>Easy” difficulty allows people to focus on the story rather than battles, while “Normal” provides a reasonable challenge for most players. In the newly added “Dynamic” difficulty, enemies grow stronger as your characters do - perfect for players who crave constant challenge.
>enemies scale within a level range set by the area they reside in, but have definite caps on their power
Good >enemies scale infinitely proportional to the player, always being stronger than them thus making getting stronger pointless or even detrimental
Bad
>enemies scale within a level range set by the area they reside in, but have definite caps on their power
No, this is still nad. Level scaling is bad even with a cap.
>I love the second one so much it's unreal.
It's one of the reasons why I couldn't play Ryza 3. What's the fucking point of engaging with the atelier crafting system if the game's going to punish you for making better, higher level shit?
I don't consider raising up the challenge a punishment. Mana Khemia 2 probably has my favorite atelier combat system of all time, but the entire game becomes piss easy if you dare to engage with alchemy, it's so disappointing.
It seems like a lose/lose either way. Either the game gets easier the more you play it, or the level system doesn't do anything, just giving the illusion of progress.
>enemies grow stronger as your characters do
That seems to imply character level, though, i.e. level scaling not performance in battle.
But the description in the pic makes it sound like adaptive difficulty, so I am getting mixed signals here.
When done right, yes. All enemies should have a range, so rats don't keep being a problem in the endgame and dragons don't feel weak early. That way you have some flexibility and the player won't feel obligated to grind or punished for doing all the side quests
i usually go with the difficulty the devs have optimized the game for. its dumb to play hard mode because it some games too tedious since all it does is increase health and damage of enemies
AAA devs optimize normal difficulty for 80 year old women and full body cripples. Picking anything less than hard for a modern console game is embarrassing
>embarrassing
Anything that bases its difficulty around bullet sponges is embarrassing.
And no life nerds who think this equals a challenge are pathetic.
You're an idiot. If the devs are shit at balancing, they're far more likely to just increase enemy damage and health on the harder difficulties and call it a day. Playing any AAA games on hard, with the assumption that it offers a more difficult but still well-balanced challenge, is retarded
It's more like you won't know whether a game is well balanced until you've played it for a while. So I always start on normal, and if I later want to replay the game I might go with hard if I think that would make the game more fun. Starting out on hard without prior knowledge makes no sense, as you said
dynamic is normal but if you are lvl 100, then everyone is level 100
it is aimed for you if you do too much sidecontent, get way too strong so the game doesnt feel like a breeze
>FF7R had great combat but was too easy
Hard mode should have been normal. Also i wish they had committed to remixing the boss ability's.
First boss does 2 tail lasers instead of 1 in hardmode. I like that system. But most of the bosses never change up their signature normal attacks. They never used it to its full potential.
Not in games like WoW where they have retards always squishing the levels/numbers and you end up with weird scaling issues like low level characters with absurdly high crit/haste/dodge chances or items that deal a disproportionate amount of damage.
>low level characters >leveling dungeon finder >lvl 15-25 characters absolutely destroy everything regardless of spec >as a low level healer any button could top someone's health >queue in as lvl 40+ healer >heals barely move party's health bar >offensive spells do no damage
This was early SL, is it still like this?
It depends on the games mechanics. Older RPGs lack the mechanics to do level scaling, thats why ff8 was kinda bad.
In ARPGs, then the rpg mechanics complement your action skills and you can make hard battles more fun that way. Basically, leveling up its not just increase your stats, but access to better equipment, more abilities, etc.
>Older RPGs lack the mechanics to do level scaling, thats why ff8 was kinda bad
?
I assume you mean that despite enemies leveling with you, you could outright obliterate everything in your path easily by abusing shit like limit breaks and junctions.
My point is that in older RPGs, when you level up its usually just putting higher stats on your character. You dont earn anything else from it.
In other RPGs, specially ARPG, leveling up doesnt just increase your stats, but lets you get access to new equipment, abilities, and get stronger in more ways than just stats. Thus, if the enemy and you both get more stats, you can still out manouver your opponents with other mechanics than just raw stats.
