Fix for scaled leveling?

[orph]

Well, I'm glad so many people chimed in, but not one person actually even attempted to answer the question I asked. I'm just going to take that to mean that nobody of note has mentioned an intention to remove this "feature" and I'm going to wait for the GOTY edition so there has been time for someone new to fix it.

 

There will probably be lots of other game enhancing mods by that point anyway, and I won't get raped by DLC.

[Herculine]

I don't mean to sound snarky, but it's kinda hard to mod for a game that hasn't been released yet.

[hector530]

Ugh, trust me, on my fully leveled up character in fallout 3 with good weapons it took multiple magazines of hits on reavers(or whatever) to kill them. It was unfun. Thats it. New vegas wasn't bad about it and it had no scaled anything, but the DLC ramped the life up on the enemies and was annoying with that as well. I didn't get Old World blues because I hated the first two, so I have no idea about special robot weapons in that DLC.

 

 

 

My fear with Skyrim is that I'll be constantly harassed by enemies just above my level throughout the game. Which is not a game I want to play. I want to take the time to be stronger than everything I face, and when some bandit attempts to waylay me I want to crush his head in with one blow. Clearly Bethesda doesn't want people playing their games the way I like to play them, so I'm hoping that there is some modder with experience doing rebalance stuff who intends to work on this. If there is no such person then I know to wait for a GOTY on Skyrim so there has been enough time for someone new to develop this stuff.

 

no i dont trust you because i got 100% in fallout3. every quest done, every location visited, every weapon, every dlc, maxed all skills and stats on the 360. an Enclave squad in hellfire armor pffff no problem. like i said youre the first person ive heard say that. everyone else complains about fo3 and NV enemies being to weak and the game to easy.

 

as for skyrim i think the leveling will be fine. as long as the quest items arnt lvld. that annoyed me more then anything. never really thought enemies were tough after i found out weakness spell stacks. enchant every weakness spell on a weapon along with fire, frost and shock damage and things die quick or if wanna be really cheap 100% weakness on magic for 1sec and 100 health drain. 200hp first hit, 400hp next and so on so on.

 

but just about every enemy leveling in oblivion sucked. you know its a problem when ppl would avoid sleeping so you dont level and/or make classes with skills they knew they wouldnt rank up.

Edited July 26, 2011 by hector530

[AltreU]

To answer your question, yes there will be level scaling, but it will be fixed for various parts of the game. There will be parts where enemies are way to strong for you and you might have to come back later. The level scaling comes in when you get into their level range, they'll level up with you until they reach their cap.

 

So pretty much: you're level 1, you arrive at a level 8 area and find it too difficult to complete; you go to a lower level area and get up to level 7 and decide to take on that level 8 place; you stay there and get to level 12 and find that the xp isn't good enough and decide to explore a higher level region. (this is how I imagined it will function after reading the article....)

 

 

So pretty much, it's like New Vegas, maybe even better. Read over the sources in the info thread to find the actual article, I don't remember which one it's in.

[Vagrant0]

Level scaling can't actually be undone completely since the game is open-ended with the player conceivably moving through any area at any level.

 

There are generally two ways to solve this...

 

1). Have spawns of a single type level with the player... so, for instance, as you level, things also get more health and do more damage.. Which is generally poorly received since it leads to little variety and removes most of the point of even leveling since everything else also gets stronger. Leading into the issues of immortal enemies, or things getting much stronger than you if you havn't kept up on important skills.

 

2). Have a variety of spawns at fixed levels, but swap them out based on the level of the player. This is a little better since it allows for more variety in spawns, and gives you pockets where you're facing things which are weaker than you or stronger than you. But, people still don't like how spawns in a dungeon or the world change based on their level. There also quickly becomes an issue where things stop becoming stronger because they aren't programmed to, which leads to a nearly unstoppable character and boring encounters.

 

The only other state is to have static spawns that don't adjust with the player. But, this only works when you have a linear environment or semi-linear one since you can't plan what level the player would be when they go through that section. With TES, this sort of system doesn't work well since many don't touch the main quest until other quests are done, while others do the main quest immediately and go to other quests later, while others try to do both at the same time. So having later parts of questlines with harder enemies would mean forcing the player to have to come back later or level along that questline only to face trivial challenges in other questlines when they get to them.

 

Frans/mmm used the second method above for the most part, scaling types of enemies with variety rather than making the same ones harder.

 

OOO used the second method as well for most spawns, but also had fixed spawns in the wilderness and higher level spawns in special dungeons.

 

Morrowind used the second method, but capped out at about level 25, but was acceptable because higher end equipment was very scarce and expansion mobs were significantly tougher.

 

Oblivion also used the second method for the most part... But had far fewer varieties of mobs, and tried to use aspects of the first method to bridge the gaps and cover the higher end. The part where it failed horribly was in making higher end equipment trivial to find at high levels, and had things scaled up to levels 80+ and often far beyond the sorts of strengths that the player could reach without branching outside their specialization and eventually modding in equipment.

 

FO3 used the second method as well, mostly with the same degree as Oblivion, but with a few changes. Most notably, encounters which were both leveled, but also had a fixed minimum based on main quest progression. But, FO3 was also quite a bit more linear than Oblivion.

 

FONV used mostly the static method, but was far more linear than FO3, but still had leveled spawns for most dungeons and many field areas. This also shows that even though the player is told rather strongly to avoid an area until later, they will usually go there anyway.

