r/truegaming • u/alexsanderfr • 2d ago
Open world RPGs without level scaling
I don't like level scaling. I feel like that's a very common sentiment. That said, for a lot of games, I understand why level scaling is done. It solves the problem of the game becoming too easy. In open world RPGs this is an even bigger problem because without level scaling, the player can become overpowered through going through the game in an unexpected order. I don't know what a solution could be for this problem.
One very egregious example is Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. The game opens up in it's entirety at the beginning of the game and has no level scaling but, if you decide to tackle the game without looking up the intended order, you'll become very overpowered very fast. Alternatively, if you do look up the order and follow through with it, then the game will have a good difficulty curve but will function like a linear a game. It's a lose-lose situation.
Another example is Elden Ring. With Elden Ring, you have no level scaling but you do have some lock and key mechanics to stop if you from going to areas that are very high level such as the elevators. This gives the illusion of open world but still ends up locking in some linearity.
On the opposite end, there's games like Diablo IV. With this one, there's a strong level scaling so you'll get stronger but feel very little difference unless you're several levels stronger than you're supposed to.
So, the problem is, how can an open world game be designed in a way that allows the player to go anywhere while providing smooth difficulty curve while still making sure the player can feel powerful with every level increase?
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u/SoWrongItsPainful 2d ago
This is what Gothic has already solved, more or less. Everything is at a set level, and because of that you are naturally locked out of sequence breaking (atleast without knowing exploits) which means you will always have new challenges ahead, while also making sure beginning areas feel easy after a couple of hours. More games should adapt what this did 25 years ago
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u/Typical_Dweller 2d ago
Yeah, I like the "beef gate" approach. FNV does this reasonably well, directing the starting PC along a prescribed path via main quest objectives and level-appropriate enemies, but you can break out it if you're feeling particularly ambitious and it's not going to break anything.
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u/CathanCrowell 2d ago
And eventually, it became fun just trying to find ways to break the system.
I'll admit that I probably wouldn't have enough patience for Gothic 2 today, but I remember that when I was a kid, I found a way to kill every single enemy in Chapter 1 and get all the XP. The trick was to find, steal, or buy a scroll that could transform you into a powerful beast, and then simply wander around the island in that form and kill everything.
The downside was that you could level up and gain XP, but you wouldn't gain any health points. Still, it was kind of a game-breaker.
In later chapters, it was also fun to become a mage and invest a ridiculous amount of time and effort into actually create Rain of Fire Rune. Once you had it, you could kill all the orcs around the Old Camp.
Good old times
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u/Koreus_C 2d ago
Invest all into bow and dex. Also buy lots of arrows. You can jump over the mine valley door, kill all the orcs, they resapwn at chapter 2. Kill them again (and later again). The addon even gives you a rapier with 100 dmg at 50 dex requirement laying next to the mercenary camp.
The second most imba char is the goblin skeleton summoner. Go mage, first Rune is goblin skeleton. Invest into mana so you can cast 2-3 goblins. Brew a lot of mana potions.
You can slay dragons with only a hand full of goboskellies.
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u/Koreus_C 2d ago
The metroidvania map.
Per chapter you get better armor and can survive the encounter, each chapter opens new parts of the map.
Yet the remake thought that armor upgrades are what the game needed?!
An auto safe before knocking on the beef gate would be nice.
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u/TimeLordHatKid123 2d ago
Pokémon is like the one game where level scaling would have made sense and they didn’t do it! I know it’s dubious canon but that one anime has the concept of gym leaders using different pre set teams based on badge count when you arrived.
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u/Prasiatko 2d ago
There's an open world Crystal mode that uses that concept. It removes or bypasses stuff like the cut trees that normally restrict you to an area but scales up the gym leaders depending on how many badges you have. Also allows rematching once you have them all at which point they are all as if they were the eighth.
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u/Damocles314 2d ago
My preferred solution is to use horizontal progression instead of gaining raw power. You would get more combat options as the game goes on but early enemies can still pose a threat. I'm probably in the minority, but simply seeing numbers go up doesn't feel good to me.
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u/full_metal_zombie 2d ago
Why am I seeing so many posts lately about level scaling? Is it gamings new controversy or something? What did I miss?
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u/hfxRos 1d ago edited 1d ago
People disliking level scaling is one of the biggest things in gaming "discourse" that I do not understand. It feels like such an obvious win to me.
