“No Real End Game” and Progression in Ashes
Progression is the core of the RPG in MMORPG. When you start the game, progression is the origin of gameplay. What is then strange, is you become as strong as possible and you are done with progression. This end, is the origin of ‘end game.’
When I looked at Ashes they said there was no real end game. That instantly told me to start looking at their progression system because, that’s what it actually means to have no end game. Looking at it I have a lot of concerns, but I want to talk about two things I would like to see change.
To start off, Node progression seems intuitively focused around the Node, but it should be focused around the players. Instead of the actions of the players directly building up the node, the actions of the players should build up a personalized node progression path that then affects the node when those players are residents of the node. The goal is to reward and give value to players that is then desired by the leaders of the nodes to attract players to their cities. For an economic example: A node should not progress because of the amount or quality of trade routes being run, but it would progress from having successful trade runners as residents in the node. This would not replace active growth in the node, like a quest line to upgrade the node, but it would replace any form of grind that would define node progression. This type of progress will empower players and give them a feeling of value, and it will drive player interaction and recruitment outside of just guilds.
This method makes up for a fear I have when player cities can be conquered or downgraded. It has been shown in games like Darkfall or Albion, that when players invest significant time and effort into a city they lose, guilds will collapse and players will quit the game. This is even more of an issue in Ashes because you can have third parties like a tavern keeper lose his tavern and progress if a node fails. But that shouldn’t matter, a good chef or tavern keeper is the reason it is good, not the location. A player whose city collapses should be able to move and boost the new node from his experience. If a mercenary guild that fought in castle sieges decides to pick up and move, that new node should become more militaristic even unlocking a stage upgrade quest if it’s a military node. People are the progress and they make a city so they should be where progress is saved.
Although second, the first thing that hit me was the class system. It’s one dimensional, you get one class on your character and you level that up to the max. It is the standard model for the west, so it is not surprising, but to really make it shine you need higher level account systems like ESO has with CP levels after cap. Where when you hit max level you start leveling champion points. Then any alt you make retains the champion point level and can start leveling them again at max. ESO is a good example of a game with a poor release that doubled down on progression for success.
It doesn't get much better looking at sub classes either. They mentioned quests to unlock, which is fantastic, but unless they are somewhat gated and take effort the progression reward will be lackluster. This brings me to the eastern leveling systems, like in FFXI/XIV, or Archeage where one character can be all the classes. Personally, I want one character all classes and your sub job augments reflect the level of the other classes requiring you to max out all 8 classes to get the most out of sub job switching. There are so many ways to change this, leveling the archetype combined classes independently after 25 but keeping the primary archetype. Or you could even go nuts and make it so one character can level all 64 combinations. I just want to see as much potential progression as possible packed into one character, or if it’s not possible tie as much of it into the account.
I know systems like these bring in new issues. Such as how do you deal with node deleveling and node conflict, or what about wanting to play other races in a one character all class game. But I'm concerned this game is making mistakes that many of the original MMOs did where they focus on a fantasy world and not really aware of what the game that the players are playing is. Especially due to the eastern influence, Lineage 2 and archeage, these games have a successful pay to win dependent gameplay loop. Players have constant progression and are rewarded with PvP where they get to be OP if they invest money or time into the game. The issue is these games depend upon the infinite gambling like progression that inherently unbalanced PvP. If you cut that P2W off and you cut that progression to make fair PvP the model collapses. I personally would love to hear if the whole game was reexamined at with personal player progression in mind.
