How is this game evolving?

[Gfted1]

^Press the "S" button.

 

Ill get my coat...

[Tigranes]

 

 

I miss the old FF8 concept as the enemies level the same way you do. Too bad this is commonly overlooked in RPGs.

Play Oblivion as a cautionary tale about how ridiculously broken this kind of scaling can be - and how to do it better, like they attempted (but were not entirely successful) in Skyrim.

 

Are you talking about ES4?

 

 

Oblivion is ES4. What you're talking about is level scaling, and it has actually become very common in RPGs the last 10 years. The problem is that it is often done in a really terrible way. If enemies just linearly scale with you all the way, for example, then what's the point of becoming more powerful? So you end up seeing roadside bandits in Oblivion sporting Daedric armour, or being able to beat FF8 late game bosses at level 1. 

[scottii]

diversity is the first thing thing to come to mind.  ill check out es4.  have it in my playlist for awhile now.  thanks for the insight.

[Zenbane]

If enemies just linearly scale with you all the way, for example, then what's the point of becoming more powerful?

 

Leveling up usually involves more than just increasing base attributes. So like... at level one you are forced to just beat a monster to death with a stick; but then at level 30 you can instead... stun, debuff, backstab, fireball, then chain lightning his buddies. Without monster scaling, combo's and strategies are void, and instead player evolution ranges from spamming stick swings to spamming fireballs.

 

Monster scaling is done so that stronger tactics are required to defeat an enemy. This has been observably true in RPG games for some 15+ year at least? Sure, some games have abused this and implement monster scaling as the sole form of combat difficulty, but that is the fault of the developer. If done correctly, monster scaling helps grant a sense of achievement to players who hone their combat tactic skills and abilities.

[why]

I would say that scaling has been going on for the entire span of humanity.  High school basketball teams generally play other high school teams.  College baseball teams play against other colleges.  The local peewee football teams doesn't play against an NFL team.  In old cRPGs, scaling was implemented by monster type in a certain area.  Tabletop was always different because the DM could adjust monsters accordingly and there wasn't as much filler time such as travel and whatnot between relatively safe areas.  So, if he wanted to convey the relative safety of an area, the players could always encounter less dangerous or trivial obstacles.  If he wanted to convey changes in the location, the party would face the new and more difficult creatures.  That's harder but not impossible in a cRPG.

 

Here's my beef, and I think Ob's name mentioned something akin to this earlier, sometimes a wolf is just a wolf.  If I bypass a few creatures early on, I should expect those creatures to be more or less area difficulty appropriate.  The pack of wolves menacing the small outpost that I never visited shouldn't suddenly be battle wolves with a contingent of dire wolves and a big daddy wolf with a shiny collar sporting the name 'Satan' etched into it.  If the wolves scale like that, did the outpost people scale also?

 

People have pointed out to me that scaling occured in BG2, and I enjoyed BG2 quite a bit.  So I know that it can be done well and that I shouldn't let the bad taste of Oblivion taint my appreciation of scaling, but, just for myself, I don't really want uniformly difficult fights.  I want most fights to be challenging on some level, a smattering of really difficult fights that make me change up tactics or use new ideas, and if I head back to previous areas, I don't mind some fights that are pretty easy or even trivial.  Scaling is best when I don't know the design team is using it.

Edited February 11, 2016 by why

[Zenbane]

Here's my beef, and I think Ob's name mentioned something akin to this earlier, sometimes a wolf is just a wolf.  If I bypass a few creatures early on, I should expect those creatures to be more or less area difficulty appropriate.  The pack of wolves menacing the small outpost that I never visited shouldn't suddenly be battle wolves with a contingent of dire wolves and a big daddy wolf with a shiny collar sporting the name 'Satan' etched into it.  If the wolves scale like that, did the outpost people scale also?

 

lol... All hail, Satan Wolf!

 

I see that you were trying to illustrate the concept of pointless scaling, but you painted a picture so entertaining that the prospect of Satanic Wolves alone makes scaling seem glorious

[Heijoushin]

OP may be right. One symptom of having 2 expansions which start within the vanilla campaign is the difficultly being all over the place.

But I say, let them go crazy now with WM2 (making new abilities, magic weapons, resting bonuses etc.) and then when POE2 comes out, they can start from scratch with making a balanced campaign.

And Why also has a point. Scaling should be more subtle, and (where possible) logical.