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.
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.
The problem here is that Baltaro does not have gambling. It just uses cards and chips as the basis for playing the game. Like Magic the Gathering or Inscryption.
What? Fallen Order is much closer to Dark Souls than it is Spiderman or Arkham. It’s all slow, methodical combat encounters instead of flashy combo beat 'em up mechanics.
For something many consider soulslike but actually is much closer to an Arkham or Spidey game, see Ghost of Tsushima.
Give me one good reason I shouldn’t be able to have a customizable PC in Tetris.
Seriously: I think narratives in games should be based on player choice. To me, that’s the difference between a game and a book or movie. To choose your own path instead of passively following one.
But clearly I am a minority here. Some of the biggest games are linear set-piece things with no choice in the narrative structure. Even open-world games tend to be linear narratively.
To use your example of Spec Ops: The Line: there is significant player choice that the main dude did not have to be a rigid character. They could have been as customizable as V from Cyberpunk 2077, and the effect would still land.
They’ve only announced it to be getting released on PS5 in 2025. That’s almost all the information there is about the game rn. I would take it to mean timed-exclusive, but that’s still not releasing on all platforms at once.
The kinds of people that claim “wokism” in games tend to also not actually play the games they’re bitching about, so they don’t actually know what to expect.