Crevice tab
Savant
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2013
- Messages
- 224
The primary motivation behind level-scaling is not too lazy to hand-craft, but rather the desire to give players the option of going at their own pace.
Which is bullshit. It may well be true but it's still stupid bullshit. The same sort of funny in an ironic way bullshit that I've talked about in this very thread. Giving the players a skip to the credits option is dumb- if you're building an open world game, selling an open world game and marketing an open world game that's focused on exploration then fucking use that open world and encourage the players to explore it. Saying 'oh well questing is optional you can just skip it all and go to the final cutscene where you'll be forever described as awesome' is utterly retarded and defeats the very purpose of the game.
What's more that mentality is transferring to things that aren't related to leveling: see Skyrim's quest lines and all those boring optional skippable randomly generated quests which still consumed time and money to build because voice acting and stuff but were designed from the get go as skippable which is part of the reason why they're so boring.
The BG 2 developers back in the day had to worry about not allowing you to get to Spellhold at level 9 because you're just going to get pwned repeatedly with no way out. In the worst case - eg a plot critical event that doesn't allow backtracking - it breaks the game, forcing a hard reload from an old save. In less bad cases, but equally horrible in anal retentive developers' minds, the player goes to Spellhold at max level and goes lolwut and proceeds to ezmode through the rest of the game, feeling no challenge whatsoever.
How do you solve this issue without level-scaling? The answer is gating, ala 15,000 gold = lots of exp-giving quests to go to Spellhold, quest chains that force you to hit Chapter X before doing Z, etc. But gating takes away player freedom - there's no two ways about it, and feel especially hamfisted when implemented in open world environments eg doors you aren't able to open, roadblocks that you aren't able to walk around, dungeons with guards denying you entrance, etc.
So players have the freedom to do anything but fail? Games should always be on autowin no matter what you do mode? Or are players so retarded that when confronted with great big warnings that going into the Fortress of Doom to fight the Big Bad (TM) is going to be really hard and they should save the game beforehand? And even if they are couldn't the devs implement an autosave feature for important spots?
How do you solve this issue without level scaling? Proper world design that provides enough content without turning the game into a cakewalk, a difficulty slider for the small tweaks that may escape you and having the courage of not treating the players like big spoiled inbred toddlers who have to be constantly held by the hand and praised for going to the bathroom.
It should be very hard to almost impossible to do the upper ends of a quest line if you've only done the mandatory quests to get there. Instead there should be plenty of get the fuck out and train points just like it happened in Morrowind. Is something too hard? Well open world- do easier stuff. Is something too easy? Well you might be able to do the really epic stuff now. Is the epic stuff too easy? Make it fucking harder- there's no reason why fighting 5 goblins should be harder than fighting a bloody dragon. Things aren't quite perfect? Well that's what the difficulty slider is for. Have the NPCs actually say relevant stuff warning the player of dangerous zones instead of taking arrows to the knee and accept that the player will once in a while get confused, make a mistake and then get killed especially if it's the first time he plays the game. That's what save games are for.