Brighter Shores dev responds to player complaints over controversial leveling system

Brighter Shores dev Andrew Gower has responded to player concerns over the game’s leveling system, which is proving divisive within the community.

Unlike Runescape, Brighter Shores soft-resets combat professions and gear whenever players begin a new episode or enter a new zone. It’s important to note, that your stats from each episode are not reset. Instead, when you enter the next episode, you’ll have a new set of professions, which complement your previous episode one profession. 

Lead developer Andrew Gower has assured players that “there is definitely no wipe,” and that this previous profession progress will be kept. In fact, players can still level their past professions by heading to Hopeport. 

Despite this explanation, many Brighter Shores players are not fans of the game’s unique leveling mechanics. 

“Some professions being limited to an episode make sense,” wrote one player on the Brighter Shores Reddit page. “For example, a forest area would have Woodcutting but maybe no Mining opportunities. However, combat should be universal. It doesn’t make sense to begin the next episode with my HP being reduced.” 

Other commenters were also not fond of how the new chapter skills appeared fairly similar to their previous counterparts. 

“It’s just pointless to have the same skill of a different area named something else, yet be practically the exact carbon copy,” wrote one frustrated player. 

“People have voiced their disappointment after going to change areas thinking all that work would benefit them in the next area, just to be brought back down to the same level they were hours prior.”

Fen Research

Brighter Shores leveling system works very differently from Runescape.

However, not every player has seen the episode resets as a negative. “Older zones like HopePort would become quite literally trivial when it comes to combat, responded one commenter. 

“Every mob would die the second you sneeze at them with your Gear on, thus making the content mostly irrelevant after a while. Funnily enough, [this is] a problem that all versions of Runescape suffer from, once you’re past a certain point, you pretty much almost never go back to earlier zones for combat purposes, because mobs are incredibly low-level there.”

It’s still early days for Brighter Shores and the game still has a lot of content to add, like PvP, which is one of the major features that’s currently missing. If you’re looking for the fastest ways to get Profession XP when you enter a new episode, then be sure to check out our guide.