The End. The dreaded two words that finish off any play experience. In RPG's, the end comes when you hit the maximum level, at least in most cases. What are some mechanics that can be introduced to limit the factor of 'the end', while preserving gameplay experience? I have a couple ideas, such as offering unique gameplay experiences for higher level characters, opening up entire sections of the world to characters once they get to a certain level. Not just giving them cheap trinkets, but taking their gameplay to a new area. One such idea would involve creating a system where players would aim for level 100 status, let's say. The maximum level would be 135, and most experienced players would max out at 127, due to experience and time constraints. Once you reach level 100, specific zones of the online world would become accessible, offering more unique challenges. You establish 100 as the end level, and then suprise players with 35 levels of more content. This is really a physchological trick, convincing players that they've gotten something extra, but it could work. It could function similar to nightmare and hell modes in Diablo II. Instead of layering higher difficulty areas on top of the game world, you could offer specific high level areas, giving players what is essentially another game to play once they've maxed out their options in the 'normal' realm. Just a thought.

Sounds like a lot of dev work that only a small percentage of your audience will appreciate. As a level 38 player, I'll think, "Hey, why are you pimping out the Millionaires' Club when our hit detection is still gimpy?"

And what happens when players hit 135? Some eighth-grade introvert will do it. "Experience and time restraints" sound like a glass ceiling and a pipe dream, respectively.

Having crapped all over your idea, I think it's a good one. I love the "bottomless dungeon" levels in Lufia games or the Tactics Ogre series. Anything that lets me take my fully buffed character/party and really put them through their paces is welcome. Rather than having a plateau of admission into a bonus area, why not design your world so that it expands as your capabilities do?

We've talked a lot about world boundaries on this forum, and one of the ideas is scaling difficulty. The center of the world is a perfectly peaceful, safe city. As you move farther way, the towns get rougher, the wilderness gets more wild, and the beasts get beastlier. Tougher characters can hang out in ring five without fear, since they exude such an aura of toughness that no fifth-ring monster would attack them. Ring twenty would be death for most players, but the toughest of the tough can play tennis there with impunity.

Ring thirty, though, is impossible. Not even a party comprised of the most maxxed-out characters in the world can last long there. However, somewhere in the wilds of Ring Thirty you'll find the Mythical Signet Ring of Badassitude. If you get that, and wear it, then locked doors open at your touch, you can buy a big house in the town (for an extravagant fee, of course), and the city elders make a molten image of you, and set it up on high. Also, you glow slightly. And NPC chicks are totally into you. And you get a motorcycle! Made of cheese!

The point is that there should be something that's so hard to do that even a buffed-to-the-max character will have a hard time. So you go through the game, making an awesome character, and get to this impossible feat. Then you start over with a new character, and you groom this one exclusively for that last challenge. The rest of the game is different, and harder, because you have to focus on abilities that aren't terribly useful until that last little bit, but you make it, and you get the job done, and you get all the super-terrific, gameplay-enhancing features.

It's up to you, really.

Eliminate levelling.

I'm serious. The fact that (virtually) everyone else is doing it only means that everyone is copying everyone else, not that levelling is an intrinsic feature of role-playing games. It may be an intrinsic feature of the current definition of the RPG genre, but all role-playing means is that you play a character. Nothing says that character needs to have a level. Also, levelling and its traditional associated equipment upgrades and ever-badder bad guys tends to rely on massive quantities of graphical content -- exactly what indies can't afford.

Oh, and the "surprise! more levels!" trick would work... for the first half-dozen players to reach level 100. Then it's all over the web... and it just postpones "The End," anyway.

Honestly, if your entire game revolves around gaining levels, and there's a maximum number of levels, "The End" is unavoidable. The best you can do is let the player restart at a lower level -- presumably on a different "class" track, and maybe with some bonuses so they don't feel like those hundred-odd levels were a waste of time.

Edit: I'm wrong. Iron Chef Carnage has described the actual "best you can do." But once you get your motorcycle -- made of cheese! -- it's still "The End."

Ragnarok online handles high levels by allowing them to change into a new class once they reach a certain point, allowing them access to new skills, powers and equipment.

We had discussed at length about a system for a possible Shadowrun MMORPG, where players who excel in a particular field (such as a hacker tripped to the rim with cybernetics) could eventually upload his mind into the Matrix, thus becoming a personification of his class. So really powerful players could walk around with extremely rare characters to flaunt their stuff. ;D

There's also a system that for the longest time i thought Everquest did (they don't really explain it all that well on higher levels). Basically, when a character reaches his maximum level (lets say 65), he can then choose to "Spend" his levels to buy special permanent powers for his character. He would have to start off at a low level again (say level 1-5), but he would have the special powers he bought with his enormous experience. These abilities could be anything from instant teleportation, to healing, to free attack/defense spells, etc. Whatever you may think up. This ends up extending gameplay alot, combined with Iron Chef's idea could keep players busy for a long time, both trying to get into difficult area's and defining their uber characters with special abilities.

Well, a few things.

First off: Indie's can't afford graphics if they can't afford to pay artists. However, paying for work is a non-issue for me. The amount of content in my game is limited only by how long it will take me to get bored of the concept.