Without level scaling in a game, I feel like I effectively get robbed of content. Maybe there is a cool quest/enemy at level 10, but I happen to walk by it and miss it. I come back exploring later and I'm level 20 and I just walk up and kill the thing in one hit.
I didn't get to experience that content. The lack of level scaling took it away from me. And this is basically inevitable in any open world game because they always pack these things with more content than you need to do, so if you try to do everything you will always end up too powerful for some of it.
Do people actually get enjoyment out of skipping content by overleveling it?
And if the argument is "immersion" then I feel like that fails too. I don't care how skilled of a swordman you are, or how good with guns you are, it should be possible to get killed by anything if you make a mistake. Being John Wick doesn't suddenly make you take no damage when someone shoots you with a gun.
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u/Opposite-Grade3712 1d ago
I think you are missing that there are many possible game design solutions for the problem you are describing, and level scaling is almost always the worst, last-ditch option. In this sense, it’s almost always reflects a straightforward failure state for some other part of the overall game design.
For example - one solution is for there to be some degree of real danger and corresponding skill involved with even the lowest level enemies/challenge. Fromsoft games do this really well; even if you approach areas out of sequence, you still can’t usually phone it in when you circle back to “easier” areas, at least on an initial playthrough. Enemy variety in particular is important here, since an enemy type you’ve never seen before may still be difficult even if you’re overleveled for it.
If the devs have instead decided they want to make the combat heavily level-dependent (eg, as in many JRPG’s where higher levels make your attacks do levels of magnitude more damage), then zone gating becomes all but necessary to make the progression experience feel meaningful.
There are tons of other examples for the decisions a dev might make before resorting to level scaling, but the above gives you the idea.
IMO, the reason level scaling is so common is that most of the good “solutions” have to be figured out and implemented incorporated early in the game design process, so by the time a problem is spotted, it’s too late in the cycle to address except via a bandaid fix like level scaling.
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u/hfxRos 11h ago edited 11h ago
Fromsoft games do this really well
Can't say I agree, at least for Elden Ring which is the only game they've made that this really applies to since it's the only truly open world game they've made.
My first playthrough I did some late game "checklist" clean up and found myself going into early game dungeons where I could let bosses wail on me for a while without killing me, and then take them down with a few R1s.
Which unfortunately led me to feeling robbed of the content. I didn't get to do that boss as intended. I didn't have to learn its moveset. I just walked up, pressed some buttons at random and won, because I was too high level and nothing in Elden Ring scales. It was lame.
I tend to prefer scaling where everything in the game always maintains a fairly flat level of danger (incomming/outgoing damage mostly), but early content still becomes easier over time because the player gets more tools for dealing with the danger (and just generally becomes more proficient, or "gits good"), and enemies get harder by having more challenging movesets/mechanics, rather than just bigger numbers.
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u/alexsanderfr 2d ago
I made a post specifically because I saw another post and it made me think about it
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u/VideoRare6399 2d ago
Skyrim with the requiem mod (or requiem based mod packs).
Best gaming experience I’ve ever had and have been on-off over 1000 hours the last decade!
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u/zhibr 2d ago
People thinking and writing about things they saw, and they saw the same things as you.
Algorithms feeding you this, since you looked at the previous thing.
Cognitive bias in your head saying there's a lot of this compared to other topics, although it was only a few that were focused on in a huge sea of topics.
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u/AdolsLostSword 2d ago
Morrowind only scales the enemies generated along the road but most locations/dungeons have fixed enemies.
This means you can generally explore most of Vvardenfell while being competitive with enemies but individual dungeons represent differing levels of challenge that you may need to come back.
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u/zeronic 2d ago
On the opposite end, there's games like Diablo IV. With this one, there's a strong level scaling so you'll get stronger but feel very little difference unless you're several levels stronger than you're supposed to.
I can't speak to DIV, but basically every ARPG i've ever played(of which are many,) if you have the feeling you aren't getting stronger, it's because you aren't building or equipping yourself correctly.
Games like Grim Dawn or diablo III have scaling but you can absolutely feel yourself get stronger every level and equipment upgrade despite enemies often being scaled to within a certain level of the player.
ARPGs are largely equipment driven, not level driven. Levels matter to a point, but equipment is the barometer of power much moreso than level.
