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.
It’s just pure laziness on the part of game devs so they don’t have to balance shit or care about level progression.
It’s not lazy though, they have to make all the enemies still, and they have to figure out what level activates which ones. That’s just as much work, simply used waaaaaaay less effectively.
I wouldn’t say it’s lazy (few things in gamedev are), but it’s certainly less effort to do level scaling than it is to repeatedly test an incredibly long experience to make sure players never get too over leveled or under leveled. Level scaling is a pretty simple concept. Most units have their stats automatically distributed according to their level (this will allow you to use the same unit in multiple regions and still have it “work”). So, when a player enters a region, you loop over the monsters in the are and go “is this monster less than the player’s level? if so, bump it up”.
Level scaling is easier than not level scaling if you’re trying to make a game where the player has a similar experience for most of the game. Especially in an RPG where players could choose to do or not do side quests or where players could grind levels. When you reach the next main story beat, the player could be any number of levels. I think for the vast majority of people (who want a relatively casual game experience), level scaling ends up being a huge benefit, even if it’s frustrating to people like us that care a bit more deeply about the systems in a game.
One of the best satisfactions I’ve ever had in games was going back to an area I’ve struggled in and just mopping the floor of the enemies there. I don’t like becoming a god at the end of a game and still have to worry about a normal enemy being a bullet sponge and being able to kill me.
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
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.
