In order to understand what a progression system is used for, you need to understand the concept of gameplay loops. Let’s use Call of Duty as our example today, since it’s a great case of a non-RPG game that successfully integrated a progression system into their gameplay.

A gameplay loop is the collective set of actions that the player will be doing over a specific time frame. At the most basic, we’re talking about actions that usually happen within seconds of each other. The core gameplay loop for Call of Duty at the moment-to-moment level is:

While the player is actually playing the game, these are (most of) the actions they expect to be doing. They are shooting at people, they are running and hiding from them, they are reloading and traversing the world. This is the primary focus of the moment-to-moment action. The immediate player goals here are very simple - survive the fight, kill the enemy, get past the obstacle. These are all goals that happen almost immediately, because the actions involved are happening almost every second of the game.

After we’ve established our core gameplay loop, we can then take a step back for a larger overall view. As a designer, we need to provide gamers a secondary gameplay loop to provide higher-level goals - these are goals that are reached by accomplishing the goals in the core gameplay loop and keep the player from getting bored. Hacking and slashing is fun, but you need some higher-order goals in order to keep interest. So now, you use the core gameplay loop to build more elements of gameplay, more things to think about, more goals to achieve. Here are some examples of some higher order goals in a secondary gameplay loop that are dependent on achieving the goals in the primary loop:

This isn’t necessarily a loop, but it is a bunch of secondary, higher-order goals that the player will accomplish by engaging in the core game loop. You may have noticed that the time step for accomplishing these goals this longer overall than the core game loop. This is important! These goals are generally achieved on a minute-to-minute basis, rather than second-to-second. This builds an additive sense of fun for the player - the core loop is fun, and they are doing the fun core things to accomplish fun secondary goals as well. This is how games construct depth - increased layers of thinking prompt the player to make interesting choices and evaluations.

So from here, we can take an even broader view. From the minute-to-minute gameplay, we can extend it to a tertiary game loop. Here’s an example of the tertiary game loop in action:

Notice how accomplishing each of these goals tends to result from repeatedly accomplishing the goals in the secondary game loop. It’s not really a loop, but they’re all tertiary, longer-term goals for the player. These goals will affect how the player chooses to approach the goals in the secondary loop, which trickle down to the goals in the primary loop. This is game depth at work.

These goals tend to be achieved on the time scale of tens of minutes, possibly hours or even longer. You can apply this concept of layering goals to practically any game. Not every game has a tertiary game loop, for example - a lot of arcade and mobile games don’t (or have very simple tertiary goals), since they are intended to be consumable and forgettable. They don’t need them, because they aren’t intended to be played at that time scale. But with a sizable investment ($60 for a retail game), players need to feel like they are getting the proper entertainment value out of it, and that means that they need tertiary game goals to chase after.

After you separate the gameplay elements into their primary, secondary, or tertiary status, you can start to see where some games break down. Some games are very strong in the primary gameplay loop, but lose in the secondary or tertiary. Diablo 3 at launch was an excellent example of when the tertiary game loop breaks down - the primary gameplay loop is engaging (killing monsters is fun and responsive), and even the secondary gameplay loop is fun (fighting lots of monsters at once, dealing with the different kinds of monsters, etc.), but the tertiary level lost a lot of its luster because the auction house essentially short-circuited most of the loot hunting and gathering. It made that part of the tertiary game goals significantly less fun, which hurt its overall long term engagement.

Now you might be wondering… where do progression systems and skill trees come in? These are both tertiary game goals. They provide things for you to think about and work towards by achieving your goals within the primary and secondary loops. Solid tertiary goals tend to be more difficult to create since things like “Advance the plot” can be much more resource intensive to create than something like “level up, spend talent point, get new ability to use”. Progression systems also feed back into the secondary and primary loops - by providing new context and new abilities, you can affect the gameplay in the inner gameplay loops when you accomplish a single goal at the tertiary level. The progression systems are designed to continue to provide goals on a scale of tens of minutes to hours as a means of extending the lifetime of the game. They are the also the primary means of gauging how much of the game the player has completed. The tertiary game loop is where the long-term playability of the game really comes out, and progression systems are one of the most cost-effective ways to build a set of tertiary goals.

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