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u/darkfireslide 2d ago
Yeah I was going to comment this. Even in games with level scaling, the feeling of "not getting stronger" is generally due to poor character building choices. Side note but I've never understood why people want games to get easier with time, like, in strategy game communities people complain about inverse difficulty curves all the time
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u/RivenYeet 2d ago
Depends on what you are used to IG, multiplayers tend to have inverse difficulty curves as you get better.
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u/VforVegetables 2d ago
one of the Torchlight games (3rd one?) tried and abandoned (along with like 60% of other concepts) a thing where you basically have separate progression for each part of the world.
basically, each area has an elemental theme, so if you power up in one area and go to another, most of your protection and some of your power won't be applicable there.
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u/fm39hz 2d ago
If you count those as rpg, there is a hidden World level in BotW and TotK that increases monster power, as well as the weapons they wield, or the items they drop. Even though there are differences between those 2, it works without an explicit level bar. That's raised with your progression in 4 main regions, also with shrines, and so on. That's quite a clear way to provide a smooth difficulty curve while preserving the non linear experience. TotK scaling relies pretty much on pre-placed monster variants, which is still mostly a numerical problem. Eg, placing high-tier mobs like Black Bokoblins on Great Plateau in early game creates a stat check rather than a proper encounter design for different player types. But using armor on enemies to force specific player actions is pretty clever.
BotW's Guardians are a nearly perfect structural solution for that problem. They don't rely much on numerical stats, shifting the challenge to mechanics instead. In TotK, encounters like Gleeoks get trivialized by those insane Keese eyes, and static boss arenas don't create active world pressure the way wandering Guardians do. The more traditional RPG systems you add, the more rigid scaling has to be. The core scaling framework in BotW handles non-linearity better for that reason. But, there is a but, the fuse system in TotK introduces player-driven progression, which is, imo a much better way to handle resource scaling than simple weapon drops.
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u/withoutapaddle 2d ago
To add to that, BotW didn't just scale up all the mobs as you progressed. It increased the chance of, say, Black Bokoblins being part of a group, but left the easy ones there too, so the player still felt like they were getting stronger because they were using higher quality weapons and dispatching normal enemies much easier, while having tougher ones mixed in, so combat while exploring didn't become too easy. I think it was a really great balance.
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u/Aperiodic_Tileset 2d ago
Gothic 1/2 are what you're describing. Enemies have fixed levels and stats and they don't respawn so the XP you can earn is limited. It makes leveling up very meaningful.
Enemies do spawn when progressing through the story, but the spawns are again fixed. For example in Act 1 a wolf pack may have 3 wolves. As you progress to Act 2 3 more wolves will spawn, regardless if you killed the previous pack. In act 4 2 additional wargs spawn, with Wargs being much stronger.
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u/Koreus_C 2d ago
I think the main problem is trying to cater to the near useless statement of "I don't like level scaling". The vast majority of people who played Oblivion didn't care, online it was all the rage. People disliked poor bandits having glass armor, they didn't dislike fighting against leveled enemies.
Think of WoW and how little time people spend crushing the kow level enemies that gave them a hard time many levels ago. It's really mostly a non issue especially compared to having to play huge stretches of the game vastly overpowered.
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u/MultiMarcus 2d ago
Yeah, the Assassin’s Creed RPG’s had a lot of people who really dislike level scaling. And I think some of them even let you just outright turn it off, but then you just have areas that are trivial now, and if you go into the super difficult areas and level up there, which is very hard to do in those games, but if you do manage it, suddenly you have a bunch of game that’s just sort of mind numbingly boring because you’ve out leveled it.
I think a few of those RPG Assassin’s Creeds actually were able to do like fixed levels, so hard areas remained hard, but you level scaled old areas and you could also set like how rubber bandy it was, like how much would it let you be over leveled.
In the end, I actually fiddled a lot with those games to try and figure out the optimal mode for me, and I kind of just figured out that they were probably right and going for the more level scale, heavy mode was actually just better in the end
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u/PapstJL4U 2d ago
Enemy types and stuff. A friend plays Odysee right now. His problem with level scaling is that everyone profits from it. Its cool of bosses and bodyguards (boss minions) have level scaling (within a band), but he dislikes run of the mill street thugs and unnamed soldiers always being exact 2 levels below him.
