Personally I dislike it very much. It take feel of achievement. Why even bother with gaining experience if it makes enemies stronger?
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.
I despised it in World of Warcraft, but I actually loved it in The Witcher 3. How I feel about it seems to be at least somewhat related to whether it’s a singleplayer game or multiplayer. But it’s more complicated than that - in TW3 without scaling enabled the whole game becomes piss easy even on Death March so it’s kinda required for me to even enjoy the gameplay at all. There are still many ways to gain relative character power that exceeds the level scaling that eventually you just WILL overpower everything regardless.
Unless it’s basically broken I will play games on the highest difficulty possible, because that’s just more fun to me. It makes each game an epic saga and something that can grip my (limited) free time for many many months. Which is good, because I have issues picking up and putting down fictional universes, I get a bit too attached. I don’t get super emotional about it, I just really don’t have the mental energy to deeply engage with something new unless I’m truly done with the last big thing. (I am also neuro-non-standard, I have heard of a term for this, “inertia”)
CRPG doesn’t usually refer to MMOs or action rpgs. They’re referring to games that emulate a tabletop RPG but on a computer, which is where the C comes in. Generally they’re modeled after Dungeons and Dragons or similar systems, like Pathfinder.
There is always going to be some kind of level scaling in an RPG. I just think it’s a matter of what kind of scaling you’re using.
The kind that everything in the world just levels up when you level up fucking sucks. It completely kills any sense of power progression since your power level stays pretty much the same comparatively.
The kind where the enemies are just static levels based on where they are is better. You can still freely go to those areas, you just aren’t likely to survive until you actually get stronger. And as you get stronger, you can literally feel the power gains as areas you were getting your ass beat down in have the turn tables and you start beating their asses.
Scaling done by just creating a single archetype and then doing math to it also kinda sucks. It doesn’t ruin fun factors, or anything, it just seems lazy. Give the new enemy type it’s own stat block instead of just being another guy with bigger number. Unless your game has so many enemies that “same guy, bigger number” is inevitable, I don’t like it.
Cyberpunk 2077 used the static levels on launch, but changed to almost everything leveling with you in 2.0. I think the change actually worked better for the game, but it’s also done differently than every other game I’ve seen use that approach. Enemies gain stats much slower than V does, so a level 20 V still feels much more powerful than a level 1 V, but you also have the freedom to explore rather than having arbitrary beef gates making it nigh impossible to go to certain parts of the city before you’re supposed to.
On the other hand, I also love Morrowind’s painstakingly hand-crafted world with static enemies and hand-placed loot. In most games done that way, however, returning to lower level areas is typically a complete waste of time.
Ultimately, I think both systems can work if they’re done well, but everything leveling up is almost always done poorly, or at least worse than the average game with static levels.
A system I have thought of before is a hybrid where enemies have a target level and then their actual level is the average of your level and the target level. For instance, if an enemy’s target level is 20 and you’re level 1, they’ll be level 10. You probably won’t be able to do much to them. But when you get to level 10, they’ll be level 15, which you might be able to deal with if you’re good. You’ll eventually out-level them, but they’ll still be interesting to fight because when you’re at level 40 they’ll be at level 30. I only make the occasional mod, though, so I’ve never gotten to test if this actually is fun.
Fallout 4 has the hybrid method, and still doesn’t get it right 😮💨
It scales enemies as it has since Oblivion, but also scales them differently based on how far away from Sanctuary they are spawned. Everything on the southern and eastern side of the map are always gonna be stronger than the player by some degree, while everything close to the starting point is weak, even when it’s spawning a stronger variant due to player level.
But to be fair, I don’t even see FO4 as an RPG. It’s a FPS with minimal RPG elements. So I tend to strip the scaling entirely with mods to make it so humans (including the PC) die quickly and only the big, beefy mutants (super mutants, deathclaws, etc) are bullet sponges.
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.
Correctly done level scaling should be optional. Like in Dark Souls 2, after you defeat a boss of an area, you can use a special consumable to increase the difficulty of that area to NG+. And it’s stackable, too. That was one of DS2 unique mechanics I’m actually sad they didn’t add in DS3 and Elden Ring, because sometimes I don’t want to restart the whole playthrough in NG+.
Level scaling is usually used to make development easier, so making it optional would require the extra work to come up with appropriate enemy strength and the eoptional scaling effect on top.
