Level Scaling RUINS MMORPG's (and how to fix it)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มิ.ย. 2024
- Ladies and Gentlemen welcome
I'm Josh 'Strife' Hayes, and in this series of video essays i'm going to talk about the failings and weaknesses of my favorite video game genre, the MMORPG.
In this video, i'll be looking at level scaling, what it is, why it happens and why I think it can ruin games.
If you'd like to chat live I stream nightly on twitch at:
twitch.tv/joshstrifehayes - เกม
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nothing matters, when you killed gods like titan beings at the end of this expansion, only to be asked to gather 12 hides of local creatures afterwards in the beginning of the next. no amount of scaling can make you powerful.
Such is the issue with never-ending upward scaling making prior content irrelevant, including the difficult endgame content. I've always preferred for an RPG to have a set finish line for character progression that does not move.
@@kuuryotwo5153 I think eso handles this kind of well? The main story sees you defeating a god, then the expansions are all just side content. The dragons are basically demigods or minor gods, but they are not as imposing of a character as Molag Bal.
The best solution, imho,would be to have the main solo quest line not be about world saving encounters but much lesser storyline. Then have expansion questions and raid/dungeons storyline be about the bigger stuff.
Look at FF11, the max lvl was 75 there from 2003 till 2010. Almost all the old content stayed relevant untill the gear power creep started to take huge jumps in 2007.
I hate power creep and I'm done with WoW thanks to it. (There's other reasons, but power creep was the first thing that started to annoy me too much)
I've always loathed level scaling.
Same
I don't mind being scaled-down if I'm helping newbies out in earlier areas, or setting people to a comparable state for PvP (though I recall some the stat scaling was a bit screwy so you could be crippled still), but yeah Skyrim style it's a total no no.
One of the main reasons why playing through FF14 can be cumbersome. Love the game but man that part can be hard to ignore
@@blueboi12jj the normal world doesnt scale, are you talking about fates?
@@arohk4415 yeah and main story instances. Even dungeons lol
OMG I hate hate HATE level scaling! You never feel as if you've improved at all when everything is just as difficult as it ever was.
@
Josh Strife Hayes I think this video is great. Though I do feel I should point out a few things regarding GW2 that most people now dont even know and it is very hard to find this information anymore. The reason why GW2 has scaling is due to the fact the game was meant to launch without levels at all (crazy I know). After internal testing they found players didnt understand the hero points (skill points without level but exploring), buying books, and armor upgrades(lets you put on better stat armor) was the way to progress. So the Anet team had to add in levels but also added in scaling as it was the original way the game was meant to be. Also a fun fact is that the game didnt have heart quests they also had to be added because internal testers didnt understand to just run around the world and see what happened as questing. GW2 tired to shake things up more than most people realize and it got changed due to it was too much of a change from other MMOs in 2012.
The first Guild wars was unique and I still play it. It had thousands of different skill combinations. Players could get the right setup, they could solo hard parts of the game. Guild wars 2 tied all your skills to weapons so you lost that customization. Level scaling is what made me never play it again. I spent months leveling. I decided to get all the discoverable things like Vistas and the like. I started back in the starting area and at lvl 70, I got absolutely demolished by 2 lvl 5 bandits. I didn't know what the fuck was going on. I then realized that they scale you down. I quit then and there. I have never looked back at it. I refuse to play games that level scale.
@@reginaldfluffington5142 bro we get it you're stuck in the past, gw1 was great but gw2 is newer and runs way better. You can't even jump in guild wars 1. Like honestly dude you ain't gonna be convincing anybody.
@@reginaldfluffington5142 also lol @ you for dying to two bandits.
and difficulty was supposed to scale depending on how many players are in the area too, they marketed the zones as being this epic random fights that never happened
@@reginaldfluffington5142 If you died as lvl 70 vs 2 lv5 bandits you suck. I can kill 2 lvl5 bandits with lv2 starting character.
My 1 complaint about ffxiv. I wouldn't mind the level scaling soo much if it was just stats (although I can see why people would) but losing access to all my abilities whenever I get put into a lower level dungeon and only having a certain portion of my abilities is never fun.
Yeah that sounds like a horrible implementation. Limiting the raw numbers is one thing, but limiting what you can actually do is something else entirely.
@@nephatrine I think the point is to allow encounter design that wouldn't necessarily make sense with max level abilities. If for example there is no AoE heal available, that completely changes how a designer can approach an encounter.
I disagree.
Your character being scaled down to enter a dungeon is a good thing.
You have all the relevant abilities for that particular experience.
It's wonky for Black Mages because of how their rotations progress, but for every other job it is a very good system.
@@delphaneuxlacroix I can kind of see where your coming from and I can actually agree to a point. The only thing is it kinda sucks to go into a lower level dungeon to not have even your basic combo especially in some of the early dungeons where you can only realistically spam 2-3 attacks the entire way through.
@@delphaneuxlacroix My main job is a Black Mage, and level scaling drives me nuts. In fact, it has always driven me nuts, from ever since I started out as a Thaumaturge class back in 2013.
I remember playing the elder scroles: oblivion as my first real RPG. When I got high enough level to realize enemies had become ridiculously tanky, I turnd the difficulty to the lowest setting. That's when I actually felt powerful and had fun.
I saw a pretty cool video about how leveling up in Oblivion works. th-cam.com/video/NNlILuseQJw/w-d-xo.html
Apparently you can actually become *weaker* by leveling up if you don't know what to do.
@@totaldestruction152 yes that's true. The enemy level was based on your character level. Your character level increased after you increased 10 levels in any skill(s), so if you went for a lot of crafting or non combat skills you ended up unable to compete with the NPCs.
When I played Oblivion, I solved the Oblivion crisis early by finding a tall cliff and throwing my level 12 character off it and never loading the save again, ensuring the forces of Mehrunes Dagon could never challenge the might of the town guards.
On next playthrough, I just set my class skills to a bunch of useless stuff I never used, then trounced everything with maxed magic skills and a fireball spell that simultaneously turned me invisible. Level at end: 3. (Don't actually recall, but it was ridiculously low)
Skyrim's constrained level scaling is genius by comparison.
I played the majority of Oblivion as a level 1. I saved the main quest for last and had to level up once in order to hold a daedric artifact. I found it super enjoyable playing this way because I detest level scaling.
I play Skyrim on the lower difficulties, which helps the feeling of being the ultimate Dragonslayer and one of Tamriel's greatest heroes. (I also play with follower mods, and a couple of competent followers make short work of most enemies).
The worst is actually when you are say level 30 and killing a monster with your level 30 equipment. You ding to 31st and are expected to have level 31st equipment to kill the same monster and all of a sudden you can NO LONGER KILL THE MONSTER. When you purposely keep your level low so your equipment can make you harder than you should be at your level to do tasks, there is something seriously wrong.
Careful the Dark Souls community will show up at Soul level 1 saying get good scrub😄 All the whilst having end game gear that is fully upgraded 🤔 One might suspect that instead of leveling up your character you should only upgrade equipment.
I agree!! I love starting a game and being weaker, limited in ability and gear etc. but through grinding, leveling, completing content etc you can see & feel a tangible difference in your growth and ability!! It’s a good feeling to see your progress realized BUT when a rat kills you at level 1 and can still kill you as easily at level 100 it feels like a waste of time and effort to be exactly where you started after a month of learning, grinding etc. it’s like I’m grinding for the ENEMY to get stronger!! No sense of real progression!!! It’s like working your job all week and not getting a paycheck at the end
This was my biggest problem with ESO, it's so bad there that if you buy a level 40 set of gear and level up, that gear becomes worse. You need to go get a level 50 set of the same gear to be as powerful as you were at level 40.
That part of ESO pissed me off to no end, especially the Champion Point system that keeps scaling gear until CP160. Meaning that not only is gearing during 1-50 annoying/meaningless, but once you hit 50 you still can't actually commit to gearing up the way you want until you rack up 160 Champion Points. That is, if you want gear to have the stats all the guides tell you about. That's not the end of it either of course, because who wants a fresh CP160 player in their group? Keep farming those dolmens until your eyes bleed.