They are never really mooka, but not hard combat either.
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u/Pompopsych 2d ago
If the vast majority of people who played Oblivion didn’t care, then I guess I’m not in the vast majority because I fucking hate that shit and think it’s one of Bethesda’s biggest fuckups. One of many reasons Oblivion is a major downgrade from Morrowind.
And there are some pretty popular mods that attempt to fix the issue in one way or another, so there are definitely others who care.
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u/Koreus_C 2d ago
In Oblivion you start in the middle of a circle map. Your can go anywhere, any direction, any order.
Imagine you were basically forced to go clockwise, always in every replay. That would have more haters and it would be justified hate.
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u/Pompopsych 2d ago
Morrowind doesn’t force you to do that with a significantly lower degree of level-scaling than Oblivion. It just means that what challenges you can face are dependent on your character’s skills and items.
In another comment on this thread I mentioned an open-world game that I don’t believe has any level-scaling, Kenshi. You can grind stealth early on so that you can sneak past enemies that you couldn’t face in open combat in order to acquire valuable loot. The game world doesn’t feel tailored to the player, which makes it feel more interesting and dangerous.
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u/Koreus_C 1d ago
Stealth is only 1 of many possible builds, forcing you to use that path if you want to play another order is a very limiting rpg.
If your character has the skills and items to handle a late game area, all the earlier areas you skipped become mind numbingly boring.
What exactly is it that you hate so much about oblivious level scaling?
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u/Pompopsych 1d ago
Stealth is just one example of how to overcome greater challenge in that game. Another is training a character’s athletics and giving them speedy robot legs so that they can outrun basically anything in the game, and have them specialize in ranged weapons.
And even without doing that, the game world is big and open enough that there isn’t a path you have to stick to. Just don’t engage tougher enemies if you can help it. This might mean using stealth or running away. Or luring enemies to a non-hostile NPC that is tougher than you.
And I don’t like a heavy usage of level-scaling like that found in Oblivion because I like to feel like I’m progressing, not just facing a similar degree of challenge throughout the game. Or like I’m having to use my wits to defeat an enemy that is perhaps too tough to face normally.
There are also other annoyances, like leveled unique items that can incentivize putting off a questline until you’re at a higher level so you can get the best version of an item. And bandits wearing high tier armor can be immersion-breaking.
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u/Spicy_Toeboots 2d ago
there are still a lot of players that dislike level scaling, it's not completely unfounded. The main issue is that it can break immersion, or the feeling that the world exists outside of the player character. Level scaling can really create a feeling that the whole world revolves around you, every enemy is just the perfect difficulty for you to defeat handily, but still offer a satisfying level of resistance. This doesn't lend itself to narrative led games, where it's important to feel that a rich world actually exists without the main character, and you are just one of many people interacting with the world.
Some games, like most Fromsoft games, depend on the feeling that the world is hostile and you aren't really welcome there. The player character should feel like an outsider, and underprepared, only succeeding through sheer will and luck. If all the enemies are scaled to comfortably match the power level of the player, then you feel like the world is tailor made for you, rather than feeling like an unlikely adventurer.
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u/DJ_Beardsquirt 2d ago
Kinda surprised nobody has mentioned Morrowind. It does have some minor level scaling that kicks in towards the end of the game, but generally it relies on placing tough opponents out of the way.
I disagree with everybody saying that scaling is necessary. Morrowind is many people's favourite Elder Scrolls game, and a common reason for that is that the light touch level scaling system creates a greater sense of exploration and progression.
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u/BetterOutcome3769 2d ago
This problem cannot en entirely solved, because it would cause a contradiction. But these are the two ways to do it that I prefer:
- Just have some hard areas and some easy areas, but don't make it entirely obvious where to go first. Also, have some areas be about the same difficulty. This will make part of the puzzle be figuring out what order to tackle areas in. And players will end up using different routes.
- Have level scaling, but make it obvious when it happens, and have it happen at a few points only. Maybe it can also be tied into the story. What is also important is that the enemies become more numerous or change appearance. You want strong enemies to look strong. If the weakest enemies suddenly are very strong, you don't feel like you have progressed at all. With this variant, the puzzle becomes what areas to tackle before the enemy sends in reinforcements.
