Horizontal VS Vertical Design [MMOPINION] 

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I prefer horizontal, there's grind but its not to get up to the standard but rather to have options in that same standard and I like that freedom

“an expansion isn’t actually expanding on the game when it’s the only relevant part of the game to actually play” I love when you do these videos because i feel like this is your niche! This type of analysis of games and genre’s is where you shine and I can only hope that other companies are watching and take notes.

You know, every content creator says "I would not recommend something I don't personally like" in their sponsor segments. Josh is one of the few that I belive when he says it.

My biggest issue with vertical power creep is that it just gets old very quickly. One can only go through so many cycles of power creep reset. The way I felt at the end of Cataclysm is the same way I felt at the end of Pandaria and the way I felt at the beginning of Cataclysm is the same way I felt in Pandaria. It feels so articial when my power level just flucuates extremely predictably in set cycles. It stops me from feeling like I'm getting more powerful and more like the predictable ups and downs of a rollercoaster. Still fun, but not exactly exciting after a couple rides.

I'm kind of a...diagonal player. I want to enjoy the process, but I also want there to be some point to what I'm doing. Being the absolute best doesn't matter to me much if at all, but just doing arbitrary content with little to no reward gets dull fairly quickly. That reward doesn't NEED to be stat-based necessarily, but there needs to be something beyond just the experience itself to avoid it wearing out its welcome.

I like the fact that I can take a break from Gw2 and still come back without my character being gimped. Also, it’s nice to be able to jump around different maps and do different things depending on how I feel with everything still being relevant.

I always appreciate horizontal progression. It makes me go back to play again an again for a long time without any issue, unlike its counterpart which gives off massive FOMO and once I don't play for a certain period of time I just tell myself that I'm certainly behind everyone else and I just never touch the game again.

There's one thing on vertical progression I'd like to say: you can still have a great experience alongside the gaining of power. It doesn't have to be a mindless grind. However, games that have both the experience and the reward are very few and far between (I believe)

I like vertical progression, but not for being more powerful than others. I like being able to look back and see how I've progressed myself and become more powerful than I was before. A bit of horizontal choice in which improvement to get first is all I need to feel like I'm deciding my own journey.

I just really enjoy how Gw2 dosen't have a sub. I wish more MMos would do that. I really do.

Seeing Guild Wars 2 sponsor Josh makes me so happy! I play GW2 since 2015 and back then it was so niche that after path of fire and the icebrood saga being announced I thought it would just die. But it didn’t! Arenanet really pulled themselves together, they reset their goals and now GW2 is thriving more than ever! It is truly great to see an mmo rise from the brink of death, especially such a great one. There has never been a better time to play GW2 than now.

Seeing Josh get the recognition he deserves is awesome and I'm happy to tag along for the ride, grats on the sponsor !

I am a huge fan of horizontal games. I'm also glad Fashion Wars 2 gets more attention. When it comes to horizontal experiences, that is the game to play. The rest of the guild is all stacked on legendaries that require months of grind? No problem, I can still keep up with my exotic/ascended gear while chasing new fashion choices from the expansions over stronger eq since the difference is not very high.

Most MMO's have both systems in place to a greater or lesser degree, but are weighted to one or the other. good video, keep them coming!

One thing i love about guild wars 2 is how your attacks change depending on your weapon. Just started, I'm an elementilist and uts described as a highly versatile class. You have up to 5 attacks, sigis not withstanding, but those attacks can change if you have a different weapon.you can also switch between 4 different elements, changing your attacks. Once you unlock the ability to switch weapons during combat, you now have at least 40 different attacks at any given time. Madness.

Coming from 13 years of WoW and 2 years of FF14, this video made me decide to give GW2 a shot. Makes me sad that I didn't give this game a chance sooner. So thank you for that. Great video.

Good to see this kind of video. It’s become increasingly rare over the last few months.

Horizontal progression is good for World Map. That's something I learned from WoW and GW2. And that's something I want to see figured out with new MMOs by developers, I want to come back to low level zones to find something else to do there, not only pick some ores and good bye...

I'm definitely a horizontal type. I like experimenting, finding new ways to overcome challenges. As Josh stated, the process is more fulfilling for me than the end result. I could create a build that has turned out pretty terrible but tinkering with it and drawing out its full potential is an enjoyable experience. The experience and knowledge from that process is also valuable for future builds. Though as you said some games introduce so many features that finding something enjoyable is the most daunting task and you often feel burnout from searching for something interesting before actually doing it.