Also, this makes crafting items and trading ridiculous (as if it wasn't already convoluted enough) -- Especially for new players who might end up trying to buy gear based off some guide only to find themselves with a sub-par item (due to it not being CP160) or being unable to use said item because they (despite being the correct level) aren't at CP160 yet.
Agreed with all of this, there is also one more factor I don't think got mentioned.
Its the kind of railroading level requirement they do in games like World of Warcraft, where they severally punish your XP reward when fighting enemies slightly below or above your character level, effectively forcing you to go quest in the area the game wants you to be.
You can't reward yourself for being a clever and skilled player, by going to a high level area to kill a few enemies 10 levels above you. Not only does the game seriously gimp your combat stats unfairly so you can't hit or dodge, but even if you do win, the reward is basically nothing. No good xp, unlikely odds of good loot, not worth the risk.
I can understand why they do this but they take it too far and it was always a pet peeve of mine while playing WoW. Sometimes I would accidentally level too high and had to drop all my quests in the area where I enjoyed questing, because both the quest rewards and rewards for fighting enemies were reduced to not even 5%.
What I see as the biggest problem in modern MMO's in relation to the RPG aspect is the slow removal of the RPG part. Using WOW as an example, in the old WoW you had skill trees and could invest points each level where you wanted. Later they made you pick one of the 3 sub classes and locked your points to it until you reached a certain number of points - limiting options and builds. Even later (after I stopped playing so I may be fuzzy on details) they fully removed the skill trees altogether, and replaced it with a 'pick one of 3 options' every 10 levels or so making unique builds not really a thing. A good MMO should aim to have more possible builds rather than less.
Yeah one of the reasons I quit wow over a decade ago. Every expansion allowed less and less creativity on the players part.
The first time I heard of level scaling was in gw2 and it was implemented to fix the problems of non-level scaled mmos, which I think, was every other mmo at that time. Personally I think it works well at least in that game and is the main reason why players are spread everywhere in the world map.
You can also keep higher level players near the so-called lower level zones by having plenty of level-gated quests and other content that pops up in those zones as players progress. I've always imagined a bunch of flowers with the centers being a hub/village/city with petals that radiate in all directions but always return back to center for further content.
I agree with you on that. Gw2 iirc still makes it, that the challange doesn't scale up. If you leave a lvl 10 map, while lvl 10, and go to a lvl 60 map, you will die.
If you go back there at lvl 60, you will be able to win. You are stronger.
But if you, at lvl 60 go back to a lvl 10 map, you will be scaled down, so you can still enjoy the challange.
I do like that, it makes it possible for world events to happen all over the world. So you have reasons to go there. And there are always people there, even in low lvl areas. And since high lvl players LOOK differently, it is still nice to see them, when you start.
@@kranik11 I agree I feel like GW2 did it right. When you return to a starting area, or any area lower than your current level for that matter, you are scaled back to an appropriate level. However it's really like area level+, you are the epitome of what a hero in the area should/would be. So the progression of your strength still shows, but only to a point, so enemies/encounters that truly matter will still have some challenge to them.
@@ClickToPreview That can be fixed by adding higher level content into the "low-level" zones. Like adding a world boss or something, but that's a whole different conversation.
@@GodzRemains but could you still play with lower lever players and enjoy the game? Lower level player cant do content with you because they would get one shot and if you do it with them they are just going to watch you one shot everything and be bored themselves.
Man, that cushy scratchy sound in Morrowind when a hit would land but still miss because your skill wasn't high enough still haunts my dreams to this day.
I hate level scaling so much. Their excuse is that it gives higher level players reasons to quest with you to make the low level areas more lively, but it never seems to accomplish this because these areas often remain dead. I like being able to smash through low level mobs with my more powerful gear. Also, the scaling is sometimes really bad. Fallout 76, for instance, decided to implement level scaling and while some of the enemies like the ghouls seemed to scale okay, others ended up breaking all my gear so often that I had to build a stupid adhesive farm to keep everything repaired. I stopped playing the game because of that. It's hilarious how the one thing people hated the most about Oblivion got implemented in that game.
When WoW first implemented level scaling I was one of the people that tested it. They also seemed determined to make sure everything took longer (more on that in a second). I didn't really like it. Nothing ever got easier. Progressing through an entire zone you would think that after leveling a few times the enemies you started out fighting would become easier, be weaker as they are first thing you met in a large area. But they were still the same and nothing ever changed.
They also did a lot of other things like nerfing heirlooms and dungeon XP (while keeping the piss poor drop rates of the older zones) to extend the play time. I publically stated I felt like this was due to them preparing to release the allied races that were due to come with BfA as a pre-purchase bonus. I was told I was nuts. Turns out I was right - they put in this more time consuming system with no fixes to their game breaking bugs in order to make people take longer and thus stick around to level their new race to get the armor or spend the $60 for a boost (or $25 for a race change) and forgo the armor. I was so disgusted it was a long time before I returned.
I don't think level scaling has any place in typical RPGs that have player power tied to a traditional progression system. When all/large parts of the world constantly get stronger with you, there's little sense of accomplishment. Did you have problems with a quest? Well, no more going back in a level or two to handle it, it remains the same. This type of problem in turn means that game content gets dumbed down over time. There can't be challenges because the game strips away a way to deal with them naturally outside of hoping there's another soul around that will help you. And all too often, due to how disjointed and poor the older leveling became in WoW, there wasn't. So no challenge, no sense of progression, just a static march with a new ability here and there that really didn't make things go faster in the long run.
Level scaling has always seemed to me to be a poorly thought out bandaid to a broken leveling experience. Instead of finding ways to fix it, the easiest solution (make it all meaningless) is implemented to again rush players to endgame without ever becoming immersed or attached to what their character or what they are doing.
Solution 3: Get rid of levels entirely. I don't feel a sense of accomplishment or powerful when I return to a place I had difficulty with and stomp all over things. I feel bored.
That's probably why most of these MMOs can't hold my interest for more than a couple weeks, but EVE Online had me for years.
I wouldn't get rid of levels entirely but I agree that simply boosting your overall stats with every level is not the way to go. It's neither lore-friendly nor beneficial for the long term experience. There needs to be some progression within the game though. Learning-by-doing-type skilltrees or gear designed for certain types of content are progression systems as well. The different skills and item sets would need to be somewhat balanced overall but remain relevant for specific use cases so players have a reason to get them.
@@Mantaforce2 That's one of the reasons I mentioned EVE Online. It definitely has a progression system, but you never outscale the content. Within a few weeks you can be out in 0.0 space enjoying the "end game" content while being useful. And even starter systems present late-game challenges, like flying into Jita with tens of billions of ISK worth of cargo in the hold. Planetside as well. But those are also very or exclusively PVP centric games.
Most games have limited scaling anyway. As high lvl, you profit of gear and your skill points granting new passives, skills etc. so they're still much stronger than low lvls
This I constantly noticed in mmos with scaling. No matter what, if my baseline stats are numbers of magnitude higher because of end game gear and perhaps some sort of earned traits with percentage-based buffs, I'm still going to be so much stronger than any character at the level I'm scaled down to.
I personally honestly like level scaling because without it the lower level zones are completely irrelevant and useless as soon as I out-level them. I can just not experience them as they were designed to be if I happened to overlevel in another zone.
But I think it's really important to balance it properly. It should still be an option to outgrind and outlevel an annoying world boss. Mobs should scale up slower and start lagging behind a bit the more you level up. The zone will at some point still become less relevant, but you have the option to grind there with easier mobs if you don't feel like hustling. And it's still not a 1-hit hot mess because the mobs are just a few levels weaker, not 20-50 levels below you, so you can have a bit of a simple challenge but an overall easier game if you want.
I actually really enjoyed the way City of Heroes handled this, with their Mentor/Sidekick system. If a lower level player joined a higher level player's party, their stats would boost to one below the leader's level. If a higher level player joined a lower level, they would be dropped to the lower level, but they would have all of the powers they had earned up to 6 levels above their reduced level.
