Why I Prefer Skills over Classes

Most MMOs hand you a class at character creation and call it a day. Pick Warrior, pick Healer, pick Mage. You get a predefined kit, a predefined role, and you slot into the predefined holy trinity of tank, healer, DPS. It works. Millions of players have enjoyed that model and will continue to. But it's not what I want to build.

Eternal Dawn uses a skill-based progression system. There are no classes. Your character is defined by what they do, not by what they picked on a menu screen before they'd ever set foot in the world.

How It Works

Every character has access to a catalog of skills (currently 30 planned, though this will evolve) and a total pool of skill points to distribute among them. Right now that pool sits at 750, with each individual skill capping at 100. These numbers are subject to change as we test and iterate, but the principle behind them is fixed: you can train broadly, but you can't master everything. Skills rise through use. Swing a sword, your Melee Weapons skill goes up. Gather herbs, your Herbalism goes up. Brew a potion, Alchemy goes up. Your character becomes what you play them as.

Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies are, for me, two of the best sandbox MMOs ever designed, and we draw direct inspiration from them. The use-based skill system is at the heart of that lineage.

Our leveling system works similarly to Skyrim in structure. Your actual power comes from skill progression, not from your overall level. Your character level exists mainly to increase base stats and, importantly, to distribute the talent points you earn along the way.

At the 750-point cap, you have real choices to make. A focused build might push 4 or 5 skills to 100 and still have 250 to 350 points left for utility, gathering, or crafting skills. A broader character spreads thinner. Both are valid.

But raw skill levels are only half the picture. As you train, you earn talent points, a small and finite currency (currently 50 total per character, also subject to tuning) that you spend on meaningful choices within each skill's progression. Instead of a traditional talent tree, we use a talent choice system: every 10 skill points gained in a skill presents you with a selection of options, and each pick is permanent. You don't get enough talent points to fill every ladder. You have to choose what matters to your character.

These choices aren't about climbing a power curve. They're about deciding how you want to play. Here are a few examples from skills we're designing right now:

In Armor, you might choose between Bulwark, which increases your block chance the longer you stand still, or Battered Veteran, which raises your damage reduction as your HP drops, making you harder to finish off. Neither is strictly better. One rewards a defensive anchor playstyle, the other rewards a fighter who thrives under pressure.

In Archery, Patient Shot builds damage while you stand still and resets when you move, supporting a sniper fantasy. Kiting does the opposite, increasing ranged damage as you move away from your target, rewarding constant repositioning. And Scavenger has nothing to do with combat performance at all: kills with ranged weapons drop more loot, a pure farming incentive.

In Melee Weapons, Momentum builds a damage multiplier on consecutive hits that resets on a miss. Predator increases damage against targets with lower HP than you. Weapon Bond rewards loyalty to a single weapon, increasing its damage the longer you use it and resetting on swap. Three very different fantasies from the same skill.

Character Identity

This is where I think the class versus skill debate gets interesting. The common criticism of skill systems is that everyone eventually converges on the same "best" build. And honestly, that can happen. Players are clever. They optimize.

Talents and masteries don't prevent that. I'm not trying to outsmart the theorycrafters. What they do is provide genuinely different ways to play the game. Two characters can both have Herbalism at 100, but one invested their talents into the cultivation mastery, spending their days tending farm plots in their player housing, crossbreeding herbs, growing exotic species. The other chose wild gathering, roaming the wilderness on long expeditions, discovering rare spawns that cultivated gardens can never produce. Same skill, same level, but each one engages with a completely different slice of the game.

At level 60 in any skill, you hit a mastery fork. Three specialization branches, and you pick one. A Blood Mage who specializes in raw destruction plays nothing like a Blood Mage who leans into sacrificial healing, burning their own vitality to keep allies alive. A Restoration caster who chooses the Healer mastery is mechanically and thematically distinct from one who chose Warden or Purifier. These forks are permanent by default. Your mastery choice is part of who your character is.

The talent point cap is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. You have room in the skill point pool to train plenty of skills. You can dabble widely. But you can only deeply invest in about five skill ladders. That tension between breadth and depth is where character identity lives. You're not locked into a class, but you can't be everything at once. Your choices define you.

Perfect Balance Is Not My Goal

I'll say something that might be controversial in MMO community: I don't think MMOs should be perfectly balanced. I'm not sure it's even possible unless every skill is functionally identical with different visual effects and names, and at that point, what's the point?

What I do believe in is making different approaches viable and interesting. One skill might be powerful in open-world PvP. Another might shine in dungeon encounters. A particular combination of masteries might be incredible in one situation and mediocre in another. That's not a bug or not a bad design.

I'm designing Eternal Dawn so that optimal builds are not required to have fun. I want a character with an unusual skill combination to discover unexpected synergies. I want the player who pairs Pickpocketing with Trading and Leadership to have a different, genuinely interesting experience from the Destruction/Conjuration/Necromancy specialist. Neither build needs to be "the best." Both need to be worth playing.

Horizontal, Not Vertical

Eternal Dawn favors horizontal progression, and I want to be precise about what I mean by that because the term gets misused. I don't mean the world scales to your level and everything stays equally easy. That's a different design philosophy entirely, and it's not what we're doing here.

What I mean is that progression gives you more options, not just bigger numbers. A Grandmaster Blacksmith doesn't just make swords with +5 more damage. They unlock recipes, techniques, and material interactions that a Novice never sees. A character who masters Camping isn't "stronger" in combat. They can set up wilderness shelters, enjoy powerful campfire regeneration, and log out safely in dangerous territory. That's power, but it's lateral power. It expands what your character can do, not just how hard they hit.

The skill system supports this naturally. Your skill point pool lets you build a character who is a competent fighter, a skilled herbalist, a decent cook, and an expert treasure hunter. None of those overlap in the "bigger numbers" sense. Each one opens up a different slice of the game world.

Be Weird, Experiment, Have Fun

At the end of the day, this is what draws me to skill-based design. Classes are clean. Classes are legible. But classes draw a box around your character before you've played your first hour.

I want Eternal Dawn to be a game where a player decides, fifty hours in, that their sword-and-shield fighter should learn Alchemy. Where someone builds a Treasure Hunter who camps in the wilderness for weeks, mapping routes between rare herb spawns and buried chests. Where a crafter who has never swung a sword in anger is still a respected, essential part of the server's economy and social fabric.

Will players find optimal builds? Absolutely. Will tier lists emerge? Probably within the first month. But the system is built so that the gap between "optimal" and "interesting" is small enough that playing the character you actually want to play is never a punishment. That's my goal for the Eternal Dawn.