Editing Game news/Per episode combat professions (section)

==The reason for this design==
We have designed Brighter Shores to be enjoyable both for players who want to play the game many hours a day AND for people who might only be able to a play a few minutes a day. This means that, in the future, some players will be a '''much''' higher level than others!

However, when we introduce new episodes we want them to be fun for everyone. But if there was a single combat profession across the whole game, and the monsters in episode 5 started at level 100 for example, then all the players who play a lot would already be a way higher level than that. They would find it way too easy, skipping past a huge chunk of the start of the episode, and then find that they don't have much to do. Conversely, all of the players who only play a little would find it way too hard and wouldn't be able to take part in episode 5 at all!

Some games try to solve this problem by having a level cap to stop people being too high. This cap is increased each update, and they then 'accelerate' all characters up to the level of the latest content to stop people being too low. But this means every update results in a huge amount of 'dead content', and accelerating new players undermines the achievements of existing players. It also means people spend a long time stuck at a level cap with no further levelling possible.

Other games try to solve this problem by making the content in the game 'autoscale' based on a player's level rather than having a fixed level. But we don't like this as it means levelling up doesn't actually achieve anything or unlock any new content.

Therefore, we have designed Brighter Shores in a different way. We have gone with what we call the 'breadth and depth' system. It is NOT intended that you first 'finish' episode 1, then go on to episode 2 and never go back to episode 1 ever again.

Instead, 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. 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 'side quests' for this purpose. These side quests 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. Over time, we plan to add even higher level side quests, so that your Hopeport guard level will keep being useful for a long time! The difficulty of a side quest is indicated by its number of stars.

The episodes are also heavily interlinked, so you will regularly find yourself going back and forth between them. For example: You might use your episode 3 combat to kill some monsters for potion reagents. You might then take these reagents back to episode 1 to make some potions, which you then use in episode 4. Once you reach episode 3, you can also start making your own weapons which you can 'tune' for use in ANY of episodes 1 to 4, further interlinking the back and forth between the episodes, and allowing you to rapidly gear up in episode 4.