Submitted 4 weeks ago by Adeptus@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Personally I dislike it very much. It take feel of achievement. Why even bother with gaining experience if it makes enemies stronger?
Agreed. I really enjoy being able to one hit enemies that made me shit my trousers a couple of hours ago. The rats I killed for that innkeeper when I arrived shouldn’t even be worth my attention during endgame.
That could also be done by having improved techniques to quickly dispatch the rats without needing to also scale up the character’s toughness so their bites are less effective.
Correctly done level scaling should be optional. Like in Dark Souls 2, after you defeat a boss of an area, you can use a special consumable to increase the difficulty of that area to NG+. And it’s stackable, too. That was one of DS2 unique mechanics I’m actually sad they didn’t add in DS3 and Elden Ring, because sometimes I don’t want to restart the whole playthrough in NG+.
Level scaling is usually used to make development easier, so making it optional would require the extra work to come up with appropriate enemy strength and the eoptional scaling effect on top.
they would need to develop balanced mechanics. Level scaling completely ruins any sense of progression.
It depends. When done correctly it can be fun, if all creatures/enemies are always scaled to your level, no. Dragon monsters for example should always pose a challenge or some kind of monsters that are you mirror images/copies, that type of thing.
There is always going to be some kind of level scaling in an RPG. I just think it’s a matter of what kind of scaling you’re using.
The kind that everything in the world just levels up when you level up fucking sucks. It completely kills any sense of power progression since your power level stays pretty much the same comparatively.
The kind where the enemies are just static levels based on where they are is better. You can still freely go to those areas, you just aren’t likely to survive until you actually get stronger. And as you get stronger, you can literally feel the power gains as areas you were getting your ass beat down in have the turn tables and you start beating their asses.
Cyberpunk 2077 used the static levels on launch, but changed to almost everything leveling with you in 2.0. I think the change actually worked better for the game, but it’s also done differently than every other game I’ve seen use that approach. Enemies gain stats much slower than V does, so a level 20 V still feels much more powerful than a level 1 V, but you also have the freedom to explore rather than having arbitrary beef gates making it nigh impossible to go to certain parts of the city before you’re supposed to.
On the other hand, I also love Morrowind’s painstakingly hand-crafted world with static enemies and hand-placed loot. In most games done that way, however, returning to lower level areas is typically a complete waste of time.
Ultimately, I think both systems can work if they’re done well, but everything leveling up is almost always done poorly, or at least worse than the average game with static levels.
A system I have thought of before is a hybrid where enemies have a target level and then their actual level is the average of your level and the target level. For instance, if an enemy’s target level is 20 and you’re level 1, they’ll be level 10. You probably won’t be able to do much to them. But when you get to level 10, they’ll be level 15, which you might be able to deal with if you’re good. You’ll eventually out-level them, but they’ll still be interesting to fight because when you’re at level 40 they’ll be at level 30. I only make the occasional mod, though, so I’ve never gotten to test if this actually is fun.
Fallout 4 has the hybrid method, and still doesn’t get it right 😮💨
Don’t know about CRPGs in particular, one way or the other. But in general I agree with you op.
If you level up, and it means your stats go up and all your enemies level up and stay at the same balance with you, it’s pointless. It still affords a moment of happiness ‘cool I levelled up’, but in a much less satisfying way.
The point of level up early in RPG video games was, to my knowledge, so that any one with time and patience could beat a game regardless of skill. The idea of level scaling is almost the exact opposite, to remove the advantage of levelling. They cancel out and both player level and enemy level should be removed if that’s happening.
That’s assuming a 1:1 unversal scaling though, which is rarely the case. In the details it can be tuned to something worthwhile - which enemies scale, how much they scale, etc.
Still, my thought is when games want level scaling, they should consider why. If you want players not to overpower enemies via stats, maybe get rid of the stats (or don’t change them on lvl up). Levels can still augment your player with new spells, unique abilities, or more options. Or maybe more carefully consider the placement of enemies and what their default level and stats are set at. Or maybe consider a lower level cap, or a lower range of stat values.
The possibilities are wide open, but level scaling done poorly can make level ups feel like a punishment.
Leveling systems come from pen and paper D&D, which was inspired from wargames where units gain experience.
I think the place they are getting the bit about patience from is specifically dragon quest. Where the devs intentionally positioned it in opposition to other games of the time that required you to get good so to speak.
I read an interview a few years ago, I think with Yuji Horii about the design in dragon quest being set up specifically so that by sinking time in you would eventually overpower everything and progress, even if you never improved at the game mechanics. I couldn’t easily find it again when I looked to link it but maybe I will be able to later today.
What CRPGs have level scaling? I think almost every CRPG that I played doesn’t have any level scaling.
