WoW level cap raising to 100

No, not an official Blizzard announcement, not even a rumor. But it suddenly dawned on me that there is nothing keeping Blizzard from raising the World of Warcraft level cap by 10 levels in every expansion, even if they speed up a bit and release one expansion per year.

Everquest raised its level cap from 50 to 70 over the years, plus adding some "alternative advancement" system. But even reaching level 50 in the original game took a very long time, and many people (including me) never got that far. By making World of Warcraft much shorter, Blizzard has a much greater percentage of their players reaching the level cap, and thus being interested in the next 10 levels. And there is no reason why that can't continue to level 100 or even beyond. There is no "hard" level cap.

The alternative to adding content at the top is to add content at the side, like doing the two new races with new zones from level 1 up to I don't know what. But attractive as that sounds (and I'd really like a couple more zones level 1-59, especially dungeons), there are limits to that approach as well. I remember revisiting Everquest a couple of years later, and finding all the zones that used to be popular in my time totally deserted, because everybody was in the newer zones. If you have too many zones where you could possibly go at any given level, you just dilute your player population too much.

My favorite expansion idea is still one which encourages players to restart at level 1. Final Fantasy XI was good in that respect, at level 30 you were able to do quests which opened up new character classes to you. But then, FFXI had this great class switching system anyway, where you didn't need to make a second character to play a different class, you could simply switch from being a level 30 warrior to being a level 1 samurai. I'm still hoping that the WoW "hero classes" work something like that. You reach a certain level, or do a certain high-level quest, and either you can transform your character into a level 1 hero class character, or it opens up a hero class character slot for you. A bit like the old SWG "force sensitive" jedi character slot. Of course the expansion set that would do that better had new zones for level 1-59 as well, in case players already know all the existing low level stuff.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link