Campaign Difficulty Progression

[Ninjamestari]

My problem is that if the game stays equally challenging and difficult the whole time, I don't feel any sense of progress or advancement. I'm objectively more powerful fighting more powerful enemies, but I feel just as week as the beginning, and lose interest.

 

This encapsulates my thoughts on the matter rather nicely. I don't like the world arbitrarily changing because of how strong my character is just to accommodate my level. It doesn't really make sense and just knowing that level scaling is in there eats away at my immersion significantly. I like games that stay the same regardless of what the player does, if that leads to a few less challenging encounters then so be it. This whole goal of homogenous difficulty makes the game sound more like a brainless consumer-product than a piece of art. I want to play a piece of handcrafted art, not a calculated homogenous product for brainless consumption. I want to experience the different paths and paces depending on the mood I'm in while playing, I want to experience the extremely challenging fight that tells me "come back later when you're stronger" by butchering my party in seconds. If anyone has played the first two Gothic games, you'll know the type of game world design I like.

 

One of the things is also that I like my character's power measure to be concrete, not just some vague abstract number that in the end doesn't mean anything because the world scales to your level. Mathematically speaking, a scaling world makes zero sense, doesn't fix any actual problems and instead introduces several new ones. Level scaling environments and monsters are one of the worst ideas to ever be introduced into cRPGs, and I've hated the concept from the moment I first heard of it.

[Ninjamestari]

 

Totally agree, and I think there should be some mode where you say you are going to be completionist, and content scales accordingly. One reason stuff becomes so easy is because it isn't scaled to accommodate for the xp from all the side content.

 

 

That's just bad quest/world/game design, you don't need to have scaling for this. The point is to not have too much optional XP available; if your character can only be +/- 1 the appropriate level for each important encounter, you'll only have a slightly easier or slightly harder time with it, and there really is no problem, and if there is, then the problem is too steep of a power curve per level. A +1 level should optimally be only a slight increase in the characters overall power, significant enough to notice, but it shouldn't turn a difficult fight into an easy one, that is too much. If you want an example of how NOT to do this, I recommend taking a look at the games of the Divinity series, where a single level can turn a fight from incredibly challenging to a simple cakewalk, which plays bonkers for the whole game experience difficulty-wise, and depending on how many side-quests you do those games can be either frustratingly difficult or ridiculously easy, and never really on the sweet spot. The key to a controlled difficulty curve in an RPG is not scaling, it's encounter design coupled with a slow power curve.

[Lephys]

This encapsulates my thoughts on the matter rather nicely. I don't like the world arbitrarily changing because of how strong my character is just to accommodate my level. It doesn't really make sense and just knowing that level scaling is in there eats away at my immersion significantly.

 

Thing is... why are unslayable dragons or Orc armies not parked right outside the starting village, blocking your road to literally anywhere else? The only answer is "because your party can only feasibly handle wussier foes right now." Thus, wussier foes are in the early part of the game, and you conveniently don't encounter ludicrously difficult foes until you go elsewhere.

 

I know it gets out of hand, but people act like the natural state of a game world just exists somewhere, and the developers who try to adjust anything in it contextually are unnaturally playing god. No, they're god already. The fact that the Prologue isn't "an unstoppable force razes your village to the ground, and everyone dies, including your main character. THE END" is because they deem that it doesn't happen. Largely because that wouldn't be fun at all. But, that's just a blatant example of NO adjustment, while most level-scaling complaints are merely an example of way too much/incorrectly-designed adjustment.

 

No one really wants NO adjustment, because no adjustment doesn't make any sense. The game world, by design, is adjusted to your party's adventure through it.

 

You can't rightly expect for time and effort expended by your party to mould and shape your power growth, but for the exact same tribe of goblins to just sit on their arses during that same passage of time, in the same spot in the forest, where no other tribe takes over their territory, or they don't get wiped out by some drakes who take over the area.

 

That being said, most scaling applications could be better designed with general world-lore in mind, like the above example. But the fact that even the same goblins are there with better equipment and more HP, etc., a month down the road, is not that crazy considering your party are the exact same way. "How DARE the developers not lock all of my foes into stasis whilst I get better!"

 

You're not Goku, and you're not owed a hyperbolic time chamber.

[Ninjamestari]

 

This encapsulates my thoughts on the matter rather nicely. I don't like the world arbitrarily changing because of how strong my character is just to accommodate my level. It doesn't really make sense and just knowing that level scaling is in there eats away at my immersion significantly.

 

Thing is... why are unslayable dragons or Orc armies not parked right outside the starting village, blocking your road to literally anywhere else? The only answer is "because your party can only feasibly handle wussier foes right now." Thus, wussier foes are in the early part of the game, and you conveniently don't encounter ludicrously difficult foes until you go elsewhere.

 

I know it gets out of hand, but people act like the natural state of a game world just exists somewhere, and the developers who try to adjust anything in it contextually are unnaturally playing god. No, they're god already. The fact that the Prologue isn't "an unstoppable force razes your village to the ground, and everyone dies, including your main character. THE END" is because they deem that it doesn't happen. Largely because that wouldn't be fun at all. But, that's just a blatant example of NO adjustment, while most level-scaling complaints are merely an example of way too much/incorrectly-designed adjustment.

 

No one really wants NO adjustment, because no adjustment doesn't make any sense. The game world, by design, is adjusted to your party's adventure through it.

 

You can't rightly expect for time and effort expended by your party to mould and shape your power growth, but for the exact same tribe of goblins to just sit on their arses during that same passage of time, in the same spot in the forest, where no other tribe takes over their territory, or they don't get wiped out by some drakes who take over the area.

 

That being said, most scaling applications could be better designed with general world-lore in mind, like the above example. But the fact that even the same goblins are there with better equipment and more HP, etc., a month down the road, is not that crazy considering your party are the exact same way. "How DARE the developers not lock all of my foes into stasis whilst I get better!"

 

You're not Goku, and you're not owed a hyperbolic time chamber.

 

 

There's a huge difference between automatic algorithmic level-adjustment that changes the stats of the mobs and simple level design. What you're talking about is the latter, the thing I don't like is the former. Adjustments in this context is the game making changes to the world in the fly based on math-variables, such as your level. Having weaker mobs in earlier areas is strictly level design, and it doesn't change as you gain in levels. If encounters scale, you can't even have a comparison between the power you have in two different play-throughs; perhaps you skipped most of the content the first time around, and now you've done everything this time and I think you should be able to see and feel that difference in power.