Gothic 3 will not ENTIRELY be scaling.

[Red Russian]

http://www.rpgdot.com/#48791

It seems that not the entire gothic world will be scaling, only certain "key encounters". Scaling boss fights accroding to the player's stats is not actually a bad idea. As long as they don't scale the rest of the world, I'm game. Oblivion's horrendous scaling system leaves much to be desired, but I can understand somewhat. It does accomodate all players. Good players and Bad players are both accomodated with scaling as the fights are always fair. But it kills the idea of leveling then, doesn't it?

Anyway...

As you can see I'm new here!

Been reading through the General RPG section and the News Section, and boy, talk about expressing yourself! LOL! :D I'm having a blast reading through the past posts. Reaching page 12 and still laughing.

Refreshing break from the usual forums out there. Best registration I ever did. :D

 

[Kraszu]

Scaling should only be time based not level based. Anyway there is no offcial info on haw it will work.

 

[Tekar]

http://www.rpgdot.com/#48791
It does accomodate all players. Good players and Bad players are both accomodated with scaling as the fights are always fair.

I do not agree, if you're not carefull you'll fall behind on the monsters and the game will become onplayable. In Ob leveling isn't hard. It's getting the most out of a level that's the problem and new/bad players won't be able to do this so they're in trouble.

 

[Abernathy]

The quote from Rpgdot:

"In response to the Gothic 3 E3 Preview, it appears there's been a new development: Gothic 3's bestial line-up will not scale like Oblivion's. Creature balance will remain largely the same as it was in the 2 predecessors aside from one crucial aspect.

Posted by Aspyr Media

However certain key encounters *may* scale in order to facilitate balance within the gameplay.

Key encounters, referring to the boss fights, is in a revisional period right now and will likely scale to the specifications of the player character."

I don't think that's news as such, but the Oblivion 'scaling' system was so fucking awful that the mere mention of the word 'scaling' tends to send people into a blind panic.

Piranha Bytes aren't making games for kiddies, so unless something's changed I'm inclined not to worry about it. Unless I get eaten by a meatbug, of course.

 

[Atrokkus]

Since you've read the posts at general rpg discussion, you surely understand the common Codex standpoint on Oblivion's scaling: it sucks big time and accomodates noone.. hell, even some ES fanbois complained about it.

I'm very much afraid that Piranha Bytes might slowly deteriorate as a creative team... in a way that now they seem to follow some of the massmarket trends. I hope I'm wrong, though. I really want to see something like Gothic 1 again, but better in every respect.

Unless I get eaten by a meatbug, of course.

Those little guys are vastly underestimated, if you ask me.

 

[RuySan]

Bosses...time...whatever

For me there shouldn't be any scaling in an RPG.

 

[HotSnack]

Bosses...time...whatever

For me there shouldn't be any scaling in an RPG.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with scaling, since the idea is only to do something a DM would do normally anyways (that is to tone down an encounter if he knows that it will annihilate the party in its current state, or to increase it if he feels the encounter isn't challenging enough).

Some things work well with scaling and some don't. For example having an event where an assassin comes from no where and tries to kill you will work with scaling, as you may not have a clear idea as to how powerful the player is, but want the event to be challenging regardless. On the other hand having an event where you must pass a troll-guarded bridge to reach your next objective should not have scaling. The troll should prove a challenge for even the most combat-orientated of characters, and if he cannot defeat the troll then the character should either find some other means to cross to the other side, or come back when he is stronger.

The difference here is that one event forces the player to solve it in a set way, while the other the player can choose how and when to solve it.

 

[sheek]

Bosses...time...whatever

For me there shouldn't be any scaling in an RPG.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with scaling, since the idea is only to do something a DM would do normally anyways (that is to tone down an encounter if he knows that it will annihilate the party in its current state, or to increase it if he feels the encounter isn't challenging enough).

Level scaling is stupid.

The only reason to have it is if you already messed up and made character advancement too fast/powerful.

 

[Atrokkus]

A PnP simile is a bit off the mark. A pnp session is a constant improvisation -- DM is not just guiding the players through predefined checkpoints, he basically makes up the world and story on the fly. In a CRPG, however, the world is preset. Automatic scaling based on PC's stats is perhaps the lamest and most pathetic design element I've ever witnessed in the genre. It's neither realistic nor challenging or interesting in terms of gameplay. Dumbdown galore.