This is an interestingly well timed video for me. I came back to Guild Wars 2 after a 10 year hiatus in which I played from launch and no-lifed to get ahead of the curve. In that time I acquired a full set of exotic crafted gear, the highest quality at the time, explored all the content in the personal story quests and the overworld. Shortly afterward through a combination of burnout and running out of things to do, I left. Fast forward 10 years, I log back on again. I open my mail to see 10 birthday letters, organize my inventory for an hour before realizing material storage now exists and muddle through the several dozen of freebie consumables and skins I've been sent. Swap my TMNT Shredder looking gear for a full set of Luminous and I embarked on 'new' content. While the game is as high-quality as ever, I might have made the realization I enjoy vertical progression more. I still feel like my character is powerful and I'm knocking down story quests with no real challenge or personal investment in the story. I don't remember any of these characters and they're addressing me like I'm their commander-in-chief. It really raised interesting questions for me on the reasons I play games and the tradeoffs of horizontal and vertical progression.

An important point I think was missed when discussing horizontal progression is the importance of in-game cosmetics. While those can seem trivial, think about FFXIV, a game that is about 80% vertical progression, and how much effort people put into running older content to obtain glamours, mounts, and furniture. Those can become a easy form of creating horizontal progression for older content that keeps it relevant well beyond the point where the gear is no longer the "best" thing.

Watching this video makes me realize how well OSRS balances vertical vs horizontal progression. OSRS is my "main" MMO but like most players I have taken a couple extended breaks from the game. When I've returned it's always extremely easy to get back into things. There might be new ways to train skills but the old methods still work too. There might be new gear added but my old gear is still perfectly viable. You just consult the wiki a few times when you run into something new and before you know it you're gaming again.

I used to be a verticle progression player; I wanted to reach max power and max gear ASAP. But as I've matured and gotten a bit older, I find that the experience of playing and having fun has more value to me than just grinding for "moar powa". That's why I keep going back to Guild Wars 2, it's just such a pleasant change of pace from the constant grind of many other MMOs and I always really enjoy playing, even if I end up not really "getting much done". Just playing is reward enough.

Love this video! There's something (somewhat) related to this I'm wondering if you'd be interested in talking about. Dead cities in MMO's. In the MMO I play people either congregate around the starter cities or the endgame city of each expansion. What are some good ways to keep at least a decent population in cities usually accessible through the middle of progression?

Really makes me think about Warframe and how it has problems with both power creep and feature creep. There's so many things to unlock and so many tiers of power to achieve that trying to get a new player into it is just way too daunting. Such a cool game, but the glue has turned to rubber with time.

I'm a huge fan of horizontal progression. This is why I play ESO, as it has so many unique sets to attain and while some are more effective than others, the variety allows for countless playstyles. In the same vein I also prioritize Roleplay over performance, mostly grinding for things that allow me to customize my aesthetic or playstyle

FireFall, an MMO shooter that's no longer around, in it's early days had a great horizontal system in place. The world was truly open, with dynamic events appearing in every corner created by the game itself, like a mini-dungeon opening, or a random road encounter, or *literal city-hub sieges.* As well as player made ones, for example, you could use a "Scanhammer" to survey nearby terrain for crafting materials to mine, then call down a huge drill (called Thumper) on that location (again, anywhere in the world) that needs to be defended from waves of mobs as it mines resources, and the longer you defend it - the bigger it's mineral reward would be for all players that participated. It's class system was awesome too, you had 5 class archetypes with 2 sub-classes each, *and you could swap between them freely at any time,* while still being useful at any point of the game. And then they decided to scrap all of that, and went for a good-old-rotten vertical, level locked progression system, with static quests and no mining or crafting at all. The game was shut down shortly after, lol.

These video essays are damn close to legendary quality. Absolutely superb writing, clarity of explanation, speaking style, and decent visuals to accompany the essay. I also really love that the subject of the video is one that's going to be relevant for a wide section of the gaming public. Wider than the number of people interested in some flavour of the month game, at least. It means that if I'm trying to recall a specific quote or aspect of your argument, I'll be able to recognize at least which video to go to to reference the idea, unlike all those discussion videos I've watched that were titled based on some date, or based on some irrelevant news story of the week.

