What Makes a Good Level Up System?

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"Players will optimize the fun out of the game" You are damn right.

The line of progression following clouds hair is the best thumbnail gag ever.

I love how the Monster Hunter series works with progression. It's got the story stuff where you slowly fight bigger and bigger monsters but you use their stuff to make more powerful equipment to become more powerful yourself. Not to mention how your own skill as a player increases as you go on, making it feel as though you're really mastering the monsters

I always think back to The World Ends With You, where the quality of loot you get from enemies are proportional to how low your level is. A slider lets you control where your level currently is from the ones you added, and the game gets challenging even when your level is on par for where you're at in the story, so the level system becomes an built-in difficulty meter that rewards you for mastering encounters enough to not need the stat bonuses.

Something missing from this discussion is being over-leveled or under-leveled. The amount the player scales with levels determines how much enemies scale in power. If this amount is too great, individual levels will make too big of a difference and the player will regularly be over-leveled or under-leveled. Just look at Pokemon. The stat gains, new moves, and evolutions from leveling up can cause fights to go from difficult to trivial in just a few levels. On the other hand, Dark Souls has each level give a very small bonus on top of having those bonuses get smaller over time. This makes it so that enemies can also have a slow progression in power. Being under-leveled or over-leveled only makes a small difference in dark souls so difficulty can be consistent. If you go to a late game area under-leveled, you'll have extra challenge but it's possible to beat the area. If you go to a lower level area, enemies still provide a challenge if you get careless. Reducing how much levels increase the power of the player also allows for games with leveling up to be open ended. Dark Souls once again is a good example of how small amounts of scaling in levels is helpful. Areas can be done out of order and it hardly ever feels like you're under or over-leveled. However, in a game like Pokemon, they usually can't be open-ended without extra systems to adjust levels. Pokemon Gold and Silver tried to be open ended; however, the levels of many areas ended up being way too low. All the possible areas the player could go when the game opened up were set to a level they can handle at that time. However, once the player has completed one of the areas they could go to, they become too high in level for the others. Sadly, if the area's levels are increased, then it'll become hard for the player to actually tackle the areas out of order since they won't be able to handle higher level areas. It's not impossible for games with leveling up systems to be open-ended even if levels cause higher increases in power. A good example of an open ended game with levels that give a larger amount of power is Monster Sanctuary. It's a monster taming RPG similar to Pokemon that's going to release later this year. It has level scaling similar to Pokemon except each monster has its own skill tree. Additionally, all fights in the game scale based off of how much of the world you have explored. This allows for the game to be a completely open ended metroidvania. As long as you don't skip fights in the game, you won't be under-leveled and all fights will keep up with you in difficulty unless you specifically go out of your way to grind. I highly recommend checking it out.

The level progression systems that I hate, especially in RPGs, are the ones where the enemies level up with you. It completely defeats the purpose.

I think the Mario and Luigi rpg games like partners in time, and bowser’s inside story do a good job with leveling up.

I really feel like you should've talked about the downsides of point allocation, specifically as it pertains to ARPGs like Diablo and Path of Exile, where a beginner player can essentially make their character unusable by investing in the "wrong" stats/skills. With such systems, I think it should be standard that resetting your allocated points should be doable at any time, or at least fairly easy to do. This would encourage experimentation, while avoiding discouraging players who might end up with a sub-par build after spending many hours on a character.

Also worth noting about Lost Odyssey, it's probably the best RPG at encouraging you to use every character*. The linking system with your immortals is part of it, but each map has a "level cap" as well. Once you hit the level cap of a specific map, your experience gains are *significantly reduced, meaning that it's better to change party members out once they hit that level rather than letting all that EXP go to waste on characters who are having their progression stunted.

What has to be my least favorite leveling system is the one where XP earnings per character is determined by how many/what actions they made during battle. It usually ends up in a situation where a couple of party members get stronger and carry the team, even worse if kills are too important a factor meaning support characters and healers may get disproportionately less XP than the attackers even though that heal they did was key too them surviving another round.

"Players will optimize the fun out of the game" Like every god damned game I see where you can level up money drop rates, or experience gains, or "luck" Quit giving that as a stat. Also false choice trees. Those times where you can choose between upgrades in your stat tree, but instead of adding new options, what they do is just increase multipliers. I want to see "Now your wind spell creates a wind tunnel for a while that makes you move faster in that direction, which is cool and helpful but you might also want to try that ice spell." I don't want to see "Now your wind spell has rocks in it that increase the damage by such a high amount, you're NEVER going to level up your ice spells again."

Final Fantasy X's sphere grid was a brilliant customizable leveling system.

My favorite leveling system is from The World Ends With You. You level up, but you can choose to level down anywhere from 1 to your current level. If you do, your HP drops, but the drop chance for items is multiplied depending on how many levels you reduced. Other stats for combat are determined by food, clothing, and your pins (abilities) so it's still possible to beat those tough enemies at Level 1 and get a rare item.

There's a game an steam called hylics and its got a really unique progression path where there's no real levels, and dying just sends you to an area where you keep everything you had when you died. The only way you get stronger is exchanging and finding items in the overworld. Its really cool.

One of the unique things I love about Fire Emblem is that EXP there is a limited, finite resource. Combined with its perma death feature. EXP is also quite risky to distribute, since the underleveld character who need it the most die so easily while the stronger, overleveld characters get diminishing EXP returns.

FINALLY someone talks about the broken design of FFXV's exp caching!!! I was so frustrated for the whole game because I loved the atmosphere and experience of camping, but I always felt like I was losing exp by not using at least the 2x hotel. I missed out on basically every camping side story and didn't actually know they were a thing until I was almost finished the game. Truly terrible design from the ground up.

Nice video, but very surface level. I would argue it spends very little time talking about what makes a leveling system GOOD, and spends the majority of the video simply defining the terms. While there's nothing wrong with that, it is a bit misleading, and it's something I've noticed has become a general trend with Design Doc videos. In an effort to speak to the broadest design elements, there's a distinct lack of depth. Paper Mario's design failed because it decoupled the leveling from the game progression. Okay. But the entire rest of the video was just designed to highlight examples of what games have done -- not necessarily what they have done well. Is FF9's system of leveling up your inventory good or bad? Is a point allocation system better when it's simple and direct like Castle Crashers' or when you have a massive set of choices like Path of Exile? When you aren't playing a traditional RPG, how much do you want to commit your game to RPG elements and why? Which of the examples in your video have a great feel and which feel clunky or simply serviceable? Is it better to give the player LOTS of levels and/or points so that the game is consistently incremental, or give them only a few very concrete moments where they can upgrade their character, like in Mass Effect 2? These are all points that could have given this video some depth. As it is, we're really just watching a big checklist.

What about a "Good Design Bad Design" series about level up systems?

I always really like low number rpgs like bug fables, where early-area enemies can still be deadly if you aren’t prepared.