Level cap or no level cap?

[MoobooMagoo]

I am fine with a level cap. What I DON'T want is an experience cap like Baldur's Gate. In that game, the system had a level cap that we were artificially cut off from it. I don't think that would happen in this situation because this is a brand new IP. I don't even mind a leveling curve like the old .hack games had, where there was a level cap but each game had the soft cap get progressively higher and higher.

 

I just don't like seeing 'level 30 out of 100' and not being able to do anything because I'm 'capped'

[Sensuki]

The TotSC level cap was pretty good, it was quite hard to reach 161,000 XP.

 

Once you did there was almost no content left in the game. The only reason it was like that though was to try and balance out the classes since they used different experience tables.

 

this won't be a problem in P:E

[teknoman2]

The TotSC level cap was pretty good, it was quite hard to reach 161,000 XP.

 

Once you did there was almost no content left in the game. The only reason it was like that though was to try and balance out the classes since they used different experience tables.

 

this won't be a problem in P:E

that cap allowed a ranger to reach lv8. if you have the trilogy mod that removes the xp limit, the ranger may get to lv9 but it takes a lot of work to find every little bit of xp in the game. so cap or no cap, you usually could not get past lv8 for lack of xp in the game

[Sensuki]

Rogue level 10 was 160,000 actually, but yes

[Ainamacar]

I prefer no hard level/XP cap, but would make XP gained dependent on the challenge's difficulty relative to party (not character!) strength. As the PCs gain power the amount of XP gained by a given challenge decreases, and the greater the party power the more severe the reduction. Similarly, an underleveled party that succeeds at a signficant challenge will gain a lot of XP at once, but gain less on future challenges than if they had skipped this big challenge. This dynamic allows a lot of flexibility with balancing the party with the environment, because whether the party is over-leveled or under-leveled they are nudged over time toward the XP an "appropriately powerful" party will have. Furthermore, as long as parties that clear identical material (but not necessarily in the same order) end up with similar total XP the system also balances them with respect to one another. Finally, scaling XP gained allows one to make the leveling progression very simple, like 1 level per 1000 xp or something like that.

 

One can do almost the same thing by using fixed xp per challenge and changing the xp needed to level in an ever-increasing manner (like in AD&D and therefore most of the IE games), but this eventually requires huge numbers, and is especially challenging to pull off if the minimal path and the completionist path have wildly diverging total xp. For example, suppose half is required and half is optional material: if you want to make sure, without using a hard level cap, that the completionist is at best a few levels ahead of a person taking the minimal path, then you need to make sure that those few levels require half the xp in the game. Then, in the sequel or expansion, you start with high numbers and it just gets worse.

 

The other advantage of scaling XP gained is that it can take party composition into account more smoothly. Our IE predecessors have mostly mishandled this. In BG/BG2 soloing, for example, is relatively satisfying because you get lots of extra XP to make up for having no other party members. Then you hit the level cap and not only do you have most of the game left, but by the time you reach the end your "party" is roughly 1/6 as powerful as what the developers assumed when designing the content. So the level cap really only "worked" for a specific party composition, not all allowed compositions, in addition to all the other issues with caps. In IWD2, by contrast, XP is scaled relative to strength so things could have worked well. However, the scaling was actually determined by average character level, which is a measure of average indivdual strength rather than overall party strength, and so in practice it only really worked for full parties and even lacked the grace period that made using smaller parties in other IE games work OK up until the characters hit the XP cap. I consider that to be a major oversight in IWD2, especially since it could have been largely mitigated by revising a single calculation.

Edited October 20, 2012 by Ainamacar

[teknoman2]

Rogue level 10 was 160,000 actually, but yes

i used the ranger as an example. some classes could get to 15 or just 5 for all i care with 160k xp, the point is that there were barely a few k more that what the cap allowed in the game and based on your play style you may not ever get them... and even with the cap off they would not make any difference for most classes

[Sensuki]

I wasn't trying to oneUP you, I shouldn't have used the word actually. I was agreeing with you

[Tusck]

I voted for a level cap. I don't want my characters to have every skill and have maxed attributes. I want them to be "human" as in flawed, not perfect. I want the fight through the world to be difficult rather than just being a group of basically what would be gods.

[Chr1s]

Don't really matter but unless there's skills and abilities for unlimited amount of leveling i don't see the point, just tedious leveling without any sort incentive don't hold any appeal to me.

[teknoman2]

well since the xp will be awarded for doing quests, for finding an clearing secret dungeons, for defeating bosses, for surviving through a certain death encounter and so on, you wont be able to just grind xp, but you can just get the finite number of xp the devs have made available. so at some point there simply wont be any more xp to have in the game and that's the cap. and that is of course preferable to having a total of 200k available to be gained, but your character cant get any more than 150k

[AGX-17]

There should be a cap, raise it with expansions maybe. But you should have to go out of your way to reach the cap (i.e. just doing the main storyline would leave you underlevelled for the endgame.) I've played video games with "no level cap" and it just gets ludicrous. Nothing really has any meaning when a mage-type character has HP in the millions.

Edited October 20, 2012 by AGX-17

[Uszi]

If they're talking about making it so you only get XP from completing quests, objectives, story segmets, etc, then there doesn't really need to be a cap, does there?

 

I mean, there's a maximum amount of available experience in the game, and the developers can control how much players can ultimately acquire and when/where they acquire it.

[Shades]

I would only be happy with a level cap if it was set slightly higher than the experience you would acquire in the game had you gone through thoroughly and done every single quest that you possibly could. Basically so that you would only hit it if you'd been spending a fair amount of time killing monsters that respawned over and over again or something similar. If you hit an xp cap during a normal playthrough or a normal thorough playthrough then it feels like you're being cheated out of any experience you would have earned after you hit it.

[SKahn]

A character who did every side quest should finish the game at a higher level than a character that just did the main story.

[Jojobobo]

I didn't vote as I'd want a fixed amount of experience in the game, so though there is a level cap it would be because you have all the experience available in the game as opposed to you reach a max level and then stop levelling up regardless of what experience you gain. I think that way is better as it's nice to feel like your constantly advancing.

[Demobinkibinki]

I really don't want a level cap.

 

There can be a limited or diminishing number of creautes to fight and missions to complete, but

once I reach a level cap, I lose some of my interest in a game.

 

As a character levels, it takes progressively bigger jumps to reach the next level which is a limiting factor of sorts in itself.

 

Let those people who want to grind out repeatable quests, or clear out every corner of a map for some small benefit do so.

That will be me. I want the freedom to choose when the game ends. You can limit special skills or some other benefits of leveling after a cap, but leave off the cap so I still feel like I have some freedom. If I wanted to be told what to do, I would just go to work.

 

The Might and Magic Series put a cap on each skill, but did not cap levels. You could win some of them around 40-50 level, do most side quests and end up with 50-60 level, or grind exp on mobs and reach 100+ Level. (Obviously an MM level does not match up with AD&D, but you get the idea.)