9:46 - Vertical progression has the same problem in reverse. Vets have to tell new players which features have been overwritten in the efficiency hierarchy and need to be ignored.

I've been both in the same game at different times. For example in FFXIV I have done progression raiding, but right now I'm focusing on gathering and collecting pretty things for my character to wear. I always feel my relationship with MMOs is healthier when I take a more casual attitude.

I've been playing Lineage 2 for so long so GW2 was the first time I'd ever played a game with Horizontal Progression. Loving it so far.

This is why I like PVP games like overwatch because Your strength is not determined by your stats, it’s determined by the unique abilities each character has and your skill. Each character has advantages and disadvantages but no one is stronger than anyone else, I wish they would apply this concept to an MMORPG

As a PVP player in both WoW and GW2 player I can solemnly say that vertical games are more task oriented and horizontal games are more casual oriented. WoW felt like a job and GW2 feels like a pickup game when you want to relax. GW2 gives you the options to do what you want and WoW tells you what you have to do

It doesn't have to be a dichotomy. A game can have vertical progression up until max level, then become more of a horizontal progression, so you get the satisfaction a seeing the damage numbers go up, while not having older content become obsolete. Also, if we say that a vertical progression has a 90° line and horizontal progression has a 0° line, you can very much have a game where your progression line is at 10° or 20°. So over the years, with new expansions, there would be a slight amount of power creep, but not enough to make old content useless. And the focus of the new items is not directly to be more powerful than older ones, but to give more builds variety. Of course, with more builds variety, there will be more ways to min/max your character, leading to a little bit of powercreep.

You hit on something very relevant to my experience playing EverQuest, which is a game that has both too much power creep and feature creep. If I logged into Live EQ today, not only would all of my items be outdated and nearly useless, but I would have no idea what I was doing because so many features and systems have changed. That's why I play the Time-Locked Progression servers every year. It keeps me in my power and feature comfort zone, which may be the real reason I enjoy it so much.

I like the way you categorised and elaborated the vertical or horizontal progression. It's very concise and relatable to personal experiences

Thanks man, you managed to put words to something I couldn't. For a while I noticed me and my friends had been playing less and less games together, and when we did we'd always have completely different goals/pathways to getting through our game/what we wanted to do in it. Using your words, my friends would all be vertical players while I am a horizontal player. For example: take a game of minecraft. We'd start a world and within a week my friends have already beaten the end, got fully enchanted netherite armor, and made a fortress castle to store it in. Meanwhile I am still using iron armor, have no enchants, and haven't even touched the nether, but if you'd look at our gameplay you'd see they basically beelined everything while I had journeyed to a distant jungle, got an army of parrots, tracked down some wolves and llamas, and had begun making a long tracked journey to the farlands using nothing but a mobile base made of llamas. Whenever we play MMO's they always try to go through wikis to find the best possible stuff while I take my time, read through the story, and only go for the items that cross my path and see where my journey takes me, though more often than not I try to give myself some challenge as well like only use noncombat equipment or only kill specific types of enemies, etc.

I've played and enjoyed both types of games. However, I'm in my 30s, and when I started playing games, they were played simply to have fun. I find that a lot of vertical progression games aren't attempting to be fun, nor are they generally good. They mostly just jingle keys in front of your face in order to trigger very cheap dopamine hits. They want you to feel like trash in order to make you want to prove that they're worth being on top. Especially when PvP is involved. It's extremely predatory and honestly immoral in many cases. That doesn't make all horizontal progression games good in comparison, but something like GW2 never attempts to mess with your brain in that way. You play to have fun, take things at your own pace and do whatever you want to do. And sure, having so many options available to you can be overwhelming at times, but I'd take that over being exploited and manipulated by vertical progression games any damn day.

Seeing pre-searing Ascalon always makes me cry from joy. Props on the Me/Mo build too :D

Loved the video, i was really looking forward a way to really understand how horizontal progression works since i've always played vertial mmos up until now and i am willing to give gw2 my all! Also thanks for the xp boost link i didn't even know it was a thing! Claimed and subbed to you !

Both are great but what gw2 does great is that i cant stop playing for months and i dont miss anything. Tho I would love some new pvp maps :V

I feel like I'd enjoy horizontal progression more than vertical if the actual experiences were flawless. I love playing a combat medic during a big tough world boss battle. I hate when other players cheese a boss by having a group of 5 summon it before a group of 50 pop in to stomp it.

