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An Erudite Discussion of Level Scaling

hpstg

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You can't have any degree of non linearity in exploration, without some sort of level adjustment for the enemies. If done right, nobody even notices it exists.
 

MRY

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You can't have any degree of non linearity in exploration, without some sort of level adjustment for the enemies. If done right, nobody even notices it exists.
That's not so. There are plenty of games -- not just RPGs, but games like Metroid or Zelda -- where you have some degree of nonlinearity without scaling. I don't recall appreciable level scaling in Fallout (though there may have been some?) or Arcanum or Vogel's games, not to mention a lack of level scaling in many older RPGs that were also nonlinear. Level scaling is only needed for a completely open world where the player can go anywhere in any order without a difficulty spike. It may also be necessary in a really large game where, absent level scaling, a large percentage of the world will be trivially easy by the time the player gets there.

A key aspect of great nonlinear games is the sense that some areas are nominally accessible but perilous. The player has to make cost-benefit decisions as to whether it's worth going someplace dangerous now, or whether it is better to come back later. It's particularly nice if you introduce some cost to abstaining -- thus, the player can't always be confident that he'll be able to come back later. But you definitely want at least some portions where you power up, then come back to challenging areas and crush your foes -- at least you do if you want a traditional hero-story arc to the game.

Level scaling is basically an easy way to insure that you don't need to balance your game taking account of nonlinearity -- it's like throwing up your hands and saying that everyone gets a passing grade because grading is too hard: it doesn't solve the problem so much as obliterates the very possibility of a solution.
 

Jaesun

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Well done encounter tables, like the ones used in Baldur's Gate was fantastic. That is a system that was done very well and should be done in more games, instead of LOL Add MOAR HP+LEVAL TO MONSTAR!!!1111

EDIT: The "level scaled encounters" in TuTu and BGT are complete fucking shit. I am talking about the original Baldur's Gate Game.
 
Last edited:

Haba

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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Scaling enemies are usually bad.
World that evolves influenced by player actions is usually good.

Returning to kill a level 1 bully one hour later can be fun, but discovering the said level 1 bully encounter after 30 hours of playing is not much fun. So while you were adventuring, the bully was lifting and got some mad gains.
 

CyberWhale

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Finally, someone with brainz and vision. :salute:

I'm a huge proponent of difficulty scaling, despite not ever seeing it (properly) implemented:

1. level scaling (enemies increase their damage and/or health)
2. equipment scaling (enemies wear better armor and/or weapons)
3. numbers scaling (more enemies of the same/different type)
4. AI scaling (enemies becoming better organized and/or individually smarter)

...all of it should be, of course, narratively supported and limited to/consistent with in-game logic of the world in question.

For example: Village struggles with a pair of extremely vicious wolfes on top off all the other trouble they have to endure on a daily basis.

Choice A: You come into the village, help its people with mundane tasks and kill the wolves that are terrorizing them, but fail to find their cubs.
Choice B: You come into the village, steal from its people and don't give a fuck about the wolves because you're not willing to risk your life at the moment.
Choice C: You genocide all the wolves in the vicinity and make some buckz by selling their skinz in the nearby village.

After a few mounths of traveling and fucking around the world in quest for adventure, gold and fame, you come back to TEH VILLAGE and find the following situation:

Consequence A: The village has, without having to wonder about constant wolf attacks, prospered and grown. Their economy relies on herding cattle, some ex-soldiers have joined their ranks, and all of them are now equipt with studded leather armors. On top of that - some of those wolfcubs have been trained and are now used as additional help as well.

Consequence B: You find the village in ruins, completely deserted. Well, that's only true if you don't count all the fucking wolves roaming around and constantly attacking you. Every time you manage to kill a pack, another one seems to find your trail. You aren't even aware that the original wolves have now grown even stronger and became alphas, and are now persistance hunting you and waiting for the perfect opportunity to ambush you.

Consequence C: The Village actually isn't in any shape better or worse then when you've previously visited it. Except it feels somehow different. You see a bunch of LARPers wearing wolfskins and howling. They tell you that their name is Wolf clan and their sole purpuse is to kill the man who butchered their idols. Good thing they don't recognize you, right?
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


Okay, this was a pretty retarded example, but I think you can guess my point - choices & consequnces bitchez, both in story and gameplay (difficulty as well) terms alike.
:dance:
 

Declinator

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Finally, someone with brainz and vision. :salute:

I'm a huge proponent of difficulty scaling, despite not ever seeing it (properly) implemented:

1. level scaling (enemies increase their damage and/or health)
2. equipment scaling (enemies wear better armor and/or weapons)
3. numbers scaling (more enemies of the same/different type)
4. AI scaling (enemies becoming better organized and/or individually smarter)

...all of it should be, of course, narratively supported and limited to/consistent with in-game logic of the world in question.

As I understand it level scaling specifically means that the enemies scale according to your level and not just that their level increases due to some player related factor (such as the player's actions). So it's not that Oblivion has both level scaling and equipment scaling because you'll face level 50 bandits in glass armor but just level scaling because they scaled (in ways not defined by the term "level scaling") to your level.

So what you are talking about is more like choice scaling or player action scaling. Difficulty scaling would just mean that enemies scale according to the difficulty chosen which is a well-trodden path to say the least. Of course this is all semantics.

Perhaps RPGs don't have much of that (enemies getting better or worse due to your actions) but other genres (e.g. strategy) do.
 

Scroo

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Codex 2014 Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Sounds like Oblivion. Robbers in full daedric armor worth a whole kingdom. :rpgcodex:

Only if executed poorly. I like how you deliberately ignored my comment above that explains how it should work. Haters gonna hate, I guess. :troll:

Your example is extremely detailed C&C instead of the classic level scaling tho :P If developers could put this much effort into it then yes, it could work since it fits the narrative and doesn't feel forced.