I dunno why but games like paper mario do scaling very well on a per level per area basis.
It goes from a skill to avoid damage early to just sponging weak enemies.
I think it's the numbers.
Depends on if it still means there's fodder enemies to break it up.
Honestly think cyberpunk of all games cracked it. Everything is your level with the rework but enemies are tiered based on if they are supposed to be a threat or not so even if everything is matching to say level 30 there's still shitty little dudes to power trip on and tougher guys who, in theory, put up bit more of a fight.
>level scaling
That shit should be purged with fire from anything and everything its in. Just look at vanilla Oblivion.
The only way to use level-scaling is in specific circumstance like a rival character or a group of characters/enemies that are meant to challenge player in a specific way (like talon company/regulators in Fallout 3 or mercenaries sent to kick player's ass in Skyrim). Issue with level scaling is that its so badly used by devs that they managed to bastardise it to hell and back. Lazy sods.
>enemy scaling means bloated stats, more damage more bullet sponge
miss me with that gay crap >enemy scaling means they will vary their combos, be more unpredictable, punish the player on mistakes more often, be more aggressive in general, block and properly defend more often
real shit
it depends, if the combat system is fun and the level scaling makes actually meaningful changes to enemies (ie. giving them better equipment, making them more "skilled"/use more advanced tactics in combat, alter their placement to make combat encounters more challenging) then yeah i'm all up for it. if it simply bumps up the numbers it's unnecessary and breaks the flow of the game.
Not at all. My most fond memories of gaming were playing Morrowind as a kid and grinding until my character was strong enough to go to the more difficult areas.
easy difficulty, rush through the game and move on. people who choose the highest difficulty need to justify the time spent in front of videogames, convincing themselves that they are good at something given that they lack skills in real life
fucking hate it with a passion. i remember when d4 got closer to release and everyone was mostly bitching about the lootbox and battlepass shit. while they were valid complaints, i knew for a fact that the level scaling was by far the biggest offender. didn't get the game solely for that.
No. >Level scaling
If enemies scale with you, then your sense of progression is diminished or maybe even outright gutted because it's much harder to compare your previous state to your current one if the same enemy dies by 10 hits on both occasions. >Dynamic difficulty system
If the difficulty shifts to accomodate the player in an ever-decreasing manner, then the player may not get better or learn things while playing. Which is fine if someone only wants to play casually, but for those who enjoys vidya by getting challanged won't be able to beat the same level in a platformer for example because the game decreased it's difficulty the moment you died.
Although none of the systems I mentioned above appeals to me, the objectively good game design would be to give the option for the player to choose how they want to play. Those who desires a challenge can opt out of the systems above and those who just wants to have a good time while watching youtube videos or whatever can use the options that suits them.
Depends on how it is done.
Diffiiculty should impact the AI of the enemies most of all.
Easy: Enemies charge straight at you
Medium: Enemies take cover and flank you
Hard: Generative AI analyzes your individual player behavior and adjusts the enemy AI to match and counter your personal playstyle.
If it's just more HP / Damage, resulting in damagge sponges and cheap 1-hit kill enemies, that is bullshit.
its SHIT
sometimes i wanna over level and break the game and get so incredibly strong
other times depending on the game id wanna do a challenge run where i DONT level up and beat the game being underpowered
you cant do any of these with level scaling
That wouldn't be level scaling, just adaptive difficulty. Two different things.
>Easy” difficulty allows people to focus on the story rather than battles, while “Normal” provides a reasonable challenge for most players. In the newly added “Dynamic” difficulty, enemies grow stronger as your characters do - perfect for players who crave constant challenge.
Ok? That's not based on your own level, though, just your performance in fights. How much damage you take, etc.
>enemies scale within a level range set by the area they reside in, but have definite caps on their power
Good
>enemies scale infinitely proportional to the player, always being stronger than them thus making getting stronger pointless or even detrimental
Bad
This
Remnant 2 had the latter and the whole game felt like shit because of it.
