The Rush to Endgame Pt. 2 - Filling In The Levels

Game developers are not stupid.  They know that leveling up, increasing numbers, and filling in the bars to completion is inherently satisfying in a staggering amount of players.  When they make endgame content, which in this situation meaning content that comes only when you're at max level, they include all sorts of methods for increasing your own numbers, whether it's grinding reputation, climbing pvp ranks, or acquiring shinier and better gear in places you can only access once you've finished the leveling process.

The smart ones will have these systems running concurrently with the leveling process, so that when leveling abruptly ends, these other systems that incentivize play will remain familiar to the player.  To do otherwise is to have an experience where you play two completely different games, the leveling "tutorial", and the "real game" at the end in which you do completely different things during leveling.  This sort of tonal dissonance between the two sections is very aggravating, and akin to having a nailbiting horror movie end in a ten minute light-hearted slapstick section that intentionally tries to make the previous horror bit pointless.  One of those things for the avant-garde and those bored with the genre, but for people just wanting to enjoy and immerse themselves in what's going on, it's jarring.

In which case you may ask yourself... why halt leveling at all?  Part of it comes down to design choices.  If the game is very strictly gated by levels, allowing uncapped leveling can quickly make any challenge set forth pointless.  To explicate, imagine a single-player game with an RPG-ish structure.  In this game, you are only allowed to set foot in the dragon's lair once you are level 60, and anytime before than that you cannot even enter the zone.  The game will not let you, and even if it did you would very quickly become slaughtered as inherent level differences between targets carry strict penalties.  The game designer for this example included this feature so that players would be compelled to stick only to zones appropriate to their level and not try to level too quickly by fighting enemies a much higher level than them.

At level 60, this fictional dragon in this fictional game is a very tough challenge, and the dev team put a lot of heart, soul and effort into this encounter.  A player trivializing it would basically waste the time they put into making it, in their mind.  Regardless, the player fights the dragon, and finds himself not up to the challenge.  If the player can still level, he can simply grind experience until he holds the advantage and take out the dragon, trivializing the difficulty of the encounter away from execution of game mechanics, into simply spending more time killing what's likely to be far less challenging monsters.  So is the solution simply to water down levels to be far less important?  Not necessarily. 

It all comes back to knowing what kind of game you're making.  In my personal experience as a player, games where levels can make a huge swinging difference are absolutely fine and even great when you're playing games where you're expected to start from the beginning often, such as in roguelikes.  That kind of game, however, is completely different than a game where you're expected to invest a lot of time into a very small set of characters.

Again, there's no particularly good or bad game mechanic, just a good or bad situation to implement them.  They are multiple different tools in your toolbox, and I hope that as you grow as a skilled craftsman, you are able to determine when to use the hammer, and when to use the mallet.