62 réponses à ce sujet

[Maconbar]

Wintermist wrote...

I'm an old-school gamer so I prefer the old way to do RPG's with no scaling. We used to get games that punished us if we ventured into an area we couldn't yet handle. If we was that stupid, well game over to us.

If they have to do scaling atleast have different opponents designed for us. Early on, rogues attack us, but later on those rogues have tougher fighters with them, wearing heavier armour and whatnot.

I remember in Oblivion I wasn't rewarded for getting stronger (until I found a mod to fix it) and it's the same problem here.

Basically what they have done is taken away from the player, responsabilities, thinking we can not by ourselves handle various difficulties in different areas. Killing off players because they ventured into the wrong area is apparantly a thing of the past.

BW has used level scaling for most of their recent games. If you look at DA:O, which used level scaling, you are easily able to choose the order in which you attempt the middle quest lines, i.e., dwarf, elf, circle, and redcliff. Without level scaling it would become much more difficult for players to pick which one based on personal preference. So there are advantages to having level scaling.

[Wintermist]

Maconbar wrote...

Wintermist wrote...

I'm an old-school gamer so I prefer the old way to do RPG's with no scaling. We used to get games that punished us if we ventured into an area we couldn't yet handle. If we was that stupid, well game over to us.

If they have to do scaling atleast have different opponents designed for us. Early on, rogues attack us, but later on those rogues have tougher fighters with them, wearing heavier armour and whatnot.

I remember in Oblivion I wasn't rewarded for getting stronger (until I found a mod to fix it) and it's the same problem here.

Basically what they have done is taken away from the player, responsabilities, thinking we can not by ourselves handle various difficulties in different areas. Killing off players because they ventured into the wrong area is apparantly a thing of the past.

BW has used level scaling for most of their recent games. If you look at DA:O, which used level scaling, you are easily able to choose the order in which you attempt the middle quest lines, i.e., dwarf, elf, circle, and redcliff. Without level scaling it would become much more difficult for players to pick which one based on personal preference. So there are advantages to having level scaling.

I agree there are advantages, and your example is a good one. Though, there's always the possibility to having scaling by using different mobs too. Dragon Age Origins pulled it off way better than Dragon Age 2 I think.

[adneate]

Wintermist wrote...
I remember in Oblivion I wasn't rewarded for getting stronger (until I found a mod to fix it) and it's the same problem here.

Oblivion is a great study in the problems with an auto-level system, the theory behind it was to make it so that player wouldn't just become a God and slaughter everything in sight thus getting bored. However as Bethesda and everyone playing Oblivion soon figured out the system didn't just make leveling unrewarding it actually can make it a punishment. Everyone else leveled through statistically perfect formulas, if your character build was less than perfect or you didn't grind your minor skills to get +5 attribute modifiers you'd actually get significantly weaker with each level up. The solution was obvious after Oblivion's release, it was to put in level caps so that certain enemies could not level past a given threshold. So from levels 1-4 they are too strong to fight en masse while at 5-8 they are as tough as the player and at 8+ the player is stronger than them and they get much easier to fight. This concept along with better designed leveled item lists were implemented in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so if you're a Level 20 character in Power Armor with a Plasma Rifle you're going to blow through any number of raiders you find.

Dragon Age 2 suffers from many of the exact same problems that Oblivion suffered from 5 years ago, why they repeated them EXACTLY despite everyone knowing the solution is a bit of a mystery. Though I suspect given that this game had 1/5th the time in development as Origins they used an auto-level system so they didn't have to actually design any encounters or check their difficulty. Which would explain the sometimes erratic jumps in difficulty, where fights go from too easy to half an hour long battles of attrition against HP behemoths.

[Maconbar]

adneate wrote...

Wintermist wrote...
I remember in Oblivion I wasn't rewarded for getting stronger (until I found a mod to fix it) and it's the same problem here.

Oblivion is a great study in the problems with an auto-level system, the theory behind it was to make it so that player wouldn't just become a God and slaughter everything in sight thus getting bored. However as Bethesda and everyone playing Oblivion soon figured out the system didn't just make leveling unrewarding it actually can make it a punishment. Everyone else leveled through statistically perfect formulas, if your character build was less than perfect or you didn't grind your minor skills to get +5 attribute modifiers you'd actually get significantly weaker with each level up. The solution was obvious after Oblivion's release, it was to put in level caps so that certain enemies could not level past a given threshold. So from levels 1-4 they are too strong to fight en masse while at 5-8 they are as tough as the player and at 8+ the player is stronger than them and they get much easier to fight. This concept along with better designed leveled item lists were implemented in both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so if you're a Level 20 character in Power Armor with a Plasma Rifle you're going to blow through any number of raiders you find.

Dragon Age 2 suffers from many of the exact same problems that Oblivion suffered from 5 years ago, why they repeated them EXACTLY despite everyone knowing the solution is a bit of a mystery. Though I suspect given that this game had 1/5th the time in development as Origins they used an auto-level system so they didn't have to actually design any encounters or check their difficulty. Which would explain the sometimes erratic jumps in difficulty, where fights go from too easy to half an hour long battles of attrition against HP behemoths.

BW used the same leveling approach for mobs in DA:O.

[adneate]

Maconbar wrote...
BW used the same leveling approach for mobs in DA:O.