>enemies scale within a level range set by the area they reside in, but have definite caps on their power
No, this is still nad. Level scaling is bad even with a cap.
I love the second one so much it's unreal.
>I love the second one so much it's unreal.
It's one of the reasons why I couldn't play Ryza 3. What's the fucking point of engaging with the atelier crafting system if the game's going to punish you for making better, higher level shit?
I don't consider raising up the challenge a punishment. Mana Khemia 2 probably has my favorite atelier combat system of all time, but the entire game becomes piss easy if you dare to engage with alchemy, it's so disappointing.
It seems like a lose/lose either way. Either the game gets easier the more you play it, or the level system doesn't do anything, just giving the illusion of progress.
If done correctly (like RE4) it can be very good
Its usually trash
no i want to be able to oneshot people when ive earned it
>enemies grow stronger as your characters do
That seems to imply character level, though, i.e. level scaling not performance in battle.
But the description in the pic makes it sound like adaptive difficulty, so I am getting mixed signals here.
they already confirmed is not adaptive difficulty. Its aimed for those who do side content and dont want to steamroll the rest of the game.
Meant for
When done right, yes. All enemies should have a range, so rats don't keep being a problem in the endgame and dragons don't feel weak early. That way you have some flexibility and the player won't feel obligated to grind or punished for doing all the side quests
i usually go with the difficulty the devs have optimized the game for. its dumb to play hard mode because it some games too tedious since all it does is increase health and damage of enemies
AAA devs optimize normal difficulty for 80 year old women and full body cripples. Picking anything less than hard for a modern console game is embarrassing
>embarrassing
Anything that bases its difficulty around bullet sponges is embarrassing.
And no life nerds who think this equals a challenge are pathetic.
You're an idiot. If the devs are shit at balancing, they're far more likely to just increase enemy damage and health on the harder difficulties and call it a day. Playing any AAA games on hard, with the assumption that it offers a more difficult but still well-balanced challenge, is retarded
It's more like you won't know whether a game is well balanced until you've played it for a while. So I always start on normal, and if I later want to replay the game I might go with hard if I think that would make the game more fun. Starting out on hard without prior knowledge makes no sense, as you said
They are based for making this optional as it pleases everyone this way.
does dynamic just adjust from easy>normal or is it possible for it to get harder than normal?
FF7R had great combat but was too easy
dynamic is normal but if you are lvl 100, then everyone is level 100
it is aimed for you if you do too much sidecontent, get way too strong so the game doesnt feel like a breeze
>FF7R had great combat but was too easy
Hard mode should have been normal. Also i wish they had committed to remixing the boss ability's.
First boss does 2 tail lasers instead of 1 in hardmode. I like that system. But most of the bosses never change up their signature normal attacks. They never used it to its full potential.
Not in games like WoW where they have retards always squishing the levels/numbers and you end up with weird scaling issues like low level characters with absurdly high crit/haste/dodge chances or items that deal a disproportionate amount of damage.
>low level characters
>leveling dungeon finder
>lvl 15-25 characters absolutely destroy everything regardless of spec
>as a low level healer any button could top someone's health
>queue in as lvl 40+ healer
>heals barely move party's health bar
>offensive spells do no damage
This was early SL, is it still like this?
if I never feel stronger and the entire game is an uphill struggle then what's the fucking point
It depends on the games mechanics. Older RPGs lack the mechanics to do level scaling, thats why ff8 was kinda bad.
In ARPGs, then the rpg mechanics complement your action skills and you can make hard battles more fun that way. Basically, leveling up its not just increase your stats, but access to better equipment, more abilities, etc.
>Older RPGs lack the mechanics to do level scaling, thats why ff8 was kinda bad
?
I assume you mean that despite enemies leveling with you, you could outright obliterate everything in your path easily by abusing shit like limit breaks and junctions.
My point is that in older RPGs, when you level up its usually just putting higher stats on your character. You dont earn anything else from it.