I remember when level scaling came to WoW. Everything felt the same, i was playing the mage and each type of enemy i found took the same amount of spell power to kill. From spiders to dinosaurs. Mind nublingly boring.
Same issue in Skyrim. When you level up and gain strong gear suddenly the low poor bandits are all some rich chieftains
I quit WoW for that very reason.
It's like having a staring contest with a mirror. Who had this idea first and why did nobody point out how it cancels out levels??
I really like the Level Scaling in GW2 because they scaled it in specific areas, not all the time, and GW2 really pushing the "party" mechanics which is fun to do especially for world bosses. Leveling scale PVP determines how good a player handling that class, not just 1 hitting everyone
I never liked how it scaled the player down, rather than the enemies up. During my path to max level, my character's power was constantly jumping all over the place, and it felt very unsatisfying as a result, not being able to see tangible progress in numbers.
@@TheRadPlayer Yeah it's better when the mobs scale up than the way round. Scaling a player down is extremely irritating.
@@glanni It definitely ruined my connection to my character, and was a big part of why I ended up quitting shortly after hitting level cap.
@@glanni You can't really scale the monster up when there's a bunch of player with different level around the same area. So the only solution for GW2 is obviously scaling down the players. Anyway in GW2 gear still play a role and you're rly more powerfull than the monster if it's a rly low level zone.
@@benoitb Well, WoW does scale up the monsters, you can even play together if one is on level 4 and the other on level 30, and you will both have a very similar difficulty.
To be fair they have started doing that rather recently, and I don't know which technique they use for that or if it was even that easy/possible when GW2 came out.
Edit: once you're over a certain level the monsters stop scaling with you in older zones. Like, when you're in Northrend the monsters will only scale with you up to level 30. In the Legion area they scale up longer, I think about 40, and in Bfa it's up to 50.
100% agree! Some of my favorite pve memories are from the hunting quests in Nagrad from the BC era of Wow. When I first tried to kill the bosses at level 66 I got my ass handed to me. Came back at level 70 and was able to kill them all. Trying to solo 3 man content was always a fun challenge
Not anymore. Wow has level scaling.
That's why I like gw2. It's not about how much you level it's about skill. Can you use your skills usefully and successfully in the right sequence. I'll take learning mechanics over just trying to make my damage .4% higher
limited mechanics with no gear progression, the reason why GW2 is boring mess for casual players only is because once you get exotic gear you dont need more
@@PeriqculosusCZ if grinding for hours for to get gear that gives you 1% dmg modifier is your idea of of fun, then you can keep it. I'm not gonna waste 20-30 of my life just so I can hit some pixels for a little more dps. Also with the trash combat systems in most MMOs I'm good. Watching WoW raids it's just watching a tank stand there while everyone else hits it's ass with dps. Seems like a tons of fun (sarcasm). If you think Gw2 is boring that's cool. But if you go back to my original post and read the opening line. You see that I made this post referring to what I LIKE. Could careless what anyone else finds fun bro
@@fai591 I totally agree. Cut the hours of grinding for gear. Just let me play the FUCKING game! That's why I love the cosmetic grind so much more. I'm not working because I feel like I have to. I'm not grinding because I don't want to be behind. I'm farming gold because I want that new sparkly thing-a-majig, and by golly, I WILL get it. It's a personal goal that's I've set for myself and it's that much better to do it because I chose to do it myself. It mattered that much to me.
My favorite take on level scaling is probably grim dawn (an ARPG), where each zone has a level range, and the enemies will scale with you, within that level range (for instance iirc the first combat area is lvl 1-7 or somesuch, meaning enemies base levle will never go above 7 (note, base level, powerfull enemies ("blues" or "yellows" have an inherent level bonus added to them from being that tier of difficulty, whcih will exceed the scaled level, but only by a couple more levels)
even so, grim dawn has an enemy ina side area to one of the zones in the first chapter, which is monstrously more pwoerfull than that area , iirc we're talking a minimum lvl 31 enemy, that has a large level bonus to the scaling, in a msall cave attached to a normally lvl 10-18 or so area.
This is level scaling used well imo
This is one thing that Enderal, a complete overhaul mod for Skyrim, changed from the base game. Enemies' levels and types are dictated by the area you find them in, not your level. You WILL get destroyed if you wander into an undead-infested swamp at level 5, but at the same time if you stay in the starting area till you're level 20 you will eventually be able to easily survive any combat in the area, making it easier to explore it fully without being constantly interrupted by enemies that always stay ahead of you.
It also leads to a more balanced gameplay because treasure will NOT level scale to you. Meaning if you have a sneaky enough build to grab treasure from a high level area it WILL reward you with some items you can get earlier than you would otherwise.
All it took was removing a mechanic from the base game to make exploration a much more meaningful component and give the player a lot more agency. Which areas you choose to tackle first becomes way more significant when you know you won't just meet the same enemies over and over.
I'd like PVE level-scaling to be optional, so if you want to explore a zone but not be bored by the difficulty, you have the agency to hold back a little on your dmg output, etc. At the same time, you can choose to just destroy all the low lvl NPCs if that is what you want.
Maybe have a setting in the options menus to turn on or off level scaling? Could this work? If I want to go be a badass in a zone I cleared at level 10, and now I'm level 50, I can go into options and disable level scaling. Which would include drop-scaling as well. You can deactivate level scaling so you can kill low level enemies with ease, but then they drop low level gear. If you want scaled drops then you have to leave level scaling turned on.
What's the point of going to a new area then?
Say you're fighting a big worm. You're level 50 in a level 10 zone, and you turned on scaling. You will always beat the worm. Low level players being able to join in on your fight means the worm cannot gain new skills as you level as they wouldn't be able to experience those skills as they aren't yet the level they need to be to experience them.
This means you're fighting a level 10 ai over and over as an experienced player with more access to buffs, debuffs, combos etc.
The early enemies in mmo's are all jokes to allow new players to gain their footing. Even having new consumables, potions, means that you'll have the advantage.
GW2 did this with exp, not loot, but it meant that there was no incentive to explore as far as levelling up went. I got to 80 from the first 1-15 and 15-30 zones.
@@twelvesevven4678 I think you missed the point. The point of the suggestion to be able to turn off scaling was an option for those players that want to go back to a low level zone and experience the difference their hard work and leveling has made, as they kick Hogger's low level ass with their level 70 character (or whatever, details not important). The complaint about scaling is that everything is always scaled to your character as your level and thus some players never feel like a big badass. Thru struggle against low level enemies when they ARE low level, but realistically should be able to go back and annihilate those same enemies when they're max level. Being able to toggle scaling would allow them to get that gratification once in a while but at the cost of crap loot. Nobody serious would really ever do it - at least not much - because the drops from it would suck. The question about "what would be the point in going to a new zone" is completely unrelated and irrelevant.
I meant against your 'leave level scaling on' for 'scaled drops'. Scaled drops seems a terrible idea.
Having some enemies scale to your level seems like it might be confusing. I could also see it creating a meta where you just go as a really low level player and fight these "roaming" mobs in high level zones because technically that would be doable.
But overall, the whole reason that scaled enemies exist in the first place is to make the world accessible to everyone; this approach breaks that (as you would still be restricted when questing to zones your level).
I'm not a fan of scaled content in MMOs, as part of the fun is trying to do content that is a higher level than your character. If you get a really good drop, maybe you can take on level 25 mobs at level 20, for example. My personal preference is to remove the scaling entirely, but maybe a better solution would be to narrow the power gap between levels. A max level player can one shot players half their level in many games. If this gap is narrowed significantly it would allow more content to be accessible at one time while still allowing characters to become powerful (maybe 5~10x the power difference between new characters and level cap instead of 100x).
it's one of the reason why i like morrowid the most, + the fact that it has static loot to a degree as well. in skyrim at the beggining no matter where you go you you get the same loot for the most part, after you level up you get better loot all around but it's everywhere, you come across a bandit on a bridge asking for 10 gold while he is wearing full set of high level gear, it just ruins the experience so much. That daderic dagger or bow you find should feel special and not have one drop from every other enemy. man i remember when oblivion came out, at lvl 5 or so i shoot a troll with 3 arrows and it died, at lvl 50+ i shoot the same troll with 20+ arrows and he is still not dead
I'm actually using your videos to question the game ideas that i have, and.. yeah, we're pretty much aligned, bro.
