Level Up-Scaling - The Pros and Cons

[PudyMaster]

Level Up-Scaling - The Pros and Cons

Level scaling is a topic which seems to come up a fair deal when discussing The Witcher 3. Because of that, I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to further the discussion on this topic, going in depth about what the game would benefit from having level scaling, and the adverse effects that it could suffer from its implementation as well. However, what I'll be talking about here won't be complete level scaling, which would destroy the sense of progression the developers clearly wished to have in the game. The level scaling I wish to discuss here is level upscaling. For those not in the know, level upscaling raises the levels of the enemies below the player's level to match their's. That means a ghoul which would normally be level ten, would be raised to be level twenty if that is the player's level, but if the player was level five the ghoul would still be the level ten. The purpose of this would be to provide a consistent challenge throughout the game. However, for the sake of this discussion, the level upscaling would only be applied to quests, and not the monsters in the overworld.

Pros:

-A Consistent Challenge- As I said earlier, this kind of level scaling would allow the game to have a consistent challenge throughout the entire game. But why is that important? Some players probably like being able to mow their way through the game. Be that as it may, there are difficulty settings for a reason, and I'm going to assume that even with level upscaling the easy difficulty setting would still forgiving enough for players not interested in a challenge. The challenge of combat makes the game more satisfying to play, but it also helps reinforce the realism of the setting. When we're told that the witcher's profession is dangerous, the reason we believe it is because of how lethal a single pack of drowners can be. As it is, however, the lack of level upscaling can lead to certain encounters being hilariously easy. For instance, there are monster contracts throughout the game that provide no challenge if the player is one or two levels above the recommended one. With level upscaling on quests, every contract will really sell the idea that the people need a witcher, and will also help place us more in Geralt's shoes when he gets ripped off or cheated by certain individuals.

-Late Game Progression Will Actually Exist- I've now beaten The Witcher 3 three times, and each time through the higher the level I reached, the more the game content started to collapse into itself, leaving me with only one or two quests within my level range. This defeats the purpose of an open world as level ranges shepherd the players through certain quests, and on repeat playthroughs I was doing the same group of quests in a pretty similar order. One of the benefits of being an open world game is having a high replayability, but being unable to complete quests you may have missed forty odd hours ago can be frustrating, especially since the world is set up in a such a way that there is no easy way to know which areas are for low level players and which are for high level players. With level upscaling, I'd be able to complete quests that I didn't stumble across when I "should" have, and believe me, there are all sorts of quests hidden away in obscure parts of the world, which is great, but I would like to be able to do them and actually get experience for it. As it is, I had to grind out one level in order to be able to equip my mastercrafted cat school armor, and was right at the end of the game, with no quests my level to get me up to level thirty four.


Cons:

-Level Scaling Is Game-y and Artificial- Many people would argue that level scaling in any form breaks immersion because it doesn't make any sense. This certainly isn't wrong as level scaling is inherently artificial, and in other games with level scaling, this really does kill immersion. The go to example of completely artificial level scaling would The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, where late game the player would encounter lowly bandits donning the most effective armor in the world. This certainly is a valid complaint, and something to be wary of.

-Level Scaling Could Be A Hassle to Implement- If I'm being honest, I have no idea how hard level upscaling would be to implement, but I imagine it can't be easy, especially in a game as complicated as The Witcher 3, so this makes sense as it could be enormous burden on the extremely talented folks at CD Projekt RED.


