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.
It's generally implemented in a way that takes away fun. If a game had fun fights that were always intended to be strategic, it'd be ok, but when you have to kill identical mob after identical mob to progress in the plot, i don't see the point.
i remember getting bored and annoyed near the end of oblivion.
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.
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 even 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).
bin.pol.social
Aktywne