This is my absolute biggest ripe with WoW at the moment. What is sad is that they'll most likely stick to this model forever.
WoW still works with scaling right? I think even when you increase ilvl mobs also scale, but i want to think they dont scale as much as you do
I was so glad they didn't implement scaling in the Shadowlands. Too bad every other zone in the game is scaled now. Takes away the sense of danger in hostile lands like Northrend. Why would I take the Lich King's treath seriously if I can literally go to his citadel at like level 15?
As long as being higher leel than the enemy still gives you a noticeable edge against enemies that you would not have had against enemies whene facing them at or below their level. I am cool with it. It's good to be able to down scale to help friends or simply play thru a lower level zone without completely trivializing the content.
Though their is something to be said to make this something you have to opt into.
This reminded me of a game that didn't have level scaling. It didn't really have anything really, it was one of the first MMOs, Everquest. In one zone, East Commons, everything was low level except for one mob, the Gryphon. It roamed around the path just ganking people. It was amazing. That level of awareness, fear, and fun just isn't possible in a scaled game.
EQ2 offers scaling and progression. You can mentor down, to be level with a zone, and in some instances you are able to scale up. I think it has a nice balance of static and scaled mobs. It's one of the things I like about the game. Unfortunately, a lot of the effort to raise skills and abilities, and gain more powerful gear, has been reduced in recent expansions, and some have even been eliminated, in an effort to make everyone, starting a new expansion, equal in progress.
Scaling killed WoW for me. During BFA they scaled enemies not just to your level, but also based on gear. I played a tank, and because tank damage doesn't increase very quickly, it actually took me longer to kill things as I leveled up, and once I hit the cap and started getting gear the enemies took the same amount of time to kill. No sense that I was getting more powerful. It wasn't the only factor, but it was a rather large one.
How do you feel about areas that you can return to but with a set 'zone level'
For example an area with a
1-10 range
11-20
21-30
So you can choose to hit the easy level to feel powerful, or challenge yourself on the higher ones?
Simple solution, at high levels transition to logarithmic scaling for mobs, and keep linear scaling for bosses/minibosses. Example: In a level 1 area mobs scale with you to level 10, then scale less as you level higher, up to a set limit at say level 20. That allows a consistent challenge level in the area for players between lvl 1-10, then gets easier slowly from lvl 10-20, and above 20 it rapidly becomes a trivial enemy. Pros: more consistent experience if you come into an area over or under levelled from the designer's perspective. Especially valuable in early areas where a new players might run into issues with exploring into more dangerous areas. Cons: less immediate feeling of progression while in the area. The enemies won't start feeling weaker until you reach the soft level cap for the area. This could be fixed by flattening the level scaling slope. Here's a numerical example of the overall concept.
player lvl 1-5, enemy level = player level (enemy range is 1-5)
player lvl 6-10, enemy level = player level x 80% (enemy range is 5-8)
player lvl 11-15, enemy level = 5 + (player level x 40%) (enemy range is 9-11)
player lvl 16-20, enemy level = 9 + (player level x 20%) (enemy range is 12-13
player lvl 21+, enemy level = 14
definitely more difficult to code, and the numbers are just an example and therefore would need to be tweaked to the game, but I think it makes the most sense out of any proposed level scaling schemes aside from static levels.
So you're basically scaling everything but in a way that it becomes easier at higher levels while there should still always be something challenging for the players?
ESO doesn't work excactly like your version but instead it uses multiple way to progress with you character (and account) without countering all of them through scaling.
Your base stats remain pretty much the same as long as your gear is more or less on your character's level but you still become stronger in certain ways due to the skills you unlock (learning-by-doing), item sets which you can acquire in different types of content and finally the championlevel system (CP) which allows every character of your account to allocate champion points in order to boost specific stats according to what type of content the character is supposed to do most of the time and what role they're supposed to fill. Btw, CP CAN'T be used to make you perfect in everything at the same time.
There is a noob-bonus which increases your stats but becomes weaker as you level up but for each level you also get at least 1 attribute point which you can use to increase you health, magicka or stamina individually.
This way the challenge slowly shifts from regular questing and beginner-friendly dungeons to more mechanic-heavy dungeons, solo-trials, group-trials and raids - basically what you would expect to be endgame content - because of your increasing efficiency as DD, tank or healer and you even benefit from your playtime on your other characters thanks to championpoints.
The only problem with ESO's current system is that regular questing becomes boring for veteran players. If they would introcude a veteran mode for regular questing, just like they have in dungeons, trials and raids, to increase health and damage and include more mechanics in battle then I would consider that system as pretty much perfect.
@@Mantaforce2 @Mantaforce There are a lot of great ways to get around strict leveling progression. Valheim has a pretty great system where your max health and stamina are determined by temporary boosts from food items, and 90% of damage scaling comes from armor and weapons. The remaining 10% comes from boosting skills by using them over time. Another system I liked was FF2 where you had fixed growth after a set number of battles, but the amount of growth was increased by stats that would increase based on your actions in battle. E.g. HP grows 1:1 based on stamina, taking damage in battle increases your stamina stat. If you start with 10 stamina, every HP increase gives 10 more max HP. Boost stamina to 11, and every increase gives you 11 HP. Different systems work better in different contexts. Valheim's system is great for survival/building because when focused on that aspect of gameplay you dont have to worry about dying of hunger, but when you want to go dungeon delving you put on your best armor and eat your best food. It wouldnt work well for a game based on PvP or exclusively focused on combat, because it breaks the flow of a battle when you have to hide behind a tree to down a plate of sausages and a bowl of vegetable soup to keep your max health above your enemy's damage. The FF2 system wouldn't work outside of an instanced battle RPG, because you would have to set a different metric to determine when and how to scale stats. Leveling systems work well for combat focused MMOs because they are consistently active and trigger the part of the brain that feels good when you've achieved something.
I think quests is a system that needs to be severely overhauled in most MMOs. Getting basically the same set of "fetch 10" or "kill 10" quests in every new area is incredibly demotivating. I think the best thing to do would be to decrease the amount of quests but increase the length and reward as you progress. When you start out you'll still get a dozen "kill the rats in my cellar for 500exp" quests, but (assuming level cap of 100) by the time you get to lvl 50 you'll be getting 2-3 very long quests with massive rewards. Like: "go to this dungeon, steal the widget from the invincible guardian, use it to unlock a portal to this inaccessible mountaintop fortress, raid the fortress to destroy the ring/crystal/throne that generates the guardian's invincibility, then go back and kill him" quests. The rewards and difficulty should also be very high, totalling at least as much as, if not more, than the rewards from however many small quests would have been in the area.
An idea I just had right now is level gating quests in both directions, a min level and a max level. Trivial quest types could be cut off above a certain cap, while new, more complex quests become available. You could even tie in lore, setting, rumor etc. and create good reasons to visit old zones. E.g. in starterville an NPC tells you theres a dragon settling nearby and "dont worry, someone stronger will deal with it." Then you get a dragon slaying quest 4-5 locations later, and then remember, "hmm, that guy mentioned a dragon..." Then you go back to the starter town and get another dragon slaying quest." Of course, none of this kinda stuff will ever make it into a AAA title, since they're basically naked cash grabs at this point. No creativity or room for experimentation whatsoever.
The first time I noticed that level scaling in GW2 it seriously annoyed me as I didn't expect to be so weak when I went back to my original starting area.
Then after that I was almost fine with it as I got used to it, until in a few later areas I find out I'm sometimes melting away with some enemies on some classes because I was scaled down. If I wasn't scaled down I would've been slaughtering them as I even tried to progress above them to see if the "maxed cap" I could be would change anything.
It didn't.
The only example of enemy level scaling that has made sense to me was from SWTOR.
Long story short, there's one quest where you go into a cave & you come across the light side manifestation of yourself. From here you have a choice of either becoming one with this entity or fighting it. If you choose to fight it, it will always matches your level because it is basically you. This is an example of story explanation making a design choice acceptable, especially because it doesn't apply to every enemy in the game.
