Quote: Original post by PinFX
I'm surprised noone has mentioned City of Heroes, which applies a partial no-numbers system including the unshowed stats and getting new skills each level that you mentioned. As far as I could tell it didn't take much away from the fun, but maybe if we explored this concept of leveling up more, we could find ways to make leveling up even more fun.

Another game worth mentioning is Eve-Online. Levels are none existant (to an extent). Your character trains at a rate dtermined by his primary/seconday attributes, whether your online and playing or offline, he will still train at the same rate.

This appeals in one way, in that you don't have to play every hour of every day to compete with the hardcore players. You can spend your time in the game focussing on playing, having fun, earning money and not just randomly killing stuff to reach the next level. That said, you find yourself spending a lot of time randomly killing stuff to get enough money to make use of the skills you trained while you slept :P

Despite having no leveling, the game is still addictive, but the addiction is now in other areas of the game such as earning the most money, or owning the best ships/items, or killing the most player characters.

Leveling may be addictive (albeit borringly addictive) purley because its an easy goal for players. Remove the leveling and they'll find other areas of the game to become addicted to, which will hopefully be more intresting (but not always)

In my personal experience, I level up in order to have a "perfect" character. On the other hand, in Final Fantasy games I've long since got bored with the endless battling to level-up using a less than fascinating combat system. In fact, if you visit Game FAQs there're several mini-FAQs on FFX-2 dedicated to levelling up your characters hands-free - basically go somewhere, rig the joystick to leave your character running into a corner to generate random encounters and leave the X button held down somehow to activate the same commands in every battle (having set the cursor to memory and left it pointing at an appropriate choice for each character) - provided at least one character is doing a healing action and none of the local enemies are tough enough to pose a threat, when you come back in a couple of days you'll have reached max level. Anyway, the point is that, for at least some people, the levelling in itself has ceased to be addictive, though they still want the rewards of having levelled.

If the individual actions you need to take in order to gain levels are sufficiently tedious, then levelling becomes a chore you set aside a chunk of time for in advance and just try and get through rather than a lure to keep you playing.

Since someone else mentioned Black and White already, I'll say that, for me at least, while it's very hard to stop playing it (because, apart from the handful of level transitions there's no real breaks in play), there's no real drive to go back to it after a break. Add the fact that the computer players appear to cheat, and a few other annoying features, and I very much doubt that I'll go back to it for a while, and probably never bother to complete it.

On the other hand, Kingdom Hearts, which is basically Final Fantasy: Disney, but with a real-time combat system directly integrated into the rest of the game rather than having combat whisk you into a parallel universe temporarily, I still find reasonably addictive, though at least part of that comes from the ability to level up in the Colosseum - rather than facing endless random encounters for the standard random encounter spoils (a handful of coins and a few minor items) you face a structured tournament and have another short-term goal to help you through... Anyway, the levelling up in that is sufficiently skill based that it's not just a matter of taping the X button down and coming back later.