Dionysus said:
I think open-world games are precisely the sort of games that can benefit from some level scaling. Nothing sucks worse than finding a town that is practically useless to you because you were "supposed" to go there at level 1. And that sort of thing is most likely to happen in an open-world game. More linear games don't need it because it's easier to coordinate the level of challenge and the character's level.
Well, open world games probably shouldn't have character/equipment systems in place that have enormous gulfs of effectiveness between start and endgame. That isn't a great way to design things if you have the objective of making all areas have content suitable for characters of all levels. Certainly, you can "bandage" this in a lot of ways, level scaling a la Bethesda one method among many. However, certain methods won't tend to work very well, including the aforementioned Bethesda-esque level scaling. It's a blunt tool, and rather lazy design that shows in the fact that The Elder Scrolls is a very bland gameplay experience overall.
I'd propose that there are better ways, more sophisticated methods. Broadly, they may fit under the notion of "level scaling", but I think they're different enough to be described as distinct from the way the Codex understands the term "level scaling".
First, design areas a little more intelligently. For example, a cave home to a tribe of goblins might be a good fit for a low level character, but a poor match for a higher caliber adventurer. A designer who wants a cheap solution would just scale the goblins as a solution to this problem. We saw things like this in Oblivion in which goblins just "ranked up" as the player character leveled up. A better idea would involve a bit more of an in-depth approach to designing areas. Make the goblin tribe a fixed encounter, one that low level characters will find appropriate, but add more to their lair. Maybe they do ritual sacrifices, throwing livestock and villagers captured in raids down some sort of pit. A pit that low level characters won't be able to get to the bottom of. And at the bottom of the pit is some sort of critter(s) more appropriate to a high level character who is able to find their way safely to the bottom of the pit. Maybe a demon, a dragon, or some other foul beastie. The main idea here is to make some sort of passive (read: not openly hostile....not sure if this is the best choice of words, but whatever) barrier to lower level characters in areas initially suited for them that high level characters will be able to pass through and find content more appropriate to them if they don't show up at the "right time". It also has the bonus effect of giving lower level characters a taste of mystery, a bit of a hook to come back and further explore when they've progressed a bit more.
Second, employ more sophisticated schemes of level scaling. Forget the hack job done in most games just swapping out lower rank critters for higher rank ones, that's not very fun, not very interesting either. Try something a bit more sophisticated, maybe scaling events and quests to character levels. Let us suppose an example town. A character strolls in at low level, the game recognizes this, and then only makes certain quests available. We'll say these are typical "low level" affairs (easy combat, low-threshold skill checks, low rewards, etc). The player continues adventuring, and after accumulating more experience, and leveling up a bit, are informed of new quests available, maybe by letter or by a messenger. They can go there and do those quests then. These might be more difficult endeavors with more tricky combat, skill checks that require a bit of specialization, and appropriately scaled awards. Maybe there will even be a third or fourth tier of quests available upon leveling up. And the other thing required for this would be to unlock the quests immediately for characters who show up in our hypothetical settlement at a higher level. This serves not only to "scale" areas better to characters, making them less "useless" to characters of varying levels, but also to make for a simple way of showing the passage of time in the world, having more problems develop in places as the player character adventures on.
However, both these proposed methods aren't perfect. Again, they're only "bandages", they will still have a lot of problems. For one, over-reliance on these things breaks verisimilitude. If you find demons, dragons, and liches behind some sort of "level door" in every goblin den, orc cave, and kobold city things seem a bit artificial. The pitfall of the second method is that the world seems to revolve around the character too much, breaking any sense that this isn't just a virtual playground.
At a point, we realize scaling methods of any sort are a bandage that is used to shore things up when a developer wants to create an open world game, use a system with excessive character/equipment progression, and have the areas all seem useful to all levels. All three objectives can only be met with a significant amount of "bandaging", often through different methods of scaling. As mentioned in the start of the post, it's easier to merely design a system of character/equipment progression with less of a gulf between start and finish in order to satisfy the objective of open world exploring with content suitable for most every character. You still will likely need some bandaging through level scaling, but nothing as blunt, and frankly, stupid, as Bethesda-esque universal scaling.