The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they used heavy scaling to let you explore wherever you want in the overworld from the very beginning.
It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared (so you wouldn’t see high-level daedra until your level was in the teens).
Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level, so you could revisit the starting area and a normal bandit would be wearing a full set of magical heavy plate worth tens of thousands of gold while demanding you hand over twenty coins.
Skyrim was somewhere in the middle, which lead to all combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.
TES is CRPG? I always consider it more of an ARPG
The only one I know that might fit the bill is Pillars 1. When you’ve done a lot of the side content, you’ll be overleveled, and in the final act the game asks you if enemies should get scaled to your level, so there’s still a challenge. But that’s still optional and you’re not forced to do it.
Consider me a psycho with a hot take, but I have always preferred games that mix the enemy difficulties around in a zone. Something like Ark where, sure, level 3 Dodos spawn on the starting beaches, but a level 70 Spino can spawn not far away and you have to be sure to skirt it lest you become a healthy snack. The steady progression of “zone difficulty” has always bugged me a bit because it is just so far off from realistic. Sure, close to a settlement there would be culling of particularly dangerous creatures, but some of them would still exist (if the settlement is being responsible). And yeah, as you get farther into the wilds those sorts of cullings would fall off rapidly, but to say that there would be areas where there are no easy monsters or no hard monsters, even in the wilds, is just not accurate.
Also, you get the same feeling of accomplishment, sometimes more, when you have died to hard monsters in starting areas a bunch of times then learned to skirt aggro properly, but then suddenly you come back after being out for a while and utterly decimate them. Just feels so good.
I despised it in World of Warcraft, but I actually loved it in The Witcher 3. How I feel about it seems to be at least somewhat related to whether it’s a singleplayer game or multiplayer. But it’s more complicated than that - in TW3 without scaling enabled the whole game becomes piss easy even on Death March so it’s kinda required for me to even enjoy the gameplay at all. There are still many ways to gain relative character power that exceeds the level scaling that eventually you just WILL overpower everything regardless.
Unless it’s basically broken I will play games on the highest difficulty possible, because that’s just more fun to me.
CRPG doesn’t usually refer to MMOs or action rpgs. They’re referring to games that emulate a tabletop RPG but on a computer, which is where the C comes in. Generally they’re modeled after Dungeons and Dragons or similar systems, like Pathfinder.
Ah, I didn’t see the “c” in my sleep deprived state, whoops
Something that’s being heavily overlooked in this thread is the difference between a CRPG and an RPG/ARPG. I’m not sure which one OP is referring to, but if you want an easy guide, Fallout 1-2 are CRPGs, Fallouts 3-4 are not. Skyrim, the Witcher, latter Assassin’s Creed games, Elden Ring, etc are not CRPGS. Games like Divinity Original Sin 1-2, Baldurs Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder, etc are CRPGS
I’m not sure I agree.
Claiming that Skyrim is not a Computer Role Playing Game requires some supporting reasoning.
Something like the Berlin Interpretation might help but as it is you don’t specify which features you use to qualify/disqualify for inclusion.
A CRPG is the video game sister-genre of the table top role playing game.
“Computer Role Playing Game” doesn’t mean “A Role Playing Game that’s on the Computer”, the word computer is used specifically to distinguish it from tabletop, meaning it’s intrinsically tied to tabletop RPGs.
So if a game plays with very similar mechanics to a tabletop rpg (Turn based, tile or distance based movement, top down or isometric views, unique player-created characters, plus the other hallmarks of the greater RPG genre), then you can call it a CRPG. Games like XCom are closer to being CRPGs than the likes of Skyrim, though it wouldn’t itself qualify because it’s not an RPG.
Games like Skyrim are well established in the “Action RPG” genre and the burden of supportive evidence and reasoning would really be on you to try and make the claim that Skyrim is a CRPG.
I like it, but only as an alternative to very good balancing with very slow power scaling. Unless I’m playing a superhero game, I don’t want to one-shot starting enemies once I’m higher level.
This is all tied to my preference for immersion above all and my tendency to fiddle around in a game pretending I’m playing a TTRPG rather than rushing to the end.
De_Narm@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Level scaling is never fun and never will be, I think. There is no progression if your fights with early enemies are just as hard as they were 50h ago.
You could probably design around that by providing in-depth build options such that optimized builds outscale other entities of the same level. Later game enemies themselves would be optimized better and better. But that’s really hard and I’ve never seen it done. Why provide a dynamic build for each enemy with each level if you could just have a normal non-scaling progression?
These systems often lead to me avoiding combat altogether. While not exactly a crpg, Oblivion was more fun to me without ever leveling up (which was optional, but made fights kinda pointless).