One of the more unusual things about Brighter Shores, the newly-launched MMO from RuneScape creator Andrew Gower and his brother Paul, is its profession system. As we explained in our recent dive into the game, professions are region-specific, so when you move from one episode to the next, your professions, including combat skills, are left behind. Not everyone loves the system, but in an update posted today on Steam, developer Fen Research asked that everyone “please give it a chance.”
The idea of the “breadth and depth” system, as the studio calls it, is to ensure new content remains open and fun for all players, while avoiding level-related pitfalls that are common in other RPGs and MMOs. Some games impose level caps to ensure nobody gets too far ahead of the crowd, the studio wrote, while others auto-scale content based on player level. But neither system is ideal: Level caps trap players at arbitrary ceilings for extended periods of time, while auto-scaling “means levelling up doesn’t actually achieve anything.”
Brighter Shores takes a different approach by gating player skills while ensuring they remain relevant and accessible. “It is relatively easy to progress to each new episode (breadth), but even when you have reached the latest episode you are nowhere near finished,” the developers wrote. “Instead, you can at any time choose any of the episodes you have unlocked and continue to level up further in that episode (depth).
“Each episode also has harder ‘sidequests’ for this purpose. These sidequests are intended for the players who want to put in more hours, and give a further reason to keep levelling up your professions in earlier episodes.”
Episodes in the game are “heavily interlinked,” they continued, so moving back and forth between them will be a regular thing for most players. The goal is to ensure that Brighter Shores feels “new and fresh” with the release of each new episode, and the developers say it works: “All of our testing has shown that, once you get used to it, unlocking a fresh combat profession once in a while actually becomes quite fun.”
“Once you get used to it” is a pretty big caveat, albeit one that applies to a lot of things in life. Even so, the dev team is sticking to its guns, although a few changes are being made to help players along that path: The level shown next to your character’s name now reflects the total level score across all professions, which “better emphasizes that nothing has been reset and that all of your earlier progress is still relevant” when you move between levels. Content that requires multiple combat levels to complete is also being looked at, as are better ways to communicate how the system works in the first place, so players don’t think their episode one skills are rendered useless when they go into episode two.
“Being able to add new episodes to the game that everyone can enjoy and without resulting in loads of ‘dead content’ is very important,” the dev team wrote. “We think our ‘breadth and depth’ design achieves this, but perhaps we didn’t explain it very well!”
Perhaps not, but it sure looks like Brighter Shores is doing something right. It’s way too early to judge its long-term viability but there are currently almost 16,000 people playing, according to SteamDB, which is not bad at all for a small, relatively niche indie MMO.
The reaction to the update seems largely positive too: Some players just don’t care for the system but quite a few others express appreciation for the clarity and a willingness to give it a proper shot. How it holds up over the long run remains to be seen, but there seems to be a willingness to roll with it for now, and that’s a good place to start.
