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Level scaling
Lord.Bachus
Member RarePosts: 9,686
Developing games wthout level scaling is such a waste of resources.
If i was in charge of development i would make a system that in open world areas brings people down to the level of the zones, so content is still challenging, but keeps loot tables tied to the actuall level of the players.
And for dungeons, there would be max level versions of all dungeons with different content and loot tables, .. And when max level is raised, the old endgame dungeons would be raised to max level including their loot tables, no more 10 level 50 dungeons while mx level is 80.
level scaling combined with the right resources is a must for a new game to provide enough endgame content at release..
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I'm going to side with OP here and say it is one way to keep the game challenging (and interesting) for a longer time. Encounters should scale depending on player participation too, so zerging world content wouldn't be possible.
Scaling is a good thing.
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I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
And (according to local legend) floods your pants with...something else.
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In games where niche don't matter and class options are just cosmetics, level scaling is fine.
In games where I really suck at killing this mob but am good at killing the other one, level scaling means I will always suck at killing certain things and I become the great boar killer with 200,000 kills under my belt.
One of the reasons buff bots and heal bots become bots is because they suck at everything else.
I'd be down for dynamic scaled events. For example, lets say you have a level 10-14 dungeon that is normally inhabited by orcs. Well, every once and awhile an ancient lich might show up and kill all the orcs inside and use the bodies to construct his undead army. Now the dungeon would no longer be useable by the low level players and the high level players would have to come in and clear the event. That way high level players would get to go back and enjoy old content every now and then.
I am very much against a game that constantly scales everything up and down.
I think GW2 almost got level scaling right. It was nice to be able to go into unexplored zones and have at least somewhat of a challenge. They just made it a little too easy. Their dynamic events grew in scale if ignored by players, but I think these should have also become more difficult if ignored. This way higher levels would be needed to come help save the day.
Balance is a tricky thing in gaming. A perfectly balanced game like chess is timeless. I guess the more variables you add to the scaling and balancing process, the more difficult it gets.
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Level scaling should be in every level based game simply because it allows you to legitimately play every bit of content that took x time to create. That and and you don't have to "synchronize levels" or start an alt just to play with someone. The point of still having levels, if they must be there, is to provide a progressive gateway as you level to max
Sure, it'd get boring if the game over rewarded fighting the same thing forever, like early endless-mob-grind games did.
I'm not sure it would automatically "kill immersion", as immersion can be achieved by, well...immersing yourself in something and eliminating downtime. And being able to endlessly re-run a dungeon sounds like it'd reduce downtime (although clearly it'd be much better to solve this problem more like WOW where you can queue and instantly teleport to a variety of dungeons, so the downtime it eliminated but you can still choose to totally immerse yourself in group gameplay.)
Which is why you'd want to solve that with some form of questing or reward cooldown system, where you can get a good reward once from a given dungeon that day, but subsequent rewards aren't as good until tomorrow when it resets.
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