Levelling the playing field

So, I was playing Rift the other day, and I got onto this mission thread where you summon a Titan, lose control over it, it runs amok, and you have to perform a bunch of other tasks which enable you to craft a weapon which is capable of destroying it.

Well, that's the idea.

Except in my case (and I suspect myriad other players too), I summoned the Titan, lost control over it, then promptly killed it (in an admittedly) close battle.

But the point is, I killed it ahead of the story arc.  Obviously, as is another one of my major bugbears with MMOs, the thing respawned moments later, allowing me to complete the right quests and kill it 'properly' at the right time.

Now this should never really of happened.  Don't get me started on the whole respawning thing at this juncture - that's enough for a mega-post all its own.  But sticking with, for a moment, the classic old skool way of handling quests in MMOs, I should never have been able to kill the beast at that level, at that point.  I'd go so far as to say, even with a group of players, we shouldn't be able to slay such a beast.

Firstly, if you're going to make your enemies sound (and for the sake of the story) tough / threatening / awe-inspiring... then actually make them that.  Make them 10 levels higher than you.  Make it nigh on impossible to complete that quest outside of gaining a few levels and coming back to it later.  Keep the quest line going until you're tough enough, and let the players come back to such a challenging enemy when they are capable of slaying it.

Secondly, it got me to thinking about the distribution of level-specific entities across the MMO landscape.  Typically speaking, MMO worlds are set up in such a way that players move from region to region as they advance thru the levels.  They know they start out in the Beleaguered Isles, where everything is a convenient level 1-4, and then they move to the Dead Coast, where everything is levels 5-8 and they move inland to the Forest of Doom, where everything is 9-12 and so forth.  Quite frankly, and not to put too fine a point on it, that's a load of crap.  Yes I understand the reasons for it, but the genre has been around for quite a few years now, time to get a little more sophisticated.

When you see Kings and Generals and other leader types, I think they should all be pretty high level.  Even if it means that a lower levels you have no way of defeating them.  I'd like to see quest lines that take you back to regions you left long ago, to finish someone off that was previously too high a level to defeat.  I'd also like to see combat compressed a bit, so lower levels do have more of a chance to kill higher levels.  I know this may seem a little counter-intuitive when slated up alongside what I've mentioned above, but the two can work in harmony, and provide for situations where a high level King enemy can effectively get mobbed by a mass of low level characters (not without killing quite a few in the process, mind) which would be (for me at least) a welcome nod toward realism without taking things too far.