Yesterday I talked about how in recent MMOs, items play a greater role in a characters power than they have in the past, to the point that items DEFINE your character. While I believe items are indeed a very important part of the MMO formula, placing too much weight on their importance diminishes the value of each character to little more than a tier x clone.

In order for characters to have greater personal importance, they must also have inherent weaknesses. Risk vs Reward. Allow characters to posses greater power, but add a crutch to each choice as a balance. For example, allow a character to be attended to the element of fire. Give them greatly increased fire resistance, greater strength, an enrage ability, perhaps some purely cosmetic changes to show their fire affinity. Now along with those bonuses, lower water resistance, give them a to-hit penalty, perhaps some kind of rage feature that hinders you in some way.

Make such a feature important early and often in the game. Perhaps some quests rely heavily on fire resistance, making your character ideal for the quest. Another might focus on water resistance, making you unable to complete the quest without a significantly greater effort. When giving out the quest, give the player a choice, either tackle the fire side, or water side. Perhaps the quest reward could further enhance the disparity between resistance, by giving you a fire ring for the fire side, and vice versa. This theme can continue throughout the leveling process, until finally you are a godlike character around fire elements, but very weak vs water. Perhaps some raid could involve twins as a boss, one of fire, one of water. Those that are strong with fire would be tasked to deal with the fire twin, and vice versa again. This would give your character greater importance, regardless of your items.

That’s just one example. Now give each character five or so choices, and the likelihood of your character ending up identical to another near the end of the leveling process is greatly reduced, and gives you as the player far more choice in shaping how YOU want your character to end up.

To further emphasize the power of a character over just their items, the overall importance of items should be reduced. Instead of gear making up 90% of your stats, reduce this to 50%, or even less. Place greater importance on stat growth between races and classes, so that in the early game, each feels somewhat similar, and as you level your race/class combination separates you further and further from the others. For example, a hulking race vs an agile race, both played as a ‘tank’ class. In the beginning, the difference in hit points and avoidance would be minimal, yet by end-game, you have a very substantial margin for both. Now your raiding guild goes in with both tanks. Boss one hits hard, but not often, making the hulking race ideal to absorb the blows and survive, while giving the healers time to recover. Boss two hits fast, but with smaller damage. The agile race tank is now the main tank, due to his higher avoidance he is less of a drain on mana than his hulking counterpart. Each tank is unique and important to his guild, as well as being tailored to his controllers play style and preference.

Would this require greater balance tuning than the simple pallet swap that we have now? Of course, but how much depth is added as a result? You could re-roll the same race/class combo, yet by max level have a greatly different character, and in the end, I think that would add far more to a game than increasing the level cap or adding new zones to keep the clones happy.