Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

[Paelos]

Mob scaling always sounds good in theory for a single player game. The implementation leads to boring grinds you can never escape.

[Rasix]

Mob scaling always sounds good in theory for a single player game. The implementation leads to boring grinds you can never escape.

I like mob scaling when it's applied to main quests.  Outside, it makes things a bit too samey.  Developers should make some areas dangerous just because they're dangerous, not because you're level 15 and all bandits now magically wear mithril armor and wield mini-guns.

However, when applied to main quests, the scaling needs to be capped.  If someone can't complete it due to difficulty or character build, they should be given the option to just simply out level the encounter.

[cironian]

I liked Oblivion except for the stupid portal popping. Someone needs to pull the head Elder Scrolls guy aside and tell him that vaunted main story you love so much? Yeah most people consider that an annoying chore that gets in the way of the actual fun.

Yeah. I think the only real problem with the Oblivion main arc was simply the unending repetition... Because running through one Oblivion gate is quite cool, but having to do that a dozen times blows.

That's probably the reason that while I hated the main Oblivion arc, I enjoyed the main plot of Shivering Isles just as much. There, the main arc is filled with memorable unique set pieces instead. (Playing mad dungeon master, fighting your mirror image, interrogating half the city etc.)

Admittedly, there were several other problems too, but things like level scaling can be modded away easily, while repetitive gameplay can't.

[Paelos]

Someone at a development meeting probably said, "Man, the main story arc is too short, what can we do to lengthen it a bit?"

Suggestions probably revolved around implementing a faction grind, but they had those already. What else, what...else... uhhhhh, what about having them recruit people? That's always popular in Bioware games! But how?!

Hmmm, we have all these gates everywhere, maybe they would have to stop them in every single city! It's brilliant and will waste hours of time!

[Tebonas]

The more I read about this the happier I am that I just ran through the gates invisible and closed them without fighting enemies.

[eldaec]

Mob scaling always sounds good in theory for a single player game.

Does it? I find the whole idea repellent. Stinks of narrative causality.


As for Oblivion, I just didn't play the main arc at all. It seemed patently absurd for my character to be fucking with gates when doing so was clearly making the threat worse. After a while one of the much more interesting side quests hit a bug and I gave up altogether.

[Bunk]

I played it stock the first time through. I followed the main quest through Kvatch and a couple gates (which were nigh impossible to fight through with an archer) and experienced the "hilarity" of lowly bandits suddenly finding caches of Glass and Dwarven armor. I gave up.

Then I added mods to remove the mob/loot scaling and to turn off the main quest entirely. I've probably put more than 120 hours in to it over multiple games since. 

[ajax34i]

That's the problem with a "wide open world" sandbox game:  each little area is its own little cell, separate from the rest of the world.  There are all these quests, but they're not inter-related, and as soon as you step outside the main plot line, you're a stranger, and no NPC knows who the hell you are.  

I think that what Bethesda needs to do is implement a much-more complicated system of keeping track of the player's quests and achievements, and some sort of NPC news system so that the NPC's hear about me and change their side-quests accordingly.  They shouldn't be scaling the mobs with player level (and accomplishments), they should be scaling the quests and the narrative.  Don't ask me to kill rats or collect pillows if I've killed Dagoth Ur, dammit.

[tgr]

On the other hand, it IS pre-facebook etc, so you can't really expect everyone to know who you are unless you were to tell them. I haven't got that much of a problem with there being cells of quests, as long as they're not done like one of the first people I met in two worlds, who went from "GIT DA FUK OFFA MAH LAWN" to "please help save my daughter, pwetty pweez" in 10 seconds. That is jarring.

[Job601]

What if the Oblivion gates had actually been well-designed video game levels, instead of dreary slogs?  Why can't we have a fun game inside of the sandbox?

I don't understand the complaints about mob-scaling, since the cost is a minor violation of the integrity of the world, and the benefit is that you don't obsolete massive swathes of content every time you level.  Maybe people would like mob scaling better if the combat was actually fun?

[Ingmar]

The level scaling isn't a problem if you pick your skills such that you deliberately never level. 

[Paelos]

What if the Oblivion gates had actually been well-designed video game levels, instead of dreary slogs?  Why can't we have a fun game inside of the sandbox?

I don't understand the complaints about mob-scaling, since the cost is a minor violation of the integrity of the world, and the benefit is that you don't obsolete massive swathes of content every time you level.  Maybe people would like mob scaling better if the combat was actually fun?

If Oblivion gates had opened to a different version of the realm controlled by a Daedric general. Like realms that mirrored their own personalities, and you had to fight your way through their own traps and tests. One plane could have been the eye in the tower, one plane could have a series of logic puzzles, one plane could have been a combat arena, one plane could have been a trading game where you had to acquire various flavor items from other daedra to trade to others (think Windwaker).

That would have been fun. Running to the top of the same copy/pasted tower 8 times wasn't. Whoever thought that would be a grand idea should be barred from design ever again.

