Hey guys,

I've always disliked leveled enemies/areas (basing all opponent difficulty on the PC-character level), because it feels like it completely destroys the purpose of leveling in the first place. I mean what's the point of getting to level 5 if every character in the game levels up at the same time?

Fallout 4 does it a little differently (not sure about 76, I avoid online games). In F4, the enemy difficulty is still based on your PC level, which sucks (IMO), but they are locked there once you meet them. So if you travel back to a previous location, the enemies you fought at level 5 are still at level 5, even though you are now level 10. This makes it much harder for the player to realize what's happening, but it still feels like its negating the point. It also still forces players who figure it out to play internal mini-games. For example, I avoid leveled areas until I get to a very high level, so enemies won't be locked at some pathetic level later on, and I can enjoy fighting them over and over.

I have been slacking in game development for a while, but this design problem still bothers me. Every time I play a leveling game, I'm reminded that there is no good way to do this. Either the player has to deal with extremely tough enemies that they cannot beat until they get stronger, or the leveling system is made pointless by using some type of leveled enemies. And when you go with leveled enemies, the player is forced to play this internal tweaking game, where they actually don't care about leveling up - they only care about HOW they level up - which skills do I choose to make the leveling in this game actually do something useful? If I boost my intelligence to level up more often, that would be pointless. But if I stay dumb and gain more skill points PER level, that would make me much stronger than my enemies.

Anyway, I'm looking for ideas on how to improve this situation. And even though I refer to “levels”, it is not a problem strictly associated with full character levels. Any game that allows the player to improve their abilities while giving them choices to fight against tougher opponents (one way or another) has to choose how to deal with this problem. I used to be a hardcore gamer (played every good game that existed), but these days there are a lot of games out there that I haven't tried. So feel free to mention any that seem like they nailed it.

Thanks!

I forgot to mention a few of the things I think help solve this problem. They don't fix it, but they seem to help resolve it:

1. Don't make leveling as dramatic, and space it out. The final enemies can be pretty tough compared to the first, but the second enemies should not be much better than the first. There should be larger gaps between, that serve as a sort of escalated warning. “The characters in this direction are getting as tough as nails - I need to get out of here”.. rather than “game over”.
2. Give some type of feedback when opponents are too tough. Fallout 4 uses skulls on the character names of unleveled enemies when they are too tough to fight. The player can observe them and see they are too tough, or at least try to run once they notice.
3. Allow running! Let the player escape when its too much. They will still need to recover whatever they lost (health, poisonings, items, etc), but at least they don't need to respawn or reload. Fallout 4 did this pretty well. Sometimes you can get away, sometimes you can't. But I play on survival mode, which is pretty unforgiving. Usually only 1 hit and you're toast (looking at you, giant scorpions)

That's all I can think of at the moment.

The purpose of leveling up characters is not to make them more powerful (and the game easier), but rather to provide variety (new, genuinely different abilities), to implement realistic and traditional positive consequences for accumulating experience and gear, and sometimes to offer strategic depth (what character build do you want to pursue?).

Power increase is a necessary byproduct of adding power without removing it, and scaling up enemies to keep gameplay interesting is a straightforward and honest compensation technique.

Your dislike for Fallout 4 seems mainly related to being unable to plan when to fight whom because you can't predict difficulty: monster scaling and “locking” tricks are a contributing complication (monster power becomes more variable), not a problem in themselves.

I just wanted to mention that I don't dislike Fallout 4 at all. Its actually one of my favorite games, and my “base model” of what a modern action-based RPG should be. I've put several hundred hours into it.

However, there are a couple things I feel that could have been done better. At least as far as my playing preferences go:

1. Less obnoxious leveled enemies. A more realistic setup, maybe. Or if nothing else, add some randomness to the leveling on each character spawn. Especially on revisits.
2. A better junk carrying system. Transporting junk for crafting was one of the most tedious things in the game. But crafting gun attachments and settlements was pretty cool, so we had to pick up those cans and teddy bears. There are mods that make junk have zero weight, but I'm not big on using mods for any games (choosing which rules to follow feels like cheating to me, which is a big negative).
3. There are tons of unpolished and user-hostile features, like the inability to scrap your inventory items from the menu (you literally have to drop them on the floor to scrap them).
4. Lastly, there are lots of HUGE bugs that Bethesda never fixes, like the settlement bug that causes your settlement stats to all randomly drop to zero when you travel away from it, or the terrible survival mode bug that makes everything except enemies (all items) respawn every time you revisit an area, allowing you to essentially collect infinite junk, ammo, and other supplies by just walking back and forth to a battle-area respawn site. Its hard to identify some of these bugs as actual bugs, but its hard to imagine someone purposely doing some of this.

Why do you want to have leveling in the first place? Answer that question, then design a leveling system that fits that purpose. If you have no good answer, then get rid of the leveling system entirely.

For example, if you want to use leveling to slowly introduce new abilities to the player to keep the gameplay fresh, then you can slowly introduce new abilities to the player without boosting the player's stats at all.

On the other hand, if you want to use leveling as a gating system to prevent the player from running straight to the endgame and skipping over the bulk of the game, then create a leveling system where the player grows more powerful and the monsters don't.

And if you just want to reward for playing without adding new abilities or letting her grow more powerful, then just keep track of the player's kills without increasing the player's stats or abilities.

I think a good leveling system (increasing stats like strength or specific game-logic skills) would do pretty much all of those things and more.

1. Introduce new abilities (logic-only and/or player-interactive changes) to keep gameplay fresh.
2. Gating system or a ladder to climb (because some of us love to climb ladders). The leveling system itself is a ladder, as well as providing stronger enemies to battle, or harder locks to pick, etc.
3. Reward the player for completing fun tasks, like combat. Fun is an important injection. We should never reward the player for doing something tedious, even if it rarely happens. For example, carrying tons of junk around, dropping a fork to have room for another oil can, is tedious.

Your list was very good, and I couldn't add to it at the moment. But I'm sure there are others.

I think Role Playing Games were designed to be pointless. You kill level 1 monster, you gain experience and loot, you level up your skills and you buy better equipment. Then you need level 2 enemies to keep the challenge and to progress further. And so on and on.

As long as new enemies are created to challenge the player there is no real progress. It's an illusion, although an addictive illusion.

Like you said, the stupidity of the system is evident when players avoid levelling up to make progress, or they level up in strange ways to prevent powerful enemies spawning.

I think enemies should be at the same difficulty the whole game. With cunning and resourcefulness the player must increase his skills and equipment until he is able to defeat every enemy in the game. That's a good moment to end the game.