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  • Level scaling is fine when capped appropriately. It can give your game more freedom to to area A or B first while still encouraging going to other higher areas to continue growing.

  • It seems like a lazy choice. Difficulty should be implemented meaningfully, and how that difficulty changes over time should add to the overall experience somehow. A rewarding gameplay loop doesn't automatically benefit from increasing stats over time, nor do fights get more satisfying the more artificially difficult they are. As the story progresses, I always prefer to see the stakes get raised, or new aspects of the gameplay loop unfold in interesting ways.

    It's one of the things I hated about the Elder Scrolls series. I earned all my power and gear, but suddenly here we get a level-scaled bandit with all glass gear and inflated stats who has never killed so much as a rat. There's no satisfaction in killing those guys, they add nothing to the story, and their unearned power only serves to make your achievements feel hollow.

    Give me new ways to approach the enemy, more choices, rather than higher stats. I know it scratches an itch to see a stat increase, but it creates a problem with few interesting solutions.

  • A proper level curve creates a feeling of progression because you need to get stronger to take on stronger enemies later in the game. It also gives players some room to adjust difficulty on their own, grind if you're struggling, or stay underleveled to make it more challenging. And yes, the power fantasy of going back to crush early game enemies is kinda satisfying.

    But that falls apart if enemies always match your level no matter where you are. Because then what's the point of having level ups at all? You're not leveling up to take on endgame foes, you're leveling up to stay exactly in place. In the worst case, you get something like FF8 where leveling up is actively detrimental and you're supposed to exploit the system by staying underleveled to manipulate it.

    It just feels to me like a cop-out for when developers can't hand-tune the level curve themselves.

  • Depends on the game, and even on what parts of the game. For the most part I don't think the Bethesda approach produces desirable results, and in fact it often produces downright awful immersion breaking encounters like roadside bandits in Daedric Armor. It also completely nullifies any sense of identity of any area in the open world; everything feels flat and samey. It's meant to open up the world and promote exploration, but for me it accomplishes the opposite effect. In an open world game there is a certain thrill of "getting away with" clearing a high level zone early, as is there in taking a note of "come back here later when stronger". Returning to a familiar area later and crushing enemies that used to trouble you also gives you a tangible feeling of progression that feeds into the power fantasy.

    However, I do think there is something to be said for level scaling key main story bosses. It's easy to end up with anticlimactic moments if you let the player overlevel, which is very hard to balance in an open world game. Expedition 33 is a recent poignant example of how poor encounter balance can make encounters that should be meaningful and challenging fall completely flat very easily.

    • Speaking of Bethesda, Fallout 4's scaling turned enemies into stupendous bullet sponges at very high levels. I mean, I get that it's hard to increase difficulty wirhout limit, but it just wasn't very much fun to keep pouring immense amounts of ammunition into very high level enemies.

  • Opposed. Just let me have my crazy power fantasy already.

    That and there are much better ways to implement difficulty. ie Fromsoft's entire catalog.

  • I don't like it. It's like giving someone $100 as a gift, then opening their gift for you to find $100. It was kinda fun to give gifts, but you laid out how the exercise can become pointless.

    Applied to leveling - it's nice to see the 'level up' message and hear a little chime. But if it means your enemies leveled up just as much too, then it was just a hollow dopamine hit. Nothing actually changed.

    The trick is in the balance though. The leak in my comparison is that enemies do not level exactly as much as you. If you can quickly level up enough to become unassailable, that's no fun. You need push and pull for it to be a game. There are a bunch of levers designers can pull to prevent you from way overpowering the game. Scaling a level number for the bad guys is, IMO, one of the least exciting.

  • Assassin's creed and far cry are the worst offenders for me, because of what games they came from.

    Leveled weapons, gear, enemies, are the most immersion breaking elements in modern games.

    I shot someone in the head, and because I used a level 4 gun against a level 6 enemy it does nothing?

    I hit level 15 and can now magically use this shotgun, when it's functionally identical to the one I've been using for hours?

    This is just an extension of bullet sponges as a difficulty scaler, and a cheap way to force a player into and out of certain parts of the map, all in place of what could be done through better game design.

    Games like far cry 2, assassins creed black flag, and ghost recon wild lands got it right.

    Balance comes from weapons hurting both me and the enemy. Progression through the world can be gated and guided through literally dozens of other methods.

    If the skill tree makes me too powerful for the base enemies, then let me mow them down like a god, or adjust the skill tree for a better balance.

    In dark souls, git gud really just meant grind and level up till you were powerful enough for your personal skill level. Next time through if it's easier, you can play at a lower level.

    I don't hate all games that have this mechanic, but many modern games go way too for in relying on it in place of other game design options.

    From what I understand, the black flag remake is going to use modern assassin's creed leveled weapons and combat systems, which means I likely just won't buy it and play the original.

    Don't even get me started on modern HUDs.

  • I think it's a crutch for developers who are trying to develop open worlds and don't have time to fine-tune world balance. Imo, well balanced difficulty is central to a game's pacing, and perhaps counterintuitively, level scaling does not provide well balanced difficulty. Good pacing requires peaks and valleys; you need to have moments where you feel strong and moments where you struggle for a satisfying narrative journey. Perhaps most importantly, non-scaled content provides the player agency in where those peaks and valleys are. You're always in control of how much you over-level/over-gear, and you always have the option to turn away from a challenge to get stronger.

  • It's the dumbest shit ever and one of the many reasons I hate RPGs along with fetch quests, escort missions, item farming… etc. No fucking clue how they get away with this archaic shit.

    Action games handle it best: you get progressively stronger enemies but you keep unlocking more and more tools to deal with them, which makes encounters throughout the length of the game much more interesting.

    It also makes it completely skill-based: the better you are at utilizing your full arsenal, the easier enemy encounters get, and this applies to everyone: from the most common enemy to the final boss.

  • At first I liked but then I hated it in Hellblade 1. I was pretty bad at the beginning of the game so I appreciated that it scaled down for me until I got the hang of it.

    But by the end enemies had so much health that it was just annoying. I had just gotten this supposedly amazing sword and it took a lot longer to take down a regular grunt than the first boss. And it didn't make the game more difficult, just a slog.

    Luckily I could just turn the game manually down to easy. And having Senua mow down hoards of enemies down with ease felt super satisfying at that point.

    So the best part of the scaling was that I could turn it off.

    In other games I usually enjoy the feeling of seeing how well I do against earlier enemies to see how strong I've become. And I really enjoy games like Gothic that use enemy placement to soft lock you out of areas you're only supposed to reach later.

    In our DnD session our DM sent about a hundred Kobolds or so at us when we were higher level. That was satisfying. Spirit Guardians FTW!

  • Level scaling is so messed up in Oblivion, I have to install mods to make it playable.

    If they want to make an open world that you can go anywhere with the same challenge, then don't put a leveling system there at all. Bigger numbers mean nothing when both the character and the enemies increase numbers at the same time.

    Starfield seems to have zoned scaling, but the game seems to be bland according to the reviews I have seen. I hope the next Elder Scrolls will improve.

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