What games had the worst XP inflation?

[Wyrmlord]

Basically, which games rewarded the player excessively for not doing anything special or difficult?

Planescape: Torment comes to mind, where the player gains a dozen levels in a single go right at the end. It's been years since I ever played it, but I was still bummed by this feature. I felt like I wasted time trying to do all possible sidequests earler.

Checking GameBanshee, one sees that you get:

- 10,000 XP just for entering Curst
- 65,000 XP for killing slavers
- 150,000 XP for finding the will
- 43,750 XP for saving Kyse and killing thugs
- 287,500 XP for jailing two corrupt guards

That's way more than you got in the entire Upper Ward, a much larger and more wholly filled area. It's very strange.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's not strange at all. XP inflation discourages grinding. If everything you ever kill gives you 10% of the needed xp to gain a level, you can just grind the early shit forever and steamroll the rest. So instead, enemy (and quest) xp rewards scale up as the game goes on, to ensure that you're at approximately the right level without having to grind.

 

[Johannes]

If your motivation for doing those sidequests is just getting XP, isn't it kinda nice that you don't have to do them?

It's not strange at all. XP inflation discourages grinding. If everything you ever kill gives you 10% of the needed xp to gain a level, you can just grind the early shit forever and steamroll the rest. So instead, enemy (and quest) xp rewards scale up as the game goes on, to ensure that you're at approximately the right level without having to grind.

Yeah, only if you're stuck at a particular point because you built your characters stupidly and simply cannot proceed, you'll need to grind and do shit you don't like instead of going on with the mainquest.

 

[CorpseZeb]

Gothic 3 Forsaken Gods (CP flavour). Largely random XP for various things. 500 XP for killing a f... big troll or a even bigger dinosaur "beast" and 10 000 XP for bringing a twelve mana herbs for some Mage dude... (at the point in the game, when you have a hundreds of these in your pocket...)

Ps. To be fair, though, game is somewhat playable now, from start do the end, thanks to CP team hard work.

 

[Wyrmlord]

It's not strange at all. XP inflation discourages grinding. If everything you ever kill gives you 10% of the needed xp to gain a level, you can just grind the early shit forever and steamroll the rest. So instead, enemy (and quest) xp rewards scale up as the game goes on, to ensure that you're at approximately the right level without having to grind.

But a lot of these games had progressively higher XP required for the next level.

If you offer more XP just like that, then one wonders why they didn't keep it flat - same XP requirement for every level.

 

[Emily]

Gothic 3 Forsaken Gods (CP flavour). Largely random XP for various things. 500 XP for killing a f... big troll or a even bigger dinosaur "beast" and 10 000 XP for bringing a twelve mana herbs for some Mage dude... (at the point in the game, when you have a hundreds of these in your pocket...)

Ps. To be fair, though, game is somewhat playable now, from start do the end, thanks to CP team hard work.

original gothic 3 had balanced xp wtf
troll gave u 1000 exp
and turning ing quests usualy gave u 500 exp, some even less

 

[Oesophagus]

Every game where npcs "catch up" to your level. So kotor, DA, NWN2, etc. By coincidence, the same games have level scaling. It makes the whole idea of experience irrelevant.

Also, compare BG2 exp rewards to BG1. Fucking 6000 for learning a spell. Tons of it for doing mundane fetch quests, really no different than the ones you did in BG1. I know that that's because the DnD system required tons of xp to level up later in the game, but they should've adapted the game instead of just throwing xp at the player for every single little thing.

 

[Johannes]

Gothic 3 Forsaken Gods (CP flavour). Largely random XP for various things. 500 XP for killing a f... big troll or a even bigger dinosaur "beast" and 10 000 XP for bringing a twelve mana herbs for some Mage dude... (at the point in the game, when you have a hundreds of these in your pocket...)

Ps. To be fair, though, game is somewhat playable now, from start do the end, thanks to CP team hard work.

original gothic 3 had balanced xp wtf
troll gave u 1000 exp
and turning ing quests usualy gave u 500 exp, some even less

Haven't played any Gothic 3 version, but my hunch would be they wanted to encourage doing quests instead of grinding any random enemy you encounter, as was traditional to do in Gothic 1/2.

