Personally I dislike it very much. It take feel of achievement. Why even bother with gaining experience if it makes enemies stronger?
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Level scaling is never fun and never will be, I think. There is no progression if your fights with early enemies are just as hard as they were 50h ago.
You could probably design around that by providing in-depth build options such that optimized builds outscale other entities of the same level. Later game enemies themselves would be optimized better and better. But that’s really hard and I’ve never seen it done. Why even provide a dynamic build for each enemy with each level if you could just have a normal non-scaling progression?
These systems often lead to me avoiding combat altogether. While not exactly a crpg, Oblivion was more fun to me without ever leveling up (which was optional, but made fights kinda pointless).
Don’t know about CRPGs in particular, one way or the other. But in general I agree with you op.
If you level up, and it means your stats go up and all your enemies level up and stay at the same balance with you, it’s pointless. It still affords a moment of happiness ‘cool I levelled up’, but in a much less satisfying way.
The point of level up early in RPG video games was, to my knowledge, so that any one with time and patience could beat a game regardless of skill. The idea of level scaling is almost the exact opposite, to remove the advantage of levelling. They cancel out and both player level and enemy level should be removed if that’s happening.
That’s assuming a 1:1 unversal scaling though, which is rarely the case. In the details it can be tuned to something worthwhile - which enemies scale, how much they scale, etc.
Still, my thought is when games want level scaling, they should consider why. If you want players not to overpower enemies via stats, maybe get rid of the stats (or don’t change them on lvl up). Levels can still augment your player with new spells, unique abilities, or more options. Or maybe more carefully consider the placement of enemies and what their default level and stats are set at. Or maybe consider a lower level cap, or a lower range of stat values.
The possibilities are wide open, but level scaling done poorly can make level ups feel like a punishment.
Leveling systems come from pen and paper D&D, which was inspired from wargames where units gain experience.
I think the place they are getting the bit about patience from is specifically dragon quest. Where the devs intentionally positioned it in opposition to other games of the time that required you to get good so to speak.
I read an interview a few years ago, I think with Yuji Horii about the design in dragon quest being set up specifically so that by sinking time in you would eventually overpower everything and progress, even if you never improved at the game mechanics. I couldn’t easily find it again when I looked to link it but maybe I will be able to later today.
Yep, that is indeed what I was thinking of (though I don’t have a link handy either).
Didn’t mean to imply that’s where experience levels were invented. The clarification is appreciated though.
And even thought I was alluding to that DQ comment, I’m sure it wasn’t the first game to adapt experience levels, and across the board making things easier wasn’t always the impetus.
Consider me a psycho with a hot take, but I have always preferred games that mix the enemy difficulties around in a zone. Something like Ark where, sure, level 3 Dodos spawn on the starting beaches, but a level 70 Spino can spawn not far away and you have to be sure to skirt it lest you become a healthy snack. The steady progression of “zone difficulty” has always bugged me a bit because it is just so far off from realistic. Sure, close to a settlement there would be culling of particularly dangerous creatures, but some of them would still exist (if the settlement is being responsible). And yeah, as you get farther into the wilds those sorts of cullings would fall off rapidly, but to say that there would be areas where there are no easy monsters or no hard monsters, even in the wilds, is just not accurate.
Also, you get the same feeling of accomplishment, sometimes more, when you have died to hard monsters in starting areas a bunch of times then learned to skirt aggro properly, but then suddenly you come back after being out for a while and utterly decimate them. Just feels so good.
What CRPGs have level scaling? I think almost every CRPG that I played doesn’t have any level scaling.
The Elder Scrolls, infamously. Since they are open-world games, they use heavy level scaling so you can explore wherever you want from the very beginning.
It was alright in Morrowind. There, your level just controlled which enemies appeared, so you wouldn’t encounter high-tier daedra in the overworld until your level was in the teens and you actually stood a chance.
Oblivion utterly fucked it up by having everything scale to your level. You could revisit the starting area and a normal bandit would be wearing a full set of magical heavy plate worth tens of thousands of gold while demanding you hand over twenty coins to pass. Combine that with a weird player leveling system that punished you for picking non-combat skills or leveling up as soon as you could, and people loathed Oblivion’s leveling mechanics.
Skyrim’s scaling was somewhere in the middle, which lead to combat being inoffensively bland the whole way through.
TES is CRPG? I always consider it more of an ARPG
It’s in a weird halfway position, though it’s less cRPG and more action RPG with each iteration. The character creation in Daggerfall wouldn’t be out of place in a tabletop game.
Fair enough, morrowind had some things of a CRPG like a chance of miss your hit, both TES and Fallout became less CRPG
Something that’s being heavily overlooked in this thread is the difference between a CRPG and an RPG/ARPG. I’m not sure which one OP is referring to, but if you want an easy guide, Fallout 1-2 are CRPGs, Fallouts 3-4 are not. Skyrim, the Witcher, latter Assassin’s Creed games, Elden Ring, etc are not CRPGS. Games like Divinity Original Sin 1-2, Baldurs Gate 3, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder, etc are CRPGS
I’m not sure I agree.
Claiming that Skyrim is not a Computer Role Playing Game requires some supporting reasoning.
Something like the Berlin Interpretation might help but as it is we don’t know which features you use feel qualify/disqualify a title for inclusion.
A CRPG is the video game sister-genre of the table top role playing game.
“Computer Role Playing Game” doesn’t mean “A Role Playing Game that’s on the Computer”, the word computer is used here specifically to distinguish it from tabletop, meaning it’s intrinsically tied to tabletop RPGs.
So if a game plays with very similar mechanics to a tabletop rpg (Turn based, tile or distance based movement, top down or isometric views, unique player-created characters, plus the other hallmarks of the greater RPG genre), then you can call it a CRPG. Games like XCom are closer to being CRPGs than the likes of Skyrim, though it wouldn’t itself qualify because it’s not an RPG.
Games like Skyrim are well established in the “Action RPG” genre which is intentionally distinct from the CRPG genre so the burden of supportive evidence and reasoning would really be on you to try and make the claim that Skyrim is a CRPG.
Wikipedias list of video game genres has a brief distinction explanation. The most important being turn-based vs real time combat.
Thanks for presenting your rational, its well reasoned within the definitions you give.
However the definitions might not be as universality accepted as we might like, for example this presents CRPG as synonymous with “role-playing video game” with ARPGs, TRPGs, MMORPGs, etc as subgenres.
The distinction is very much universally accepted. The reason CRPG is used synonymously with RPG in that article title is because CRPGs were at the time of their inception what an RPG was. You can tell by reading the introductory description and the characteristics section that what is being described and named are tabletop-like CRPGs specifically.
You’ll notice that in the section that defines ARPGs that they’re referred to as a hybrid genre. They are related to CRPGs which is why they’re on the page, as they borrow elements from CRPGs but they are their own genre that by that hybridization are distinct from the traditional CRPG.
This is reinforced by the Wiki link I sent you which is a more cut and dried succinct list of game genres, where it lists ARPGs and CRPGs as two distinct genres.
