I’ve never been a fan of level caps in RPGs. AD&D had them in many games. If you bought something like the original Pools of Radiance Gold Box edition, you were limited to 8 or so on average. Only by getting the expansions you would be able to receive more levels. The problem I found was that you were perpetually limited by levels in terms of abilities. Of course, if you played any significant amount of AD&D, you’d realize that you can have far more abilities than what these games offered.
The Ultima series also imposed level caps. Once you hit those levels, then you pretty much focused on finishing the game. Similarly though, you would end up picking items and certain characters to optimize your game play. So again you could not avoid the cookie cutter game play.
Looking at World of Warcraft, I’ve come to realize that level caps hurt games because of how you limit abilities. WoW wants to avoid the cookie cutter talent tree feeling by once again re-inventing the talent tree (it’s not even a tree anymore). But you really can’t move away from the cookie cutter aspect simply because there’s an artificial limit imposed that essentially dictates the maximum number of skills/points or whatever one can achieve. After that point, you have no where to go. In the case of WoW, gear upgrades provided through each patch become the only way for measurement of progress in the game (and downing bosses; but that seems more personal than anything since there’s a PVP aspect; also, we’re talking about a reward system that shows character improvement)
One major difference between WoW and these other games I mentioned is that once you purchased an Ultima 4 or a Pool of Darkness, you could play it endlessly, revisit the game, etc. without having to pay additional monthly fees. In other words, you would come to a stopping point. WoW though isn’t something you just “stop.” You can stop paying but if all you want is just to play the game for one week, could you justify reopening an account for that period?
That said, the mentality involved here is that you don’t really want to just “quit” a game like WoW. However, you do want to feel like you’re making head way into the game from a character point of view. In this sense, I really hate the idea of level caps because you feel as though you can’t make progress on the character itself and depend on other means of measurement for feeling the character improves.
Games that avoid this are like Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, Diablo and Might and Magic to name a few. There might be a limit cap, but actually reaching that cap is pretty tough. More importantly though, each level isn’t so significant that it completely unbalances the game. Yet when you receive a level, you’re rewarded with some choice in distributing your points (well, in BT, those points are automatically distributed)
You might argue that some players might just grind all day and night to max out there characters, thereby destroying balance once again. First, there are ways to offset this situation. One is to make leveling really hard by increasing the required amount of XP per level to grow at a steady, but scaled pace. Two, make it so that each level only imparts some enhancements like hit points, spell points, attributes, etc. For PVP, limit it to brackets of levels. For monsters, limit encounters to a range of levels.
The thing about a game like WoW is that only the last level in the game (for that particular expansion) is the only meaningful one. I mean, why even bother having levels when the rest are meaningless? Or why bother having higher levels when the next expansion re-invents them completely?
The arguments the developers make in terms of cookie cutter specs and choices are quite fallacious. IMO, the thing is that they’ve never attempted to differentiate between PVP and PVE clearly to offset the balances imposed by the two. But they will never get around the cookie cutter aspect unless each ability in the talent tree are made equal to some degree. But again, what’s the point if all you’re doing is adding color, time/penalties and other things just to offset each other?