Star Wars The Old Republic Leveling System

Today game developer DamianSchubert gave us some new details about what type of advancement system we will see in TOR.

The design team believes that one of the hallmarks of both great Bioware products and of the strongest MMOs is a solid character progression system. By this, we think characters should get stronger, they should gain more flexibility (i.e. more abilities or other choices to make in combat), and they should be presented with different avenues for character development within their class.

There are multiple ways to build an advancement system in an MMO. We did indeed choose to go with a level-based system for SW:TOR. It seemed to be the best system to align with our other goals for the game, including the story progression elements. Our version of advancement gives greater returns for questing and story than simply killing critters.

Regarding the grind: level systems aren’t inherently bad, and in fact are a lot of fun in a lot of games, both MMOs and not. A leveling system (and indeed, any advancement system) becomes a grind when it is poorly tuned – when it’s too slowly paced, when its uneven (i.e. ‘hell levels’), when the rewards are poorly paced (i.e. no rewards between levels 35-39 but several at level 40), or when the advancement system acts as a barrier between you and what you really want to do. When this happens, people stop just enjoying the game and start looking for ways to maximize their advancement efficiency. This is when people start talking about there being a ‘grind’. Put another way, the ‘grind’ is a symptom of a bigger problem, that being the act of progressing your character isn’t inherently fun on its own.

Again, this is no way limited to level-based systems – I’ve certainly played MMOs without levels where players ‘grinded’ up their skills, their abilities, or their faction reputations, among other things. Still, we’re pretty sure we have a handle on how to keep the advancement path smooth but interesting, and advancement rate is one of the things that we’ve been asking our players about in all of our internal playtesting.