However, I would *really* love to see a system which allows for NPC's self-development in combat skills. For instance, Hunters camping in the forest get attacked by wolves pretty often. Why not allow all of them gain experience, or improve corresponding skills directly. Could be both an exp or skillbased system for npcs, separate from that of a PC. Of course, this calls for several random factors such as npcs meeting each other in the gameworld and possibly conflicting.

By the way, that's what we've rarely seen in previous Gothic games -- people fighting other people, randomly or not, just like critters do. The winners (or survivors) should get tougher, naturally.

 

[Prime Junta]

However, I would *really* love to see a system which allows for NPC's self-development in combat skills. For instance, Hunters camping in the forest get attacked by wolves pretty often. Why not allow all of them gain experience, or improve corresponding skills directly. Could be both an exp or skillbased system for npcs, separate from that of a PC. Of course, this calls for several random factors such as npcs meeting each other in the gameworld and possibly conflicting.

To do that realistically, though, you'd have to have a newbie generator to replace dead NPC's with fresh meat. Otherwise you'd end up with a world with a very few, very tough NPC's. IOW, you're getting into the whole living world can of worms which is an incredible amount of work to do well, and will only screw things up if *not* done extremely well.

What's more, you could fake it with a lot less work, using plain ol' scripting. Just set up triggers to kill off some NPC's and level up others, with a few new lines of dialogue added to the survivors so the player knows what happened (should he ask), once some conditions are met -- like T amount of game time past, quest Q completed, or level L reached. And to flesh it out, add a few "random" NPC-on-NPC or NPC-on-monster battles for the player to walk in on. Nothing you couldn't do with the Infinity Engine, no ornery and expensive AI needed.

 

[HotSnack]

A PnP simile is a bit off the mark. A pnp session is a constant improvisation -- DM is not just guiding the players through predefined checkpoints, he basically makes up the world and story on the fly. In a CRPG, however, the world is preset. Automatic scaling based on PC's stats is perhaps the lamest and most pathetic design element I've ever witnessed in the genre. It's neither realistic nor challenging or interesting in terms of gameplay. Dumbdown galore.

Well not always, after all a DM might just want to run you through a campaign he pulled out of a magazine/the internet/whatever, adjusting whatever he feels appropriate. Other than that I can agree with most of what you said.

Again going back to the assassin example I made earlier, gauging the character's strength could be a pretty difficult thing to do in a freeform game, in which case scaling can be used to adjust the encounter. I'm not suggesting that scaling will be done to the extant so that a combat-wimp or pro will get the same experience in terms of a challenge, rather a combat-wimp will find fighting the assassin to be one of the hardest thing he has ever done, while a pro will find it to be an enjoyable challenge. What I'm trying to say is that for forced fights, encounters should be adjusted so that it is not impossible for a combat-wimp to survive, and for pros to not just leisurely plough through. Something that can be hard to do in a freeform game if the assassin had a set level.

 

[Atrokkus]

IOW, you're getting into the whole living world can of worms which is an incredible amount of work to do well, and will only screw things up if *not* done extremely well.

Indeed. Again, I *would love* to see it, but I understnad full well that it's barely possible to do on a world-scale, at this point.

What's more, you could fake it with a lot less work, using plain ol' scripting. Just set up triggers to kill off some NPC's and level up others, with a few new lines of dialogue added to the survivors so the player knows what happened (should he ask), once some conditions are met -- like T amount of game time past, quest Q completed, or level L reached. And to flesh it out, add a few "random" NPC-on-NPC or NPC-on-monster battles for the player to walk in on. Nothing you couldn't do with the Infinity Engine, no ornery and expensive AI needed.

Yeah, that's a very good compromise.
For instance, a classic scenario: some non-mainquest-related town A (a quiet, small village) is at the risk of being attacked by the neighbouring bandit group. First, just some small raids -- killing a stray farmer on the roadside or something, while a major offensive is in the making. Player may not even know about it, unless he overhears the rumors or reaches the town on his own. Now, if they attack, the town is doomed for certain, *unless* the hero intervenes. And at this point, he may decide on which side he's on -- though I guess the reputation stat -- if it exists -- should kick in here and determine if bandits are aware of his goody-two-shoe nature, therefore being hostile right off the bat, or otherwise, be willing to have him by their side. Then, whenever the majority of either force is eliminated, "victory" is triggered, making this location either a big bandit encampment or a nearly desolated village.
Now, if bandits take over, they should get restocked and leveled up. Same goes for the villagers if they win (with players's help).

Such a scenario is quite easily scripted, though it is by all means much harder than implement a one-for-all scaling system, like Bethsoft did.

