Is leveling up role play or not roleplaying? Does it have a place in computer games?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of leveling up?
Name, games where it was done right and games where it was done wrong.
Personally I fine it break immersion in skill based games like elder scrolls, fallout, mass effect. its even more of a trouble where it is tied in with character damage which in real life should be based only on the weapon and hit location.
The problem is even bigger in games like mass effect where the player enters the role of the most elite commando humanity has to offer and he makes a tremendous progress in a short time even though pressing the trigger hasn't changed.
In addition to breaking immersion I also noticed it creates a lot of problems for developers regarding game balance, some tend to level up the enemies as the player grows in strength, ending up breaking immersion even more. And if the enemies didn't grow in strength it creates a problem in sandboxes games and sometimes even in linear games where the player becomes too strong and the world is no longer challenging. after all there is also a limit to how many enemies you can throw on the player before it starts breaking the story. (Too many bad guys vs good guy syndrome.)
Real life experience thought me that while your skills become better the more you train, each of us reach a limit. In most games the limit is the player capabilities regarding that game.