In reality scaling feels shoved down your throat usually which thus kills any sense of progress. Even limited scaling like Wizardry 8 feels forced and annoying.
 

duanth123

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how it should work

Let me be the first to disappoint you by reminding you that, historically, level scaling has almost always been used as a wax substitute for proper game design.

What you have suggested is a way to avoid that, but maybe you should ask yourself whether you have any reason to believe Obsidian is interested in such an approach?

Particularly given the relatively uncritical (outside of certain unkempt circles) of PoE's shit-tier encounter design.
 

hpstg

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That's not so. There are plenty of games -- not just RPGs, but games like Metroid or Zelda -- where you have some degree of nonlinearity without scaling. I don't recall appreciable level scaling in Fallout (though there may have been some?) or Arcanum or Vogel's games, not to mention a lack of level scaling in many older RPGs that were also nonlinear. Level scaling is only needed for a completely open world where the player can go anywhere in any order without a difficulty spike. It may also be necessary in a really large game where, absent level scaling, a large percentage of the world will be trivially easy by the time the player gets there.

A key aspect of great nonlinear games is the sense that some areas are nominally accessible but perilous. The player has to make cost-benefit decisions as to whether it's worth going someplace dangerous now, or whether it is better to come back later. It's particularly nice if you introduce some cost to abstaining -- thus, the player can't always be confident that he'll be able to come back later. But you definitely want at least some portions where you power up, then come back to challenging areas and crush your foes -- at least you do if you want a traditional hero-story arc to the game.

Level scaling is basically an easy way to insure that you don't need to balance your game taking account of nonlinearity -- it's like throwing up your hands and saying that everyone gets a passing grade because grading is too hard: it doesn't solve the problem so much as obliterates the very possibility of a solution.

Thanks for the reply and the thoughtful comments. I stand corrected. How would you approach a situation where the player skips a part of the world that is supposed to be "easy", and then cones back to it? Fallout didn't do level scaling, except in some random encounters (if that at all). Your answer made me wonder if Tyranny will have Kotor-style hubs, where the player can choose the order of visit in a large area, and some kind of level scaling seems inevitable (to me).
 

IHaveHugeNick

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Whole lotta bollocks in this thread. Scalling in Pillars is optional and at the same time it's mandatory if you don't want the White March and Act 3 to turn into big red I ALWAYS WIN button. The entire game would be better if it had build-in scaling from the start.

The only situation where flat level scaling is guaranteed to be a total disaster, is a fully open-world with respawns and lots of backtracking, aka Oblivion. It's also guaranteed to be a total disaster if you don't have any scaling, aka Witcher 3. Sandbox RPG is a sort of game where you need either a complex scalilng scheme (hard to do) or hand placed encounters (expensive to do), for the combat not to be a total mess.

But when you have non-linear world with modular maps, no respawns and little backtracking, level scaling is a non-issue.

Assuming that Tranny will have a similar modular design as Pillars, which it probably will, because the limited map size they went for is most likely some technical imitation, there's literally zero reasons why scaling would be a problem. All you have to do is scale every map once, when player first arrives. That's it. You can still have no-go zones, you can still backtrack and slaughter the big bad bear that kicked your ass when you were level 2, and you won't have to plow at every step through meaningless mobs that are Gods in glass armor.
 

MRY

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How would you approach a situation where the player skips a part of the world that is supposed to be "easy", and then cones back to it? Fallout didn't do level scaling, except in some random encounters (if that at all). Your answer made me wonder if Tyranny will have Kotor-style hubs, where the player can choose the order of visit in a large area, and some kind of level scaling seems inevitable (to me).
It is tempting to fantasize about how these things could be done in a perfect world, but I suppose there's probably good reason that what one tends to see is either simplistic level scaling or nothing at all.

I don't think of myself as much of a designer, but I guess this is the approach I'd take to the problem you describe:

(1) Is there any reason to permit the player to come back to a part of the world that was supposed to be easy? For example, say you have a standard Chosen One plot where the player starts as a farmboy in Peasanton and there is a gang of bandits lurking in the forest whom he's supposed to kill shortly after a stranger delivers to the farmboy his long-dead father's magic sword. If the player bypasses this "dungeon" (probably a small forest map with a handful of encounters and some trash gear that is only marginally better than a jerkin and homespun breeches) during the game's introductory phase and instead heads off to the nearby city where the quest begins in earnest, what reason is there to let him return to bandit issue later in the game? This is not a Scouring of the Shire scenario -- it doesn't really matter thematically. So I would probably simply close off the quest altogether. If you return to Peasanton you learn that a handful of farmers paid off the bandits and they left, or whatever.

(2) I would consider tying enemies' power advancement to something other than the player's level. For example, to the passage of time (in a DA:O or Exile 3 scenario) or, alternatively, to quest triggers. This would require something more than stat bloating. Ideally (as in Exile 3) you'd see actual manifestations of the enemies' advance, such as villages being destroyed, but at a minimum you'd want to change the kind of enemies and perhaps change some of the encounters. In a "gather the three maps" scenario, I might have the quest giver say something to the PC such as, "For now, you've got a lead on the Sith. But as soon as they know what you're up to, they'll be sending reinforcements to guard the map." Or whatever. Then I would scale the enemies' power to the number of map pieces you've recovered. I would use this kind of scaling sparingly, though, for main-quest segments where you know the player has to complete A, B, C segments but you don't know the order.

(3) I would consider having the way in which a player interacts with an area change depending on his power level. For example, if we have to let the farmboy go back to Bandit's Vale even after leveling up, what if upon his arrival, the bandits come out and greet him and promptly surrender? Or ask him to be their chief? The level scaling considerations are almost always treated as combat considerations, such that the logic runs something like: (i) this area is designed for a level 1 farmboy to fight in; (ii) at level 20, it will not be fun to fight in this area; (iii) therefore the enemies must be scaled up to be a challenge at level 20. But that's not an inescapable logical chain. Step (iii) could instead be "therefore, at level 20, the player should resolve this area with something other than combat." On a trivial level, Earthbound (the SNES jRPG) has enemies run at the player when the player's level is lower than a certain threshold, then run AWAY from the player when it is higher than a certain threshold, and I think (although perhaps I'm conflating it with another game) at a high enough threshold the combat just autoresolves with victory.