Excellent video & thank you for the free pack! Guild Wars 1 & 2 have been just about my two favorite MMOs of all time, so I'm glad to hear how much you enjoy 2 as well. I never really thought of the Horizontal / Vertical before when playing MMOs, but now a LOT of my choices in games have started to make sense.

One thing that is great about elite specs in GW2: To unlock those, you need points that you can earn by doing differing special tasks on the maps. If you come back to GW2 after a new expansion and thus new specs released, you immediately have some task to work towards: earn those points to unlock the new specs to try. You still have a lot of freedom to achieve this (esp. if you still got stuff from previous expansions open), but at least you got a rough direction and can ease into the experience while you unlock the new specs.

Guild Wars 2 build variety is expanding with every patch, it's actually insane. The game is on a positive news streak right now, it feels so good!

as a GW2 vet since launch, I appreciate nothing more than knowing that my gear and progression in the game will NEVER be invalidated. My legendary armor and weapons? Always the best. My level? always maxed. My class preferences? Always relevant. GW2 is a game that wants you to play it as a game for the sake of being a game and any progress you earn is yours forever. I don't know that I could ever play a vertical progression game again now that I'm so used to never having to worry about it. It's just great.

As an OSRS player who mains an ironman, this video really helped me realize WHY I love the game mode so much. To me, I enjoy the journey to the top and being at the top. Getting a twisted bow/scythe/shadow were amazing feelings, but getting progressively better gear/pbs/being more comfortable in end game pvm were equally great. I think I enjoy the idea of vertical with the journey aspect of horizontal design. Maining an ironman really changes the way I view OSRS and, consequently, all other games.

Thanks for the great video Josh! Always appreciated.

I've been playing Guild Wars 1 since 2006 and then Guild Wars 2 since release with minor breaks and I love the horizontal design. Even Guild Wars 1 feels not outdated and is imo very well aged and still tons of fun to play

This is exactly why I'm hooked onto OSRS so much. It feels like a vertical design game with horizontal design mechanics. A very finely balanced mix of the two, an experience that doesn't feel like it completely shifts into one or the other design philosophy. There IS an objectively best choice for each of the combat styles, the best method of gaining XP while skilling, best runes to craft, best trees to chop, etc. The skills themselves are quite literally the vertical scale by which you hop from one stepping stone to another on the way to the top. Hell, the "prestige" that comes with owning lvl 99 skill capes or the best sets is what drives players forward most of the time in Runescape. HOWEVER, the way the game presents itself is by giving you the choices on how you want to achieve that top and because it takes so long to transfer from one stage of the game to the other, older content is never invalidated or overshadowed by new content. Usually, because grinds can take 100-200hours, you end up trying all the content available anyway, purely out of boredom or wanting a change of pace while still working toward that overarching vertical goal. When there are multiple training options for an overarching goal, you end up with the satisfaction of the experience of the horizontal design, while still getting the satisfaction of having reached the vertical design pyramid top.

Thanks for this, this video really put into context something I've felt whenever I play MMOs with friends.

One of the things I love about FFXIV is it manages to keep old content relevant in multiple different ways. You level multiple Jobs in FFXIV on one character, so all of the old dungeons are relevant for your alt job progress. You also run Roulettes that put you in a random(ish) dungeon that your job can run, or lower, and scales you down to that level so that new players also don't feel stuck unable to run a dungeon no one wants to run anymore. The reward isn't exactly gear one can use at max level, but you get tokens you can save up to buy high level gear. In a way it kind of combines horizontal and vertical design together.

As a dev who advises Blizz, Amazon, and other major MMO publishers, I can say that the best balance for end-game, done correctly is neither, but a combination of both because you hit all the right spots for players of all types, it is not easy and comes down to proper tuning/scaling and balancing.

While I do enjoy vertical design, I'm definitely someone who enjoys the process more. If a normal vertical player consume content so they can become stronger, I become stronger so I can unlock more content. I especially love the leveling process in MMORPG, unlocking new areas, learning new spells and abilities, seeing my character go from a complete novice to a capable master. It's just so much fun to experience.