[Rendakor]

I don't understand the complaints about mob-scaling, since the cost is a minor violation of the integrity of the world, and the benefit is that you don't obsolete massive swathes of content every time you level.  Maybe people would like mob scaling better if the combat was actually fun?

My favorite part of a leveling system is the ability to render swathes of content obsolete. If a dungeon is too hard, I can go gain a level or two then go back and it'll be easier. This is not the case in Oblivion; you gain a few levels and so do the mobs, it's fucking absurd.

[WindupAtheist]

What if the Oblivion gates had actually been well-designed video game levels, instead of dreary slogs?  Why can't we have a fun game inside of the sandbox?

I don't understand the complaints about mob-scaling, since the cost is a minor violation of the integrity of the world, and the benefit is that you don't obsolete massive swathes of content every time you level.  Maybe people would like mob scaling better if the combat was actually fun?

This is MMO designer bullshit talk infecting single-player gaming like a fucking plague. "Obsoleting content" my sweaty nutsack, it's called "getting to roflstomp shit" and it's awesome.

[Ironwood]

Totally.

[lamaros]

Perhaps even fucking awesome.

[Ironwood]

I want to be able to go through a horde of kobolds like a lawnmower at level 28.  I also want to wander into the beholders lair at level 2 and get my shit pushed in.

The only reason anyone ever scaled mobs in a single player game is to make less work for the developers and less development time to push it out the door.

Oblivion sucked balls.

[Sheepherder]

A point for consideration: most mods that "remove" the scaling don't, but instead just increase the number of permutations, set floors and ceilings on NPC level and the highest tier of gear obtainable through less use of generic lists.

On a completely unrelated note that Fordel talking about armour in the Rift thread got me thinking of: Bethesda needs to rework their armour system, again.  Increasing returns in time to live with linear increases in AC, and AC being dependent upon skill is a goddamn terrible idea.  These two factors combined are probably responsible for almost all of the whinging about non-combat characters becoming ridiculously hard once you get into the double digit levels.

[cironian]

Level scaling can be good, if it's used with certain constraints:

 - Not all mobs should scale. The climactic dungeon of a quest line may be all leveled, but if I'm ambushed by random bandits, only their captain should be leveled.
 - Not all scaling mobs should scale at 100% of the speed of the player. It's OK to make them somewhat stronger over time, but the player should gain a little edge over non-boss mobs as the game progresses.
 - Most scaling non-boss mobs should have hard max levels.
 - Once you first enter an area, the level of the mobs in there should be locked in, so as to allow intentional outleveling of areas that are too hard. (AFAIR Fallout3 had this, while Oblivion didn't)

[Bunk]

Sheepherder is right, they don't completly remove the scaling, but they at least put some appropriate caps to it. OOO is probably the most popular one out there. They didn't just put limits on the leveling lists, they added more monsters to the game to give you more ranges. There were bands of bandits for example, that if you were unlucky enough to run in to at level 3, would kick your ass. There were other bands that you would encounter closer to starting areas that became fodder by level five.

They based the difficulty of encounters on region rather than just level. The farther I ventured from civilzation, the greater chance I would encounter something nasty. There was still some scaling within those encounters, but a minimum level minotaur was still going to slaughter my level five ass if I encountered one. In stock Oblivion, if I were to run off in to the wilderness at level 3, I would have never encountered that Minotaur deep in the mountains, instead running in to that same numpty bandit in his patchwork hide armor.

Basically, Oblivion's stock scaling meant one of two things: you optomized yourself for combat and no fights were ever a challenge, or you didn't optomize and you got your ass kicked from level one through fifty. OOO lets me explore, judge where I am compared to the content, and decide what to do based on what I enjoy. Which on occasion is raining fury upon a lair of those numpty bandits.

[Job601]

[
This is MMO designer bullshit talk infecting single-player gaming like a fucking plague. "Obsoleting content" my sweaty nutsack, it's called "getting to roflstomp shit" and it's awesome.

I don't mind roflstomping some shit -- if I'm wandering around in a field and I get eaten by a level-scaled wolf at level 20, that's no fun.  What I hate is discovering an awesome dungeon for the first time and not really getting to enjoy it because I there's no drama or tension when everything dies with one click.   Why should the whole game be boring just because I've been playing it too long?    Maybe it's not right to scale the mobs everywhere, all the time, but for people who like playing with the game mechanics the alternative is that combat becomes progressively less and less interesting until its trivial by the end.  I am not defending Oblivion, a game whose combat was extremely boring all the way through, but I do think some kind of level-scaling is necessary in open world games.

On the other hand, I do think that encountering a monster that's too strong for you and grinding until you can clean its clock is something that's been fun since Dragon Warrior I, a game which consists pretty much entirely of that experience over and over.  Maybe its no good wrong fun, but I think it's a mechanic worth preserving, and I sympathize with the complaints that level-scaling makes it impossible.

