Will PoE have level scaling? (Please no)

[Lephys]

And yes, it's a one-off possibility of scaling, which still makes overall scaling... terrible.

Haha. Alright... I vote we stick to non-overall scaling, then.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Were was it used in BG2?

 

Irenicus fight in spellhold.

[Karkarov]

You know maybe I remember wrong but I could swear they have long since said the main story missions scale to the party/player and only the side mission stuff is static.

[R.Alexander]

You know maybe I remember wrong but I could swear they have long since said the main story missions scale to the party/player and only the side mission stuff is static.

I think you are right. It would make the most sense so that the main story has the right challenge.

[Stun]

Were was it used in BG2?

The Irenicus battle in spellhold. He casts Spawn Clones, and suddenly there's a duplicate of everyone in your party, as well as a duplicate of all the crazy prisoners you've freed. Edited May 14, 2014 by Stun

[Hassat Hunter]

Hmmm, I don't  recall that... seems I need a BG2 replaying in the near future

[ShadySands]

I want reverse level scaling

 

The game should change my level to be equal to the level of the monsters

 

It's only fair

[Kore]

Im a bit late to the party, but I thought I'd my thoughts here.

 

For most difficulty settings I'm somewhere in the middle ground on this discussion and I think I'm happy with what Sawyer has suggested so far. However, thinking about the insane difficulties I actually think that level scaling here would be worthwhile. I can play Baldur's Gate on insane difficulty on my head no problem, even playing IWD on Heart of Fury with a level 1 party is only super challenging for the first few fights. Insane should be challenging for every minor goblin fight, regardless of my level, so in this instance alone I think that level scaling is definitely a good thing.

[Valorian]

I'd like the endgame crit path content to be tuned for level 12 parties. If a person wants to dash through the critical path and finds certain challenges too hard, there's always the option to turn the difficulty level down. However, games that do have level scaling don't provide the option to turn it down or off, unfortunately.

[Lephys]

^ Actually, Oblivion had that option. You could adjust the scaling ratio, from "off", all the way up to 2:1. It was separate from the difficulty setting, methinks.

 

Just a fun fact.

[Hassat Hunter]

I seriously doubt the game infamous for it's horrendous scaling had the option to turn it off... :facepalm:

[Lephys]

If you couldn't turn it off, you could turn it to like... .0000001:1

 

It was a slider. I'm fairly certain all the way at the bottom was "off," but, I'm not 100% on that. I'd have to go check when I get home.

 

*shrug*. Most people don't even know it was adjustable, though. This was on the 360 version, btw, so I can't say with certainty that it wasn't specific to that version. But, as far as I know, it was a direct port.

[curi]

level scaling is the wrong debate.

 

the main debate should be: is it necessary that you get 20x stronger from the start of the game to the end of the game? or would getting only 2x more powerful over the whole game be OK?

 

when you scale up power level a huge amount, you create huge problems for an open game world.

 

it's saying the world has a huge amount of variance: it has level 1 enemies and level 20 enemies that are 20x more powerful. and so then you have a big issue of how do the protagonists, in this world full of all levels of enemy, manage to fight the right enemies each step of the way?

 

if the world itself has a smaller variance, so a max level party fighting a group of 10 bandits never has a free walkover, then the whole level scaling issue goes away and won't be done. problem solved.

 

the other important thing here is how the game handles resource recovery. if you regenerate to full hp and mana after every fight, like some games, then fighting someone slightly weaker than you is boring because you will win, and it doesn't matter how efficiently you win because all resources involved are temporary for that one fight.

 

in a better designed game – such as Pillars of Eternity – fighting waker enemies matters because some resources do not regenerate for every fight. in PoE's case, health and per-rest abilities don't regenerate. that's GREAT. it means fighting weaker enemies isn't boring because you have to worry about conserving longer-term resources during those fights, so even though you'll definitely win the fight, the amount of resources you will lose during the fight is not at all a forgone conclusion.

 

so there's 2 main reasons for level scaling:

 

1) huge variance of power levels in the world

 

2) because of terrible resource systems so that fighting anything that isn't your own power level is boring

 

issue (1) is debatable, but my opinion is characters simply shouldn't scale up very much over the course of a game.

 

issue (2) is not really debatable. games need long term resources to add complexity and interest, so there are different outcomes to a fight other than "win" or "lose". you need more complexity than that like, "i won but i lost a lot of hp, and used up some potions, and neither of those is very easy to replenish". PoE gets this right of course. better than BG. limiting rests per trip out of town, and having endurance as a fight-long resource vs health as a longer term resource is GREAT. and having per-encounter and per-rest abilities is, again, GREAT.

 

i'm not too far in the game yet but it looks well done so far, to me. i don't know exactly what level scaling ended up in the game, but the resource system is really good. the power level scaling from start of game to end of game looks way too big, IMO, but (from what i can guess so far) no worse than other games (e.g. baldur's gate), and much better than some (e.g. diablo 3).

Edited March 29, 2015 by curi