Senior Staff Writer Chris "Pwyff" Tom decided to go in-depth with what he thinks makes for the perfect MMORPG. Today he's focusing on character progression and the leveling process.

To further expand on the topic of creating a sense of progression with challenging content, one game that is constantly harangued by reviewers and players alike is NCsoft's Aion, with its reputation for ultra-high experience requirements and grindy gameplay. To be honest, I have a bit of a soft spot for Aion, and I still remember those sleepless nights I spent looking for the best staff for my Chanter. Unfortunately, where Aion fell short of its mark was in its lack of content depth at all levels. Granted, I always had a few quests telling me what to kill next, but at no point did I feel that any level was different from any other. At the level cap there were all sorts of neat activities to do (Dredgion, rifting, PvPing in the Abyss), but for everything prior to the cap, there were only a handful of dungeons I could run through as I slowly made my way to the top.

Looking forward, although I don't see any games on the horizon that promise a slow progression style like Final Fantasy XI, I'm definitely interested in seeing how Guild Wars 2 turns out. In a dev blog posted almost a year ago, Game Designer Isaiah Cartwright promised players that "progression in Guild Wars 2 is way more than just leveling. We have achievements, trait collection, crafting, dungeons, skill collection, items, and much more." One way the team plans to deliver on this promise is to flatten out experience requirements across all levels so that the time requirements from level to level shouldn't increase as you go higher. In other words, if you're chugging through content at a specific pace, you can expect to level up at that pace right to the cap.

I'm also hoping that The Secret World will really succeed in its take on character skill progression.  In The Secret World, there are no classes or levels for players to grind through; instead, everything you do yields some experience toward the accumulation of a skill point. From here, players can invest that skill point in one of 500+ unique skills, although they are only allowed to bring seven active skills and seven passive skills into battle. While the promise of thousands of unique character builds is really appealing, I'm most excited about seeing how Funcom maintains that strong sense of character progression with such a loose system of skills.

In the end, with a lot of our current MMORPGs in the market, it feels like leveling and character progression are really just obstacles that players need to push through before they can get to the "real" game. While I'm not saying that this is a "make or break" aspect for aspiring MMORPGs, I'm still really hoping that upcoming MMORPGs take character progression seriously and they try to create a strong, immersive game at all levels.

Next time, I'll talk about my favorite topic: PvP!

Christopher "Pwyff" Tom, Senior Staff Writer