If it isn't obvious by now, I'm in favor of level upscaling for the reasons listed above, and I believe the Pros cancel out the cons for a variety of reasons. The first one is that I think level upscaling really isn't more game-y than beating a pack of wolves to death with your fists simply because you're higher level. The level upscaling in question, however, wouldn't stop that from happening, but it ensure it doesn't happen in quests.
Those are my thoughts on the matter, but I'm very interested to hear what everyone else has to say. With New Game Plus on the horizon, level upscaling could be implemented in that mode, allowing the original experience CD Projekt RED created to remain intact, but also providing a more open experience for the next playthrough. Mods, if you think my post is in the wrong category, I'm sorry about it, my rationale is that this is a discussion on what level upscaling would bring to table, and what it would take away, but this is kind of a suggestion I guess, but I just wasn't sure where to put this, and this category seems like a catch all. If I'm wrong about that, I apologize again, I don't wish to waste your time.
Cheers, and thank you to all the hard working people at CD Projekt RED for creating such a wonderful game to begin with, and the dedication you have to making it the best experience it can be!

 

[Randomdrowner2015]

Levelling n scaling is what you turn to when you run out of time and other resources during RPG-development.
Will provide details later.

 

[moonknightgog]

1) There's no challange with level scaling, because all enemies have your level.
2) There is no progression with level scaling, because if you can kill everything from the start, levelling up, crafting etc...make no sense.

Level scaling is a lazy design approach. The point of levelling up is exactly not having a challange anymore, because you are stronger than your enemies.

 

[Wasteland_Ghost]

If auto-leveling system is absolute evil, then we have no hope for truly open world. So sad.

A leveling system when each and every enemy has level, skills and equipment equivalent to that of main character is a lazy design. Common bandit wearing a legendary armor and parrying a whirl sounds terrible. But TW3 has wide variety of enemies and there are some that might benefit from being leveled, IMO.

Random enemies. I don't think that these should be leveled. When you outlevel such enemies it feels good and gives you sense of power and achievement.

Hidden treasure and witcher gear hunting. Same as above, but I think that random loot shouldn't be leveled either, so you would get proper reward for difficulty. Yes, it would mean that you get almost no reward for cleaning low-level treasure mark, but that would be at least logical and will give you something for your next playthrough.

Monster contracts. These need leveling, IMO. Because enemies here are unique and fighting them shouldn't be about outpowering, but about outsmarting the enemy. They should be challenging. Always. And shouldn't depend on main quest progression. They really should give you a sense of what being a witcher means. And rewards shouldn't be so pitiful.

Side quests. To be honest, I don't know. The way they are now, their level is somewhat connected with nearby main quests and they give you a wider perspective on the story and the world. They do have enemies, but they aren't about fight. I feel like moral choices mean more than difficult battles here, so battles shouldn't be too hard for these.

And, finally, main quests. It's the main source of XP and rewards and you are now forced to do these. It might or might not be good depending on individual player, but still, they are main story quests and they should be challenging. Or at least the challenge should depend on difficulty: for story they should be easy and for DM they should be hard as hell.

That's just my opinion, I'm not pretending its the best way to handle open world and levels, but that's how I feel beating the game twice (on "Story&Sword" and on "Blood&Broken Bones") and being half way through on "Deathmatch".

 

[Lieste]

I counter the arguement that enemies should have their levelled increased to match Geralt's progression, by noting that this progression has no real sense within the story context.

Rather than upscaling enemies to match Geralt as his skill tree & equipment explodes his character abilities out of recognition from his starting set, I'd far rather see a consistent "world" where bandits, peasants and guards are broadly similar in generic toughness, but with slightly differing skillsets and equipments.... and most monsters are fiercer/tougher/meaner and more often have natural resistances to one or more attack types. Also toning down some improbable feats from generic mobs (like *consistently* parrying Geralt's whirl attack (or his light and fast attacks in general)) but improving the protective value of armour *most* of the time.
I dislike the *double bonus* of strong attacks getting *significantly* additional damage (seems to be around 3x the *basic* damage at the moment based on a cursory examination of a simple sword on my current character) and also ignoring armour values. But both light and heavy attacks *easily* overwhelm almost all armours in game from quite early on. Permanently applied *strong* resistances and large HP pools then make enemies fairly "tanky" at high levels, but without any way to really reproduce the style of fights from the books.