In other RPGs, specially ARPG, leveling up doesnt just increase your stats, but lets you get access to new equipment, abilities, and get stronger in more ways than just stats. Thus, if the enemy and you both get more stats, you can still out manouver your opponents with other mechanics than just raw stats.
>playing anal travesty 7: retard
I dunno why but games like paper mario do scaling very well on a per level per area basis.
It goes from a skill to avoid damage early to just sponging weak enemies.
I think it's the numbers.
Depends on if it still means there's fodder enemies to break it up.
Honestly think cyberpunk of all games cracked it. Everything is your level with the rework but enemies are tiered based on if they are supposed to be a threat or not so even if everything is matching to say level 30 there's still shitty little dudes to power trip on and tougher guys who, in theory, put up bit more of a fight.
>level scaling
That shit should be purged with fire from anything and everything its in. Just look at vanilla Oblivion.
The only way to use level-scaling is in specific circumstance like a rival character or a group of characters/enemies that are meant to challenge player in a specific way (like talon company/regulators in Fallout 3 or mercenaries sent to kick player's ass in Skyrim). Issue with level scaling is that its so badly used by devs that they managed to bastardise it to hell and back. Lazy sods.
Scaling is retarded. Why would I want sewer rats to be the same threat as extraplanetary gigademons?
Hate it.
>enemy scaling means bloated stats, more damage more bullet sponge
miss me with that gay crap
>enemy scaling means they will vary their combos, be more unpredictable, punish the player on mistakes more often, be more aggressive in general, block and properly defend more often
real shit
Based
Came to to say that God Hand has the best difficulty ever
it depends, if the combat system is fun and the level scaling makes actually meaningful changes to enemies (ie. giving them better equipment, making them more "skilled"/use more advanced tactics in combat, alter their placement to make combat encounters more challenging) then yeah i'm all up for it. if it simply bumps up the numbers it's unnecessary and breaks the flow of the game.
Not at all. My most fond memories of gaming were playing Morrowind as a kid and grinding until my character was strong enough to go to the more difficult areas.
easy difficulty, rush through the game and move on. people who choose the highest difficulty need to justify the time spent in front of videogames, convincing themselves that they are good at something given that they lack skills in real life
fucking hate it with a passion. i remember when d4 got closer to release and everyone was mostly bitching about the lootbox and battlepass shit. while they were valid complaints, i knew for a fact that the level scaling was by far the biggest offender. didn't get the game solely for that.
I'll play on Easy. Remake was already easy on Normal. I may as well just say fuck it and go full power fantasy.
No.
>Level scaling
If enemies scale with you, then your sense of progression is diminished or maybe even outright gutted because it's much harder to compare your previous state to your current one if the same enemy dies by 10 hits on both occasions.
>Dynamic difficulty system
If the difficulty shifts to accomodate the player in an ever-decreasing manner, then the player may not get better or learn things while playing. Which is fine if someone only wants to play casually, but for those who enjoys vidya by getting challanged won't be able to beat the same level in a platformer for example because the game decreased it's difficulty the moment you died.
Although none of the systems I mentioned above appeals to me, the objectively good game design would be to give the option for the player to choose how they want to play. Those who desires a challenge can opt out of the systems above and those who just wants to have a good time while watching youtube videos or whatever can use the options that suits them.
>Do you like level scaling in videogames?
No. I enjoy growing stronger than my foes in JRPGs, and level scaling kills that possibility entirely.
Depends on how it is done.
Diffiiculty should impact the AI of the enemies most of all.
Easy: Enemies charge straight at you
Medium: Enemies take cover and flank you
Hard: Generative AI analyzes your individual player behavior and adjusts the enemy AI to match and counter your personal playstyle.
If it's just more HP / Damage, resulting in damagge sponges and cheap 1-hit kill enemies, that is bullshit.
its SHIT
sometimes i wanna over level and break the game and get so incredibly strong
other times depending on the game id wanna do a challenge run where i DONT level up and beat the game being underpowered
you cant do any of these with level scaling