That being said, I've also heard that this enemy's level caps out after a while, so you can theoretically grind to a really high level & bypass the challenge there.
Personally, I was so bad at the game that I ended up going with the light side choice because I literally could not bypass the enemy otherwise.
Everyone is making great points but I think we are all asking the wrong questions. It's not about if leveling in mmos should be scaled but what levels in mmos should reward you with. The issue is not if players, zones, and mobs have levels. For the most part it's a stats problem.
You bring up a great example with dnd and how traditional rpgs reward players with character progression. The difference between mmos and tabletop dnd though is that stats are meaningless in mmos. In dnd stats represent something about your character and arent just a number. For example, a stength of 5 might mean your character is very frail and would struggle picking up heavy objects, while a strength of 15 might mean your character is as strong as a powerlifter who can lift objects at least twice his weight. These stats are not only grounded in the context of the world and setting but they have limits. It's not a dragon ball Z power level that goes into the hundreds and thousands as most mmos do.
Mmo stats basically take away meaning from every part of the game. It doesn't matter how imposing or powerful a monster looks. Even if it has difficult boss mechanics, the monsters stats are all that matter. A level 30 dragon can be killed easily as part of a low level story quest while a lvl 80 goblin is 10 times as strong merely for appearing in a higher level story and zone despite being a smaller, less intelligent, and less of a dangerous creature. Monsters, gear, player characters, and virtually every aspect of the game become watered down. All that matters are the constantly growing stat numbers.
So no I don't want level scaling. I like progression and leveling. I am tired of devs using stats and levels as a crutch though. I want meaningful progression and mechanics that are creative and skill based. A human mage should always be abled to be downed by a well placed dagger to the neck regardless of if he's level 1 or 60. Some monsters should always be a threat to players. Mmos need to put purpose and meaning back into leveling.
Yes! MMOs have totally lost sight of their original roots, and are using the _skeleton_ of pen-and-paper mechanics that was adapted decades ago rather than trying to implement better and better equivalents as technology improves.
have to remember mmo's are different. they typically are to be played for many months or years on the same characters. the characters don't start over from level 1 either. players play at any time, with or without others. there's no DM to change things up. in pen and paper, players usually played less, like only on weekends when they can all meet up, and they'd start over from level 1 consistently, oftentimes with altered mechanics too. in my expeirence, mmorpgs are more treadmill-ish than SPRPGs, mostly because designers haven't found a commercial means to retain the same depth in MMORPGs over time. so the result is MMORPGs try to appeal to different needs and desires in players.
@@gukonni I agree that's how mmos are designed today. The goal for many developers is to keep players engaged for as long as possible. Especially when revenue is based on subscriptions and microtransactions. And many players want to be able to put in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into a single mmo as well.
It's an unpopular opinion to have but I'd argue that the "infinite content" approach should not define mmos and is ultimately why they are dying. Content takes time and money to make. For every 100 hours of development you might get less than an hour of player gameplay. Mmos fight an up hill battle of trying to push out enough new content to keep players playing the same game. And in order to achieve that many mmos have to pad out content with time limits and excessive grinding.
And as a result the leveling experience we're talking about which was once meaningful rpg character progression becomes this stretched infinite number chase. This becomes especially apparent with every new expansion released where the level cap is raised yet the content itself is more or less the same of what players have already dealt with because both the lore and engine have already been established.
There are plenty of games out there that people put time countless hours into such as mobas and fighting games. The problem mmos need to solve is what kind of content will be timeless and provide players with constant enjoyment. As of now the easy way around this is just creating the same content over and over and just increasing stat numbers arbitrarily. There's no meaningful progression or problem to be solved by the player.
@@brohogany9920 well i agree, but the last part of my comment was "so the result is MMORPGs try to appela to different needs and desires in players." so if MMORPG designers haven't found a commercial means yet to have the same depth in MMORPGs, the resulit is they try to appeal to something else. MMO's, for example, are social. This all by itself creates content. I remember back in 1999 we spent a lot of time just chatting. Just being in a group with somebody was great--being able to see them and interact like you were there with them. I gave attention to what others were wearing and the emotes they were using. In UO, people had houses and merchants to show off their wealth and creativity. I also played on pvp servers. PvP is sandbox gameplay. That's another form of content that was relativelyi cheap to produce--they just allowed players to kill each other and tweaked it over time . It wasn't a perfectly balanced system, but players found ways to make it meaningful without designers needing to create anything. I also think the treadmillish commonality in MMORPGs actually appeals to achiever-oriented players. I sometimes found myself appreciating a simple grind after hard day RL working for in-game longterm purpose. I liked the feeling of comittment to the progression and doing it alongside in-game friends. In fact, I found myself consistently coming back BECAUSE of my in-game friends. We all wanted to stay together and help each other progress. This helped us overlook the grind and give us a reason.
So I think what's happened is MMORPGs are social experiments with some features unlike traditional SP RPGs.
All u nerds want all this realism in games but can't grasp how hard it is to actually program. Wait for technology to catch up to your expectations.
Err, FFXIV is in the thumbnail but only dungeon/raid content and open world events are synced and you can turn off syncing for dungeons/raids. (no exp but you get all the loot)
Hell even world bosses aren't synced.
Plus level sync always syncs you to the highest item level possible at that level, and higher level gear always syncs to the cap. If anything, this makes old content too easy, and definitely doesn't invalidate your efforts.
As someone whose favorite thing to do in mmos was attempting to take on enemies way above my current level in order to challenge my ability to maximize the effectiveness of whatever skills and abilities I had to work with at the time, enemy scaling has caused me to entirely lose interest. Level scaling just feels to me like a way to allow players to explore any part of the world without having earned it, which is no different than using cheat codes as far as I'm concerned. I really wish that mmos would simply allow for level scaling servers as an "easy mode" option so that those of us whose immersion hinges on a sense of danger while out exploring the world can actually enjoy the experience as well.
Level scaling can impact the story telling as well. Since you could do whatever quest whenever, the plot lines can become splintered.
GW2 does it pretty well. You level up to earn the ability to explore areas you previously couldn't go to while being able to go to low level areas to help your friends without trivializing the events.
ESO however, really dropped the ball. You get weaker as you level up and have to equip gear to regain that power. Your skillpoints are the only thing that shows any sense of progression at all.
There's a gear level cap at 160 Champion Points and has been there since over 4 years ago. At that level you can finally start gearing up with Item sets, Weapon Traits, Armor Traits, And upgrading your weapon to the highest rarity. That's just the parts concerning gear, You also have Mundus stones, Potions, Food, Skill points, Champion Points, Poison/Enchantment, Etc. The DPS gap between a new player, And an endgame player is significant. A new player playing efficiently can struggle to reach 10k DPS, An endgame player playing efficiently reach upwards of 100k+DPS. That's why I love it, There's a lot of progression, But the progression isn't about running a power treadmill every few months to get a higher arbitrary number.
Wait what? Been thinking about playing ESO, how does the pve scaling work?
City of Heroes had a lack of level scaling across most of its content - with the exception of missions (which were scaled to the character) and giant monsters (which were effectively raid bosses which spawned in certain zones at random).
This is a topic that's very important to me. I remember playing Oblivion when I was younger. I completed the Shivering Isles DLC. At the end of that DLC you are crowned the new "Daedric God of Madness". When I returned to Cyrodiil, I was mauled and killed by a cougar. That experience forever cemented my thoughts on this matter. This is also why I eventually realized how much more I enjoyed Morrowind over Oblivion and (Vanilla) Skyrim.
this is great, I love your insights
Final fantasy 14.
Level scaling in fates. I think it's a great way
The game allows you to sync down to the appropriate level for fates in the overworld or for dungeons, and for dungeons there's an option to turn syncing off. FFXIV handles it best.
I quit WoW and came back to it about a year later, after they added level scaling. Made it nearly impossible to catch up to other player in any of the combat occupations, not to mention the lack of a need to go out and find properly-leveled enemies that you need to fight to level up. Quit for good after that, and it’s the sole reason I don’t go back.