I m so glad that I found this channel.. I was always attracted to MMOs all the way from when Perfect World came to Brazil (10+ years ago), now thanks to you I know why I liked so much and what aspects Idid like

A great topic and something I love to pick apart with friends. To go a layer deeper to this too you have to think about players who manage to hybridize and enjoy both forms of progression with aspects of both. There are major 2 things when picking your game and thats; what form of progression does it involve and then, in what ways do I enjoy progressing. I personally prefer vertical progression alot more, but I recognize and respect the virtues of horizontal and I take my time and slow down to enjoy my progression and smell the daisies when I am playing even vertical games. I love this topic, well done!

I much prefer horizontal progression, though I do enjoy having some vertical progression layered on top of it. I'm still into Pokemon because it does just that. Leveling and evolution are the only systems that are purely vertical, while unlocking additional encounters and moves is much more horizontal. I guess I could also use the weapons in Souls games as an example. The difference in movesets and stat scaling means collecting weapons is mostly horizontal, while upgrading an individual weapon or stats is the vertical layer on top.

When I see horizontal progression I right away think of Final Fantasy XI, I find it hard to believe any other game did horizontal progression better than FFXI at lvl 75 cap. Your equipment was situational and could be relevant for years. I am suprised this wasnt an example in the video.

😮 I just listened to a whole novel in 19 minutes... holy shit dude. Well done, and well said.

I am so glad I found your channel. So good.

GW2 is such a great mmo

Horizontal player for sure. I've been playing guild wars 2 for almost its entire life span and I was a big fan of Guild Wars 1. I loved exploring and discovering new skills and builds which are different but not necessarily better than what I had before. I love finding new armor and weapons which have different uses or open up different builds. Vertical progression only keeps me interested for so long. Eventually I burn out and I stop caring about the number increase of this skill and I begin to be disillusioned by the fact that many of my favorite skills I've grown to love are either replaced or obsolete.

I played GW2 when it first came out in 2012 and beat the main game and all of its content by February of 2013, just as Fractals was becoming a thing. I didn't play for many years and have now started playing GW2 again from the beginning with a brand new character and the game is sooooooo different. It is filled with so many features (they even retooled all the professions) and various types of achievements and dailies and currencies and all that, that it feels like a completely different game.

Been playing GW2 first time recently it's one of the most casual MMO's I've played but in a good way I enjoy it very much. It respects your time wonderfully and it's quite fun to play with the map exploration and mounts.

These definitions (and some of the associations) are a little off, although there is a lot of merit to this video. Vertical progression in game design is about improvement, getting better at the game, whether that be overall or along a single path among several. This can manifest as classes, tiers in skill or ability trees, levels, stat increases, better gear, and upgrades. This _includes_ new abilities of slight to moderate changes to gameplay that improve your ability to perform certain game loops. Vertical progression is not restricted to numerical increases. Horizontal progression in game design is about increasing your repertoire of ways to engage with the game. This means abilities with moderate to major differences in how you interact with things (eg short versus mid versus long-ranged, fast yet weak versus slow yet powerful, targeting enemies versus allies, single-target versus a few targets versus large aoes, damage and/or healing and/or status effects, burst versus DoT, etc), or expanding the range of things that you can interact with entirely (eg flight, environmental interactions, and tLoZ items in general). These are _often_ universal additions, applicable across many to all players even when vertical systems are also present (eg, usable and beneficial for most/all classes). Horizontal progression generally means that it does not improve your other abilities but adds a new one. This is a spectrum, not a hard binary. New abilities or gear through vertical progression can also add in horizontal progression (eg a new skill with both superior damage _and_ status effects, mobility effects, or other features, or superior gear with playstyle-altering benefits), whereas horizontal progression can occur as independent vertical progression along different features or areas of the game. There is also a difference between vertical/horizontal _character_ progression and vertical/horizontal progression along _other_ game axes, such as narrative/plot/story (furthering one grander story versus multiple smaller), map (going deeper into or adding onto one area or plotline versus accessing multiple), social (rising high in one guild versus getting along with many groups), and so on. Most games have multiple axes of progression simultaneously, *especially* mmorpgs. While vertical progression _tends_ to lend itself more to goal-oriented gameplay and/or motivations, it is not categorically so. Some people enjoy the journey and/or process of improvement, and a fixation on horizontal progression is still a fixation on progress or accomplishment (a goal) rather than process. Vertical progression systems lend themselves to goal-oriented mentality because who and what a player can engage with tends to be limited based on their vertical progression as, setting aside when adequate vertical progression renders someone an altogether non-viable candidate for certain content, it is an opportunity cost for others who are at the far end of the progression line to take someone lower down the rung (costing them time and stress compared to someone further along) or sometimes a competitive disadvantage (pvp). It is more a symptom of the problem of designing mmorpgs so heavily around endgame than it is about vertical progression in itself. Similarly, while horizontal progression has its own sort of ease and casualness with its own type of flow state, not needing to worry about 'keeping up' to nearly the same degree, completing this can easily become a checklist and effectively a collection of smaller, directionless vertical progression systems. Vertical progression systems enable their own form of ease of mind in removing the need to impose (possibly arbitrary) goals onto the game and enable its own type of flow state in relaxing into a single clear activity and objective.

