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PENALTIES FOR LEVELING UP
Posts
Antilurker77
871
Antilurker77
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Closeauthor=Desertopa
In Diablo 1 and 2, lot of the main character's effectiveness might have been determined by their equipment, yeah, but the characters clearly made progress relative to the enemies they were facing at that point in the game as they trained. You could go back to an earlier point in the game, exchange your equipment for random drops from that point, and slaughter previously challenging enemies like cockroaches. And finding better equipment wasn't contingent on your level, but on what places you're exploring or what enemies you're fighting. If you head to a place you're not strong enough to navigate normally, sneak and dodge past your enemies, and open up some kind of treasure chest, you could be rewarded with treasure far ahead of your level curve. And why not? It makes sense both in terms of in-world logic (this is where the more powerful enemies who use more powerful items are actually located,) and in terms of rewarding alternate playstyles.
This was in launch D3, but ended up being removed. Since after all, why bother killing low-level stuff when you just rush through higher-tier content for sick loots? It got to the point where people were ignoring Act 1 Inferno and would just rush Act 3 Inferno areas for resplendent chests and goblins.
Diablo 3 sacrifices both in-world logic and the sense of progression. It might still effectively force you to raise your level to navigate the game, but leveling up becomes something less representative of the growth of your character relative to the challenges they're facing than of the backwards spin of a treadmill, forcing you to keep running to simply stay in place.
Using your analogy, with the way the loot system works you aren't really running so much as taking an leisurely stroll like an old man. And still, this is completely ignoring new skills which could let you take leaps on this treadmill. A level 50 versus a level 50 horde of zombies is going to have an easier time than a level 20 versus a level 20 horde of zombies.
Crystalgate
694
This seems to be a question of perspective. To put it simple, you leveling up is a reward while the enemies leveling up is a penalty. So, you get both an advantage and a disadvantage when you level up in Diablo 3. I can't tell whether the advantage or the disadvantage is greater in that game. However, in most games with levels, you only get an advantage by leveling up. That tends to be the standard people use when gaging level rewards. Any disadvantage you get is seen as a penalty, even if the advantage is still greater.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=Antilurker77All other things being equal this is absolutely not true at all; the enemies gain far more power per level than you do in D3. They have to, in order to make up for the fact that you're getting better equipment too. The amount of power they earn per level is equal to the amount you earn per level, plus the amount you're expected to get if you upgrade all your equipment by one level, plus an extra bonus that they added in order to make the game keep getting more challenging as you keep playing.
A level 50 versus a level 50 horde of zombies is going to have an easier time than a level 20 versus a level 20 horde of zombies.
New skills aren't actually stronger than old ones in D3, so by the time you're level 20 you're as strong as you'll ever be.
Now, you're likely to get new gear on your way from level 20 to level 50, obviously. But simply leveling up from level X to level X+1? Bad idea, every time. Guaranteed to make every battle in the game harder.
If you want to be stronger, you have to get equipment without leveling up. This is of course easiest to do once you're at max level... which is the only reason to level past 20. But for true maximum power, your goal should be to get a full set of level 20 legendaries, store them in the cross-character bank, delete your character and start over, and then stop leveling once you reach level 20. You will be WAY WAY WAY stronger than a level 60 wearing all legendary equipment.
Edit:
However, it wouldn't have to be anywhere near this major of a penalty to piss me off. Having any penalty at all for leveling up pisses me off. There shouldn't be even a smidgen of a chance that you'll become weaker in any way, unless it's possible to level back down.
Desertopa
775
author=Antilurker77
This was in launch D3, but ended up being removed. Since after all, why bother killing low-level stuff when you just rush through higher-tier content for sick loots? It got to the point where people were ignoring Act 1 Inferno and would just rush Act 3 Inferno areas for resplendent chests and goblins.
The answer to "why bother?" is because RPGs are, generally speaking, more fun when you follow some kind of coherent, story based sequence than when you're just wandering around killing stuff to get more stuff so you can kill more stuff, ad infinitum.
This is where the incentives of online play clash with the incentives of fun game design. It induces a sort of fun-based tragedy of the commons, where people do things that aren't very fun to avoid the even less fun situation of being left out of the loop by all the other players.
Game designers get away with it because liking and wanting things are two different neurological processes which can operate separately, or even in opposition to each other. For instance, people can find themselves unable to tear themselves away from internet arguments even if they realize that they're only making them miserable and not changing anyone's mind. Social obligation and reinforcement can keep people coming back again and again even when they're not having a good time, so the game designers aim for that, and don't worry so much about whether their game is any fun when all's said and done.
nurvuss
958
author=unity
Ugh, Saga Frontier had an area where if you tackled it too late, all the monster encounters turned into near-boss level squid fights. ...Though I think that may have just been a case of the game not being tested and refined enough before it was launched?
