Thread: A plea for 3.0 and beyond: Job Customization

Originally Posted by Delily

I honestly have to wonder where you get your information from. That is NOT horizontal progression. You've described a classless system, similar to what's present in UO, Darkfall, and the Elder Scrolls (offline) series. Horizontal progression occurs when developers put a limit your character's ability to grow stronger by gear or some form of leveling mechanics (Paragon levels in D3, Realm abilities in DAoC). Rather, the most traditional form of it is introducing a system where players earn abilities by content. Master levels in DAoC are an example of this.

Restricting your characters ability to grow with leveling and gear mechanics is the simplest definition of Vertical Progression. Horizontal Progression is increasing the power of the player's character and it comes in two forms open and closed. An Open Horizontal Progression there is no leveling and class system there is just an ability tree where Player Characters have a large arbitrary number of skill points to spend in categories of Melee, Range, Magic, Pet, Tank and Healing to build their Job it's entirely character progressive. Closed Horizontal Progression is like WoW where the skill trees are locked behind the classes and ESO is in between the two extremes. Horizontal progression is mainly used as an alternative to the leveling system and answer the end game gear grind that plagues every mmorpg.

Originally Posted by Akiza

Restricting your characters ability to grow with leveling and gear mechanics is the simplest definition of Vertical Progression. Horizontal Progression is increasing the power of the player's character and it comes in two forms open and closed. An Open Horizontal Progression there is no leveling and class system there is just an ability tree where Player Characters have a large arbitrary number of skill points to spend in categories ofMelee, Range, Magic, Pet, Tank and Healing to build their Job it's entirely character progressive. Closed Horizontal Progression is like WoW where the skill trees are locked behind the classes and ESO is in between the two extremes. Horizontal progression is mainly used as an alternative to the leveling system and answer the end game gear grind that plagues every mmorpg.

There is no open and closed horizontal system. You're combining concepts needlessly. When it comes to the skills you character has access to, it's either a class based or skill based system. When it comes to your character's growth, there's horizontal or vertical. Horizontal involves levels, whereas with vertical, it's some form of quest to get your skills. You can do a class based horizontal game, and you can do a skill based vertical game. All horizontal progression would mean it that rather than gear, there would be something else we would be working towards, such as skills.

And there are other ways to answer the gear grind.

Originally Posted by Akiza

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You're thinking in the right direction, but you're over complicating things in your definition. Horizontal progression, in its purest form, is simply giving the player (by endgame) a very wide spectrum of skills/equipment/whatever that are not inherently better than each othe. It's not about having skill trees or unlocking things, even though most games utilize unlocking or "shops" to keep new players from getting overwhelmed.

The Megaman or Bioshock games are good examples of this. In MMOs the closest thing would probably be the Guild Wars series, especially Guild Wars 1 (max level was 20).

Truth be told though, most game systems do it both ways. For example, the weapon and armor system in Monster Hunter is designed so that certain types of gear is more effective against certain types of foes (a la megaman), but obviously there is still vertical grind in getting to the next tier of each specific type of weapon/armor.