np NP Monday, Jun 10, 2019

[hkmaly 490]

http://egscomics.com/egsnp/fantasywasteland-28

Considering this is beginning quest which probably didn't required them to go too far away, I would find more logical if the skunk stopped levelling when they GOT the quest. But, maybe they expect the player will get lost on way to first quest?

It sounds like cheating on first hearing it, but it's actually no more cheating than how the levels are set in game which is NOT open world. And obviously necessary. And as long it's done in way people won't notice - which they WOULD if every boss required first seeing him, be defeated by him and then leveling - then I guess everything is ok. But I wouldn't like to be the one who is tuning the parameters ...

Hmmm ... did I played any game with this effect? ... did I played any open-world game? ... well, the minecraft clone, but that's TOO open and when I played it there were no enemies yet.

[ChronosCat 158]

This reminds me of Final Fantasy VIII, though the enemy leveling wasn't done as well as it apparently was in Skyrim. In FF8 the enemies didn't stop "training", and their levels were based the average strength of your entire party (both active and inactive). This made it possible to cheat the system by leaving most of your party untrained, but it also meant that if you trained everyone equally, you'd never gain a level advantage over the enemies. There were of course other ways of getting stronger, like better weapons and spells, but if your team was balanced, and you failed at getting the best weapons and spells and didn't properly optimize your stats, some of the late game bosses became next to impossible to beat.

My sister actually gave up on the game close to the end because she managed to make those bosses too strong for her to handle. (In fact, it was only thanks to looking up a walk-through to try to help her that I learned about this system.)

[Scotty 1,061]

6 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

This reminds me of Final Fantasy VIII, though the enemy leveling wasn't done as well as it apparently was in Skyrim. In FF8 the enemies didn't stop "training", and their levels were based the average strength of your entire party (both active and inactive). This made it possible to cheat the system by leaving most of your party untrained, but it also meant that if you trained everyone equally, you'd never gain a level advantage over the enemies. There were of course other ways of getting stronger, like better weapons and spells, but if your team was balanced, and you failed at getting the best weapons and spells and didn't properly optimize your stats, some of the late game bosses became next to impossible to beat.

FFVIII's junction system was such that the character's stats were augmented by the spells you junctioned to them, like Cure would augment health, Fire would augment attack, etc, if you get the Quezacotl Guardian Force early on and get it's "Card" ability you could use every random encounter to "Draw" magic from enemies then turn them into cards, you'd end the battle and get no experience, but you'd get AP for getting more abilities for your GF and Queza's "Mid-Mag RF" ability let you upgrade Cure and Fire into Cura and Fira which boosts stats even more and there's a "Hi-Mag RF" ability from another GF that upgrades Cura and Fira to Curaga and Firaga. So you could essentially max out your character's stats without leveling anyone, and it doesn't cause enemies to scale.

[ChronosCat 158]

Which is all well and good, but as far as I know from my sister's play-through and the walkthrough I read (I haven't played the game myself), they don't make it clear in the game that you would want to focus on raising your stats in that manner rather than bothering with traditional leveling. ...I'm actually still a bit frustrated about it on my sister's behalf...

...Come to think of it, I wonder if what Carol is saying here is actual "Fantasy Wastland" dialog to warn you about over-leveling? If so, that's a nice touch.

[Scotty 1,061]

3 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

Which is all well and good, but as far as I know from my sister's play-through and the walkthrough I read (I haven't played the game myself), they don't make it clear in the game that you would want to focus on raising your stats in that manner rather than bothering with traditional leveling. ...I'm actually still a bit frustrated about it on my sister's behalf...

Yeah, I initially didn't know that was possible until I read it on I think it was gamefaqs.

I also heard about a theory that enemy levels scaled with Squall's level so the trick was to kill him off and level everyone else.

Other Final Fantasy games were more straightforward, FFIII and V used the Job system where each character to be any "Job" and you'd basically be leveling those jobs as well as the character, and it can be grindy because I think there were like 20+ jobs and there were certain enemies that was easier to fight with a particular job so if you didn't have it leveled enough, you'd be in for a world of hurt. FFII had a weird leveling system where characters could basically do everything, but what they did determined whether certain stats increased or decreased, so if a character used physical attacks a lot and defended a lot, they'd get stat increase strength, HP and defense, but decrease agility, intelligence, wisdom and mana, while using black magic increase mana and intelligence, but decreased strength and HP, so you could find your party completely unbalanced for a boss fight.

FFIV I think was just a general level system, each character was a specific class with their own abilities and you could pretty much just grind to max level without any scaling issue.