Is that the card quest in Devon, where you start each battle as "drunk", granting a variety of negative status effects? That was annoying even at a low level, argh! That Maelstrom squid....
RyaReisender
200
It's not exactly like that. SaGaFrontier simply has a "+1 tier" modifier in some regions. The devon swamp is one, the other one is Bio Lab. Even if you tackle it early it will be quite hard. However, if you're at the point where the Kraken appears you already have reached the highest tier so any leveling beyond that will just make you stronger but not the monsters.
Also I think there were some water-resistance accessoires that prevented damage from Maelstrom. But I might not remember it correctly.
Also I think there were some water-resistance accessoires that prevented damage from Maelstrom. But I might not remember it correctly.
There are. The fights were still hard even with a few of those. My main problem, design wise, with the region isn't the powerful squid. It's that EVERY encounter becomes the powerful squid. There's no variety to the enemies in that area once you hit max tier. (Or, if there are, I never encountered them. It was just one squid battle after another). Luckily, encounters in that area won't trigger if you walk perfectly, so with some practice, many of them can be avoided.
RyaReisender
200
Yeah it's probably the worst region of all. I just learned how to avoid all battles on that map. =p
LightningLord2
230
In order to contribute to the topic, I never actually understood why it's so bad to not scale the levels of open-world rpgs - you have areas that are more dangerous than others, a good selection of like-leveled areas at any given time and you can choose to tackle an over/underleveled area whenever you feel like it. It's simpler, more immersive and more dynamic in difficulty than level scaling all over the place.
Antilurker77
871
Because you have no indication of what areas are what level. You'd be forced to running to every corner of the map or reading a guide book looking for something level appropriate to do. You'd also be railroading the player through your game, which defeats the purpose of it being an open world game.
Runekn
0
Has there ever been a game where weaker enemies might not scale as well as you, but learn a few tricks? Like bandits might not really care about trying against some level 2 fighter, but a level 99 glowing messiah? Maybe it's time to run away. Or use a stun grenade or something. It probably won't work if the hero is exponentially more powerful, but I think it's a cute idea at least.
Man, I remember playing the PSX version of FF1 (or was it II?) the first time and heading straight north only to have myself killed instantly. I don't know, on the one hand it's a cheap kill but on the other it did add a sense of fear to the game - when will I be strong enough to go north? If I go south will I die too? Where can I go from here? Are all enemies that strong? How am I supposed to save the world?!
It was actually kinda great.
Also puts me in mind of freakin FF12 - don't get me wrong, the story was very ugh, but that first area? With the huge dinosaur? Here am I killing critters left and right and suddenly, huge dinosaur. Hm... I should be able to kill that since I'm not having any trouble with the other creatures of this level... Aaaaand I die. ONE HIT KO!
...I loved it. XP
It was actually kinda great.
Also puts me in mind of freakin FF12 - don't get me wrong, the story was very ugh, but that first area? With the huge dinosaur? Here am I killing critters left and right and suddenly, huge dinosaur. Hm... I should be able to kill that since I'm not having any trouble with the other creatures of this level... Aaaaand I die. ONE HIT KO!
...I loved it. XP
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=Antilurker77I'm pretty sure there are tons of ways to actually communicate difficulty to the player without strategy guides. Some ways are subtle and some are not.
Because you have no indication of what areas are what level. You'd be forced to running to every corner of the map or reading a guide book looking for something level appropriate to do.
On the subtler side, you can use politics and framing to make it clear that you're not welcome in certain areas. For example, if you're wandering through the tundra and come across a checkpoint run by The Empire, with a military camp beyond it - hey, those are the villains, that's probably higher level than the rest of the tundra zone. If there's a zone that requires activating three Hell Runes to open the entrance of, and it's surrounded by black fiery spires, then you probably wanna stay away until near the end of the game. If you're in a field where the enemies are biting flowers and giant insects, they're probably not tough. If you come across a random cave in that field, there's no reason to believe the cave will be much harder than the field. If you transition to a new area and the terrain becomes totally different, be careful because you're in a new region, and it's almost certainly not the same level. A quest to rescue a group of demon hunters about to be sacrificed implies far more danger than a quest to rescue a group of schoolchildren about to be sacrificed. Etc.
On the blunter side, you can use geography - areas can be more difficult when they're further from the starting point, or further east, or in deeper levels of hell. Or a certain subset of optional missions can be used to make difficulty clear - if there's a blacksmith who sends you to get upgrade materials from each zone in the game, and you don't visit an area until you get a blacksmithing mission for it, then you know you're the right level because you just finished the previous upgrade. Or each region can have a town or merchant at the beginning of it, which sells weapons and armor that are appropriate for the level you're supposed to be. These kinds of gameplay conventions establish a clear pattern that the player can easily follow; you don't even have to tell them what's happening, they'll figure it out naturally.