I am fond of a mix. Ideally a very low scaling vertical with a few routes to increase. I like having to make choices between bigger numbers and unique effects. In team pvp especially, if there are more choices, there are more interesting outcomes. If a game is too vertical, there is always a correct answer and you have fewer variations of the fight to react to. If the game has too many unique effects, however, they become overly difficult to balance.

I love your breakdown of the benefits of both! Personally as I go through phases of being able to play a lot and then not at all, I really enjoy the horizontal progression system of Guild Wars 2. I can leave for a year, and come right back to where I was. Of course there are new things to learn, but the older content has not become irrelevant.

This was very insightful and deeper than this topic covered. Thanks for covering this, as far as games go, this is useful design information as devs aim to hardness the optimal challenge of both the horizontal and vertical landscape.

FINALLY. A video where Josh has more than one hotbar in FFXIV.

Great video as always. Side note, everytime I see runescape a little light inside me flickers. I truly love that game.

Horizontal progression for me, no wonder I love Warframe I love when games have a ton of difference in content Warframe is a good example of it has a lot of features and due to the community it’s easy to understand what to do to unloock what you need and there is just so much to do: normal gameplay, mechs, space missions, skateboards, levels, mmo maps, characters, customization… It really only needs home personalization like in 90% of the other mmo’s to be perfect which is weird considering the personalization of your ship and of the clan dojo are already present (and yes, it is a money-sink I love)

Man, I've only recently been exposed to this channel, but I LOVE this content! I love MMO's, and I've just never really seen another channel that does a true deep-dive into design choices like this. This may have honestly become my favorite channel, almost overnight!

Really solid video, definitely got me to think about this more objectively. I'm 100% a horizontal progression player. I don't have the time to play games enough to chase the vertical ladder all the way to the top. Guild Wars 1 is still my MMO of choice, and you nailed it right near the end in talking about it, the adventure, the progression, it's all very horizontal. Yes there are some end game areas that require optimization, but you can actually do pretty much the entire game without having the absolute best equipment. I think horizontal progression is the better choice overall, more options on how to build yourself will allow a wider variety of players to feel like they're still significant. There will always be the Meta, but I think in a vertical progression game, the Meta is determined by the developers, whereas in a horizontal game, the Meta is determined by the player base.

Really enjoy watching the game, hope to get into it soon!

Dang I thought you were gonna talk about vertical vs horizontal map design and got excited

I started MMO's in EQ and DAoC. Back then verticle progression was pretty much all there was. When GW2 came out it changed things. I have played it since day 1 with breaks in between but all of my gear has stayed BIS the whole time. The metas change, dps/support may go up or down but my gear is always still great. That is why I love GW2.

My first real MMO experience was Tera, which was a *heavily* Vertical oriented game. But the pacing of those patches that made your BIS Visionmaker gear obsolete gave me whiplash, plus if you didn't have the top tier gear you'd often get gatekept out of basic content that was required TO get the BIS gear. Eventually the gear creep got so high to the point that any break whatsoever was extremely punishing, and not even your achievements / laurels were safe. Because they frequently removed old dungeons and other content, the achievements went with them. And instead of cumulative achievement points they'd often go down after content was deleted, losing your hard work and progress and forcing you to do it all over again. I hated that a lot, and got frustrated as hell after my Diamond laurel got reset for the fifth or sixth time. Then the publishers decided to fast track the leveling to zoom you up to level cap so you could get on that Korean grind faster, destroying any semblance of a storyline and removing countless side storylines in the process. It left the game feeling barren, where the only thing to do was to play the marketplace like a slot machine or afk in Highwatch waiting for groups that would usually kick you out if your gear score wasn't at the top. I do not miss ANY of that. I currently play GW2, and I must say I love the horizontal progression a lot more. I like seeing my mastery number go up. I like collecting achievements. I enjoy the terrible achievement related cosmetics. I'm slowly building up my Legendary Armory for the sake of convenience and, when I'm not learning raids, I'm usually just chilling in a city roleplaying, or trying to git gud at griffon stunt flying. And it's very satisfying to know that the legendary gear I've gotten will be relevant now and ten years from now, and I can just focus on the exploration and gameplay and having fun the way I want to play, not how the game dictates that I play. I'll also add that seeing old dungeons and content in Tera that my friends and I had great fun with being wiped from existence for the sake of 'power creep' always sucked (RIP Wonderholme). Meanwhile dungeons in GW2 scale you down so they can still be challenging and relevant regardless if you're at cap or not.