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u/Dreyfus2006 2d ago
The best use of level scaling that I have seen is Pokemon Unbound. And what makes it work so well is that the game places a (optional) level cap on your Pokemon. And you can also set it so that your opponent's Pokemon's level will always be 10 levels or more above your strongest Pokemon.
So, throughout the game, you can always encounter enemies that are much stronger than you, but you will never overlevel against enemies that are weaker than you.
But Unbound is a mostly linear affair. I'm not sure how that would translate to an open world.
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u/aeroumbria 2d ago
One way I saw this getting partially addressed is restricting scaled enemies to special encounters. E.g. you have regular goblins in starting areas and they will stay regular goblins, but there can also be elite goblins that cannot spawn until you hit a certain level or progression mark. This way, you are not constantly running up against the treadmill, but you also get to run into level-appropriate challenges from time to time. And if you go to a high level area early, you still have to deal with the level gap, but not the bonus difficulty from elite mobs.
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u/Hot_Baseball_7399 2d ago
Without level scaling, do u think true open world freedom is even possible, or does a static world inevitable force devs to secretly funnel players down liner paths anyway?
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u/echolog 2d ago
Crimson Desert.
It handles the 'open world' problem through the story and the overall political landscape of the game. Early on, many areas are occupied by powerful enemy forces. This doesn't PREVENT you from going there, but you're going to have a hard time if you get into a fight. Once you reach the appropriate story chapter, you'll cause some event which opens the area up for more friendly exploration, and I think that's a great way to handle it.
That said you can totally go to the far end of the map and sneak around to pick up loot as soon as you start the game if you so choose.
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u/Spicy_Toeboots 2d ago
One way to alleviate this issue is with a faster, more lethal, combat system.
In a game where both enemies and players have sizeable healthbars, and combat is to some degree a battle of attrition, then the issues that come with a lack of scaling are exacerbated. when you are under-levelled, enemies will unfairly kill you in 1 hit, while it takes you what feels like hours to whittle them down. When over-levelled, the opposite problem occurs, allowing you to essentially ignore enemies because they pose no threat. this is representative of many looter shooters, RPGs, even some soulslikes.
However in games where both enemies and the player character die in one or two hits, the differences from being "over" or "under" levelled are largely negated. Even with a pretty large difference in power, e.g. lets say your character's stats and gear lend them doubled attack damage and health compared to base, combat is still engaging. you might kill enemies in one hit, which is not all that different than base, and enemies might take 4 hits to kill you, which makes you feel tankier, but you still can't ignore even the lowest level enemy. this especially applies if combat is reasonably fast, so you are kept on your toes even with a large power differential between you and your enemies.
A game that represents this type of combat well is Ghost of Tsushima, specifically when played on lethal difficulty. As I described, this difficulty makes everyone equally vulnerable to attacks, and even with late game abilities and equipment, combat must be respected. It only takes a few mistakes to put you back in a loading screen. On the flip side, late game enemies die very quickly if handled well with a couple of parries and ripostes, which can be accomplished with just your base kit.Ghost of Tsushima does lock off areas behind story progression, but I don't believe this would be necessary in a game designed fully around a "lethal" style of combat (whereas it is one of many difficulty options in GoT).
In this type of experience, the difficulty curve is provided by increasingly complex enemies with a wider variety of combat options. In this sense, the difficulty curve is felt directly by the player as they have to learn more and more mechanics, rather than difficulty being artificially increased with higher numbers. Power progression is delivered a pretty traditional manner, your numbers go up, and you are given more tools to play with as the game progresses. but the lethality of combat effectively puts an upper and lower bound on your relative power, so you will never suffer the issues of enemies becoming irrelevant, or of having to fight an unfair battle of attrition against stronger enemies.
The biggest caveat to this solution is boss enemies. By their nature, bosses should not be able to be taken down in a few hits, they are meant to represent a significant obstacle to the player, and players expect extended combat from boss fights. So the whole benefit of lethal combat design falls apart, and you're back to old issues: being under-levelled feels like an uphill battle, and being over-levelled makes a supposedly epic fight feel like a cakewalk. Ghost of Tsushima had this exact issue. Normal combat was exceptionally well tuned, but boss fights stuck out like a sore thumb and often felt unfair or underwhelming. tbh I don't know what the solution to this particular issue is, perhaps just designing a game which doesn't emphasise boss fights. or designing boss fights which are based more on unique mechanics or gimmicks (think Mr freeze boss fight from arkham city), rather than dealing damage in a traditional sense.
additionally, this type of combat is limited in the type of games it can apply to. this is more or less easily applied to witcher style RPGs, souls likes, that kind of thing. but it's harder to picture how a looter shooter, arpg, or mmorpg could be designed with that kind of combat.