Or, if you're feeling really lame, you can just literally list the level of each area on the world map. Or put enemies' levels right above their heads when the player is walking around getting in battles. This kind of thing is what most MMORPGs seem to do. It lacks finesse, but it's functional.
(MMORPGs are living proof that, yes, you can have an open world RPG without scaling enemies. They are notorious for having other types of penalties for leveling up, but those are put there solely to reset everyone's progress after each expansion pack.)
RyaReisender
200
Can also be done by quests. In the starting area you get quests that are fairly easy to do or lead to another region that just one level harder than your current one, where you then again get new quests. It doesn't need to be linear and can split into many directions but until you get a quest for a really hard region it takes a lot of travelling.
And yeah well, open world doesn't mean you HAVE to have access to everything right at the start. There can be regions that you can only reach after learning how to fly or swim for example. There can be a dungeon that can only be entered if you found 3 items in 3 other dungeons first, etc.
Or combine both - make quests for example depend on a character's "fame". You only get harder quests if your fame is already high enough.
And yeah well, open world doesn't mean you HAVE to have access to everything right at the start. There can be regions that you can only reach after learning how to fly or swim for example. There can be a dungeon that can only be entered if you found 3 items in 3 other dungeons first, etc.
Or combine both - make quests for example depend on a character's "fame". You only get harder quests if your fame is already high enough.
author=Liberty
Man, I remember playing the PSX version of FF1 (or was it II?) the first time and heading straight north only to have myself killed instantly. I don't know, on the one hand it's a cheap kill but on the other it did add a sense of fear to the game - when will I be strong enough to go north? If I go south will I die too? Where can I go from here? Are all enemies that strong? How am I supposed to save the world?!
It was actually kinda great.
Its if you go west twenty tiles or so. You'll hit the Mysidia enemy table which is at least midgame enemies and you'll basically get wrecked. Heading north is where you're supposed to go but if you enter the town you're supposed to and talk to an Evil Empire Soldier you'll fight one and he'll wreck your face*.
*unless you recruit Minwu and hit them with Exit and OHKO them until they drop a Toad tome which is the greatest spell in the game that can defeat the final boss **.
** abusing a glitch caused by hitting him with... the Wall spell iirc.
Crystalgate
694
The whole problem with not knowing how strong enemies are in a sandbox game comes mostly from the game makers not keeping things consistent. For example, in Skyrim you kill dragons near beginning of the game. Meanwhile, giants tend to one-shot you if you fight them early on. However, chance is the giants aren't supposed to be superior too dragons story wise. Even if they are, dragons are usually supposed to be high end enemies and letting the player kill them near beginning absolutely destroys any kind of intuitive way of gaging enemy strength.
If a game follows a "enemies who look stronger also are stronger" logic and keep relative enemy/soldier strengths consistent between story and gameplay, there will be very little confusion.
If a game follows a "enemies who look stronger also are stronger" logic and keep relative enemy/soldier strengths consistent between story and gameplay, there will be very little confusion.
What I don't get is the mentality that it's bad to die to figure out that something is a bad idea. Hey, I died fighting that aforementioned dinosaur thing. I got a funny anecdote out of it and learned not to tangle with the damn things. Lesson learned, carry on playing, it's not a detrimental part of the game.
Now I could understand if you died all the damn time doing different things while trying to actually follow the plot/road laid out for you, but dying once by doing something that clearly isn't supposed to be done at the current level? Not a bad thing. It sends a clear signal (don't do the fucking thing) and sets the boundary. Like the Super Mutants in Fallout 3 - you don't go tangle with them straight out of the gate even if they are accessible at that time. It's just stupidity (or being very, very ready because you planned out going to fight them) to go out and hit them then complain that that area's too hard.
A death here or there doesn't really break a game. Bosses should be hard. Areas that you aren't supposed to go in should be hard. Otherwise, just scale every enemy to the players level or have no enemies at all. Death isn't always a bad thing.
Now I could understand if you died all the damn time doing different things while trying to actually follow the plot/road laid out for you, but dying once by doing something that clearly isn't supposed to be done at the current level? Not a bad thing. It sends a clear signal (don't do the fucking thing) and sets the boundary. Like the Super Mutants in Fallout 3 - you don't go tangle with them straight out of the gate even if they are accessible at that time. It's just stupidity (or being very, very ready because you planned out going to fight them) to go out and hit them then complain that that area's too hard.
A death here or there doesn't really break a game. Bosses should be hard. Areas that you aren't supposed to go in should be hard. Otherwise, just scale every enemy to the players level or have no enemies at all. Death isn't always a bad thing.