 

[Emily]

btw i just hate those games where u go from 10 hp to 1000000000000000
one of the things i really apritiate in AoD
just fucking make it belivable, that a master swrodsman can have maybe 60 hp, and epic swiging tech that can kill an oponent in one slice if it crits (50 percent for instance)
and regular guy ahve 10 hp, and regular swordsman have 20-30 etc
Games like kotor DA NWN are just fucking retarded, makse u wonder so what if there is 213412124 darkspawns if they are lv 1 they cant even hit u lol

 

[Oesophagus]

btw i just hate those games where u go from 10 hp to 1000000000000000

Yeah, this. I don't know when this started, whether it's an MMO thing, but it's just ridiculous when you think of the enormous gap between a lvl 5 char and a level 15 char.
I liked how Mount and Blade did it. You could put all your stats and skills in HP, but that would mean you can take a lot of damage and that's it, you're shit at everything else. And it didn't award hp/level, it relied solely on your stats.

 

[hoverdog]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

 

[Damned Registrations]

It's not strange at all. XP inflation discourages grinding. If everything you ever kill gives you 10% of the needed xp to gain a level, you can just grind the early shit forever and steamroll the rest. So instead, enemy (and quest) xp rewards scale up as the game goes on, to ensure that you're at approximately the right level without having to grind.

But a lot of these games had progressively higher XP required for the next level.

If you offer more XP just like that, then one wonders why they didn't keep it flat - same XP requirement for every level.

Thats part of the system.

Suppose you make a game, and in the first area the player should be level 1-3. In the second area they should be 4-6. In the third area They should be 7-10.

If you just need the same xp for every level, the player can grind past the level easily. And if they get to the next area too quickly, they'll take forever to catch up, because they aren't getting any more xp but need the same amount.

So for levels 1-3 you make the xp requirement 0,50,150. But for level 4-6 you make the xp required 1000, 2000, 3500. In the first area the quests and rewards give between 5 and 50 xp. In the second area everything jumps up massively to more like 200-2000 xp. So even if you spend ages in the first area, you won't find the second area too easy. But even if you breezed through the first area avoid a lot of quests/backtracking/combat and got less xp, even a single challenge in the second area will bring you up to the minimum level the area is designed for, instead of being stuck trying to play catchup.

Those exact numbers are uneven and hamfisted, but the principle is pretty obvious. Instead of scaling the content to the player's level, you scale the player's level to the content. It lets you control the level of challenge and balance without limiting the player's freedom too much.

 

[Johannes]

btw i just hate those games where u go from 10 hp to 1000000000000000

Yeah, this. I don't know when this started, whether it's an MMO thing, but it's just ridiculous when you think of the enormous gap between a lvl 5 char and a level 15 char.
I liked how Mount and Blade did it. You could put all your stats and skills in HP, but that would mean you can take a lot of damage and that's it, you're shit at everything else. And it didn't award hp/level, it relied solely on your stats.

It's way older phenomena than MMOs.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Fallout 2, PST.

 

[villain of the story]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

That's largely a problem of marketing/pitching the idea. HP isn't supposed to represent your "life force" or anything like that in the sense that a 100 HP character literally has more life juice to sustain him/her than a 10 HP character. In d20, it was supposed to be an easy and quick way to represent a character's experience and ability to brace himself or herself for the best outcome in being hurt, as opposed to calculating every time your character would do these actively every single time and thus burdening the game with numbers. So if you had 100 HP, it meant that even when a character scored a hit on you, you would have the conditioning to put up with more pain and keep functioning or position yourself in such ways to minimise an imminent blow.

Where it failed massively was (1) they made it depend unconditionally on Strength or Constitution or their analogues, completely forgoing other important factors as your character's agility or combat training or whatever to reduce damage / (2) not differentiate damage from weapons, beasts, magic and other effects and (3) inability to communicate the concept as different from Health Points / Lives concept in casual games. And everything went downhill from there.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

Hit points are just an abstraction to see how long someone will survive a fight.

Not how much physical injury they can withstand.

For this reason, in Fallout, there can be a person killed or severely injured with zero HP damage, and there can be a person withstanding high HP damage without actual injury.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

100 HP is still overdone, though. I like how it's done in Codex Martialis which was made by a western martial arts practitioner and a former army medic where HP progression is capped at 3xCon and there are possible quite brutal critical hits that are dependent on how much the opponents are invested in defence and offence during the attack.