Exactly why I stopped playing ESO. The game has zero sense of progression or end game. One Tamriel was one of the huge factors that destroyed this game and turned it into the console crap that it is today
@Ricky Spanish not really cp jumps by 30% from 160 to 750 which seems like a lot but say you would hit 60k then it'll be 42k and since almost all enemies in eso have the same defense that's very easily hitting the dps check for most content if not all content in eso
@Ricky Spanish which is why One Tamriel doesn't work
@@jasonivy28 yet the level scaling works significantly better in WoW simply because Blizzard separates leveling from max level content thoroughly
It still sucks but its not nearly as bad
I turned off ESO after 30 minutes when I saw that my lvl 1 character deals almost the same numerical value dmg to character lvl 30~ I saw on youtube gameplay.
Complete joke, also dealing almost 2k dmg on LVL 1 is ridiculous.
So get the fuck up of eso and let people enjoy the game play the game
You just need to think like a 40k ork. A good fight is your reward. Or just assume that the enemy is not a stupid NPC waiting for you to return with lvl 80 equipment and shred it to pieces. Imagine this level one rabbit understands that you leveling up, and rather than wait he takes an action. Go to gym, eat more carrots, learn how to fight, then the rabbit finds some rabbit elder and gets the quest to kill 10 Foxes, after this hardest task he became stronger and he went and kill 20 Red Foxes and got a quest reward(probably more carrots), then while you trading, doing stupid sidequest for a mount and new armor skin he goes and kills 10 wolves, then 10 Big Wolves, then 15 Big Hungry Wolves, then 15 Big White Hungry Wolves without complains about poor naming, he just grinds and grinds and grinds! And when the time comes, and you return with your shiny +10 Enchanted Baltasar Rune Sword of Devastation he became a fcking Rabbits god of war and progresses to kill dragons with bare teeth. And when the two-legged demon who killed his rabbit family returns, The Rabbit is ready to protect all Rabbitkind with his life and +20 Reinforced Mithril Dragon Teeth!
My issue with WoW's level scaling is the fact that the issue lay within the ever-increasing gear numbers. Back in MoP, I saw a DK with 1 million health. That number was unheard of and was most likely thought to be impossible. But I saw it.
Every new expansion will always have stronger and stronger gear, but rarely do developers decide to just reduce all stats on gear, but WoW did this once in WoD, the expansion after MoP. Then Legion came and everyone had millions of health and billions of damage. Developers need to simply balance the game without scaling the level of the players. If I'm level 125, only to have my level squished to 60, I feel weaker. It's not fun being low level, but it's worse when all content that used to be at level 60 is now for levels 10. That isn't at all fun to think of, even if it is 100% balanced. I feel like all the work I did was reset.
4:40 just like in ff8, fighting sand sharks, no matter how high I got my level at, the monsters levelled up with me, ended up not playing any more.
What? Final Fantasy 8 is the best Final Fantasy game. I think you're broken.
Yeah, you have to level your stats without leveling your level, otherwise you get curbstomped by old monsters with new tricks--especially challenging monsters like dragons. It's my favorite ff, but that was an odd design decision.
Gear, skills, talents, spells, attacks etc. are pretty good with scaling though, you have the reward of a greater arsenal of stuff to throw at that lv 12 mob when you have been scaled down to 12 from 50 or whatever while also keeping it challenging and new. It's one of the things GW2 got right I think.
Scaling enemy levels is one thing.. Why does nobody talk about the scaling of damage between combatants of different level that is so common now days? For instance, a level 50 could have an attack that does 2000 damage by default, but because they are attacking a level 60, the attack instead does 1500, based solely on the level difference, before taking into account the enemies defenses. It ends up making questing an area 2 levels higher than you impossible, and questing an area 2 levels lower than you ridiculously easy.
I got the solution : have a menu called difficulty where the player could pick scaling or no scaling. I hate scaling
I hate level scaling. It ruins games like GW2. Whether you're level 3 wearing shit armor, or max level with the best armor in the game? That spawn of 3 thugs you killed at the start of the story? They can kill you just as quickly as they could back then. Yet somehow you can now slay every dragon in existence. You can slay the most elite warriors now when you couldn't then. Yet those 3 thugs? Nope. They've scaled with you somehow. It's complete bullshit.
You started this video in GW 2. If you get your ass kicked at level one, and come back at 50 and still get your ass kicked, the game isn't the problem...
If you watch all his other videos you can clearly see he is the problem.
I always felt like Skyrim is a good game in theory, because everyone told me "oh, you can make potions, and create weapons, enchant them yourself, discover a lot of things", but in reality, if you're making all this, the world is too hard to even have fun in it. I'm not someone who wants to spend the first ten hours of a game being sure I'm good enough at combat before finally going to the part I enjoy (making potions, creating stuff, etc...). That's why seeing everyone at the time (and some even now) praise skyrim as the best rpg is bonkers to me...
Agree with you. I HATE level scaling, the whole point of leveling is to become more powerful. Level scaling makes you feel like you accomplished absolutely nothing. If i go to a low level zone, I should be able to destroy anything that attacks me. I hate being max level, having to go back to a starter area for whatever reason, and have to have a epic fight with low level mobs... makes me want to quit the game right then and there! Also agree with you on the pvp aspect, in other games I have beaten people with much better gear than me and it felt great, because my skill mattered and if the other player earned the gear they had(many didn't) then they would kill me. But you always could tell, who earned their gear and who didn't. The gear would give them an advantage over me, but skill still mattered. You don't really see it anymore, level scaling just screws everything up. If I always wanted an equal fight between people where your achievements didn't matter, then I would just play Halo.
Back in the day, Everquest did this perfect with Lost Dungeons. You could go into this area at any point and it would be challenging. The zones you run around in had a certain range that you could work towards, through, and past.
i like the guildwars model a lot but what i would do is have each area give maybe a small stat buff after finishing the quest line or grinding. gear of course is a different matter and would probably have to have caps for each area.
WoW has put a spin on this by having a scale lvling system, then giving you static lower mobs. If you level, let's say by one of Chromie time lines, the mobs will scale up with you to lvl 50. You will be forced out of Chromie's time line at lvl 50. You can go to the same zones after exiting the time line and the mobs will be lvl 30 now, rather than lvl 50.
I did Outlands in a Chromie time line to lvl 50. Once I hit lvl 50 I was given 30 sec to exit. I was forced out before I could turn in last completed quest. I had to return to zone to turn in quest. The mobs were 20 lvls below me rather than scaled up to my lvl 49-50.
Wow does use scaling, and use special lvling situations that force scaling, but also has cut off lvls for mobs to be static like, compared to your higher lvl.
The newer zones are scaling zones, while older expac zones scale to a certain point. Special time lines will scale up past the normal cut off point. Hope all I said makes sense.
WoW scales with the character even with Ilvl, but I think mobs dont scale as much as you do to keep your feeling of progression, if anyone can confirm this I d thank you
yes wow scales with even item level which is terrible, you have to hit a specified threshold in order for it to start tapering off slowly. until then you never feel more powerful, but in some instances you actually feel weaker than you were previously. it took so long in BFA for that to kick in that it was demoralizing for some players. especially since the gear was drip fed to you in such a slow amount of time in the beginning. that level 110 bear you fought at the beginning would be your nemesis for months on end until you hit that breaking point, and even then, you would still only creep ahead of it slowly.
@@Shiirow that's a shame, now in shadowlands they fixed that but only for shadowlands, thank you
Little late to this but gw2 have both solution you propose. In pve when you are scaled down in low lvl area your atributes are scaled down but you keep all skills and traits you got while leveling and they give a lot bonus stats and active and passive bonuses, so enemies you needed 5-10 hits to kill you now kill in 1-3 hits.
Scaling is the main thing that killed wow for me.
It was made this way on purpose - so people just skip everything up to max level and waste their money and time as much as possible. it's not that zones are old, it's that they were abandoned and feel like one boring grey irrelevant mess with heirlooms and helicopter questing. no gold, no skills, no items matter while you're leveling. same buttons, same sounds, same mechanics...