(4) I have long felt -- though I realize that this is not the market's preference -- that RPGs have too much character advancement. Rapid character advancements pushes stories almost ineluctably toward either a Chosen One plot (where the P.C. goes from zero to god) or an amensia plot (where the P.C. goes from [god before the story begins] to zero back to god). Moreover, the constant swapping out of gear deprives equipment of its important narrative role (consider, for example, the way light sabers are handled in KOTOR: they have an initial impact, and then they are trivialized). I think flattening the advancement curve for the characters and giving them new tools but not necessarily overwhelmingly more powerful tools is a better way to go. I think Zelda and Metroid (and I really only know these series from NES to SNES, not their more recent incarnations) are illustrative of this point. In both, you get more powerful but early enemies are not totally trivial. It's more that you develop new ways of interacting with them and the environment, such that it's fun to breeze through early areas. RPGs are a bit different -- I can't think of many RPGs where the actual interactive experience of exploration/combat is very fun, it's typically a more mental thing (either a reward loop or the pleasure of executing good tactics) -- but I think there's something to be done here.

For Fallen Gods, my plan is:

(1) There are some random combats (like in a jRPG) as you explore the world. These will "scale" to the player's level, but not by changing enemy HP or stats. Rather, the idea is that as you become more powerful, certain types of enemies who would otherwise try to kill you (e.g., a starving wolf or a couple poor outlaws) wouldn't dare try now, while other enemies that wouldn't notice you when you were weak now do so (e.g., magical creatures drawn to your godly power).

(2) The overwhelming majority of encounters in the game are not random combats but events, and these won't scale. For the most part, they are "random" as well (some occur as you wander (like random jRPG combat), some you see temporarily on the map as a place you can visit but which will go away if you don't, and some stay on the map forever. These all have a large variety of approaches. Generally speaking you can choose to fight or not to fight (though many of them don't have fighting an option at all), so you can make an intelligent decision as to whether you can handle the combat. But you also get new ways to address the encounters as you get new items and followers. These are not necessarily "better" options so much as different ones -- you get more control over what resources you spend/receive which gives you more tactical flexibility, and you can get more (or at least different) lore from the encounters.

For example, in one event you encounter a gang of dwergs (dwarfs) carrying off a sleeping maiden. Dwergs were spawned from the quicksilver that spilled from the broken corpse of Karringar where Orm split her open and scraped out the Karringold to build the Skyhold (a bit of a long story). They yearn to return to the threefold nature of Karringar (the Iron Hag, the Gold Maiden, and the Silver Man), and in fact their kidnapping of the maiden (like their love of gold) is part of this need (she is blonde). Dwerg don't like to fight, so when you encounter them, they offer to pay you to leave them alone. You can take the money (which requires no skill), try to negotiate for more, try to free the girl, etc. You might also have a coin made of Karringold (a cursed but magical coin that spawns offspring from time to time) -- you can trade it for the girl. You might have a witch who -- being, in their eyes, an incarnation of the Iron Hag -- can compel them free the girl. If you try to force them to free the girl, they might slit her throat -- with healing magic you can save her. Etc. So the encounter always has a "level one" solution (take the money) but as you become more powerful (new abilities, new items, new followers) you get a variety of different ways to approach it. You are also somewhat more likely to succeed at options that were always available (like haggling for more money).

(3) As the above perhaps implies, my approach to itemization is much more in line with Zelda/Metroid than the typical cRPG. I believe there are about two dozen items in the game. About half of those are swords or armor -- you can only have one sword and one armor at a given time. While some swords/armors are better than others, each is unique. For example, the sword Firebrand has inner heat that makes it more useful against trolls (as it dries up the Trundspittle that animates them) and woodwights, and it's also a sword of historic importance (having belonged to Eirik the Fair), which means that it can be used for symbolic effect in certain encounters (for example, with Songspeakers, who are said to have betrayed and doomed Eirik with a misleading prophecy). Or there's the Wightweave armor (a silken shirt, essentially, made from wights' tresses), which provides healing and has some role in events involving woodwights. The expectation is that the player may find three swords and a couple armors in the course of a game, not that he'll churn through a new one every five minutes. Beyond the weapons/armor, items are typically not expendables or stat boosters. Instead, they have unique effects: the Wurmskin Cloak lets you talk to birds, for example, and also protects you (to some degree) from wurms' breath; Skirfir's skull lets you move easily through hills and can be used to intimidate some foes. Etc.

I think if RPGs focused more on powering up the player in this way -- a smaller number of more meaningful items/skills/etc. -- then you woud have less of a problem with level scaling. But we'll see if it works in FG.
 
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Great post, very informative.

Regarding your four points about approaching the task at hand:

(1) So in short a world which is less centered on the player. This is excellent.
(2) I say this in relation to the rest of your post. Would it be wrong for the big baddie/antagonist to be meta enough to not to send its weaker minions to their deaths multiple times and instead opt to use a stronger underling for ie 'guarding the map?
(3) To me your post in general speaks of a quality over quantity type of design though that might mostly be the part about Fallen Gods. That is why this point, despite being a good point, is somewhat irrelevant unless aimed at someone making a game where the amount of content is more important than what said content consist of.
(4) In TloZ:Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption the fundamental aspect of what you described had not changed. Item A allows progress through obstruction A, item B allows progress through obstruction B etc. I disagree with you on the fun of blasting through trivial enemies though. In early game enemies in these two series of games are not push-overs only because of the scarcity of resources the player has at hand for example health. By late game these enemies are mostly in the way and make backtracking the prevalent feature of these games a slog. In the case of your own game I urge you to stay on the path of quality>quantity.