 

[zorba]

If I had to invent hell, it would be a level scaled experience. It reminds me of PS:T's Bloodwar... an eternal and pointless battle of matched forces.

So, to cut things short, I have decided against any kind of level scaling. I am not going to bother wasting my time on trying to catch my own tail. Instead, I just brainfucked myself into thinking that I have finished all level scaled games before starting. And you know what? I did. There, I'm done.

 

[Atrokkus]

what.

 

[Lumpy]

Level scaling isn't bad, since it deals with the problem that quests become boring after a certain level. But scaling everything to the player shouldn't be done. So here's a possible solution: quests don't scale until a certain level, then it stays at the player's level for 4 or 5 levels, then it stays a couple of levels below the player. So, while it won't be impossible at the beggining or a walk in the park at the end, it will still be relatively realistic.

 

[onerobot]

There's nothing wrong with using level scaling, it just fails when it's the only thing governing the difficulty. In fact, untill an rpg is made with a "living world" as stated above it's an absolute necessity, as it fills in where the gameplay fails to meet that ideal. Still, it should be regarded as a band-aid, and used as sparingly as possible. Failing to do so is a sign of poor design.

I always judge a game on a couple of factors. Assume that a believable, well realized gameworld scores a maximum of 100, and a game has two tools to get there: distance scaling (the good kind) and level scaling (the band-aid). To show how some games rank:

Darklands: Distance - 80, Level - 10, Total: 90
Morrowind: Distance - 75, Level - 5, Total: 80
Fallout: Distance - 70, Level - 25, Total: 95
Oblivion: Distance - 20, Level - 40, Total: 60

This shows (unless my judgement is really screwy) that while scaling is a bad thing, it's the total quality of the world that is more important. Fallout scores the highest, which is something that's ageed upon nearly everywhere (even here) but like it or not it used a lot of smoke and mirrors to get to that point.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Level scaling is stupid.

The only reason to have it is if you already messed up and made character advancement too fast/powerful.

The funny thing about all this level scaling bullshit is the old argument against turn based combat - What if you run across monsters that are much weaker than you? It's just too boring, that's why we need RAEL TYME ACSHUN!

So, they got the real time combat, and now they've decided to scale monster levels? Because some fights are just too hard or something? Or not hard enough?

 

[Rat Keeng]

Well it's a feeble attempt at making the game challenging for the uber players, those who like to max out everything, to then complain about Morrowind being way too easy and unchallenging.

Then Oblivion evens everything out according to the level of their character, and they complain about not getting stronger because everything scales along with their character's improvements.

I'd love to say the solution is for Bethesda to stop listening to powergaming fuckwits, but that's unlikely to happen, given the amount of sales said fuckwits bring in.

So not only do you end up with a system where it's near-impossible to find enemies far superior to you (even when they should be), you also end up with a system that, as you level up, ensures that every fight poses a challenge for the player, meaning no easy peasy rats, skeletons or scamps you can just brush aside, rather it's bears, liches and daedra lords all the way.

Maybe I should send my grade school essay on climaxes to Bethesda, it could probably help them in understanding the whole idea of building up to big events, rather than throwing them in your face at every step.

 

[Atrokkus]

There is no problem in making challenging gameplay.
Gothic 1/2 did that well enough. At least the first half of the game was challenging and intense: you didn't know what was around the corner, or lurking in the bushes... walking in the night through some wild forest was thrilling experience -- i remember my heart racing when i heard the wargs' growls. Now that's a good world design.

 

[Micmu]

Well it's a feeble attempt at making the game challenging for the uber players, those who like to max out everything, to then complain about Morrowind being way too easy and unchallenging.

Actually, as they said themselves, they did this for the other, much, much stupider reason.
Yes, they wanted to make all areas and quests accessible for everyone at any time.

Next logical step for Bethesda: pure FPS - no "balancing" problems. I bet my PC on it.

 

[Dhruin]

There's nothing inherently wrong with a little judicious scaling. Oblivion's problem is using it like a sledgehammer on everything.

The first two Gothic's used chapter changes to help with balance, so it's no surprise they need to make some small adjustments without chapters. I think they'll do fine (provided they have the time to finish properly).

 

[Crichton]

I rather like the way oblivion scales the little dungeons to match your character, it makes them a lot more fun than morrowind and avoids the extremes of piss-easy one-slash, one-orc late game gothic II combat as well as the early game "run-away" gothic II encounters.