Many people here made a comment about level scaling in GW2, so I'm going to talk about something nobody mentioned yet - a playstyle shift.
The best thing about level scaling is that it enables the player to go to the lower-level areas they haven't visited yet. This turns the game from a themepark, where you go from quest to quest in order of difficulty, to a "go wherever you feel like going today" sandbox, so no two play sessions are the same.
Piggy backing off of this, it also encourages players to play together. If you have friends or family who play the same mmo, you can meet up quest together despite level differences.
Level scaling makes no sense, you grind/fight hard to achieve something AKA your level, meanwhile someone who just started nullifies all your hard work by just *scaling* to your level
The only way to scale should be downwards
I disagree, in GW2, even with level scaling, you can still feel powerful in lower level zones, in most cases enemies won't even survive a full rotation of attacks when you are maxed out.
GW2 doesn't also remove abilities from you as you scale down like FFXIV does and GW2 scales you to the highest possible power of the level you're scaled down too... so it's kind of the exception to the scaling rules.
@@TheFoxtailedSamurai Indeed you have access to all your skills and class build traits that even with being scaled down you can still overpower anything in the core game save for group event bosses like bandit champions which are meant for groups (even then certain players are able to solo them much to my amazement.
first, I totally agree with you that level scaling is bad! specifically in MMOs, but your point about Skyrim is a bit off because while it does have level scaling for enemies those enemies also have a base level before scaling begins, that is why some enemies will kick your ass early on like frost trolls, saber cats, giants, and mammoths because their base level is like 10+ before scaling even begins so if you are under-leveled you will get a thrashing from some mobs that have a fairly high base level you have to surpass before scaling begins on them. But yes overall scaling is awful for MMOs. Skyrim is a good RPG I feel did scaling somewhat effectively though IMO.
While I don't see the point in Skyrim's scaling (just because it wasn't that bad, doesn't mean it helped the gameplay), Skyrim's problem was how it's difficulty worked. Most people play Skyrim on one of the two lower difficulties, so it's not so bad, but on higher difficulties, most enemies have a high chance of doing finishers, making melee a death sentence. Rather than creating more challenge, they just boosted numbers.
Morrowind does have some limited enemy lvl scaling as well as static. Calculations are based on player lvl n ea area has a lvl range for spawns. So if you go into a dungeon, it checks your level to determine whether to spawn the lvl 3 enemy in it's spawn list or the lvl 7 enemy based on your lvl, but it can't spawn anything not already in that area's spawn list, so it's controlled. Gothic does a pure static lvl dealie do tho I think.
Have to agree really, i would fancy tho a pve dungeon or smth were monsters scaled with you just to add a bit of challenge but for the most part the semse of progression is important
I like enemies and zones that level scale to a certain degree too, but you top them out at one point. Or after certain events something storywise happens that upgrades the enemies in a region.
But in the end, I like to be rewarded for hours of grinding and doing every sidequest available, no matter how ridiculous and annoying they are, by being Badass Curbstomper.
Things to take into count for level scaling:
Leveling up gets you higher stats that will allow you to use better weapons, armor and skills/magic. Maybe you only learn a skill or magic or allowed to wield a weapon and armor at level X that is effective against level scaled enemy Y, because while its stats scale to you, it might not be as resistant and strong against the skill you learnt at level X or his attacks might not be as effective when you wear the armor you get at level X. However, that would really work best against selective enemies, MidBosses, Bosses or special quest related enemies.
honest question , it is possible small alteration to solution 2 of different type of scaling for different pve zones? basic example in the zone level 1-10 the enemy health grows 5% for each 5 level and the zone levels 20-40 grows 10%.
Level scaling ruined WoW for me. I'm better at some classes than others, and the way they implemented it took away accessibility options for me.
Before level scaling, I could subsist on lower level quests and grinding relatively easy mobs to progress if I was having trouble doing level-appropriate content on a class/spec. Similarly, if I was finding some content too easy, I could try to punch above my weight class for a greater challenge. Level scaling took that away from me.
What's worse, the way they implemented it, I actually got weaker as I leveled due to the way secondary stats scaled. The same crit rating or haste rating applied less benefit on a higher level character, while enemies instantly scaled up and got more powerful and harder to defeat.
I liked the class fantasy of the mage, and enjoyed mowing down green enemies, but those went away, and suddenly every pull was a fight for my life. Accidentally pulling two mobs meant death. Rather than a relaxing session slowly accumulating xp at my chosen pace, I was forced to corpse-hop my way to endgame.
I think on retail they've scaled back the difficulty a bit and retuned things, but I still resent not having the easy a choice between content difficulty that was baked into the game and was the default assumption for how MMOs worked.
I think in addition to the 2 solutions you offered, how about the additional solution of allowing scaling to exist, but allowing players to scale at a higher rate than the enemy? This way, the feeling of progression is felt, but the difficulty of the game never gets to a point where enemies are completely trivialized or one-shot, at least not until the player is so close to the damage cap that the enemies become trivialized anyway. Trivialization becomes endgame, and you know that you've won.
What I don’t like is that you mentioned Skyrim has level scaling, but you didn’t mention that it had *Capped* level scaling. eg. level with player between level 40 through 60.
Making the npcs Static when you are below or above the minimum and maximum caps.
There is only one enemy that levels infinitely, and a couple of neutral/friendly npcs.
Keeping the sense of progression while also keeping the sense of challenge.
Though that’s mostly noticeable below level 10 or 20 and above level 60ish
As most enemies scale between those values.
One pro that kind of goes hand in hand with the content one, is if you have friends start the game, you can play with them regardless of what level they are.
Agreed, 100%. Level scaling just feels.. bad.
I don't find the games that have level scaling to be fun, entire point is to become stronger then the enemy so you can have some revenge on those annoying mobs when you were weaker, but level scaling ruins this and the fun goes away fast
I would love specific scenarios that involve you stepping into the control of a weaker character to experience the challenge from a high level character and a low level one so you can fully appreciate the reward of having a high level character.
But I prefer games where the fights feel like a physical puzzle like zelda or metroid.
I think level scaling should never be done absolutely because what's the point but I think a region should have specific leveled enemies so that it's a really difficult challenge to go there before your time which I think is how I played dragon age accidentally. It might be neat to have it so that the enemies range in level from the regional level to your level so you have to gauge who you want to pick an easy fight with and who you want to cheese your way around not fighting.
Hey, one bit of information overlooked about for Skyrim is that the enemies have a level cap to their scaling. Bandits cap at level 28, Draugr caps at 45, Dragons at 75, etc. Not sure if this would impact your position any since Skyrim is an offline game and your point on MMOs still stands.
Hello Josh. Great work on your MMO videos. Your "worth playing" series is very informative, and your beginners guides are very thorough. I'm a long time vet of FFXIV, but I watched your beginner's guide to see if it was legit, and I thought you covered everything beautifully.
For this video, I'd like to point out that your description of the scaled leveling system in Skyrim is over simplified. The scaling is somewhat RNG based, with enemy spawns having a higher chance to be a level appropriate version of the same enemy as you level (like a bandit thug in place of a plain old bandit, but there is still a chance it will be the low level bandit). Most dungeons have a set level range, so you can still out level many lower difficulty dungeons. You can also stumble into dungeons that have a min level well above your current level and get wrecked. Although it isn't perfect, I think this is a good implementation of level scaling, especially when you consider that the tougher enemies have different names. It still feels rewarding when you can start to win against the bandit thugs, highwaymen, marauders, etc.
The scaling based on your non combat skills is a whole different issue though, and I agree with you there.
The biggest problem with Skyrim having the scaled enemies comes from the fact that you can go anywhere at any time. Because Bethesda didn't think about characters potentially not leveling up combat skills in order to become a high level, it means you can soft-lock yourself out of certain bits of progression. But you're also able to break the game by not leveling up at all. Unless you're playing with the survival mode enabled, it's completely optional to level up your character regardless of how much effort you put into your skills. Which can lead to enemies being laughably weak and quest rewards being completely not worth the effort.