Regarding only the first point you make about Fallen Gods since the other two are to put it lightly awesome if they come into fruition.

(1) Just repeating what I said about meta knowledge. Could said magical creatures that you give as an example be smart enough to act before it is too late and the player can go toe to toe with them?

By the way is there an ETA for Fallen Gods?
 

ROARRR

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Playerlevel, playing time, solved quests and what kind of enemies are successfully beaten by player should be taken in account to autoscale enemies.
Also for immersion a (short) dialogue with the enemy to show the player that the foe had a reason to get better in fighting.
Easy as shit formular I would not say
:repost:
 

MRY

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Regarding your four points about approaching the task at hand
Sorry, missed this post until today.

(1) So in short a world which is less centered on the player. This is excellent.
Actually, oddly enough, I think of it as being even more centered on the player -- or maybe, better said, a "playing area" that is more centered on the "player character." Having things happen in the world independently of player action isn't something that I would necessarily endorse for its own sake (I might, in some games, but not in every instance in every game), but I definitely think that if you're doing a narrative game, you need to be thinking about what content is going to best serve the themes and protagonist's character growth. One real challenge in letting players explore freely is figuring out how to make sure that each area provides something appropriate for when the character arrives there not just in gameplay terms but in thematic terms. (At least, in a narrative/thematic RPG. The same might not be true in an open-world RPG or a dungeon crawler or whatever.)

(2) I say this in relation to the rest of your post. Would it be wrong for the big baddie/antagonist to be meta enough to not to send its weaker minions to their deaths multiple times and instead opt to use a stronger underling for ie 'guarding the map?
I'm a big believe in the maxim that it's more important that something feel "true" than that it be "real." I'm not sure villains always need to behave like a logical strategist because we're so accustomed to the idea of illogical villainy it can still ring true despite being unrealistic. That said, there is ample evidence in history of powerful empires continuously deploying forces that are just a bit too weak to overcome an insurgent threat.

(3) To me your post in general speaks of a quality over quantity type of design though that might mostly be the part about Fallen Gods. That is why this point, despite being a good point, is somewhat irrelevant unless aimed at someone making a game where the amount of content is more important than what said content consist of.
Well, maybe yes, maybe no. Exile 3 is pretty high quantity. I think you can do non-stupid forms of scaling even in large games, though of course it would be very hard in an open-world game. (Although wasn't the whole damn point of Oblivion gates -- I never played the game -- that it would provide a scaling threat that fit narratively?)

(4) In TloZ:Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption the fundamental aspect of what you described had not changed. Item A allows progress through obstruction A, item B allows progress through obstruction B etc. I disagree with you on the fun of blasting through trivial enemies though. In early game enemies in these two series of games are not push-overs only because of the scarcity of resources the player has at hand for example health. By late game these enemies are mostly in the way and make backtracking the prevalent feature of these games a slog. In the case of your own game I urge you to stay on the path of quality>quantity.
My neurotic approach to writing FG's texts essentially forces me to aim for quality. Though the nature of the game (a procedural FTL-like set up) requires a certain quantity to work at all.

Regarding only the first point you make about Fallen Gods since the other two are to put it lightly awesome if they come into fruition.
Thanks. Though that is a large if, one that you shouldn't set aside in the face of my hyping FG. :D

(1) Just repeating what I said about meta knowledge. Could said magical creatures that you give as an example be smart enough to act before it is too late and the player can go toe to toe with them?
Generally speaking, they are incapable of detecting the god when he's too weak. In some instances (for example, with some kinds of wights), it's a little like saying, "Shouldn't moths go to flames before they get big and hot enough to burn the moths?" In other instances (such as wizards), it's a matter of their detection capabilities. And with godly enemies, it has to do with a mix of lassitude and fair play.

By the way is there an ETA for Fallen Gods?
Thursday?

We're having recurrent coder problems. I'd love to have something totally playable by the end of the year, though.
 
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And with godly enemies, it has to do with a mix of lassitude and fair play.


We're having recurrent coder problems. I'd love to have something totally playable by the end of the year, though.

Out of interest, did the pantheon/s of germanic religions play fair? Are they not depicted in a way similar to Greek Gods with their humanlike vices?

Having something playable by the end of they year is quite ambitious considering you revealed this project roughly six months ago. I was expecting something closer to first quarter of 2018 the earliest.
 

hpstg

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How would you approach a situation where the player skips a part of the world that is supposed to be "easy", and then cones back to it? Fallout didn't do level scaling, except in some random encounters (if that at all). Your answer made me wonder if Tyranny will have Kotor-style hubs, where the player can choose the order of visit in a large area, and some kind of level scaling seems inevitable (to me).
It is tempting to fantasize about how these things could be done in a perfect world, but I suppose there's probably good reason that what one tends to see is either simplistic level scaling or nothing at all.

I don't think of myself as much of a designer, but I guess this is the approach I'd take to the problem you describe:

(1) Is there any reason to permit the player to come back to a part of the world that was supposed to be easy? For example, say you have a standard Chosen One plot where the player starts as a farmboy in Peasanton and there is a gang of bandits lurking in the forest whom he's supposed to kill shortly after a stranger delivers to the farmboy his long-dead father's magic sword. If the player bypasses this "dungeon" (probably a small forest map with a handful of encounters and some trash gear that is only marginally better than a jerkin and homespun breeches) during the game's introductory phase and instead heads off to the nearby city where the quest begins in earnest, what reason is there to let him return to bandit issue later in the game? This is not a Scouring of the Shire scenario -- it doesn't really matter thematically. So I would probably simply close off the quest altogether. If you return to Peasanton you learn that a handful of farmers paid off the bandits and they left, or whatever.