I've seen that most RPG's include leveling. I don't like it much myself. However, I've tried (and failed) to find a system that has more effectiveness than leveling. It give the player the concept that they've acquired great power very quickly. It's like being able to see your progress, in real time, while on a diet. That part of leveling is a great plus. What I'd prefer to do is include leveling as a more indirect measure, essentially a measure of the strength of a player's character, the player's overall skill, and a number of other factors. Players would still earn expendable skill points, but based purely on experience gains or as rewards for pulling off amazing combat move or tactical ploys. A character would have multiple rankings, their overall level, their equipment level, their combat tactics and skill level (a rating of how well the player performs in combat), and their attribute/character level. This type of gameplay would give the character stat bonuses as they use skills and play the game (e.g, you get stronger the more you fight with melee), and players would get bonus attributes as they gain experience. Essentially, there is no level cap, but the amount of experience that it takes before you get more 'bonus' points increases. Therein, this bonus point system would still resemble leveling, but it would be secondary to the main method of improving skills - by gameplay and combat. The more powerful you become, you get diminishing returns. In the end, for higher level characters, their final level will depend on their combat skill, and their tactics, since it would eventually take too long to gain bonus points, and training through combat has diminishing returns. This avoids having the character hit a 'maximum level'. It also tapers out gameplay, so that a character always feels like there's at least a little more room for improvement. Everything would resolved to dynamic levels.

P.S. Chef Carnage, your post was awesome. If more people posted such constructive criticism, more people would get stuff done.

Choosing a new class at top level, generally referred to as "remorting", is quite common among MUDs (text based MMOs.. for lack of a better description). It _can_ work well in extending the gameplay, but also completely changes how things work. Changing how you get the last few levels is often a nice way of doing things.. ie, incredily hard quests. If it was a multiplayer game (I couldn't tell what you were making), then you could limit the number of people for certain classes to 1 per top 5 levels or so. Lots of possible ideas, selling experience for boosted stats for example, but in the end.. they only slow down the end. Endless levelling, tiered levelling, split levelling.. so many options your head could explode.. but, they only slow down people finishing/stopping playing the game.

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Original post by Nytehauq The End. The dreaded two words that finish off any play experience. In RPG's, the end comes when you hit the maximum level, at least in most cases. What are some mechanics that can be introduced to limit the factor of 'the end', while preserving gameplay experience?

One possible route would be, build the game more 'wide', that is introduce more things to do in it than just fight (monsters and other players) and (optionally) craft equipment to use in the fight. If you can fill your game with more kinds of activities, it'll take the player much longer time to reach the 'been there, done all that' phase. The example of this could be _Sid Meier's Pirates_ which aside from naval combat also gives the player opportunity to take over territory, practice fencing, dancing, collect treasures, eliminate other pirates, gain titles and land, woo governors' daughters, get married, look for lost family members, track down criminals and the "evil overlord" type of enemy etc. Whereas your typical MMO is "Pirates!" limited _just_ to naval combat with bigger and bigger and bigger ships. Small wonder the players burn out on something so repetitive quickly.

Have to keep in mind though, every single element needs to be done in a way that your players can find entertaining on its own, or you wind up with SWG -- lots of things to do, nearly every single of them boring. (imo this is to large extent due to the levelling paradigm attached to the activities in the in-your-face manner... the players get caught up in "must grind to the top level as fast as possible so i can have fun *then*" mentality rather than realize it's the journey 'there' itself that should be 'fun')

Another route would be to radically modify the game play and challenges the players have to face as they advance. Something what Will Wright's _Spore_ is trying to do -- switching the game as player gains 'power' through pacman-like arcade, rts, populous clone and whatever else it has...

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Original post by tolaris The example of this could be _Sid Meier's Pirates_ which aside from naval combat also gives the player opportunity to take over territory, practice fencing, dancing, collect treasures

Original post by Nytehauq
The example of this could be _Sid Meier's Pirates_ which aside from naval combat also gives the player opportunity to take over territory, practice fencing, dancing, collect treasures, eliminate other pirates, gain titles and land, woo governors' daughters, get married, look for lost family members, track down criminals and the "evil overlord" type of enemy etc.

I can imagine whole mini-games based around disco dancing, ie. you start out not very good, but level up quickly the more experienced you get at it. And you start to learn more moves so you can personalise your dancing, do you want to be a camp disco dancer? A moshing rocker in a spiked collar and black leather boots? A shy wallflower? Do you want to enter competitions judged by other players (ie. who has the better dance routine?), or ones done by NPCs based on your current "dancing skill" level.

I prefer skills to levels. All the Elder Scrolls games does this (Morrowind, Oblivion, Daggerfall and Arena), but I think it could be done better. In those games once you get enough new skill points you gain a level and can increase the characters base stats (Strength, int, etc). Many PnP RPGs also has some form of skill system or another.

In Vampire, Mage and Werewolf (Whitewolf games in general) the player is given XP based on how well he played and what he did. This XP can be used to increase his skill by buying new points.

In Chaosium games like Call of Cthulu and Runequest (not sure if it's the same developer but it's the same system) the player marks the skill he made a success in (for example managed to pick a lock). The next time he makes a success his skill might increase. To do so he has to roll higher than his current skill points (d100) and if he manages his skill increases by d6.
Base stats are more or less fixed, but "realistic ones" like strength and to a degree agility can be trained. One week of strength trianing gives a 21 - str * 5 percent chance of increasing, so it maxes out at 21. Appearance and intelligence for example can't be changed, but make-up can alter appearance.

Got to go.. I'll check back later

Wouldn’t it be better to just put strong monsters in area you don’t want low level players to go right away.
As for levelling, my solution would be player advancement to be more based on acquiring and practicing one of hundreds a special abilities and skills, rather than just increasing you hp and strength. Ones with unique and varying effects and not just a stronger version of an old one. This would also help to make battles more interesting than just running up to each other and hitting each other with a sword until one dies. instead you could use many abilities, especially ones that don’t just do damage but could be illusions or fast undetectable movement.