(At least I don't recall any which went: "And then Geralt drew his sword and struck the bandit, barely scratching his skin before being nearly killed by the counter-blow. He popped a potion, and rolled around the courtyard for ten minutes and by skillful timing and parrying and counterstriking against the heavy and precise blows of his enemy was able to finally cut him down."...

The "harder" fights aren't (IMO) better, but just drawn out and boring ~ verging on frustrating when a small object blocks a required dodge... and they don't come close to adequately portraying the lore that the books and games claim is "who Geralt is".

I don't think we need "swords that do more damage", or enemies that will take more hits... rather a world that is more consistent by *removing* most of this inflationary pressure.

 

[Wasteland_Ghost]

What story context can be with a unique monster you don't even know anything about until you start fighting it? Leveling is bad if you can see it happening, i.e. see the exact same character gain levels along with Geralt.

When you see a bandit camp, for example, where all the bandits are level 3 and then go away, gain 2-3 levels and return to see the same bandits gained 2-3 levels too, I agree it's a bad design choice. But if you can avoid situations like this one, leveling can be actually good for keeping the challenge.

 

[Lieste]

The overall story context is that Geralt has "around" 100 years of experience of successfully fighting and winning (or at the very least staying alive) against all manner of human and non-human enemy. He is already *highly* experienced and skilled, so while learning new tricks is possible, it is extremely out of character to develop in his main skill areas to a skill/equipment level 50+ times stronger than the starting one, and to be facing human enemies which are still tougher and stronger than the "new" Geralt.

It also makes a mockery of the "deadly" Royal Griffin in the prologue when it is trivially weaker than a mid-game Nekker or Drowner.

 

[Wasbunny]

I've been giving this idea a lot of thought recently, at least about difficulty balancing and leveling in general. I've also been alternating between playing Dark Souls 2 and TW3 and think the latter could take some queues from the former in how leveling is handled.

To me it seems the main problem with leveling in TW3 is that so much is gear based. Since there are no attributes (Strength, Dexterity, Faith, etc.) that grow and are customized as you level we are left with relying on armor and weapons to give us our stats. Hence the level limitations on gear (which of course makes no sense immersion-wise) and the wildly varying ranges of damage and protection. If gear levels were eliminated and ranges brought into reason (I mean how do you sharpen a sword so much it does 50 times the damage of a standard Witcher sword, yet is so good it can't even be lifted until level 35?) and more weight was put into skills and the need to actually learn the fights (a la DS2) it would help a lot to maintain a consistent and rewarding level of difficulty.

Another difference I've seen between DS2 and TW3 is how health is handled while leveling. In DS2 you only get a teeny tiny amount of health boost upon leveling unless you specifically build for Vitality. On the other hand in TW3 your health automatically goes up by leaps and bounds just by gaining experience and going up a level. This makes no sense. A level 1 Witcher should not be downed from a single wolf bite any more than a level 10 should be standing after twenty. I like the idea of health pools going up only ever so slightly as you level, or even not at all. This would also help to even out the difficulty curve a bit since right now most agree it's way too hard at the start and way too easy by the end.

I suppose I should have stated first off that I'm not in favor of leveling enemies with Geralt. I'd prefer the Dark Souls approach where your skills, abilities (i.e. perks / talents) and actual experience in game are more important than arbitrarily inflated health pools and damage.

EDIT: Almost forgot. Speaking of arbitrary; the mechanic of not being able to all but scratch an enemy 6+ levels above you needs to stop. World of Warcraft had this (and Rift?) with their 'Hit Chance' stat I seem to remember. In my opinion it's a very lazy way to level gate one from trying to best enemies above your skill level. Dark Souls does not have this artificial hamstringing, you just have to be really really...REALLY good and or lucky to take on bosses that are out of your league.

 

[Blackhawk1189]

So, there's two problems - either you scale enemies to match player level, thus creating what we can call the Oblivion Factor, or you don't scale, and then you create different immersion problems i.e. early game monsters aren't as difficult as a pack of drowners later on and you have to do certain quests at the same time every play through.

