Why Final Fantasy 14 Sucks at Level Scaling
/The concept of level scaling is not one that’s new to MMOs, and FF14 certainly isn’t the first game to leverage this mechanic. For a while now, developers have been using level scaling in order to try and get just a little bit more mileage out of their content, to help players play together, and just overall let people spend more time playing the parts of the game that they like.
If you’re not sure what “level scaling” means, in short, the concept is that the game can temporarily match the player’s level to the level of their desired content, and by doing so, the player can enjoy a close-to-intended experience from that content, even if they far outlevel it. Think revisiting your favourite low level dungeon, and instead of just 1-shotting all the enemies, being able to play the dungeon as though it was still relevant content with at least some challenge to it. This also means that, if a player has low level friends that they want to play with, they can leverage leverage scaling in order to play with those friends, without having to switch to a different character.
Giving players a wider range of content to choose from also increases their agency. For example, for the last few World of Warcraft expansions, Blizzard has played with removing specified level ranges for their new zones. Rather than one zone being designed for level 104-106 characters and another zone being designed for level 106-108 characters, all of their most recent zones will automatically adjust themselves to whatever level the player currently is. As a result, players have the power to play the content in whatever order they want, and engage with the content that's most interesting to them. Players are more likely to show up somewhere because they actually care about the content, rather than the content just being the next thing they are supposed to do.
In fact this is a concept that they’ve already expanded to most of the content in the game, allowing players to skip entire expansions worth of content if they so choose. So if the player feels like they really don’t click with the leveling content in Outlands, they can skip it entirely, and go straight to Northrend. The scaling system will make sure the challenges and the rewards given to the player stay in sync with the player’s personal progression, even though originally Outlands was designed for level 60-70, and Northrend was designed for level 70-80.
It’s a fun idea, and level scaling can definitely add a lot of value to a piece of content. It creates a world where players are more free to play the content that they like, rather than the content that just happens to be within their current level range. Suddenly you don’t have dungeons that players just stop running because they don’t happen to be in the level 61-63 range any more. In that world, it makes a lot more sense for developers to invest more time into making the content really good, because a lot more people are going to play it for a lot longer, and so in theory, everyone wins.
But sadly, the way that FF14 approaches level scaling comes with some pretty unpleasant drawbacks. Or at least, it does for newer players like me who are starting at the very beginning, in a game that’s been continually updated for the last 10 years. A game which is currently a year into its third major expansion. To their credit, Square Enix has already started playing around with some more modern scaling tech in some of their most recent content. However, considering I’m sitting at 216 hours played and am still an expansion and a half away from being able to access any of this cool new tech, I think we can reasonably say that it doesn’t do anything to help new players.
The crux of the problem with Square Enix’s approach comes down to the fact that, when level syncing happens in FF14, it’s always lowering your level to the level of the content. This happens regularly, during all of the game’s most meaningful leveling content, and it really harms the player’s feeling of progression as a result.
The main places we see level scaling happen are in random dungeons via the Duty Finder (which the player is strongly incentivised to do at least once a day), and in major story quests (both for the game’s main storyline, as well as the storylines for each of the game’s character classes).
When the player registers for dungeon matchmaking, the game will match them with a random party of strangers and have them do a random dungeon that they all have unlocked. This means that as a level 63, I could well be thrown into a level 20 dungeon.
Similarly, pivotal story quest will occasionally place the player into a level synced scenario of sorts, which once again, may force my level 63 character to be temporarily scaled to the level of the quest. So for myself, this would currently mean scaling my level 63 character down to about level 52.
There are also world events called FATEs, but these are entirely optional, and for level scaling to occur the player has to manually opt in to it by clicking a button, and so I take much less issue with these (which admittedly, is at least in part a result of just never doing them).
Anyways, the biggest problem with lowering the player’s level in the aforementioned way, is that while your character is scaled downwards, they can only use abilities that they would have access to at that level. This means that for as long as my level 63 character is scaled to level 20, I can only use abilities I would know as a level 20 character. In other words, I lose access to almost all of the cool abilities that I have spent the last few months acquiring, learning how to use properly, and incorporating into how I play my character.
See, when you’re leveling up a character, in basically any game, one of the big draws is usually learning cool new abilities. When a new expansion comes out, part of the hype is usually “what cool new stuff is my character going to be able to do?”
So it really sucks then, to be told that you can’t actually use the new hotness in any meaningful content until you get farther in the storyline. Sure you can use them when doing random quests in the open world, but those quests usually involve monsters that die in a matter of seconds anyways. You don’t really get the same feel out of using your coolest abilities in the lamest of situations. It’s kind of like if someone gifted you a really amazing gaming computer, but then told you that you can’t install any games on it. Playing games was the entire point of the computer! You wanted it because it enriches your gaming experience, not because you wanted to read your email at 120 FPS.