(2) I would consider tying enemies' power advancement to something other than the player's level. For example, to the passage of time (in a DA:O or Exile 3 scenario) or, alternatively, to quest triggers. This would require something more than stat bloating. Ideally (as in Exile 3) you'd see actual manifestations of the enemies' advance, such as villages being destroyed, but at a minimum you'd want to change the kind of enemies and perhaps change some of the encounters. In a "gather the three maps" scenario, I might have the quest giver say something to the PC such as, "For now, you've got a lead on the Sith. But as soon as they know what you're up to, they'll be sending reinforcements to guard the map." Or whatever. Then I would scale the enemies' power to the number of map pieces you've recovered. I would use this kind of scaling sparingly, though, for main-quest segments where you know the player has to complete A, B, C segments but you don't know the order.

(3) I would consider having the way in which a player interacts with an area change depending on his power level. For example, if we have to let the farmboy go back to Bandit's Vale even after leveling up, what if upon his arrival, the bandits come out and greet him and promptly surrender? Or ask him to be their chief? The level scaling considerations are almost always treated as combat considerations, such that the logic runs something like: (i) this area is designed for a level 1 farmboy to fight in; (ii) at level 20, it will not be fun to fight in this area; (iii) therefore the enemies must be scaled up to be a challenge at level 20. But that's not an inescapable logical chain. Step (iii) could instead be "therefore, at level 20, the player should resolve this area with something other than combat." On a trivial level, Earthbound (the SNES jRPG) has enemies run at the player when the player's level is lower than a certain threshold, then run AWAY from the player when it is higher than a certain threshold, and I think (although perhaps I'm conflating it with another game) at a high enough threshold the combat just autoresolves with victory.

(4) I have long felt -- though I realize that this is not the market's preference -- that RPGs have too much character advancement. Rapid character advancements pushes stories almost ineluctably toward either a Chosen One plot (where the P.C. goes from zero to god) or an amensia plot (where the P.C. goes from [god before the story begins] to zero back to god). Moreover, the constant swapping out of gear deprives equipment of its important narrative role (consider, for example, the way light sabers are handled in KOTOR: they have an initial impact, and then they are trivialized). I think flattening the advancement curve for the characters and giving them new tools but not necessarily overwhelmingly more powerful tools is a better way to go. I think Zelda and Metroid (and I really only know these series from NES to SNES, not their more recent incarnations) are illustrative of this point. In both, you get more powerful but early enemies are not totally trivial. It's more that you develop new ways of interacting with them and the environment, such that it's fun to breeze through early areas. RPGs are a bit different -- I can't think of many RPGs where the actual interactive experience of exploration/combat is very fun, it's typically a more mental thing (either a reward loop or the pleasure of executing good tactics) -- but I think there's something to be done here.

For Fallen Gods, my plan is:

(1) There are some random combats (like in a jRPG) as you explore the world. These will "scale" to the player's level, but not by changing enemy HP or stats. Rather, the idea is that as you become more powerful, certain types of enemies who would otherwise try to kill you (e.g., a starving wolf or a couple poor outlaws) wouldn't dare try now, while other enemies that wouldn't notice you when you were weak now do so (e.g., magical creatures drawn to your godly power).

(2) The overwhelming majority of encounters in the game are not random combats but events, and these won't scale. For the most part, they are "random" as well (some occur as you wander (like random jRPG combat), some you see temporarily on the map as a place you can visit but which will go away if you don't, and some stay on the map forever. These all have a large variety of approaches. Generally speaking you can choose to fight or not to fight (though many of them don't have fighting an option at all), so you can make an intelligent decision as to whether you can handle the combat. But you also get new ways to address the encounters as you get new items and followers. These are not necessarily "better" options so much as different ones -- you get more control over what resources you spend/receive which gives you more tactical flexibility, and you can get more (or at least different) lore from the encounters.

For example, in one event you encounter a gang of dwergs (dwarfs) carrying off a sleeping maiden. Dwergs were spawned from the quicksilver that spilled from the broken corpse of Karringar where Orm split her open and scraped out the Karringold to build the Skyhold (a bit of a long story). They yearn to return to the threefold nature of Karringar (the Iron Hag, the Gold Maiden, and the Silver Man), and in fact their kidnapping of the maiden (like their love of gold) is part of this need (she is blonde). Dwerg don't like to fight, so when you encounter them, they offer to pay you to leave them alone. You can take the money (which requires no skill), try to negotiate for more, try to free the girl, etc. You might also have a coin made of Karringold (a cursed but magical coin that spawns offspring from time to time) -- you can trade it for the girl. You might have a witch who -- being, in their eyes, an incarnation of the Iron Hag -- can compel them free the girl. If you try to force them to free the girl, they might slit her throat -- with healing magic you can save her. Etc. So the encounter always has a "level one" solution (take the money) but as you become more powerful (new abilities, new items, new followers) you get a variety of different ways to approach it. You are also somewhat more likely to succeed at options that were always available (like haggling for more money).

(3) As the above perhaps implies, my approach to itemization is much more in line with Zelda/Metroid than the typical cRPG. I believe there are about two dozen items in the game. About half of those are swords or armor -- you can only have one sword and one armor at a given time. While some swords/armors are better than others, each is unique. For example, the sword Firebrand has inner heat that makes it more useful against trolls (as it dries up the Trundspittle that animates them) and woodwights, and it's also a sword of historic importance (having belonged to Eirik the Fair), which means that it can be used for symbolic effect in certain encounters (for example, with Songspeakers, who are said to have betrayed and doomed Eirik with a misleading prophecy). Or there's the Wightweave armor (a silken shirt, essentially, made from wights' tresses), which provides healing and has some role in events involving woodwights. The expectation is that the player may find three swords and a couple armors in the course of a game, not that he'll churn through a new one every five minutes. Beyond the weapons/armor, items are typically not expendables or stat boosters. Instead, they have unique effects: the Wurmskin Cloak lets you talk to birds, for example, and also protects you (to some degree) from wurms' breath; Skirfir's skull lets you move easily through hills and can be used to intimidate some foes. Etc.