However Origins has several stats that are not auto-leveled, additionally it's combat system has the ability to have hits and misses. DA2 is an always hit system that levels base player abilites. In Origins fighting the High Dragon at the temple later in the game is easier since I have more spells, talents, higher defense and attack stats and more HP. My ability to wear tougher armour and attack with stronger weapons is not scaled based on the fact that I'm fighting a High Dragon. In Dragon Age 2 it is, my armour is less effective, my resistances lower and my weapons weaker because I'm fighting a High Dragon.

It's the same concept but it's used to entirely different ends and coupled with some of the mechanical changes to the combat system it creates a much more obvious and at times frustrating experience.

[Kimberly Shaw]

In DA:O the developers did two things, from memory. They had scaling but hard capped the levels of mobs, so that a rat was never going to be more than low level no matter when you ran into it, and a Revenant was always going to kill a level 1 player easily.

DA:2 the scaling is just terrible. Immersion breakingly terrible. DA:O scaling I could live with, although some Denerim bandits needed to be (and were in a patch) tweaked as they were way too high level for street bandits. The dalish quest had lower level monsters than the deep roads no matter when you went to it because the cap was there.

If you level up your PC in act1 to level 30, the npcs in act 1 will scale all the way up with you. It's not like DA:O at all in this regards and is awful in my opinion.

Why even have levels? Just remove levels from the game if your hitpoints and damage are always going scale to the npcs hitpoints and damage output. Just remove levels and have us get new abilities. Or just give us a FPS / Hack and Slash if that is what you want gamers to be.

*sigh*

And yes, there is a bit of scaling in Baldur's Gate 2 but you face DIFFERENT monsters. Street thugs in Athlatka are EASY for me to kill at level 19 and so are goblins, orcs, bugbears. Yet an archlich is impossible to kill at level 7 AS IT SHOULD BE.

[Gel214th]

If it's that much of a problem, there will be a mod to change the gameplay to suit your tastes I'm sure.

I actually prefer the Level 30 mobs in Act I if I so desire ;-)
I like a consistent level of challenge dictated by the Difficulty setting I select.

I suspect that when people begin to try altering encounters based on groups of different monsters at different levels etc. they'll realise how difficult *that* is to balance.

[ad1dash0lm3s]

Yes, I did the glitch and I was all "i 0wnz n00bz wit lvlz20 warrior only" Then I got destroyed and realized that of course they increase same as you.

[Ox_Mox]

Level scaling isn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be. A random enemy scaling from 1 to 20 doesn't improve nearly as Hawke does. A level one Hawke might have trouble with level one street thugs, but a level 20 Hawke can slaughter dozens of lvl 20 thugs without a party to back him up.

[Merak88]

Enemy scaling defeats the purpose of the entire level and gear system. It becomes less about gaining experience and armor, more about keeping up with the system. It kills immersion and any sense of accomplishment.

A level one wolf has a 25% chance to hit. The player character levels up and now a level two wolf has a 30% chance to hit. The player must now find and equip a piece of level two armor. Now the level two wolf has, again, a 25% chance to hit. Rinse and repeat. It does not matter how high the level cap is, in this type of gaming system, wolves are just as tough at level 1,000,000 as they are at level 1.

As it has already been pointed out, the obvious reason developers do this is because it is the easy way out. One needs only to create a simple algorithm and Ta Da!, an entire list of enemy stats is complete (see Torchlight for reference). Throw this in with copy/pasting area levels, cutting out lore, streamlining story elements, and a company can whip out a game in a very short amount of time.

Edit:  For clarity, this is in general.  Bioware can pull it off better than others due to their (recent) games being single, linear playthrough.

Modifié par Merak88, 27 mars 2011 - 11:54 .

[Havokk7]

TeamRyan wrote...

DungeonLord wrote...

Btw, there are other, smarter ways of giving players a consistent challenge rather than the cheap cop-out way of simply making enemies match your level. It's the laziest way out.

Yeah I'm gonna call you on that one, name 1 single way to keep the challenge consistent with out level scaling, or adding more enemies per encounter.

I'm going to turn the question around. Why are you trying to keep the challenge consistent?

Why should every single fight you ever do be the same challenge? I think some fights should be easy, some should be hard, some should be impossible for certain specs. The rewards should match the challenge.

[UncleScrooge]

Enemy level scaling is the lazy way out for developers. It makes no sense. I'd rather have pallette swapped enemies with slightly different names and a few added skills/tactics/better AI) that begin to appear as you hit certain level milestones than generic lazy level scaling stupidness.

But it is easier to do than making more enemies that have stronger powers etc. that you meet as the story progresses.

The way the handled nightmare difficulty is lazy too. Better Ai for enemies and more of them is the way to go. Not the lazy way they did it.

Modifié par UncleScrooge, 28 mars 2011 - 12:02 .

[snackrat]

Well, it makes sense they level up, despite what some say. Levelling up is less about one-hit KOing dragons after years of barely breaking the exoskeleton of a gnat, and more about learning new skills and tactics to deal with new threats. The stats would be including so you can learn to hit harder (strength), train (stamina) endurance (willpower), get better at lockpicking (cunning)... those things. That's probably why the bonuses become less effective as you level up, too.

Besides, don't we already have the Fandumb complaining about the game being 'too easy' without us levelling up into those who fistfight with dragons in Darktown?