I constantly see level scaling come up as a bad thing on /v/
Could somebody explain what's so bad about it to me, because I literally don't see the problem?
>>334485195
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
1. If implemented poorly it can lead to things like imbalance. You either punish people who haven't optimized their builds or give no incentive to those who would like to.
2. If it's obvious it also breaks immersion. For example, in Oblivion you could go up a level or two and suddenly be facing an army of bears where previously there were none.
3. It actually detracts from the RPG experience. In an RPG part of the whole fun is growing in power. Level scaling makes it feel like you've made zero progress despite "leveling". You haven't overcome a hurdle. There was no hurdle to begin with.
With BLands 2, getting one shot is common, and it's obviously not fun.
/thread
>>334485523
>Implying this has anything to do with level scaling, when evolution takes generations to occur
>>334485195
level scaling turns the concept of an rpg world upside down. Instead of the character rising to the challenge of the world, the world adjusts to the character. The result is, though it may sound odd at first, a static world. Just look at the curves in your graph. At any point the balance between character and opponents is a constant. It doesn't matter if the player is starting out, or in the end game.
Contrast with an unscaled world. In the beginning the vast majority of opponents will be way too much for the character. The result is a character focused on survival, with many areas of the world simply cut off due to enemies. In the end, the few remaining strongholds of enemy power become the focus, while the rest of the world is highly accessible.
A useful side effect of this is that while the world is new and alien to the player, it's also highly dangerous to the character, leading to much more careful and observant play. When you spent enough time in the game though, your character is stronger, traversion a region is easier, and speedier. It's a mild form of "fast travel".
"Freeing" areas when the player has accumulated sufficient power can also act as chapter delimiters. You can't have that in a scaled world.
It needs to be done in moderation. Otherwise, what is even the point in leveling up?
>>334489882
while not an RPG, Zelda games actually showcase the effect very well, due to only a single stat. When the player starts out, opponents are an actual challenge, because they can quickly reduce Link's health completely, and they are much more valuable, as the tiny amounts of currency they may drop can help the player a lot to progress. The result is a "slow" exploration, with the player taking on enemies, but also taking in the environment. This is the exploration phase.
Late in the game though, Link has plenty of hearts and plenty of currency, so there's little reason to interact with the bad guys sprinkled all over the landscape. They're still there, and the player needs to pay some attention, but, and that's important. At that point, the player is not actively seeking these enemies any longer. The only reason Link is in that particular part of the map is because he's trying to go from one point to another, and this part of the map happens to be on the way. So the player does not want to be "held up" by the enemies. And thanks to the world not being scaled, he isn't held up. The player ends up moving much faster than when he initially entered that region, although nothing changed about the region. Only the objective of the player and the abilities of the character changed.
It should be noted that the world didn't become boring because of it. The destination the player is going to likely holds enemies that are still a challenge to Link, and the player, and the traversal itself is entertaining, because the player is more familiar with the environment and more closely identifies with it.
With an unscaled RPG world it's largely the same. It's just more disguised, due to more complex stats and interactions. The player may have a vehicle or mount at that point too, to further speed up traversal.
>>334490061
for some people the point of leveling up is to make bigger numbers appear on the screen (be it during fights or on the stat screen). For others it's a proxy for their dress up doll character.
These people will draw plenty of entertainment from a level scaled environment.
>>334485195
>LEVEL 1
>ATTACKS: TACKLE - DEALS 20 DAMAGE
>ENEMY HEALTH: 40HP
>LEVEL 2
ATTACKS: TACKLE - DEALS 30 DAMAGE
ENEMY HEALTH: 60HP
What difference in gameplay is there?
Leveling is just a wall that can only be taken down via time sink.
>>334485195
it feels good to die a million times to something on early levels and then go and kill it in 1 hit and it misses everything
i've only felt this the way i wanted in world of warcraft
because you enter a hamster wheel effect
just look at borderlands 2 late game
you get stronger, but your enemies get stronger too, so there is barely any difference
Are there any games that implement an evolving algorithm to level enemies?
>>334494998
evolving how?
>>334495050
Instead of changing enemy stats a predefined amount every level it would slightly modify enemy stats / composition over time, reuse enemies that perform the "best", and repeat the cycle
>>334495691
I'm not aware of that. Keep in mind you do not necessarily want to keep the best survivors or anything. If a typical trait of some foe is some elemental weakness, evolving that away, makes that foe exchangeable. It's the same as level scaling on a more subtle level.
Manual "evolution" may be an interesting concept, when the developer manually sets up the way a class of enemies changes over time/number of encounters/level, suggesting an evolution, while it's just a nicely hidden mechanism preparing the player for upcoming encounters. That's in difference to what a plain scale function.
>>334495691
It would just generate the most exploitative stat arrangements and frustrate the player anyway. A big appeal to harder monsters is more than their higher stats but new designs and movements. Unless you could evolve interesting new pattersn for enemeisto follow, but that would likely be too difficult for a game developer (interesting arrangements being the difficulty, as so far most procedural things get dull quickly because it's too difficult to make them near the quality of human-made things)
>>334497372
>that would likely be too difficult for a game developer
It would be too convoluted for a developer. It's perfectly feasible to tweak that stuff manually.
>so far most procedural things get dull quickly
Only the ones you noticed
>enemeisto
enemeisto is now the name of an rpg monster. What does it look like?
>>334497372
This >>334496037 would work by having a rock-paper-scissor relationship between enemy types
Level scaling completely takes away any sense of progression. Oblivion is garbage in this respect.
Level 2, iron weapons, I can kill a skeleton in 4-5 hits or 2 if I use a power strike.
Level 34, Daedric gear, takes 11-15 hits to kill a skeleton, 8 if I use power strikes. Or, level 3, I can kill a goblin and it's not much threat. Level 48 this goblin takes 30 hits to kill and will hit me for 70% of my healthbar before I can kill it despite the fact I have full goddamn Daedric and the maximum amount of damage reduction.
Bayonetta isn't an RPG, but it has some excellent progression. Starting out you can deal with regular enemies but Grace and Glory are incredibly tough. But by end game once you've unlocked skills and beefed up a bit Grace and Glory are very easy to 100-0 combo.
Gracious and Glorious are tough basically no matter what skills you've unlocked though, and are a great way to show that enemies are getting stronger without it feeling cheap. All they do beyond being beefier and hitting harder is remove Witch Time, which forces you to fight them on an even footing and not use the slow time handicap.
They also recover from staggering faster so it's basically impossible to 100-0 them without chain dodging into more combos.
>>334485195
because increasing enemy health is lazy
the amount of time it takes to kill an enemy isnt only limited by the percentage of damage you deal to them with each blow, it can also be limited by ai behaviors, environmental factors, etc
however, designing these things takes time and effort so most/all modern games completely avoid doing anything of the sort
even classic rpgs had this problem where difficulty scaled with increasingly compounding resistance types, pigeonholing you to a strategy your character may not have been specced for and necessitating save scumming