I think if RPGs focused more on powering up the player in this way -- a smaller number of more meaningful items/skills/etc. -- then you woud have less of a problem with level scaling. But we'll see if it works in FG.
I'm from mobile now and I can't reply properly, but I always had a (possibly stupid) thought that leveling should be somehow "horizontal" instead of "vertical". I don't even know where to begin describing exactly what I mean, so I'll come back at it tomorrow, but the gist is that the whole idea of hp is going away, that a level up makes you do what you do better or more efficiently and it means nothing for your total survival of someone gets a fork in your eye. The same applies to your enemies. Bruce Lee at 19 is dangerous, at 25 he's deadly, but a fireball doesn't care either way. When he develops, he does so "horizontally", he expands what he can do, but always stays within the relative limits of his phenotype. An old dragon can barf in your face and kill you, even if you've been training as a warrior your whole life. That was the greatest disappointment I got with the Witcher 3. Since they went for action convert, they could have gone with an area-hit system with no HP bloat, where what mattered would be what actually happened and not when an HP sack was depleted. Leveling up should just be about unlocking ways for Geralt to fight more efficiently, instead of a gate for areas with the same enemies with larger numbers on top of their heads.

A drowner is a drowner, no matter the level, and I should be able to kill it in both Velen and Skellige. If Geralt hits the extended arm of a ghoul, it should be cut no matter the number on top of the ghoul's head.

I'll post more and more coherently on this later, and I don't believe it's any great revelation as an idea to anyone.
 

Karellen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
(1) Is there any reason to permit the player to come back to a part of the world that was supposed to be easy? For example, say you have a standard Chosen One plot where the player starts as a farmboy in Peasanton and there is a gang of bandits lurking in the forest whom he's supposed to kill shortly after a stranger delivers to the farmboy his long-dead father's magic sword. If the player bypasses this "dungeon" (probably a small forest map with a handful of encounters and some trash gear that is only marginally better than a jerkin and homespun breeches) during the game's introductory phase and instead heads off to the nearby city where the quest begins in earnest, what reason is there to let him return to bandit issue later in the game? This is not a Scouring of the Shire scenario -- it doesn't really matter thematically. So I would probably simply close off the quest altogether. If you return to Peasanton you learn that a handful of farmers paid off the bandits and they left, or whatever.

While I think this might not apply to your Fallen Gods, I want to point out that in RPGs with open-ish, explorable worlds, arbitrarily closing off areas is almost invariably a design gaffe that should be entertained only if it can't be avoided. In fact, when it comes to games revolving around exploration, one of the unwritten rules (in my opinion) is that backtracking is always possible. This, I think, is something that a lot of designers strain against, because a world that allows backtracking is also by and large a very static world that harshly limits narrative options; Zelda games, for instance, often rely on gimmicks like time travel and alternative worlds to adhere to this principle while still having some plot progression. That said, there's a reason they stick to it; the fact of the matter is that much of the satisfaction of those games is going off the beaten path, and if you reduce the amount of content (even if said content has become, effectively, obsolete) available to the player due to skipping ahead in the sequence, there is a particular subset of players (that is to say, me) who will, deep in their bones, feel that they have been punished for not sticking to the designer's "sequence".

Of course, this gets worse the more narrative there is in the game, because while a dungeon with some random loot might be give-or-take, some RPG players (again, I'm mostly talking about me) are often very motivated to maximise the amount of story they get out of a game and will even meta-game to find an optimal path. I remember finding this very distracting in Bloodborne, where there's a distasteful dissonance between progressing through the game looking for fun stuff and figuring out the "correct" path to trigger various NPC quests and whatever, some of which were quite obtuse. The problem isn't even that the game had missable content, but that said content is particularly easy to miss while playing the game in what is meant to be the most fun way to play it.

The reason why I say that this wouldn't be a problem in Fallen Gods is that, if I understand correctly, it's a game composed out of randomized (and unique) set-pieces, in which case there wouldn't really be a way to metagame in the first place; the player has no ultimate control over the order in which he encounters scenes, which, in my opinion, an excellent state of affairs. This would mean that the player's concerns would be more generally strategic, trying to increase the amount of options available to him overall and, in general, win the game, rather than to create an optimal path through a predetermined scenario. This is why I think that more RPGs, if their conceit has to do with "choices", should try mixing in significant strategy and sim elements with clear victory and fail conditions. Which is not to say that exploration-based RPGs with a fixed pre-determined scenario are bad (they're great, actually), but they should stick to what works in them, and arbitrarily or even purposely closing off significant content is at cross purposes with what makes them fun to play.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
(4) I have long felt -- though I realize that this is not the market's preference -- that RPGs have too much character advancement. Rapid character advancements pushes stories almost ineluctably toward either a Chosen One plot (where the P.C. goes from zero to god) or an amensia plot (where the P.C. goes from [god before the story begins] to zero back to god). Moreover, the constant swapping out of gear deprives equipment of its important narrative role (consider, for example, the way light sabers are handled in KOTOR: they have an initial impact, and then they are trivialized). I think flattening the advancement curve for the characters and giving them new tools but not necessarily overwhelmingly more powerful tools is a better way to go. I think Zelda and Metroid (and I really only know these series from NES to SNES, not their more recent incarnations) are illustrative of this point. In both, you get more powerful but early enemies are not totally trivial. It's more that you develop new ways of interacting with them and the environment, such that it's fun to breeze through early areas. RPGs are a bit different -- I can't think of many RPGs where the actual interactive experience of exploration/combat is very fun, it's typically a more mental thing (either a reward loop or the pleasure of executing good tactics) -- but I think there's something to be done here.


