I was talking with a friend of mine today about a bunch of different games and something occurred to me that is actually extremely significant in regards to how D3 will play out.

We were talking about Phantasy Star Online for Gamecube, which both of us had logged literally hundreds of hours on, and he asked me "Why was that game so fun? It was the same stuff over and over, how did we not get bored instantly?" I thought about it for a second and realized something - level cap.

In Phantasy Star Online, the max level was 200. This is actually quite similar to how the level cap worked in D2. The cap was high, the levelling curve was long and got very steep at the end. Even after hundreds of hours on a single character, I think the max I reached was 145 in Phantasy Star. Also, even with the hundreds of hours I spent playing Diablo 2, I don't think I ever had a level 99 character. I think 97 was my maximum reached.

Anyway, having a high and very difficult to achieve level cap is actually a GOOD thing for continued playability. In most games, when you hit max level, you're done. You character can no longer increase in strength other than gear that you might receive. What this does subconciously is actually give LESS reward for MORE play time. So when you hit max level, everything you do is less valuable. This has a huge effect on a player's subconcious. I've seen it a hundred times in other games where myself or friends of mine would play a game and because we're thorough, we hit max level way before the game is finished and a lot of times just stop playing.

I can use Fallout: New Vegas as an example here, the level cap is 30(I think) and is actually somewhat easily reached long before you get the chance to confront the final antagonist. You're basically playing the last 1/3rd of the game at max level and gain nothing as you play, which makes the time feel wasted to the player. One of my friends stopped playing for a few weeks once he hit max level and realized that he was gaining nothing from most of the things he did.

I'm concerned for D3 and the direction that it's seems to be headed. Since they've made the level cap much lower and more obtainable, without a significant amount of motivation to continue playing a character past that point, many players will stop playing the game(especially once rerolling alts is boring). It comes down to how much return we're getting for our efforts, and if we hit max level, we're losing that portion of the benefit of continuing to play that specific character.

All this being said, good, progressive endgame features can replace the subconcious feeling of needing to "level up". It's just a matter of WHAT they decide to do for endgame in D3. Frankly though, I don't see PvP and collecting items being the answer. I don't know what sparked the decision to lower the level cap in D3. I would actually be very curious to find out.

Good discussion! It's an old topic I know but there's a lot of good points and counter-points being brought up.

So just to reiterate some things and maybe draw it back to more specific bullet points of why a lower level cap is (we believe) better for the game:

We want each level to feel like a significant boost in power. You can think of the amount of power a character gains through leveling as a bucket of orange soda, and each level as a glass. We have to have an end-point and so we can only scale player power to that point. By having fewer glasses they can be filled more, and each one has more delicious thirst-quenching orange soda. Spread that same bucket out over 99 or 200 glasses, and each level is less satisfying (if not downright unnoticeable).

We want level benefits to be as clear as possible. Some people have suggested "Well, let us hit level 60, but then keep giving us points after that." which isn't a solution, it's the same problem except worse because there's no actual tracking mechanism built in (ie levels). We also want to avoid providing level benefits at irregular intervals (although this may be unavoidable for trait points), as some people suggest "Let us level to 99 and just give us the rewards every few levels". This goes back to the first point: We want each level to feel like a significant boost in power. Trait points may not come every level, but the sum of the other increases from leveling, we feel, are still very significant and maintain our intent.

Because of the extreme leveling curve in Diablo II, balance really couldn't be adjusted around level 99 characters. This meant that the last 15 or so levels were not just minimal increases in power, but in most cases provided absolutely nothing to a characters ability to effectively complete Hell difficulty and get items, which did significantly improve their character. Instead, leveling to 99 became a status symbol more than anything.

We can have long term status symbols people can go for that are extremely visual, show to others the effort you've put in, but not attach that to something like a character level. Along with artisans, achievements, gems, runestones, and all the other various character customization progressions, we still have some surprises left in store on this front.

Balance isn't a main point for a tighter level system, but it is one side benefit. With the sum changes and improvements to all of the core designs, we believe that we can have a more reasonably challenging game throughout (as we can fairly clearly know how strong someone should be at any point in time) without attempting to create "challenge" through cheesy tactics.

The game paces out progression very well through all of the various customization systems, which are far more interesting and important to an end-game character, as opposed to chasing a number.

I'm sure I'm leaving out a good point or two. The real bottom line is that we understand people like having those long term goals, and those feel good to chase and eventually achieve, but we do not feel one needs to be character level, and in fact making character levels a long term goal brings a great many negative effects with them (keeping in mind our goals for how important each level should feel). We do not doubt that people will feel good about chasing the long term goals of building the perfect character, getting a playtime intensive achievement, leveling up an artisan to max, or any of the other many individual long term progression systems the game offers.

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Q u o t e:
Unfortunately, the level cap is obviously just so in the expansion they can increase it.

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I'd like to know why. Why is that obviously the reason? I'm not picking on you, I've seen more than a few people say this. Is it because obviously people wouldn't buy an expansion unless it had more levels? That's obviously not true because LoD sold many copies based on an additional act, new classes, new items, runewords, jewels, charms, cubing, 800x600 resolution, etc. etc. So looking at what expansions provide, how is it logical to say that we'd obviously make level 60 the cap so we could finally have some way to sell these pesky expansion things?

If you want to draw the WoW comparison, Cataclysm only offers an additional 5 levels, as opposed to the previous expansions' 10 levels each, and it was still the fasting selling PC game in history, topping the previous title holder, Wrath of the Lich King. And you could make the argument "Well there are a lot of things that go into that beyond just some more levels." And I would say "Exactly."

If we felt 99 was the best level cap to have in Diablo III, that's what we'd be doing. We work extremely hard to design, produce, test, and support finely polished games with a strong focus on fun, and that is the obvious reason these design decisions are made.

Let me follow that up with a disclaimer - We aren't thinking about an expansion at all yet, but as levels are intended to pace content (we expect you to hit the last level around when you kill the last boss on Hell) it's not unreasonable to assume that additional levels would be present in an expansion, assuming it did offer additional content we'd want more levels to keep pace with.

I don't refute the logic that an expansion could bring more levels, but I fully refute any idea that we're making design decisions that directly impact the core of the player progression system so we can have a bullet point on the back of a box.