Gated

I may have been too quick to leave Savage Coast for Blue Mountain.  Arriving in the zone at level 22 I was more or less ready for the first few missions, but the continuation of the main story remained locked until level 25.  Aside from the Homeland Security agent I mentioned in my last post, and a representative of the CDC at the other end of the zone, I haven't run into much in the way of mission givers in Blue Mountain, and I did start to ask myself how deep into the zone I wanted to go in search of side missions to level up on.  Would doing so run me ahead of the main story?

 

Each stage of the main story in SWL is gated behind a specific level requirement - you must be THIS tall to confront ancient evil - and while that's nothing new in MMOs it's particularly noticeable here because it can come up multiple times per zone.  The action missions and side missions that make up the other main sources of XP in the game are well made and there's enough of them to fill in the gaps between chapters of the main story, so it's not too disruptive, but it can still be jarring.

As common as it is in the genre I still dislike arbitrary restrictions being placed on who can access what in an MMO.  This usually mainfests in one of two ways - as a minimum required level (or item level) or a minimum required number of players.  The latter of which seems to have gone out of style.  I remember it well from City of Heroes, which at times would take it to absurd levels, requiring not only a team to access certain content, but a full team of 8 players.*

 

*A note to developers: if you want to shine a spotlight on how your player population isn't what it once was... this is how you do that.

 

World of Warcraft did it better, much to my surprise.  The discovery that I could enter any 5-man dungeon solo - to explore and take in the story and the atmosphere at my own pace, and to have truly challenging content to test my characters on as they levelled up and geared up - that kept me coming back to WoW all the way from The Burning Crusade through to Legion.

 

(That this is no longer possible, due to the zone scaling introduced in Battle for Azeroth, is the main reason I feel like I'm done with WoW.) 

 

 

Level restrictions, on the other hand, are still common, and how well that works depends on how in sync these restrictions are with how powerful the character is at that time.  This is, of course, impossible to measure since different classes, and even different builds of the same class, peak at different times.  So the end result is a character who could complete a particular quest being forced to go off and do something else that they're way too powerful for until they hit the required level... at which point they're overpowered for the quest they wanted to do and so the cycle begins as they look ahead to the next quest.

WoW - post-Cata - was terrible for this.  Any number of times I'd try to move ahead to the next zone in search of a challenge only to find that every questgiver was gated behind a ludicrously narrow level requirement.  It happens to some extent in SWL as well, certainly in Kingsmouth, and it's in Kingsmouth that the main story feels most arbitrarily slowed down and stretched out.

 

It's likely a necessary evil though, since if it hadn't been so dragged out in that zone it would be all too easy to be seriously underpowered upon entering Savage Coast, where there's actually difficult combat encounters.  Now, in Blue Mountain, I'm running into the kind of content gating I like - that if-I-go-down-there-i'll-get-killed feeling which has seen me back off from a couple of missions until I'd levelled and geared up.  Choosing to do so, rather than being forced to do so, makes a difference.