It's a kind of an adventuresque approach, but I see is quite similarly.
Sometimes it's funny to go from 10 DMG to 1M DMG in a JRPG, but I think in a more realistic setting this approach would be welcome.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
In RPGs with open-ish, explorable worlds, arbitrarily closing off areas is almost invariably a design gaffe that should be entertained only if it can't be avoided. In fact, when it comes to games revolving around exploration, one of the unwritten rules (in my opinion) is that backtracking is always possible. This, I think, is something that a lot of designers strain against, because a world that allows backtracking is also by and large a very static world that harshly limits narrative options; Zelda games, for instance, often rely on gimmicks like time travel and alternative worlds to adhere to this principle while still having some plot progression. That said, there's a reason they stick to it; the fact of the matter is that much of the satisfaction of those games is going off the beaten path, and if you reduce the amount of content (even if said content has become, effectively, obsolete) available to the player due to skipping ahead in the sequence, there is a particular subset of players (that is to say, me) who will, deep in their bones, feel that they have been punished for not sticking to the designer's "sequence".

Of course, this gets worse the more narrative there is in the game, because while a dungeon with some random loot might be give-or-take, some RPG players (again, I'm mostly talking about me) are often very motivated to maximise the amount of story they get out of a game and will even meta-game to find an optimal path. I remember finding this very distracting in Bloodborne, where there's a distasteful dissonance between progressing through the game looking for fun stuff and figuring out the "correct" path to trigger various NPC quests and whatever, some of which were quite obtuse. The problem isn't even that the game had missable content, but that said content is particularly easy to miss while playing the game in what is meant to be the most fun way to play it.
I think this is a well-founded concern, and one that has an analogy in what I would term the "degenerate maze" problem, especially present in jRPGs but in western RPGs with non-tiny dungeons, too. There, the issue is that while supposedly the goal of a maze is to find the shortest route to the end, in an RPG dungeon (which is often a maze with trappings around it), the goal is actually to avoid the shortest route to the end because every dead end has loot or XP at the end of it, and there's seldom a resource-management risk to gathering all of it.

As long as we're still in fantasyland, what I'd say is that the "degenerate maze" problem shows that the real problem is a lack of resource-management risk. If it is possible to fail to complete the maze because you hit too many dead ends, then players will actually be incentivized to solve the maze properly. Similarly, if dilly-dallying around just to vacuum up every bit of early content has some downside (for example, losing out on content or preferences down the line), then you can force players to make reasonable choices with how they behave, rather than encouraging them to play degenerately.

Of course all of this depends on what kind of game you're making. If you're primarily making a kind of pastoral exploration game without a sense of urgency, then obviously such a design step would be a bad idea. You'd also have to make sure that you avoid walking-dead scenarios, which I view as anathema in anything other than a procedural RPG.

Still, I guess I'd stand by my point, which is in any game, you have to ask, "Why should you allow the player to come here?" I don't think, "Because we designed a map and recorded voice over" is a great answer. There has to be some kind of engaging gameplay, or narrative, to justify it. Since level-scaled opponents tend not (IMHO) to produce engaging gameplay, and since level-scaled opponents tend to break the narrative, I don't think a solution to my bandit camp scenario is to scale the enemies. Changing the nature of the content there is a better approach, though, again, this is really fantasy land. Still, my view is that if revisting an area is just going to yield either a ghost town or filler crap, it's probably best to close it off.

The reason why I say that this wouldn't be a problem in Fallen Gods is that, if I understand correctly, it's a game composed out of randomized (and unique) set-pieces, in which case there wouldn't really be a way to metagame in the first place; the player has no ultimate control over the order in which he encounters scenes, which, in my opinion, an excellent state of affairs. This would mean that the player's concerns would be more generally strategic, trying to increase the amount of options available to him overall and, in general, win the game, rather than to create an optimal path through a predetermined scenario. This is why I think that more RPGs, if their conceit has to do with "choices", should try mixing in significant strategy and sim elements with clear victory and fail conditions. Which is not to say that exploration-based RPGs with a fixed pre-determined scenario are bad (they're great, actually), but they should stick to what works in them, and arbitrarily or even purposely closing off significant content is at cross purposes with what makes them fun to play.
I think FG will probably prove a disappointment (what doesn't!), but your description is more or less right.

The player does have some flexibility in choosing events. He can see events on the map, and based on their graphic (and on his godly skills), he might be able to anticipate what he'd be facing there. The player can also seek out some fixed locations like dungeons* of different kinds -- bogs, caves, and barrows, basically -- or castles, towns, churches, etc.
(* Dungeons are simply stacks of events, there's no maze, degenerate or otherwise.) He can also find out (though the exact mechanics of this are TBD) information about distant locations, like what kind of miniboss a dungeon might have or whatever. So there is some metagaming. The way I see it is basically early on the player doesn't have much a sense of what his goal is (beyond "get back to the Cloudlands"), but if he's played a few times he'll have a sense what one or more of the victory paths might be (e.g., rekindling the Skybridge or running Fraener to ground). Early on you're mostly just rolling the dice to see what kind of things you get, but as you accumulate resources, you have to make a call which path seems most promising to pursue (e.g., "I've got a wurmskin cloak, which might help with Fraener. I guess I'll go that route."). At that point, you try to make intelligent guesses at where you'll find the next helpful tools, etc.

Ultimately, you're playing against time -- can I gather enough resources to win down X path within 90 turns? Since you don't have complete control over your resources, there's a lot of guesswork involved. I've got to figure out how to make it work right so it's not too frustrating. Unlike FTL, where you always know where to go and you might lose the final boss battle but at least you get to fight it, current FG design leaves open the possibility that the player will just be flailing around not making any progress. That seems pretty crappy, so I have to suss out a better way.
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
Fuck level scaling in all its form and shapes. Ive grown to detest it even as a concept.

Encounter scaling can be fine if its limited and within a reasonable range.
 

