Blizzard May Add Temporary De-Leveling To World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm

City of Heroes contained one of the best additions to the MMO genre in years when it launched in 2004: the sidekick/exemplar system. Basically this meant that if your character was more than three levels lower or higher than that of your friends, you could temporarily level up/down to play with them. Now it sounds like World of Warcraft may be getting a similar system in their upcoming Cataclysm expansion pack.

Speaking in an interview with The Escapist, World of Warcraft lead systems designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street let slip the possibility of this new feature:

"Cataclysm may also eventually include a system that allows players to scale down their character's level in order to help newer players. The heirloom items unveiled in Wrath of the Lich King already scale with a character's level, so adjusting them to suit a downgraded character is already part of the design. Cataclysm will go one step further and replace individually purchased spell ranks with a scaleable system that allows a single ability to grow along with a character. Scaling down levels probably won't be possible when Cataclysm is released, but it's a feature that will be coming eventually and should help players of differing levels adventure together more easily."

I e-mailed Blizzard to ask for more information about this feature and received the following official response:

"That’s something we’ve talked about doing, but we don’t have any updates to share right now. Our focus at this time is on the content and feature set for Cataclysm and getting that expansion ready to ship."

Based on Street's initial wording and the Blizzard response, it sounds like they definitely want to get this feature in, but we may be waiting a while. Either way, this will go a long way toward improving playability. It also makes it easier for players to invite their friends; now they can promise they'll play with them without having to start alts.