I'd say there are too big problems with scaling in oblivion, one is that it's not consistant so animals/demons grow stronger faster than humanoids, leading to a late-game where humanoid demon foot-soldiers are no match for bears. This isn't purely a scaling problem; gothic II's animals are tough enough to crunch a player in metal armor early on, but pale before the might of a farmer with a sickle and a homespun shirt.

The other problem is that since everything's tied to character level rather than progress through the story, the story is incredibly poorly presented and there's nothing for weak character types to do to avoid getting stomped on (like grinding levels to become stronger).

I think the only rational solution is to banish progression to MMOs where people seem to enjoy it for its own sake. Though a possible alternative is what I've heard "Guild Wars" does, have a brief introductory progression period so people can get it out of their system and then get on with the rest of the game. Perhaps this could be like the introductory town in NWN2 or Fable or BG, you play a few scenes of your character's adolescence and then when he's grown, he ventures out into the world; no need for "levels".

 

[Azarkon]

I more or less abhor scaling. I understand the idea behind it: instead of having the player adapting to the game, the game adapts to the player. But while that's an oft praised idea in user interface theory, it's one area where application software and entertainment software just plainly disagree. Part of the joy of playing a non-linear game is having the choice to either tackle challenges before you're "supposed" to be able to or, alternatively, tackling them only after you're all pumped up. The former gives the player a feeling of accomplishment, while the latter makes him feel powerful. Take away that choice and you might as well make the game linear (at least as far as exploration goes), since the player will be "meeting his match" wherever he goes anyhow. Thus, scaling to me is fundamentally damaging to non-linear design.

I know that there's a contrary argument in which non-linearity is what scaling supposedly promotes ("I'm not forced to go down a specific path in order to experience the game as it's meant to be experienced!"), but inherent to that argument, imo, is the presumption of a "intended path" that defeats its claim of non-linearity. If you only want to play as the game was "meant" to be played, then imo you're not really looking for non-linearity - or at least, you're only looking for non-linearity of plot/story, and not of combat/exploration. Sure, you can explore dungeon XYZ at time 10 instead of time 50, but if scaling means that you're going to be facing monsters that are "balanced" to your level anyways, then what's the point? You've basically just switched to a different set of textures and models. This feeling is what I get out of Oblivion.

Now, I understand that Gothic 3 is going to use this feature in moderation in order to create a set of challenging boss fights, and this shows me that at the very least the G3 developers have better insight into game design than the Oblivion ones. Even so, on principle I still oppose that any scaling (in the sense of scaling to the player) is necessary. Sure, you don't want to spend weeks crafting boss fights that the player breezes through in few seconds due to having maxed out his character before pursuing the main storyline (and subsequently complaining that the game is too easy), but there are better ways of encouraging a player to tackle boss fights when they're still challenging that do not simultaneously take away the player's choice to not follow that path. The easiest feature, and one widely adopted by games of old that really *did* try to adapt to players' play styles, was to include an option for scaling/non-scaling, which doesn't require much - if any - extra work on the part of devs planning to have scaling in the first place. If Oblivion had had such a feature, instead of depending on community mods to accomplish the same thing, it would've been a far superior game.

 

[Azarkon]

I think the only rational solution is to banish progression to MMOs where people seem to enjoy it for its own sake. Though a possible alternative is what I've heard "Guild Wars" does, have a brief introductory progression period so people can get it out of their system and then get on with the rest of the game. Perhaps this could be like the introductory town in NWN2 or Fable or BG, you play a few scenes of your character's adolescence and then when he's grown, he ventures out into the world; no need for "levels".

This is complete idiocy, imo. A RPG without progression loses its quintessential uniqueness and becomes either an adventure game, an action game, or a visual novel (if the game is talk-heavy). Might as well just go for the GTA style of games, then, which I most definitely will not term RPGs.

 

[Claw]

Scaling isn't really an issue imo. Many RPGs had scaling and it wasn't really a problem. I got to level twelve and there were more and stronger enemies abroad.
My issue is with how it's done. Boss fights ought to be static or at the least have a reasonable minimum cap. They are something you work towards. The equpiment scaling is abnominable, and the world changes in such an unnatural manner the way they implemented enemy scaling.
To add insult to injury, the setting (Demo.. I mean Deadra invasion) provided an ideal justification for making the world increasingly dangerous without resorting to cheesy mechanisms.
Bethesda reminds me of our politicians. Can they really manage to make the wrong decision every fucking time? Apparently so.