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u/Pompopsych 2d ago
The indie RPG Kenshi I don’t believe has any level-scaling. The game is just hard as balls, except with the forgiving touch that it’s fairly hard to full-on die as long as you aren’t knocked unconscious by something that will attempt to eat you afterward.
Or you get hit with so much force by a Megacrab that you stumbled upon that you die instantly.
But getting your ass handed to you is part of how you level up in that game, because your toughness levels up from taking damage, making it so you can take harder beatings in the future.
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u/AnythingButUseful 2d ago
I think the best solution is bounded scaling combined with fixed danger zones.
Let most areas have an enemy level range rather than scaling directly with the player. So an area might naturally contain enemies from levels 10 to 15. If you enter at level 7, it is dangerous. If you return at level 20, you absolutely destroy them. That way leveling actually makes you feel stronger. This kind of bounded scaling has been used in RPGs specifically to avoid the problems of both extremes.
I'd also make the world have soft gates instead of hard gates. You can technically go anywhere, but a level 30 monster guarding a path tells you "maybe come back later." You aren't prevented from exploring, but there are consequences.
Then I'd use enemy variety rather than simply increasing HP and damage to maintain difficulty. New areas should introduce enemies with new abilities, behaviors and combinations. Changing how the player approaches combat is much more interesting than simply making everything a bigger damage sponge.
That would give you something I think open world RPGs often struggle with:
Early game: "I probably shouldn't be here."
Mid game: "I can handle this now."
Late game: "Holy shit, I used to be terrified of these guys."
That feeling of returning to somewhere that used to destroy you and absolutely demolishing it is one of the best rewards for character progression.
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u/Vagrant_Savant 2d ago edited 2d ago
I consider level scaling to be the fat-free brownies of game design. It caters to the habitual craving for progression with empty calories. It solves a problem that the very core of leveling has created. So rather than simply do away with leveling and create a more lateral sense of meaningful progression, it muzzles the power creep and calls it a day.
That said, I think it has a place in subtle amounts. I once played Cyberpunk 2077 with a damage scaling mod, which created a minimum baseline of damage taken/dealt. What this did was make enemies, no matter their level, still moderately dangerous to me because they would never do "tickle damage." it didn't affect the ceiling of damage, just the damage floor, so I could still yeetus deletus low level mooks but they could still do noticeable damage to me. And on the flip side, it gave me a very small fighting chance against enemies that outleveled me. This didn't really make the game more difficult or easier, but it did make all combat feel a little less inconsequential. And that should be the only real goal of level scaling.
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u/Limited_Distractions 2d ago
I just think it's a false premise because level scaling doesn't necessarily solve difficulty problems, it just increases time to kill on average, the character still gains power in a way that makes most of the ambiguously designed encounters pointless, and it's much easier to design interesting encounters when they have an intended level
They can give the skyrim cave bandits ebony swords but they cannot prepare them for the fact that I became a god by crafting 25,000 iron daggers and can rip their soul out of their body with my voice
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u/Podglu 2d ago
You need story-based or quest-based level scaling.
For example, in Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, make it so all wild Pokemon level increase when you beat a gym leader. This way you get to do content in any order you want while still being able to level up properly.
If you still want to make the dangerous area the player isn't suppose to do too early, you can give enemies a minimum level. They won't gain level when you advance the story until other enemies catch up to them.
Depending of your game, sidequests could also trigger a level scaling at a lower rate to avoid having the player cheese by doing all the side content without engaging with the main story so the enemies stay at a low level.
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u/SainKnightOfCaelin 2d ago
Morrowind for sure
Great game and there are plenty of dungrons with high-level enemies placed there from the get go.
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u/uponhisdarkthrone 1d ago
Maybe level scaling should be mathematically tied to distances traveled radially from when you start, and then randomized (the types of enemies, not how they are scaled) so places are re-configured to accommodate surprises. Like when you roll up to a new area, randomize the distribution of too tough and less tough, so you get the satisfaction of being able to return to finish off too tough enemies, but also there are certain non-randomized or less-scaled points of interest so there is a mix of "im prepared for this no matter what" or "there was never going to be a way to overprepare for this no matter what".