 

Nehrim used a mostly static method, but also very linear, to the point where taking a break from the main quest to work on skills or sidequests meant that enemies from the main quest became trivial for awhile, but enemies in side quests, or just from taking a wrong turn in the road could kill you quickly, with almost no indication. As fun as this was at some points, what it causes is for people to explore, and possibly trigger, other areas with stronger things before doing much of the main quest, resulting in objectives from the main quest (namely epic battles) being fairly trivial. Or, People focusing on the main quest, but being trounced because they strayed from the path, took a different route, or have an NPC companion which is content on watching the player get killed.

 

 

In short, more static leveling only works when you have a linear storyline and a singular quest chain. As soon as you have any significant element which occurs outside of a linear storyline, you need to move to a dynamic leveling method of some kind. Skyrim will probably have a system closer to method 2, and for the most part this is unavoidable since, like in all TES games, there is no way to flee from an impossible fight, but more so, because an impossible fight might come in the form of some super high level dragon that decided to just swoop in on you while hunting rats. Impossible encounters sound fun... until you have them constantly happening.

[weed33]

an impossible fight might come in the form of some super high level dragon that decided to just swoop in on you while hunting rats.

that's actually one of the things i'm looking forward to the most, getting into a near impossible fight against a dragon that's much higher level than me... i like a challenge =D

not saying i want it happening too much though

Edited July 27, 2011 by weed33

[Vagrant0]

an impossible fight might come in the form of some super high level dragon that decided to just swoop in on you while hunting rats.

that's actually one of the things i'm looking forward to the most, getting into a near impossible fight against a dragon that's much higher level than me... i like a challenge =D

not saying i want it happening too much though

The problem with this is that this notion is becoming far too common among players who are asking just short of games to be not only outright unwinnable, but insult you and give you cancer. With a game like this, even a 1% chance ends up being quite high.

 

I fooled around with this sort of thing in Oblivion, rebalancing leveled lists using what i considered "hybrid" spawns, which combined the good points of methods 1 and 2, in that there was variety, but within that variety things still adjusted with your level. The problem was that more often than not you would duck into some ruin and find yourself face to face with a lich, or get trampled by some passing ogre. What existed as a challenge quickly became an annoyance as you would suddenly stir up something unkillable at your level just as a reaction to your exploration. Almost every time. That and with armor appearing at any level, just very rare (less than 1%) you still often ended up with a mostly full set of elven after killing a few bandit dens. Part of the reason why I stopped with this was because all the balancing which needed to be done was quickly becoming more of a project than I had anticipated. In regards to dragons... The problem is that they're hard to start with since you won't even make one land unless using a bow or spells. Getting stuck with an extremely high leveled one would mean not only death, but probably having to restore from a savepoint made a few hours earlier, and probably not get very far until another one appeared.

 

On one hand, it doesn't make much sense for the world to get stronger when you do, but on the other the player still needs to be able to progress through the game without constant unwinnable situations. The larger the level range, the harder this is to manage. As Skyrim is being phrased as a 1-70 game, rather than the 1-30 game that Oblivion is, I suspect this would be even harder to manage without just going with dynamic spawns.

[AltreU]

If they're doing it the way I think they're doing it, I'll be happy with it. I'm one of the few that is actually fine with Oblivion's level scaling, as well as the other Beth games scaling systems.

 

I like especially that dragons will be something to fear in this. There aren't that many games I can think of where I saw a dragon and thought, "Oh crap, this thing will probably destroy me if I try fighting it! Better hide until I'm safe!"

 

Even Demon's Souls Dragon God boss wasn't intimidating as far as gameplay went. It was just a big test of patience. That thing was far bigger than the dragons shown here!

[kibblesticks]

 

The only other state is to have static spawns that don't adjust with the player. But, this only works when you have a linear environment or semi-linear one since you can't plan what level the player would be when they go through that section. With TES, this sort of system doesn't work well since many don't touch the main quest until other quests are done, while others do the main quest immediately and go to other quests later, while others try to do both at the same time. So having later parts of questlines with harder enemies would mean forcing the player to have to come back later or level along that questline only to face trivial challenges in other questlines when they get to them.

 

 

 

I hated this in New Vegas. In FO3 I didn't know I was supposed to be going to Megaton to begin with (didn't know about the quest log) so I just wandered around the wastes, my eyes wide with wonder at all the amazing sites and sounds, etc, etc...

 

I wanted to have a similar experience in New Vegas and decided to leave Goodsprings as soon as I'd finished the powder gang mission and set out into the wastes to explore. However, I only managed to get about a quarter of a mile north before I was suddenly being set upon on all sides by giant radscorpions. Later, when trying to get to Vegas, I had to go the long way around because Deathclaws had filled up the north bound path.

 

I wouldn't have minded this if it was a linear game, but the "open-world" was obviously structured to make you follow a certain path. Add half a ton of invisible walls to the mix and it just didn't feel like Fallout anymore. Don't get me wrong, Vegas was a great game, but some parts just felt too rushed "oh we don't want the player going that way at the start of the game, lets just fill the middle section of the map with giant radscorps and Deathclaws" :confused:

[Khadir]

The problem with this is that this notion is becoming far too common among players who are asking just short of games to be not only outright unwinnable, but insult you and give you cancer.

 

For what it's worth, I play Dwarf Fortress too. Losing is fun.

 

To answer the OP's question: Yes, there will be "NPC spawns not related to PC's level or skills" mods. I fully intend to make and use one for myself even before I start the game; it was easy enough to do in FO3. If there's enough people asking for one, I might even clean it up and release it. :D