It's one of the reasons that I love the first 2 expansions of Everquest 1. The world gets bigger, there are more choices of places to go and items to get, and aside from the highest level of gear (only attainable by the most dedicated of guilds), there isn't that much vertical progression at the top.

I don't even play MMOs, but I follow you for this kind of discussion of basic game design principles and mechanics. This is very much applicable to single player ROGs as well, and really helped me articulate what I had been feeling for a long time time why I prefer certain games over others. I'm definitely a horizontal progression person all the way, because what it does is expand player options and adds to your repertoire and opens synergies with existing tools in your toolkit, rather than superceding what you already have.

After playing Guild Wars 2, I can never ever go back to vertical design. I like that older content is still relevant, I like enjoying the fruits of my labour and not having it be undone with the newest update, I enjoy the freedom of choice and how the game values my time, and most of all I'm never bored because of the replayability and the variety of content.

FF14 is such an interesting example of this I feel. It's predominantly *very* vertical, there is side content but much of it is gated behind the core vertical progression (levels, ilvl, and the MSQ), _however_ the journey there is so damn enjoyable (and the mechanics and culture encourage experienced players to do old content and help others up) that it becomes much more about that journey than the destination.

I'm a type of person that stays motivated so long as I feel like I'm making progress I can see. An example, mowing the lawn. I can look back at areas I already went over with my lawn mower. I can see the progress I'm making and that motivates me to keep going. MMO's for me need this same quality. I also highly value visual progression. I'm not sure if this makes me a vertical or horizontal player.

I've always known the terms and some of the surface thoughts one might have while thinking about horizontal vs. vertical but I've never thought about to this depth. A really well done video! Also this made me realize that the old challenge of bringing your friends to also play the mmo you enjoy often times comes down to exactly this personal preference. Still one question remains in my mind... how would you value players skill levels in both of these systems with regards to the core game mechanics. Would love to see an extension of this video for this topic! Just a few thoughts I had: Often times people are very knowledgeable how to do things or where to get things in either horizontal or vertical games but the actual evaluation of "skill"-power is done in fights. Speaking of PvE that would either be putting out massive dps or handling complex mechanics (tanking, positioning, timings etc.). In vertical systems a very good player can deliver a perfect performance but still fail because the math is saying so. There are times where a worse equipped but better skilled player pulls ahead of a bad skilled but well equipped player but always is just a narrow spectrum where this can happen. While in horizontal games players get up to speed somewhat quickly and then its purely down to the player whether you succeed or fall behind, which is why I prefer those and main Gw2... But still I believe this is hardly scratching the surface of the topic and is just based on my opinion as a mainly PvE player.. would love to see more about this topic! =)

I'm in the horizontal progression camp. Guild Wars made me realize this

maybe I'm an outlier because I prefer vertical progression but I also value the journey over the destination. like, I've leveled every class to cap in ffxiv, and instead of getting deep into endgame I'm mostly just doing it all again on an alt - I just really like the feeling of leveling up, filling those bars - but getting better gear afterward just doesn't do it for me

I value this distinction so much and I thank you for making it so clear for me. I have realised now that I vastly prefer horizontal mmo design.

I used to be a vertical guy. Played FFXIV for 8~ years and putting 5,000+ hours into it. Until I burned out... twice! After the first burn out instead of raiding I spent a lot more time crafting until I reached the peak of the crafting community making millions a day crafting end game gear to list on the Market Board. At my best I was making 10-20 million gil a day during the Stormblood expansion. Until I burned out during Shadowbringers sometime before the last expansion. Fast forward a year and now with the Steam release I'm in Guild Wars 2 and it's horizontal progression is much preferred. I can see myself putting quite a few hours into this game. I've discovered that I enjoy the process as you put it much more than the power itself. The act of playing the game and having fun is much more relaxing than grinding away on that gear treadmill only to become obsolete every 6 months.