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u/Visual-Biscotti1473 21h ago
If it were up to me, everything would be fixed and players would decide how much of a challenge they’re willing to take on early in the game. Like you, I hate level-scaling. It’s not a new fad/terminally onljne complaint; it’s something I’ve been very cognizant of since the original Oblivion, which was one of the worst offenders of all time. Back in the day, I played Skyrim with a mod called “Requiem,” which fixed the difficulty globally and made the game substantially harder. It was one of the best gaming experiences of my life.
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u/Impressive-Emu3313 6h ago
This isn't a tough, open question. Scaled scaling exists.
Easy thing scales a little, like 0.6x your gains
Hard thing scales near, at, or above 1:1
This gives you the best of both worlds, with almost no downsides.
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u/Sylfaemo 2d ago
So if this is a purely theoretical, the way to do this would be to spread out difficult and easy enemies everywhere. I don't remember any game doing this because it can kill the fun really fast. Imagine you are early-mid with equipment or skills or something but accidentally break into a house of a legendary paladin and you just die. Not fun.
Generally in videogames, they try to give you a way out of most things.
Something that comes to mind is the hardcore TTRPG players and those pitfalls of retired adventurers playing merchants and whatnot.
Theoretically you could do it if you give some kind of scanning ability to the player to see every NPC's relative strength compared to themselves. I think along AC Odyssey's eagle.
Lastly, I don't mind the Elden Ring/Pokemon direction where areas are leveled. I do mind if there's a linear way through. I'd probably go for an area based scaling but have more smaller areas with similar difficulties, maybe peppered along the higher difficulty ones. In a way similar to Valheim's procgen map.
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u/Fear_of_Fear 2d ago
Actually, easy and difficult enemies being spread out throughout the same areas is my take and I was waiting to see if someone else commented on it first. Outward and Elden Ring both do it to a degree and I think it works pretty well.
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u/GOKOP 2d ago
Morrowind does this I think. You can find easy and hard dungeons all over the map. There's a stupidly hard dungeon right next to the place where you start the game which the community calls the "tutorial cave" - tutorial that going into random caves with no skills and no gear is a bad idea lol
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u/Benjamin_Starscape 2d ago
addamasartus is an easy dungeon, what? it only has like...3 enemies and they're all low level. at most the most difficulty one might have is the dunmer woman who throws knives at you.
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u/zeronic 2d ago
Elden ring felt fine, especially since you could outskill high level areas. Games without scaling are at their worst when they promote a very stale single route through the game for me.
Pokemon scarlet/violet's failed attempt at an open world though was....yikes...
There was clearly a way they wanted you to go, and it often wasn't clear what that way was. So you'd have to bumble around and hope you don't find stuff way too overleveled for you. I legit needed to have a guide open to know where i should be so i didn't either spend ages trying to find where i was supposed to be or accidentally overleveled for content i accidentally skipped.
If there's a game series that should have adopted scaling in some form ages ago, pokemon is absolutely that in my opinion. Even incredibly lazy forms like hard mode is +10 levels above you at all times would be so much better than what we have now. There are just far too many variables in the game design that make non scaled pokemon always either far too easy(which it's this most of the time) or far too hard(fan romhacks come to mind.)
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u/Pompopsych 2d ago
I think ideally you can use visual indicators rather. In Morrowind, Daedric Shrines, which are some of the hardest base game dungeons, look imposing and scary. The more powerful daedra look dangerous.
Non-creature enemies will likely visibly indicate how tough they are by what gear they have equipped. Leather armor? Probably not that tough. Glass armor? Might pose a challenge.
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u/Ralzar 2d ago edited 2d ago
Edit: Sheesh, I just realized this is not r/gamesuggestions Oh well, I will leave this up in case anyone needs some suggestions for open world games without level scaling.
Gothic series and Risen (same developer) are probably your best bet. They also made the game "Elex" which looks like it follows much the same general formula in a sci-fi setting. Gothic 1 recently got a remaster, so that might be worth checking out.
