Per-Episode combat score releveling is intentional, says Brighter Shores creator

Brighter Shores, the new MMORPG from the creator of RuneScape, has just begun its early access phase this week. Among the budding player base, one of the biggest debates about the game is surrounding the relatively odd choice of having different combat professions for each Episode. In this game, every Episode (or story Act) is set in a self-contained map, and all of them have combat professions that you must level separately.

In a new developer post, lead game designer Andrew Gower explained how this is intentional, and the reasoning behind this design choice.

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Guard skill won't become useless after you move on from Episode 1, Brighter Shores devs reassure

What about all of my passive Guard leveling? (Image via Fen Research Limited)

Episode 1 of Brighter Shores begins in the town of Hopeport, and after the tutorial, you are tasked with reaching a total level of 60 right off the boat. Your player level is a totality of all the levels you gain in professions (i.e. life skills), and combat is, of course, one of them. In Hopeport, this skill is called the Guard profession, which you improve by hitting and killing stuff.

However, many players are flabbergasted to find out that their combat level is 0 once they walk out of the Town Gates into Hopeforest (Episode 2). This is because Episode 2 has its own combat profession called Scout, which you have to level up from scratch by fighting new monsters in Hopeforest.

While this is a soft reset of your combat score, the developers reassure you that it does not make all your Guard profession leveling useless:

"Your existing episode 1 professions remain untouched and are still useful anytime you are in Hopeport. You will find that you still regularly go back to Hopeport and use and further progress those professions. However, whilst you are in Hopeforest you will predominantly be relying on your Hopeforest professions, which can feel a bit strange to start with."

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Brighter Shores' Episode-specific combat professions tie into its "breadth and depth system"

While it may seem like a questionable choice to have monster levels start from zero, this is intentional, and to make Brighter Shores more open-ended. One can argue that this is a missed opportunity to make a cohesive progression curve, but by having all Episodes have their own separate economy of combat balance, the developers make all future Episodes accessible to newer players who don't like grinding levels.

"...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... 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!"

Brighter Shores is also designed such that you want to return to earlier areas later on. This is what the developers are calling the breadth and depth system, which is a way of saying the game has both horizontal and vertical progression avenues. Rather than story acts, the developers intend the Episodes to be their own regions to be revisited later.

Sure enough, a bunch of the crafting skills introduced in later Episodes require materials found or crafted in Hopeport, meaning you'll eventually have to return if you want to fully access everything.

Cumulatively, you can reach Level 2500 in Brighter Shores from Hopeport alone, so it's obviously not intended that you do all the content in Episode 1 before moving on to Episode 2.

However, the developers are also going to implement some changes to smooth over some of the concerns, taking player feedback into account. In the future, they plan to add content that has level requirements from multiple combat professions (Guard, Scout, and more), so that earlier combat professions are relevant later on. You can read the full developer blog on Steam here.

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