[Sky]

You make my head hurt.

Level-scaling sucks. You mean you don't find it rewarding to stumble across that awesome dungeon entrance (I'm an explorer type), sneak in carefully and see three demons that can smear the wall with your entrails, and hope you can outrun them before they give up the chase? Because to me, that's a solid gaming experience.

There's a reason I love the Gothic Risen series, and mob difficulty is one of them. After the initial learning curve, it makes for a much more tense and interesting game world if you can't just skip and dance into every nook and cranny and be assured that everyone will win their trophy. As much as it grates to hear mmotards talk about accomplishment, there is a sense of accomplishment once you can go back to that awesome dungeon and take out those demons who chased you away, especially if you do it while still slightly under-leveled.

And it's not because I went and ground out exp so I could go back and do it, I just played the game normally and once I had some experience and better gear, went back and tried it again.

Oblivion sucked balls, as they say in Scotland.

[Hawkbit]

What about a system that scales from the bottom up? 

Player lvl 1 of 20 = Game mobs 1-20
Player lvl 10 of 20 = Game mobs 7-20
Player lvl 20 of 20 = Game mobs 15-20

So that a group of 15s is still challenging to a 20, but a 20 on 15 solo should be simple. 

[K9]

Rats should never scale

[Hawkbit]

Even ROUSs?

[WayAbvPar]

Rats should never be a mob in the first place. Show me crushing a few rats as a toddler in the intro if needed, but other than that, I have killed enough rats for 1000 lifetimes.

[Teleku]

Sky, I think his point was the opposite.  He hates stumbling upon a dungeon while exploring, sneaking in, and discovering he out leveled the 3 demons ages ago and everything in the dungeon is trivial.

Oblivion level scaling sucked ass, as well as combat, and many things.  I'm not against the idea of level scaling in general, however, for games like this.  Just needs to be done correctly.  First, as Hawkbit suggested, NEVER scale down enemies.  Every monster has a base bad ass level they start at and never go down from, regardless of how shitty you are.  Second, make the mobs scale against you much slower.  That way you can still out level mobs, but they can somewhat keep pace to make them not insignificant.  I guess you could just make it so that the scaling only happens to certain dungeons or special area's in the world, leaving the main world untouched (so those random camps of bandits and kobalds can always still be roflstompted).  That way the special/cool content can remain relevant longer.

So yeah, I don't know.  I'm not against the idea in theory, as long as it is done elegantly.  Oblivion sure as fuck didn't do that however.

[eldaec]

What about a system that scales from the bottom up? 

Player lvl 1 of 20 = Game mobs 1-20
Player lvl 10 of 20 = Game mobs 7-20
Player lvl 20 of 20 = Game mobs 15-20

So that a group of 15s is still challenging to a 20, but a 20 on 15 solo should be simple. 

We covered this.

What if the Oblivion gates had actually been well-designed video game levels, instead of dreary slogs?  Why can't we have a fun game inside of the sandbox?

I don't understand the complaints about mob-scaling, since the cost is a minor violation of the integrity of the world, and the benefit is that you don't obsolete massive swathes of content every time you level.  Maybe people would like mob scaling better if the combat was actually fun?

This is MMO designer bullshit talk infecting single-player gaming like a fucking plague. "Obsoleting content" my sweaty nutsack, it's called "getting to roflstomp shit" and it's awesome.

[Mrbloodworth]

What about a system that scales from the bottom up?  

Player lvl 1 of 20 = Game mobs 1-20
Player lvl 10 of 20 = Game mobs 7-20
Player lvl 20 of 20 = Game mobs 15-20

So that a group of 15s is still challenging to a 20, but a 20 on 15 solo should be simple.  

How about not using levels.

Stalker series does this well.

Even ROUSs?

Those always spawn at max.

[Typhon]

I want smart encounters that have some reason to know about me to scale and I want that scaling to be more complex - by adding more grunts, then add leutenants, adding tricks and traps, then adding bosses and making the bosses tougher.  I also want a bunch of static encounters that do not change.  I want it all!

[Paelos]

I want lower level mobs that are smarter. A lvl 2 gnoll shouldn't ever try to attack me when I'm a level 20 badass. It wouldn't just wander around hoping that I don't see it. It would run for the hills.

[Typhon]

Yes! I want goblins that piss themselves and beg for mercy - offering up their loot if I just don't slaughter them.  Occasionally, I want it to be a TARP! and have them try to push me into a TARP! where they will then try to feed me to something horrid.  I would really like it if they had written "TARP! LOL!" somewhere on the trap, but that would probably be too immersion breaking for you purists.

[Sir T]

How about not using levels.

Stalker series does this well.

Stalker does have a subtle leveling system however. Basically the further you progress you get access to the better armour and Guns, and even in the starting areas batter equipment spawns in the traders over time.

[Mrbloodworth]

It didn't make bloodsucker lairs any less dangerous.

[K9]

Even ROUSs?

Exception granted