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."