Doktor Best

Arcane
Joined
Feb 2, 2015
Messages
2,849
You can't have any degree of non linearity in exploration, without some sort of level adjustment for the enemies. If done right, nobody even notices it exists.
That's not so. There are plenty of games -- not just RPGs, but games like Metroid or Zelda -- where you have some degree of nonlinearity without scaling. I don't recall appreciable level scaling in Fallout (though there may have been some?) or Arcanum or Vogel's games, not to mention a lack of level scaling in many older RPGs that were also nonlinear. Level scaling is only needed for a completely open world where the player can go anywhere in any order without a difficulty spike. It may also be necessary in a really large game where, absent level scaling, a large percentage of the world will be trivially easy by the time the player gets there.

A key aspect of great nonlinear games is the sense that some areas are nominally accessible but perilous. The player has to make cost-benefit decisions as to whether it's worth going someplace dangerous now, or whether it is better to come back later. It's particularly nice if you introduce some cost to abstaining -- thus, the player can't always be confident that he'll be able to come back later. But you definitely want at least some portions where you power up, then come back to challenging areas and crush your foes -- at least you do if you want a traditional hero-story arc to the game.

Level scaling is basically an easy way to insure that you don't need to balance your game taking account of nonlinearity -- it's like throwing up your hands and saying that everyone gets a passing grade because grading is too hard: it doesn't solve the problem so much as obliterates the very possibility of a solution.

Pretty much this. Levelscaling doesnt solve the problems that come with nonlinearity, it simply destroys the very reason a nonlinear gameworld could benefit a game. Its a nonsolution
 

Karellen

Arcane
Joined
Jan 3, 2012
Messages
327
In RPGs with open-ish, explorable worlds, arbitrarily closing off areas is almost invariably a design gaffe that should be entertained only if it can't be avoided. ... Of course, this gets worse the more narrative there is in the game, because while a dungeon with some random loot might be give-or-take, some RPG players (again, I'm mostly talking about me) are often very motivated to maximise the amount of story they get out of a game and will even meta-game to find an optimal path. I remember finding this very distracting in Bloodborne, where there's a distasteful dissonance between progressing through the game looking for fun stuff and figuring out the "correct" path to trigger various NPC quests and whatever, some of which were quite obtuse. The problem isn't even that the game had missable content, but that said content is particularly easy to miss while playing the game in what is meant to be the most fun way to play it.
I think this is a well-founded concern, and one that has an analogy in what I would term the "degenerate maze" problem, especially present in jRPGs but in western RPGs with non-tiny dungeons, too. There, the issue is that while supposedly the goal of a maze is to find the shortest route to the end, in an RPG dungeon (which is often a maze with trappings around it), the goal is actually to avoid the shortest route to the end because every dead end has loot or XP at the end of it, and there's seldom a resource-management risk to gathering all of it.

As long as we're still in fantasyland, what I'd say is that the "degenerate maze" problem shows that the real problem is a lack of resource-management risk. If it is possible to fail to complete the maze because you hit too many dead ends, then players will actually be incentivized to solve the maze properly. Similarly, if dilly-dallying around just to vacuum up every bit of early content has some downside (for example, losing out on content or preferences down the line), then you can force players to make reasonable choices with how they behave, rather than encouraging them to play degenerately.

Of course all of this depends on what kind of game you're making. If you're primarily making a kind of pastoral exploration game without a sense of urgency, then obviously such a design step would be a bad idea. You'd also have to make sure that you avoid walking-dead scenarios, which I view as anathema in anything other than a procedural RPG.

Still, I guess I'd stand by my point, which is in any game, you have to ask, "Why should you allow the player to come here?" I don't think, "Because we designed a map and recorded voice over" is a great answer. There has to be some kind of engaging gameplay, or narrative, to justify it. Since level-scaled opponents tend not (IMHO) to produce engaging gameplay, and since level-scaled opponents tend to break the narrative, I don't think a solution to my bandit camp scenario is to scale the enemies. Changing the nature of the content there is a better approach, though, again, this is really fantasy land. Still, my view is that if revisting an area is just going to yield either a ghost town or filler crap, it's probably best to close it off.

Playing degenerately, now where have I heard that before?
:balance:

More seriously, I do agree that it's important to design games (especially ones with narratives) in a way that encourages (or coerces) players to engage with them in a way that reinforces the fiction. (It's really the sort of thing that I think all the time in my on-and-off game projects in lieu of more practical concerns like area design or functional UIs). However, I would suggest that a large part of doing that successfully has to do with managing player expectations. I have the feeling that many "platonically" feasible designs run into difficulties because they don't do a good job either informing or convincing players to adopt the "right" playstyle for that game.

In the context of PnP RPGs, people talk about social contracts; to get a good game going, it really helps to establish a bond of trust between the players and the GM over what the game is actually about and what kind of actions are appropriate. Computer games, especially ones with narratives and long predetermined campaigns, involve similar informal contracts. Once a player commits dozens of hours into a game, if he doesn't trust the game (and, by proxy, the designer), there'll be the temptation to either cheat or to adopt a "degenerate" playstyle, while, so long as basic trust is maintained, a game like Dark Souls can play any number of mean practical jokes on the player. Time limits, scripted changes in the gameworld and important limited resources are all tricky because you really have to go out of your way to sell them to the player; at that point, I think it's something you really have to design the entire game around.

Of course, there are many meaningful "contracts" an RPG could have other than the Zelda-esque "backtracking always works" one; they just come with tradeoffs. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, for instance, are basically impossible to finish except through a lot of trial and error, and you can unwittingly use up so many resources that you can no longer win, but somehow they possess enough charm and flavour that they're still quite fun - in fact, I don't think they would be fun at all if you didn't suddenly and near-arbitrarily die every once in a while. That said, I suspect that they only work because they're very short and light. A longer, more complex game that requires greater commitment probably couldn't get away with that sort of thing, because screwing the player over all the time is effectively making light of the time and effort they dedicate to the game.
 

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