Fantasy Wasteland - 28 - HD
Added 2019-06-09 03:00:01 +0000 UTCEDIT - Corrected an embarrassment of errors o_o;
Anyone who says this game doesn't have guns clearly missed Grace's biceps.
Commentary
I think this is true in all Bethesda open world games I'm familiar with, and I think it's an ingenious solution to the problem of being able to wander in any direction at any level and do quests in variable orders. It also means you can go back to an earlier area and still feel more powerful due to the enemies "not training" if you've been there before.
There are tweaks I would personally make to it for my own experience, but I would make personal adjustments to pretty much anything, and the base system in this case is a pretty good one.
It's also one that happens so organically that, in Skyrim, you can totally miss that level scaling is even happening. I've talked to people who didn't realize that level scaling was a thing, which was a reveal one of them wasn't prepared for given how much varied leveling they'd been doing in non-combat skills.
In any case, one could change the difficulty at any time, so if it turned out being the fast talking-est elf in the land wasn't doing one any favors in combat, there was a way to balance things a bit.
Comments
yeah, with Oblivion, you had primary and secondary skills, primary I think got a boost in exp gain and leveling those contributed to leveling your character, and leveling skills in general contributed to how many attribute points you could get at each character level (up to 5) so if you created a thief character and had thief skills as primary, you level those skills fast and gain character levels fast, but each character level would give you 1-2 attribute points, so the ideal way to level was create a thief with mages or fighter skills as primary and only use them when you feel that you've leveled your thief skills enough to get 4-5 points for the attributes you want to increase at level up.
Scotty
2019-06-10 15:29:53 +0000 UTCOblivion was better than Morrowind? Oblivion is practically *defined* by bad level scaling. Morrowind had it to a limited degree. Anything that spawned into the world (ie. most random overland monsters) came from a leveled list, but there were limits on those lists depending on the area you were in. You weren't going to run into anything stronger than a nix hound in the Ascadian Isles, no matter how high your level. You weren't going to avoid corpus beasts and ash servants on Red Mountain no matter how low your level. And the level of anything hand placed was fixed. Oblivion, though? If you weren't being very careful (and highly nonintuitive) with your leveling, you could end up with serious difficulty problems by level fifteen, or even ten if you were doing it particularly poorly. They did a far better job with it in Skyrim.
Daryl Sawyer
2019-06-10 13:28:39 +0000 UTCWhat's worse is that the enemies seem to keep getting stronger, but after a certain point you're just leveling ancillary things that don't make you much stronger by comparison... When supermutants attack a settlement now it's 6-7 level 70 enemies to fight off, and I get killed a lot...
Kaz Redclaw
2019-06-10 04:18:36 +0000 UTCMaybe you'd like "Octopath Traveler," in which you're warned of recommended experience levels for each area and each story quest. You still have plenty of leeway for the order in which you do things.
Stephen Gilberg
2019-06-10 03:04:52 +0000 UTCI personally haven't played past Daggerfall, but I think the thing I liked best about the game was being able to make a character who gained levels completely without combat or indispensable skills, and could gain combat skills completely without leveling, and thus being able to control how much difficulty I had in fighting, without adjusting the game reflex setting. Admittedly, I also totally broke the spell system, making my custom class have no spell regen, mana absorption, and using the spell maker to create a spell that regenerated my entire health every tick, and a couple more to do five of the spell damage types area effect at range, which got spammed at my feet so basically everything that tried to melee with me died. And then when I got my running, jumping, swimming, and social skills up enough I could afford to take hits while leveling my weapon skills and language skills. As such, my playing experience was probably vastly different than intended. That said, there was the one game where I made a completely non-combat leveling character, and then trained my weapon skills on that first rat, running away and resting, until I was able to hurt it consistently with my longsword, dagger, and fists. That game took a lot longer to get going...
Some Ed
2019-06-09 20:30:06 +0000 UTCOh, man, I remember it being pretty bad in Morrowind. In that one, your level was based on the skills key to your class. And you could customize the class. So my first character had speech as a tagged skill, so by the time I got all the quests and info from the first couple towns... I was eaten by a horrific monstrosity that should not have existed. And your stats went up an amount set by how many skills associated with that stat you'd trained that level, so the incentive was to have a very... rigorous training regimen where the instant you hit level, but before you rested to USE that level, you wanted to skill up some non-class stuff to get the coveted +5. Oblivion was a bit better, but I still found myself skipping across the countryside to cross-train... it was kinda worth it to fling myself across the lake like a skipping stone at max skill. Yeah, those games... there is a reason I <3 judicious use of say, Cheat Engine. I have fond memories of Planescape: Torment with all the stats starting at 18. That was the only tweak... I just wanted to have all the dialog choices. =D
Ardent Slacker
2019-06-09 13:21:17 +0000 UTCSkyrim was kind of okay with it though since levelling up generally did make you better at combat. It completely *ruined* Oblivion and whatsitcalled. The one before that. To keep up with the enemies you basically had to spend all your time breaking character and doing repetitive stupid grinding.
Aaron Mandelbaum
2019-06-09 06:29:32 +0000 UTCIt doesn't have to be linear. It just means you should be fighting different *kinds* of things as you level up in different *kinds* of places and maybe not try to do absolutely everything in one run.
Aaron Mandelbaum
2019-06-09 06:27:50 +0000 UTCThat, and an embarrassing number of other things have now been fixed.
Dan Shive
2019-06-09 04:20:05 +0000 UTCI think as soon as they do that, they've made a very different, more linear experience. I'm not saying it would be a bad experience, but I think if one makes a game like Skyrim linear, it's no longer Skyrim.
Dan Shive
2019-06-09 03:51:34 +0000 UTCCarol suddenly has mismatched gauntlets. the outer panel of the left hand cuff in panel 1 is light compared to the other two panels, and the left hand itself is lighter in all the panels compared to the right hand.
Scotty
2019-06-09 03:51:20 +0000 UTCI hate this level system. There’s a simpler way of making sure the player has an interesting experience: Just place enemies in areas based on power and let the player decide who to face. If I go to an endgame area at lvl 4, I SHOULD get stomped, and if I’m currently the mortal agent of no less than 3 gods, then bandits should get vaporized by a look. With their current system, my first playthrough inevitably ends up getting stomped by enemies who have been exclusively training in swords while I master cheesemaking, and later playthroughs even bosses bounce off my sculpted armor. There’s no actual challenge without constant manual adjustment, and there’s no thrill to going somewhere you shouldn’t be yet(and narrowly escaping with your life+a small amount of killer loot).
Viktor
2019-06-09 03:14:38 +0000 UTC