It goes beyond even just losing access to the coolest new abilities, though, because being scaled down can also mean losing access to your class’ core mechanics, and the pillarstones that define your class’ identity. It’s kind of silly being a Ninja, and losing all access to Ninjutsu abilties. Or being a Red Mage, and losing access to the enchanted melee attacks that the entire class is built around.
Regardless of what abilities you lose though, the important thing to keep in mind is that, being scaled down makes your class less fun to play. All the time and effort you spent trying to master the surprisingly complex rotations instantly goes to waste, because suddenly you only have 3 abilities you can use. As cool as it is to get a reasonable challenge from low level content, it’s not so great to lose all the gameplay depth associated with your own character as a result.
When the game reduces you to spamming a single ability because your action bar is full of unusable abilities, it kind of defeats the purpose a bit. All you’re really doing is giving up class complexity in order to try and preserve encounter complexity.
It doesn’t just end with losing access to abilities though, because we also lose perspective on our character’s progression as a whole.
See, the entire point of most MMOs, is the feeling of progressing your character. A part of that is leveling up and getting new abilities, but it’s also just becoming stronger as a whole. Even when we reach max level, we keep progressing by improving our gear and slowly, incrementally becoming stronger. Better gear lets you complete more content, and over time we become more and more attached to our character, who has been our avatar in this long journey of growth and achievement.
This model works pretty well, even in FF14, but the problem is that FF14’s level scaling system can lead to players who are still leveling not really having any concept of how powerful their character really is. As a result, they ends up losing track of that sense of power growth.
See, if I’m running around the world doing random quests, I know roughly how much damage I expect to do. If I level up a couple times or upgrade my gear a bit, I can observe myself getting stronger relative to where I was a week ago.
But if I’m suddenly set back to level 20, I no longer have any concept of what any of my numbers mean any more. How much damage is a level 20 supposed to do? Maybe I jump into a level 40 dungeon after that, and I have no idea what to expect there either. Because of level scaling, my character’s output is all over the place, and suddenly I have nothing to compare against. I’m constantly upgrading my gear as I level, so in theory I must be way stronger than the last time I did this dungeon, but am I actually?
This creates a scenario where my character’s output relies less on the progress of my character, and more on the level of the content I’m doing. How am I supposed to feel like my character is growing when one minute I’m doing 2000 damage, and the next I’m doing 200? And that’s not even mentioning the fact that the loot is not scaled to your level.
So the question then becomes, how could all of this be done in a way that still gets the benefit of the level scaling mechanic, but sucks a bit less for the player? Well, it goes back to something I mentioned earlier.
In World of Warcraft, when level scaling occurs, the content scales to player, and not the other way around.
The player’s abilities stay the same, their stats stay the same, their output stays the same. Everything about the player’s character stays exactly the same. The character the player has worked to build up to where it is, that the player has grown with and become accustomed to, remains familiar no matter what content they are doing. As a result, you’re never lacking context as to how strong your character is, because you can always directly compare to where your character was yesterday.
Now, this is absolutely a more difficult solution to implement than just scaling the player. MMOs are, of course, multiplayer games, and so one has to worry about more than what just one player sees. It’s not easy to throw a bunch of vastly different level characters into the same content and make it work. There isn’t really an easy way to scale the content in this scenario, without introducing some weirdness somewhere in the process, but if the developers are willing to do some magic on the game’s server side, then players may well never even notice what’s going on.
The idea is to make everything relative to the player. For example, maybe I see an enemy as having 1000 health, and my fireball does 100 damage, but on the server this just registers as “10% damage” rather than 100 damage. My lower level friend maybe sees an enemy with 800 health instead, and their fireball may do 80 damage, but to the server that is the exact same “10% damage”. We see different numbers, but everything is relative to us individually, and so while the server has to reconcile what each of us individually see, we each get an experience that works for us, and is consistent with what we expect out of our characters.
In other words, the player gets exactly the experience they expect, and the server is the one dealing with all of the jank.
Of course there are still a million little UX issues to reconcile. If my party is 20 levels above me, how much HP do I see them having? What happens when I heal them? What level do enemies display as? How much damage do other players appear to be doing if I look in the combat log? But these are all things that have answers, depending on the UX the designer is going for.
To my mind, taking the time to reconcile these minor knock-on issues is absolutely worth it, when the upside is delivering a user experience that is consistent, and that doesn’t remove the player’s feeling of progression.