Personally, I'm more of a fan of level-scaling, though I do think Witcher 3 is too far along in game design to change the way it works. It would be a total overhaul. OP's con about being shepherded through quests is more of a problem with me than coming across a bandit with good gear end game. I'm on my second playthrough of the Witcher 3 right now, and I probably won't play it again until expansion packs come out. It's just become mechanical for me. I've found a great build that has me powering through Death March right now, but there's little incentive for me to experiment on another playthrough because I know I'm going to have to do the exact same quests in the same order.

That said, this game was not meant to be Oblivion. If that's what the player wants then they should play that type of game. I, personally, would happy if they just upped the XP for quests below our levels. The game just awarded me 170 xp points today for clearing an abandoned camp site of lvl 10 bandits. 170 xp points. But, a lvl 21 quests is in the gray and rewards me next to nothing because I missed it and didn't pick it up until I was lvl 30? To me, that's a little disingenuous.

 

[erxv]

i just find it super immersion breaking when ive beaten a bunch of griffins and other huge monsters, and then a shirtless bandit takes 1 damage from my sword strikes and instantly kills me by sneezing on me.....

you could do level scaling like so: the higher your level the higher the enemies level compared to you... BAM difficulty ramps up when you progress through the game (and certain enemies could have a set MINIMUM level, so if you want an enemy to be fought later in the game, lower level players couldnt beat it)

+ you could make certain attack patterns/tactics on enemies apply from a certain level (further increacing difficulty)

i just hate it when you find some bandits, and kill all of them in 2 hits, then run 50 yards and find other bandits that take almost no damage and oneshot you... (death march)

 

[Wasteland_Ghost]

Geralt is indeed 100 years old and has tons of experience with monsters, but from this point of view any progression should be taken out of the game, both for Geralt and for enemies. This will mean DS style game when player is given no clues and have to learn through experimenting and countless deaths. Although it can be fun, I wouldn't be happy to see it in TW3, because TW3 is story-based game and not just action game.

As I already mentioned in another leveling related topic, main foes in TW3 are monsters. And these are of very different types, so ideally very different approach should be needed to successfully defeat them. If leveling up were not about more power, but about wider variety of tricks, monster difficulty would depend on whether or not Geralt has certain trick learned. And lack of active skills would finally make sense. Hell, they could have make even less active skills if combat emphasized on enemy resistances and abilities instead of strike-dodge-repeat. This would also partially solve being shepherded through quest problem, as progression would depend on which skills you have learned and not what level you are.

PS On 100+ years experienced Geralt. He almost died to pack of drowners in the book. Easiest enemy. Point is, no matter how experienced a witcher is, monsters are always difficult.

 

[PudyMaster]

I get that level upscaling isn't the ideal solution, but it is a quick solution to the huge difficulty imbalance in the game. Artificial damage layers are annoying, and I think the combat would be better if it had more high damage attacks and lower armor so the battles would begin and end much faster, but would also be extremely deadly too, with two to three blows being enough to down Geralt on harder difficulty setting, but he'd also be able to kill enemies as quickly too. As it is, however, Geralt takes a decent amount of damage and increasing the difficulty just makes enemies damage sponges. With level upscaling applied to quests, enemies would still take a lot of damage, but at least they'd be able to kill Geralt.

 

[Randomdrowner2015]

The problem is that levelling is a crude way to quantify character progression.
I say do away with levelling and tie progression to Geralt meeting new people and experience new things as well as approaching foes ad problems logically.
I wrote a long post about this a long time ago with my old account. I will see if I can dig it up.

 

[PudyMaster]

That'd be awesome if well developed, but since leveling is already built in The Witcher 3 (and the RPG genre) I don't think we'll be seeing a system like that any time soon. If you can find your older post, I would be very interested in reading it.