prototype game that I've been working on, the plan is to have bosses that challenge the player to play a certain way, and the goal is to get the player to figure out a strategy of beating the boss. Upon beating said boss, the character now obtains the boss's core ability. In order to progress, you have to figure out how to counter the boss's attacks and in so doing, your character is now able to reverse-engineer the battle experience into new abilities. One problem with doing this is that it might pigeonhole the player into a certain playstyle, limiting their options and leading to a lot of frustration with figuring out the right strategies for different bosses. Maybe there's a very tight balancing act to be had. Only time will tell.

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! What are your thoughts on leveling systems and is the progression system I've defined enough of a distinction from other systems? Do you agree with it?

Hian is a hobbyist gamedev who really just wants to learn more about games, and finds it incredibly uncomfortable to write in third person. Please be aware that he often doesn't know what he's talking about, so if you want to point something out to him or call him out on his bullshit, there's a comments section right below! Or, if you want to get real personal and all up in his face, tweet him @hianhianhian_ <3

Comments