That’s really nice of you to do. I already own some of these games and the others I probably wouldn’t play anyway tho (except for The Outer Worlds but someone else was already faster haha).
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.
Scaling done by just creating a single archetype and then doing math to it also kinda sucks. It doesn’t ruin fun factors, or anything, it just seems lazy. Give the new enemy type it’s own stat block instead of just being another guy with bigger number. Unless your game has so many enemies that “same guy, bigger number” is inevitable, I don’t like it.
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 😮💨
It scales enemies as it has since Oblivion, but also scales them differently based on how far away from Sanctuary they are spawned. Everything on the southern and eastern side of the map are always gonna be stronger than the player by some degree, while everything close to the starting point is weak, even when it’s spawning a stronger variant due to player level.
But to be fair, I don’t even see FO4 as an RPG. It’s a FPS with minimal RPG elements. So I tend to strip the scaling entirely with mods to make it so humans (including the PC) die quickly and only the big, beefy mutants (super mutants, deathclaws, etc) are bullet sponges.
A couple of weeks ago the Mass Effect Trilogy was so cheap on Steam that it was hard to resist, so I pirated it. I’m already on Mass Effect 3, it’s been a while since I played the trilogy.
I bought mass effect legendary edition from epic last year, it was super cheap and I never played. I finally installed it a couple weeks ago and am playing the first game. It’s a great game, but the drm infrastructure is really frustrating.
To play the game, I need to:
Don’t click the desktop icon it installed for me, nothing will happen Start EA app Don’t click the icon on the side, nothing will happen Click on library Click on game Ignore the helpful hint to use the icon on the side to save time Click on launch This starts the epic store This then starts the mass effect launcher Click launch on the game I want While the game is loading, the epic store will now steal focus back and I need to alt-tab back to the game Now I can play the game and it works fine
It really makes me think about pirating the other games instead of continuing this bs. Plus I should be able to then play them on Linux instead of needing to boot into Windows to play.
Gaben was absolutely correct in saying that piracy is a service problem.
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.
It’s really superb, I can’t say enough, I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. Don’t skip the side missions, they’re great too. I was sad to leave the Vatican. Let’s hope they continue to make these new Indy games!
Just make sure you have GPU that can do ray-tracing, since it’s one of the first games that requires hardware support for this feature. If it can, the game will likely run very well and look just as good.
There’s a modified .exe that will allow you to enable full ray tracing on a 10gb 3080. I tried it last night and it worked pretty well, getting between 40-70 FPS on the area under the Vatican and the sequence going to Ciaro. You just have to set DLSS to performance and the texture pool to low (note, this doesn’t mean that textures will be low quality, just the cached amount is low so you may see some pop in at times).
Oh awesome, I’ll check this out. I’ve been playing the last couple days and the game really is good. Been running it great without rt and am almost done with the Vatican
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.
The thing is, this is likely going to affect their sales to some degree.
As a parent, you may have age lock on your child’s account, or search games by rating, or just not know what this game is when asked to buy it but judging by rating.
I don’t know how significant of an impact that is, but it’s unfair.
I think they’ve done them a favour in a way. If this was day one then it might hurt them but they’re past the point of like 90% of their sales I bet, and now pegi looking like incompetent dinosaurs is just a free second wave of social media exposure
The only one I know that might fit the bill (not really) 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.
The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they use heavy level scaling so you can explore wherever you want from the very beginning.
It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared, so you wouldn’t encounter high-tier daedra in the overworld until your level was in the teens and you actually stood a chance.
Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level. 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 to pass. Combine that with a weird player leveling system that punished you for picking non-combat skills or leveling up as soon as you could, and people loathed Oblivion’s leveling mechanics.
Skyrim’s scaling was somewhere in the middle, which lead to combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.
It’s in a weird halfway position, though it’s less cRPG and more action RPG with each iteration. The character creation in Daggerfall wouldn’t be out of place in a tabletop game.
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