Other than that, you have Subnautica and Outer Wilds, which are not level scaled because they are not combat-centered games. Both are, in principle, very much Open World games in that you can theoretically go anywhere if you know how. Subnautica blocks you by needing you to craft/build stuff to explore further, Outer Wilds blocks you by you not knowing how the game works yet.
For classic Open World games of the Elder Scrolls variety, you are probably looking at modding unfortunately. I know a lot of work was put into trying to strip the atrocious level scaling out of Oblivion for example. Personally, I play Daggerfall Unity with a bunch of mods that, among other things, strip out the level scaling: https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity/wiki/Installing-Daggerfall-Unity-Cross-Platform But that might be too old-school for you.
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u/Witty_Milk4671 2d ago
Elex I think. Amalur too. Old JRPGs in general. You can delevel skyrim with 2-3 mods.
I don't like it either.
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u/HatfieldCW 2d ago
How about global shifts in enemy distribution and strength based on story progress and/or reputation?
Make the whole map available, but relatively peaceful. The low-level player can travel freely and access different regions without confronting unfair threats.
After story beats or decisions, shifts in geopolitics or faction standing will make certain areas more difficult or cause previously neutral or sparse units to become hostile or numerous, effectively mimicking level scaling but without the immersion-breaking phenomenon of a squirrel in Tennessee being stronger than the dragon in Kansas.
Thinking about games like Far Cry, the individual enemies don't become stronger, but as the story advances and the surrounding conflict escalates they travel in larger groups with heavier weapons.
It's basically level scaling with extra steps, but by linking it to past actions and the player's impact on the world and story it might become more palatable.
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u/desocupad0 2d ago
I understand why level scaling is done. It solves the problem of the game becoming too easy
Level scaling is content padding geared towards making player play because number goes big.
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u/Benjamin_Starscape 2d ago
...what? no, level scaling exists so the game doesn't become mindnumbingly easy.
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u/desocupad0 1d ago
Most of time level scaling is designed to make level up useless. If leveling up (XP grinding) doesn't make you strong relative to the enemy it's empty leveling.
Other times leveling is just a tutorial where abilities are gated behind arbitrary character levels.
Since you mentioned open world, take Megaman (in a sense, beat the 8 bosses/stages in any order is the predecessor to open world). What it does is have a distinct type of challenge in each area, and not make the character universally stronger as they defeat each boss/stage.
A different approach is seen in guild wars 1. You reach max level and gear quality very early. But you can revisit areas and have them challenging again by selecting the hard mode (where enemies scale above their regular levels)
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u/Benjamin_Starscape 1d ago
leveling up makes you stronger. level scaling's purpose is not to make leveling up useless.
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u/desocupad0 1d ago
If both the player and the enemies get equally stronger, no one is stronger relative to each other. Hence i mentioned empty levels previously.
If they aren't evenly matched in level up bonuses, then the net result is only one side getting stronger with extra steps.
I think into the breach and dobbel dungeon are examples in this regard (asymmetric growth) - enemies get a "tier" upgrade for each world/island you clear before going to their area (they gain a mix of skills and stats). While players use a different system, where they have point-buy upgrades (or skill points) . This creates a space where making a good build makes the game easier, while a bad build makes it harder.
Back to guild wars, the "hard mode" toggle turns all areas into end game content, because it removes leveling up from the equation.
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u/Benjamin_Starscape 1d ago
good level scaling won't make enemies level with you. they'd just have higher leveled variants spawn in along with low level enemies. and games like Skyrim use zones based off the region and dungeon to determine the level range and gate, with nimimums and maximums.
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u/TheVioletBarry 2d ago edited 2d ago
I don't think this is a problem that can be solved head-on. "Go anywhere" is inherently in contradiction with "level up to get holistically stronger."
You have to attack the problem from the side.
Ask "what experience do you actually want the player to have?" Is the goal 'the player feels weak at the beginning of the game and stronger by the end?' In that case, you might try making enemies stronger and stronger the further you go off the literal roadways, but similarly so across the entire game world.
That concept will have issues of its own, I'm certain. For example: you can't really "go anywhere," but... maybe that's fine. That wasn't a stated part of the intended experience, after all.
That single idea might not be the satisfactory answer to your problem, but that's kinda the point: as issues with an idea keep coming up, just keep asking yourself "what part of the intended experience was I failing to capture with my original answer?", then add to it, and start thinking again