I never actually thought about these things. Now I finally understand why I enjoyed playing Guild Wars 2 way more than I ever enjoyed playing WoW, even though my "progress" in WoW was greater. What a great video! So I guess I am into horizontal MMOs then.

As someone who is used to Destiny 2's vertical progression, sometimes it's nice to play something that isn't just a quest for more power.

I am more like a 30/70 split (V/H). I enjoy more power, but find it the most fun when a game has options for me to play, different abilities to try and ways to see how I can challange myself in various situations to think through things from a new angke to succeed.

You know I think I have a great example of a quit moment for me looking at this video, specifically for the game Neverwinter which I also used to play a lot as it was my first MMO. I had a Dwarf 2-hand warrior who was my main, i played him all the way to the end of the main story, I got started in the Sharynar campaign. I was max level at 60, I got my first real dye pack and a cool weapon appearance I could put on my existing sword, and a decent rune enchantment that gave it a nice buff and a cool Spellplague-fire flair. I was happy. Then the first expansion dropped. The level cap was raised to 70, I had to start again. Suddenly all my gear was irrelevant, and the appearance of said gear couldn't stay so my fanciful emerald-green armor and polearm went from being marginally high quality to dumpster lining overnight. I wasn't having fun with the new level system and wanted to go back and see if I could get some of the cool dyes again so I went back to the campaign I was on...and got swamped. Because although the Sharynar campaign had been tailored to max level players at the time I first played it, they changed the difficulty so that the only way you could feasilbly play was if you met the new level cap. I effectively could no longer play the content I had spent hours earning despite still having access to it as a previously max-level player. That's the last time I ever played Bjorn Grimbeard, and about when I stopped playing the MMO altogether.

An addition for Guild Wars 2, which is a horizontal progression game. There are still items and such to aim for, some of which are very difficult to obtain, but they grant you bragging rights/convenience(like unlimited stat selection and being account bound instead of soulbound), and of course the cosmetics ^-^

There are usually times in the lifecycle of an MMO when power creep stops by itself or becomes irrelevant (end of patches/expansions for instance). This is when horizontal features can outshine vertical content even in the eyes of competitive players. I usually do much more diverse stuff during these times, so I would say I like both :)

For me, the best value proposition of a game was FFT. I bought my copy the first year it came out and I've been playing it every single year since. Though, I don't use the disc anymore since I've ripped an iso and various other formats years ago. And I can now play it on handheld devices like my cell phone or tablet. If only I could read my old memory cards and import those saves. I've got at least 3 saves from old runs that I never finished and I really regret not buying a Dex drive when they first came out.

I'm more of a horizontal experience player. I don't like grind, nor chasing numbers, i like goofing around, trying various things, and learning new things about the game. I also very much like when the progression means expanding my toolset. Eve is awesome in this, because there is... both in equal measure, you could say. The vertical upgrades are at the same time the horizontal ones - getting to bigger, more powerful ships, expands your toolset, and it doesn't invalidate the smaller, "weaker" ships, since each are relevant for different situations. There are reasons for people who can fly the biggest ones to still fly the smallest ones. This is probably a large part of the reason why Eve is the only MMO i ever enjoyed.

This was a great analysis/discussion. Very insightful and explains a lot about games I've played before, whether they were MMOs or not. Probably why I like playing Warframe so much. Their devs said "porque no los dos?" There are mods and gear that are objectively/vertically better than others that people can chase if that's what they want. Or subjectively/horizontally better features to unlock if players prefer that instead.

What I love about GW2 is that no matter what I do, EVERYTHING has value. Running around the world, doing some mining and events, organised World versus World battles, structured PvP, Fractals, Raids, Jumping Puzzles... Each activity is vastly different and each rewards me for doing it. So when I start the game, I simply do what I feel like, which results in me never burning out on the game.

I like a vertical progression focus but with some horizontal sparkled ontop of it, like cosmetics, housing, maybe guild housing, etc. I like to get stronger and dominate

Great analysis as always. I was surprised you didn't mention Fractals of the Mist at any point but I guess you didn't need to since the overall concept is still explained well.