Hi
Im making a post-apoc adventure rpg. Sort of a mix between diablo, stalker, fallout and zelda. The single-player campaign goes from zone level 1 to level 10 with higher level zones in the end of the game being much more hard to survive. Like diablo, a player cannot survive in the end of the game with equipment that is enough for beginning zones. But how to balance this?

When it comes to weapons, i have a basic idea like this:

Typical rifle
level 2 rifle DPS: 10
level 5 rifle DPS: 20
level 8 rifle DPS: 40

And the value of the items scale proportionally with the DPS (so a level 8 weapon will be twice as costly as a level 5). (is this good?)

This is a very rough plan of course. The same goes for enemy difficulty. How to balance it to make enemies harder as the game progresses but not silly? (the scaling of diablo is TOO much, the scaling of fallout maybe to little). Is there any general tip?

Thanks a lot
Erik

You could also have some kind of an overheat thing. Like actual overheat, or reload time or something like that. So that low level weapons can deal well with a few low level dangers, and can defeat a few high level ones too, but if you give the player less time at the higher levels to reload the weapon or something, he wont make it with low level stuff.

Because i dont like how weapons become 10x more powerful without MAJOR changes.

It does stand to reason that an enemy with say 400 health will be easier to deal with using your level 8 rifle than the level 2 rifle but that's assuming that it's just a one on one battle without accounting for any other elements in the game. It's also going to come down to number of enemies during combat, enemy health, player health, rate of damage the player takes, regeneration rate, the reflexes of the player, and probably other things as well.