One of my many memorable moments in an mmo was in Everquest at lvl 9 sneaking trough Velious where everything was lvl 30+ and insta death for me, had the mobs just scaled down to my level
then what would have been the point? not a fan of level scaling for pve at least, in say WoW arenas doing pvp i could see it being a thing where all the fighters have the same stat and then it is more up to skill and knowledge of the class you play.
I think there should be a level scaling slider in the quest log. You can manually scale yourself down to make quests you missed relevant, but you aren't forced to. Similar to what FFXIV does for its fates world events. You can scale down to them by clicking the button, or not if you can't be bothered. The big scary roaming mobs were done well in EverQuest 2, no scaling required at all.
Playing Morrowind, I maxxed level and all skills on the base game. The expansion came out and was level scaled so I could not kill a freaking rat or level to beat the rat. Yeah, stopped playing.
As to solutions - I like the wandering random scaled bad guy - but if scaling is to be implemented, it could be set permanently when a player first enters a zone and stored on the player visited section, so all areas behave like fixed but are actually scaled :) Bit weird to do on an MMO, but it would solve the order and reward problem.
I think level-scaling only helps if you could opt-in to it, such as replaying an older dungeon with the option to scale them up. It's the reliance on bigger numbers over player skill that causes level-scaling to be an issue as enemies usually aren't smarter, they just have bigger numbers. If skill mattered more than numbers, level-scaling wouldn't have such a negative affect on the sense of progression.
Some EQ logic in "roaming monsters" generally the best PVE level scaling is scaled zones (GW, WoW) that don't downscale you, aka a 1-20 zone scales w/ player up to 20 but a 25 will still be fighting 20s, this lets you get the most out of a zone but gives you progression.
The second time scaling is amazing outside pvp is mentoring, either scaling a high level character down to play with friends in lower content, or scaling up a lower character to play with friends in higher content(the former being preferred) while giving scaling drops the high/low levels can actually use. This mechanic is also very fictional in generic dungeons.
I hate mob scaling. It makes everything I do feel pointless.
Scaling also means that old contact is no longer irrelevant. It means a higher level player cannot one shot an enemy that a week or player is trying to grind for a quest.
And as per scaled enemies, if you are fighting a boss at level 10 and find yourself getting beaten, then you can level up to level 15 and learn a healing skill which helps you defeat the boss, the same level as you because you did not have that skill prior. Yes, the bus scales from level one with you, but you do not have access to other skills that can turn the fight around.
The thing static levels also encourage is stealth gameplay. If I have the combat ability to take dungeon A, but want to explore dungeon B early: I get minced by the higher level enemies. I could level up to explore it OR I can sneak past the enemies there.
It makes sneaking very tense because if you're spotted, it's instant doom. But, if you succeed you could find way more powerful gear. That kind of high-risk high-reward gameplay is often sorely lacking in level scaled RPGs, which makes them feel like a tedious grind.
I remember realising things were level scaled in oblivion when I finally went back to that goblin cave, only to find said goblins had been replaced by Giga-Shrek 9000s. Hated it.
I agree and it boggles my mind why you hear people praising level scaling. I’ve always hated it.
I think you can still have a feeling of progression even without levels at all and that's my personal preference. That being said, I think some people like having that numeric rating of their progress through the game and so I don't think level scaling invalidates the concept of levels altogether since even if it isn't necessarily changing the challenge level of an area, it is a numeric representation of your experience level with the game as a player and progress through the game.
As an example of an MMO where levels weren't really important at all, take a look at the expansions for Guild Wars (1) - Factions and Nightfall. Characters were at or near max level by the time they left the starting area in. There were plenty of other ways to "progress" though the game though like gear and skills as well as player knowledge in what skill combos were effective against what challenges. A character who just hit level 20 felt very different than a level 20 character who was at the final mission and there was a real feeling of progression throughout even though your level hadn't been ticking up since the tutorial essentially. It was the one thing I think the expansions did better than Prophecies.
I think scaling should be about areas, like after grinding an zone you will defeat enemies easily and a new zone will feel challenging. I don't know if there is already an game that does this but I think it would be a cleaver solution
"MMO RPG is probably the most math heavy genre" - Civilization 1 says "probably" is a good word choice.
I stopped playing ESO when they brought in level scaling. I spent my time getting my mage to as high a level as I could, levelling up all the magic types and completed the storyline feeling like a god. The one of my friends got it and wanted some help, and still needed to grind my healing magic so I agreed to jump back to the start and follow him through with the agreement that all I will do will heal. Went back to the main area and got my arse handed to me by a mud crab whilst waiting for him to show up. A FUCKING MUD CRAB was like a boss battle, only for my level 5 player friend to run along a kill it in 1 hit. I was a throwing god level spells at it and NOTHING but he hits it with a starter level sword and boom its dead.
That was my quit moment as all my time and effort felt like it was absolute nothing.
Game I've dived in deep has non-scaling and scaling, and they player mostly controls this. Open world and main quest line in Lord of the Rings Online in static. Even the 4 starter areas become so easy you get no experience points if you do all of them. But certain key moments in main quest line and specific short battles available and you control them.
Say you barely didn't make it through a 20 level dungeon. So you can go back to it, keep it at level 20 and see the whole dungeon without struggling at level 50. Or you can scale it anywhere from 20 to max level, sometimes even add extra difficulty with tier 1, 2 or 3 with extra bosses and mechanics, not just more hit points and damage.
Rewards can be a problem if you can scale the game lower. So maybe you get a token instead of an item. Now you can grind lower level many times or try the difficult one for quicker, larger number of tokens. Tokens used to get gear increase by your level, so a level 20 sword costs 20 tokens, but level 50 sword costs 200 tokens and maybe a second special token you get from harder content
level scaling works if you remove levels from the game mechanics. Morrowind was scale level'd a lot. As you got better so did the enemy AI. It was what caused me to stop playing...
lol Morrowind was not scaled at all. maybe you are thinking of Oblivion. In Oblivion, if you didn't efficiently level your character you would very quickly become useless as all the enemies kept getting stronger and stronger as you leveled, meaning you had to pump combat stats each and every level and you had to know what you were doing to stay strong.
@@blackswordsman5165 Also it was kind of immersion breaking when you'd see simple road-side bandits kitted out in high level armour/weapons. I always hated that for some reason.
@@blackswordsman5165 While the enemies themselves in Morrowind weren't scaled, the *spawns* were scaled so like
My first playthrough I just stayed inside and lvled my magic until I was lvl 20 then I went outside and some big monster was wandering around the wizard who falls out of the sky lol
Meanwhile in Skyrim every other Draugr turns into a Deathlord, and the Draugr minibosses become Death Overlords, and the Deathlord Bosses become Dragon Priests, while every other Bandit becomes a Bandit Marauder.
Technically enemy scaling also depends on the way how exactly they are scaled. In one case you may encounter the same rat at level 1 and level 50 and in it will be as dangerous to you due to being scaled proportionally to you. However, let's say character's damage grows in geometric progression and rat's one is linear. When you encounter level 2 rat on second level yourself fight will remain as tough. However, when you reach level 10 and encounter level 10 rat you'll step on it and go away. Now, let's say there are skeletons which you also have to kill periodically. They may scale in geometric progression, but at a slower pace than you. In such case they'll remain a challenge for much longer than those rats, but you'll still outgrow them eventually. Just not immediately.
Basically, it depends on exact implementation. Of course we could have reduced player's growth in power, but it affects everything player do while different scaling for different monsters affects those specific monsters which allows gradual reduce of threat in case they are mixed within the same regions. While at a low level fight against 2 rats and a skeleton might be a suicide since they all are roughly the same and all hit hard on a higher level rats will lag behind and your fights against 3 opponents will turn into a fight against 1.5 or even less than 1 since skeleton will also start lagging behind. Of course effect like this could be achieved with the same scaling method for every creature, but different level ranges they can spawn as. So, if rats start and 1 and stops at 10 and skeletons start at 5 and stops at 25 encounter of 1 skeleton and 2 rats for level 1 player will be a suicidal, for level 5 player a tough fight and for level 20 player that will be a fight against single skeleton while rats won't matter.