Kaempfer
1932
FFXII, which has been mentioned previously, had a pretty good system for this. Monsters gave you less reward the higher level you were, but the experience needed to level up didn't increase too much between levels. So those Cactuars you fight near the beginning? Yeah, they, give you 1xp now and no lp at all. Have fun fighting a thousand of them. That T-Rex looking mofo that killed you near the start? Maybe you're strong enough to kill it now...
I like the idea of monsters being able to kill you off the bat. Skyrim wasn't very well balanced (none of the Elder Scrolls games are, really, although Morrowind did a not bad job), with wolves turning into bears turning into FUCKING TROLLS WHAT but the first time I strut out and got knocked a mile into the air by a giant I thought to myself "good thing I quicksaved before I tried to fight that giant!" and "that was pretty cool!".
I hate being penalized for levelling up. The problem is that balancing a game so that areas further from the start is hard enough without a game being open-ended, and levelling enemies is the easy way out. Oblivion and Skyrim are both extra poorly designed in this regard, since you can easily gain all your levels on non-combat stats (I'm looking at you, 100 pickpocket) and end up getting absolutely destroyed by every generic encounter in the game. In Oblivion, every bandit I fought had elven or glass armour on. I even fought a few with daedric. Oh- generic bandit, got some super-rare, ultra-expensive daedric gauntlets? Uh, OK.
tl;dr I agree entirely with Liberty.
I like the idea of monsters being able to kill you off the bat. Skyrim wasn't very well balanced (none of the Elder Scrolls games are, really, although Morrowind did a not bad job), with wolves turning into bears turning into FUCKING TROLLS WHAT but the first time I strut out and got knocked a mile into the air by a giant I thought to myself "good thing I quicksaved before I tried to fight that giant!" and "that was pretty cool!".
I hate being penalized for levelling up. The problem is that balancing a game so that areas further from the start is hard enough without a game being open-ended, and levelling enemies is the easy way out. Oblivion and Skyrim are both extra poorly designed in this regard, since you can easily gain all your levels on non-combat stats (I'm looking at you, 100 pickpocket) and end up getting absolutely destroyed by every generic encounter in the game. In Oblivion, every bandit I fought had elven or glass armour on. I even fought a few with daedric. Oh- generic bandit, got some super-rare, ultra-expensive daedric gauntlets? Uh, OK.
tl;dr I agree entirely with Liberty.
author=unity
There are. The fights were still hard even with a few of those. My main problem, design wise, with the region isn't the powerful squid. It's that EVERY encounter becomes the powerful squid. There's no variety to the enemies in that area once you hit max tier. (Or, if there are, I never encountered them. It was just one squid battle after another). Luckily, encounters in that area won't trigger if you walk perfectly, so with some practice, many of them can be avoided.
This is sort of true; the higher Battle Rank (the variable that determines the strength of the monsters you fight), the potential monsters sort of 'funnel down' from dozens of weaker varieties into a few really strong top tier ones. Namely, all of the encounters in SaGa Frontier can generally be predicted by the enemy sprite you touched to get into a battle, human sprites will have human enemies sometimes accompanied by different monsters, beast sprites the same thing, and so on.
What you were experiencing in the Yorkland Swamp is that all of the enemy sprites there are of the 'aquatic enemy' variety, and on top of that, you maxed out on your Battle Rank, hence the constant Krakens.
author=Liberty
What I don't get is the mentality that it's bad to die to figure out that something is a bad idea. Hey, I died fighting that aforementioned dinosaur thing. I got a funny anecdote out of it and learned not to tangle with the damn things. Lesson learned, carry on playing, it's not a detrimental part of the game.
Now I could understand if you died all the damn time doing different things while trying to actually follow the plot/road laid out for you, but dying once by doing something that clearly isn't supposed to be done at the current level? Not a bad thing. It sends a clear signal (don't do the fucking thing) and sets the boundary. Like the Super Mutants in Fallout 3 - you don't go tangle with them straight out of the gate even if they are accessible at that time. It's just stupidity (or being very, very ready because you planned out going to fight them) to go out and hit them then complain that that area's too hard.
A death here or there doesn't really break a game. Bosses should be hard. Areas that you aren't supposed to go in should be hard. Otherwise, just scale every enemy to the players level or have no enemies at all. Death isn't always a bad thing
Luckily, outside of some weird ass posts here, I don't think most gamers actually believe that they shouldn't ever die in a game if they're bad at it. Games being 'too easy' is a common complaint nowadays, and even then, most of the bullshit surrounding the player losing are behind us, save points are pretty generous, games are good at not having you stuck without resources, and even difficult games are fair. Like you said, bosses and other notes of challenge should be hard and make the player question and think about his tactics or what he's doing. Overcoming an obstacle is extremely awesome and cathartic and it's not an experience I'd ever want to deny anyone.
A player that goes 'aw man I died I'M NEVER PLAYING THIS GAME AGAIN' isn't really someone that I'd want to develop a game for.
