I can’t think of a single game that manages to have enemies correspond to your level rather than area or story progression actually contribute to the game. It just makes trying to get better gear ultimately a pointless task because the enemies get strong at the same rate so you might as well stay weak.
i thought it worked well in morrowind
enemies do scale to your level but only within a range (e.g. level 10-20 enemies might be spawned in a particular dungeon), so youre tending to get a more even challenge throughout but some areas are still only going to have really low levels enemies, and theres plenty of areas you cant realistically cant go until youre levelled up
but it works pretty well for a non-linear game so that you can dick around and do a range of questlines in varying orders, and not have almost everything over- or underlevelled while still having places that are appropriately scary and off-limits until later in the game (without physically barring the player from them)
and then they went and did the very worst fucking level scaling system anyone has ever seen in oblivion, with the bandits suddenly showing up in priceless daedric armour and everywhere just the same as everywhere else
It’s really a design choice so it depends what the devs and players want the game to feel like. Some people enjoy feeling like a god in a video game after a certain period of investment. In a more linear or a “grinding” game you might want a one to one scale. In an RPG they might not want difficulty to scale with certain enemies because you want the player to continuously employ different strategies. In more realistic games you also wouldn’t want a scale because that doesn’t exist IRL. I think the question really boils down to “why and how do players enjoy this gameplay?” and then trying to stretch that out with the leveling.
I think some combination of leveled lists and fixed level enemies is the best approach. It allows games to be open world while still directing the player, and if the player wants to test their luck or grind they can.
i just don’t get the point of a game that is just grindy combat. Why play if it just takes forever and never gets more fun? If there’s no difference in what you are doing from the staeting zone to the final boss, and it takes a while no matter what, that sounds really really boring to me.
The closest I’ve seen it be good was oblivion where the scaling had ranges. So a rat would never be stronger than x but they did get a little more dangerous as time went on. Not perfect and maybe only good with nastalgia goggles.
Fun system and another example of why patents suck. It’s a system that should be in hundreds of games but isn’t in anything because the bastards patented it.
Why the fuck are you even able to patent a vague concept for a mechanic in a game? If you change any numbers in a thing patents shouldn’t apply anymore. If you made an internal combustion engine but the pistons are a half centimeter larger in comparison to the rest of it than in the patent, that’s not covered by the patent.
Going to have to disagree with your example. If you only marginally change an engine, then it’s still the same principles at work and the same design only slightly modified. If I started the Tord company and sold slightly larger doored fords they would easily best me in court. However, the game design thing is a problem because they have to build the mechanic from the ground up inside of their game. It’s like copyrighting the idea of a car.
