Nothing worse in an RPG than building yourself up into an unstoppable beast only for every stick brandishing bandit and feral dog to be juiced up to the eyeballs when you fight them, taking your god strength blows to the face with not even a flinch.
Morrowind already had a great design for this; many enemy spawns scale with your level, but they do it by adjusting which area-appropriate enemies have a chance of spawning, and it only makes a difference to a point. Like if you go to daedric ruins in the early game they’re going to be populated with scamps which are the weakest daedra, but those are still strong enough to steamroll you. If you run into a cliffracer in the lategame it will probably be the plague-enhanced stronger variant, but you will still be able to oneshot it. This system increases the number of circumstances where you’re going to run into challenging fights you have a chance of winning, in a way that doesn’t do much to nullify your power progression or break immersion.
They should have just done the same thing in Oblivion but they had some procedural obsessed design philosophy and wanted to avoid manual level design work I guess.
When you have a leveling system and everything in the world levels up along side you there may as well not be a leveling system at all. Devs do it when they want to say they have a leveling system but are too lazy to make it work correctly.
It makes sense for things to level in an open world game where someone could encounter an area at level 1 or 10. In order to provide a reasonable challenge for the player coming to that area. What oblivion did wrong is it was far too global and there weren’t sensible caps and floors on areas.
Or you just let players get their face smashed in by a high level enemy when they trespass somewhere they shouldn’t so they learn that they’re not ready to face that challenge yet. You also craft a world that gently guides them in a viable direction to level up to meet that challenge, ideally with multiple options to pursue.
Terraria technically has scaling (actually just three tiers) but it works fine. Your gear generally upgrades much faster than the scaling enemies. The new enemies are the real obstacle which feels better. I’ve never noticed old enemies becoming a problem and by the end game your ability to clear whatever random enemies stands in your way is trivial
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to. If by “three tiers”, you’re talking about pre-Hard-Mode, Hard-Mode, and post-Plantera, I don’t think that falls under what is typically meant by “level scaling” (I realise you didn’t use that term specifically, but people up-thread did). Level-scaling would be if a green slime, which dies in 2-3 hits at the beginning of the game, grew stronger alongside the player such that later in the game, it would still take 2-3 hits.
I’m not saying this just to be a persnickety asshole, but instead to make the point that Terraria is so great because it doesn’t have the kind of scaling that Oblivion and many other open-world RPGs have. I love how Terraria has no qualms in repeatedly bitch-slapping you back to spawn if you insist on heading into areas you’re ill-equipped for (and the tiered progression ensures that there’s nearly always some such difficult place, even as the player levels up). I also find it interesting how the tinkerer’s bench acts as a key driver of progression by allowing you to pack more accessory function into fewer equipment slots.
That is to say that unless I’m misunderstanding you, I completely agree with your points, except that I would consider this to be an example of good progression without level-scaling
Nothing worse in an RPG than building yourself up into an unstoppable beast only for every stick brandishing bandit and feral dog to be juiced up to the eyeballs when you fight them, taking your god strength blows to the face with not even a flinch.
Morrowind already had a great design for this; many enemy spawns scale with your level, but they do it by adjusting which area-appropriate enemies have a chance of spawning, and it only makes a difference to a point. Like if you go to daedric ruins in the early game they’re going to be populated with scamps which are the weakest daedra, but those are still strong enough to steamroll you. If you run into a cliffracer in the lategame it will probably be the plague-enhanced stronger variant, but you will still be able to oneshot it. This system increases the number of circumstances where you’re going to run into challenging fights you have a chance of winning, in a way that doesn’t do much to nullify your power progression or break immersion.
They should have just done the same thing in Oblivion but they had some procedural obsessed design philosophy and wanted to avoid manual level design work I guess.
When you have a leveling system and everything in the world levels up along side you there may as well not be a leveling system at all. Devs do it when they want to say they have a leveling system but are too lazy to make it work correctly.
It makes sense for things to level in an open world game where someone could encounter an area at level 1 or 10. In order to provide a reasonable challenge for the player coming to that area. What oblivion did wrong is it was far too global and there weren’t sensible caps and floors on areas.
Or you just let players get their face smashed in by a high level enemy when they trespass somewhere they shouldn’t so they learn that they’re not ready to face that challenge yet. You also craft a world that gently guides them in a viable direction to level up to meet that challenge, ideally with multiple options to pursue.
Wasn’t morrowind like that? There’s nothing wrong with going somewhere and going “oh I shouldn’t be here. I’ll come back later.”
New Vegas as well. Try and take a shortcut to New Vegas instead of going the long way? Here, have some cazadors and deathclaws lmao
Terraria technically has scaling (actually just three tiers) but it works fine. Your gear generally upgrades much faster than the scaling enemies. The new enemies are the real obstacle which feels better. I’ve never noticed old enemies becoming a problem and by the end game your ability to clear whatever random enemies stands in your way is trivial
I’m not sure I understand what you’re referring to. If by “three tiers”, you’re talking about pre-Hard-Mode, Hard-Mode, and post-Plantera, I don’t think that falls under what is typically meant by “level scaling” (I realise you didn’t use that term specifically, but people up-thread did). Level-scaling would be if a green slime, which dies in 2-3 hits at the beginning of the game, grew stronger alongside the player such that later in the game, it would still take 2-3 hits.
I’m not saying this just to be a persnickety asshole, but instead to make the point that Terraria is so great because it doesn’t have the kind of scaling that Oblivion and many other open-world RPGs have. I love how Terraria has no qualms in repeatedly bitch-slapping you back to spawn if you insist on heading into areas you’re ill-equipped for (and the tiered progression ensures that there’s nearly always some such difficult place, even as the player levels up). I also find it interesting how the tinkerer’s bench acts as a key driver of progression by allowing you to pack more accessory function into fewer equipment slots.
That is to say that unless I’m misunderstanding you, I completely agree with your points, except that I would consider this to be an example of good progression without level-scaling