 

[Johannes]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

That's largely a problem of marketing/pitching the idea. HP isn't supposed to represent your "life force" or anything like that in the sense that a 100 HP character literally has more life juice to sustain him/her than a 10 HP character. In d20, it was supposed to be an easy and quick way to represent a character's experience and ability to brace himself or herself for the best outcome in being hurt, as opposed to calculating every time your character would do these actively every single time and thus burdening the game with numbers. So if you had 100 HP, it meant that even when a character scored a hit on you, you would have the conditioning to put up with more pain and keep functioning or position yourself in such ways to minimise an imminent blow.

Where it failed massively was (1) they made it depend unconditionally on Strength or Constitution or their analogues, completely forgoing other important factors as your character's agility or combat training or whatever to reduce damage / (2) not differentiate damage from weapons, beasts, magic and other effects and (3) inability to communicate the concept as different from Health Points / Lives concept in casual games. And everything went downhill from there.

Due to there being also to-hit rolls, and damage resistances, saving throws vs. damage spells on top of that, it definitely FEELS like a stat of how many stabs to the face you can take.

 

[villain of the story]

I know and that's why it fails because despite the principle design, that's sadly what it is. Otherwise, those other things are either passive or external factors. To-Hit is binary. You either get hit or you do not. Saving throw is binary. Damage resistances are passive modifiers that have nothing to do with experience or whatever.

 

[Emily]

I know and that's why it fails because despite the principle design, that's sadly what it is. Otherwise, those other things are either passive or external factors. To-Hit is binary. You either get hit or you do not. Saving throw is binary. Damage resistances are passive modifiers that have nothing to do with experience or whatever.

i think hp in d20 is really a representation of how much stabs in the face u can get, and the reason why this is evident, armor provides not damage resistance, but provides AC which makes it more easy to evade... Which is just lol. So that means that if u get hit u get hit, and if u dont get hit, u evaded the bulk of the damage ( sword got stuck in your chain mail or something shitty like that ) ..
At least my reasoning

 

[deuxhero]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

Perhaps you could read the rules instead of hating a system because of rules you didn't actually read.

HP is maxed for PCs only at the first level only. Otherwise you roll the HD or take half.

Also warrior is an NPC only class and would never have its HD maxed at first level

A FIGHTER (which is actually a PC class) with 14 con has 12 HP (10+con mod) at first level, then 5+con mod at each level

 

[Excidium]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

Hit points are just an abstraction to see how long someone will survive a fight.

Not how much physical injury they can withstand.

For this reason, in Fallout, there can be a person killed or severely injured with zero HP damage, and there can be a person withstanding high HP damage without actual injury.

A crappy one at that. AC and HP inflation are two of the reasons I can't stand d20.

 

[Malakal]

Fallout wasnt that bad in this but Torment is a good example. So is BG2 compared to BG1 where even the easiest tasks got rewarded greatly.

Other than that I guess that any game with expanding exp table fits here. 3ED DnD somewhat changed that but 2ED is a perfect example.

 

[Wyrmlord]

Indeed. It's my biggest gripe with the d20 system, a level 1 warrior has 10 hp, while the same one on lvl10 suddenly has 100. Stupid as fuck.

Hit points are just an abstraction to see how long someone will survive a fight.

Not how much physical injury they can withstand.

For this reason, in Fallout, there can be a person killed or severely injured with zero HP damage, and there can be a person withstanding high HP damage without actual injury.

A crappy one at that. AC and HP inflation are two of the reasons I can't stand d20.

Heh, but I am sure you have played the late Wizardry games. It's more daunting there.

First you must obtain an attack roll high enough to surpass full body armour class.

Then successively you must obtain an attack roll high enough to surpass body part armour class.

Then you must actually do damage above the minimum threshold for damage. Otherwise, you'll do zero or one or two points of damage.

Fail at anyone of these steps and the attack does not succeed. Neither for you nor for the enemy. Early level battles involve both sides hitting at the air.

Don't get me wrong; I like those games, but the level 1-3 in Wizardry 6 is a nasty little affair.

 

[deuxhero]

Honestly, I'm completely fine with the BMX bandit being able to take 20 stabs to the face and walk away when he shares a universe with Angel Summoner. It doesn't really make BMX Bandit GOOD, but to complain about how it is "unrealistic" is stupid.