FFVI was kind of a hybrid system, each character had their own special abilities that set them apart from each other but the Magicite system basically let them all learn every kind of magic available and most Espers gave a bonus stat increase (each esper gave a different stat bonus) at level up while the magicite was equipped.

FFVII was also similar to VI with Materia basically doing the same thing as Magicite, except characters could equip multiple pieces which has a "loadout" feel, the characters themselves didn't learn many of the abilities as the leveled, it was the materia that leveled and gained new improved abilities, and there were some that affected stats like HP, MP, attack, defence, and even changed certain other abilities, and because of how the materia worked, you could still find yourself underpowered in the late game if you didn't take the time to get the most out of it.

FFIX dealt with it by making the items you equip give you access to abilities, weapons would general give you attack/black/white magic abilities, and armor would give support and defense abilities, and each character had a limited number of AP to assign to those abilities, they get more as they level but it still end up being a juggling act in finding all the weapons and armor in the game, having all the characters equip each piece (if they're able to equip it) fight enemies until they permanently learn all the abilities the items offer, then swapping with new gear. Wash, rinse, repeat. The only real issue here is replacing gear too soon and not learning the abilities would make late game more difficult.

FFX had the sphere grid, and all the characters shared the grid which meant that all characters could potentially learn each other's abilities, and use each other's weapons and such, it also had a "tag team" feature in which you could swap out characters at any time during battle, the characters can at minimum, defend themselves, and get swapped back out for another character, and they'd still get experience for the fight, and leveling up gets you some spheres you can used to improve the characters, but there were some spheres that you had to find in order to unlock other regions of the grid to get access to more powerful abilities, or another character's abilities. I can't recall if there's any form of scaling involved, but if you didn't take the time to search everywhere, you might not find the spheres needed to get the better skills to help late game.

 

That's about all I can think of from my experience playing Final Fantasy games, I've played a bit of XI's and it's scaling was such that it forced you to group up with people pretty much from level 5 onward, and defeat made you lose experience, so if you did manage to get to level 10 solo, one death knocked you back to level 8 and gear had minimum level requirements so if you hit level 10 and replaced and sold your level 5 gear, then died, you're level 10 gear would be useless to you. and you'd basically be unable to fight without a serious handicap.

[ijuin 594]

FFII had a weird bug/feature where your stats leveled up even if you attacked yourself, which meant that if you could do so without one-hit KO'ing your characters, then the best way to train in anything was to ignore the enemies and just beat yourself up.

Anyway, having enemies automatically scale to your level kind of defeats the entire purpose of leveling up, since it makes it impractical if not impossible to gain an advantage over the enemies by leveling up.

[ChronosCat 158]

17 hours ago, ijuin said:

FFII had a weird bug/feature where your stats leveled up even if you attacked yourself, which meant that if you could do so without one-hit KO'ing your characters, then the best way to train in anything was to ignore the enemies and just beat yourself up.

Yeah, I took advantage of that when I played it, it was rather amusing.

17 hours ago, ijuin said:

Anyway, having enemies automatically scale to your level kind of defeats the entire purpose of leveling up, since it makes it impractical if not impossible to gain an advantage over the enemies by leveling up.

Exactly. If you want the enemies to always be roughly the same strength relative to you (other than your weapons/armor/magic/etc. and other stat boosts not directly linked to experience points), why use a leveling system at all? Plenty of games do without one.

[hkmaly 490]

21 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

17 hours ago, ijuin said:

Anyway, having enemies automatically scale to your level kind of defeats the entire purpose of leveling up, since it makes it impractical if not impossible to gain an advantage over the enemies by leveling up.

Exactly. If you want the enemies to always be roughly the same strength relative to you (other than your weapons/armor/magic/etc. and other stat boosts not directly linked to experience points), why use a leveling system at all? Plenty of games do without one.

The key word here is ALWAYS.

If the game scales enemy levels so they are ALWAYS roughly the same strength relative to you, it means big part of the levelling system was done needlessly ... or wrong. There may still be "interesting" parts like getting new abilities/spells at certain levels, but if your stats get bigger and stats of your enemies as well, it's pointless.

However, the example provided in comics and the commentary talks about enemies only "training" until you encounter them. That makes sense: even if you don't know about it, if the enemy will beat you, you can go level up, then return and have advantage due to levelling.

As I mentioned, it would work even better (but be more complicated) if it tracked your progress and stopped levelling the boss when you took the quest, BUT restarted it if you "get lost" and took too long to make any progress in it.

Or, alternatively, instead of scaling to your level the bosses could scale based on other quests you do. Basically, if, due to the open nature of the word, you can do quests A, B, C and D in any order you want, then doing quest C would make enemies in A,B and D stronger, based on assumption you either levelled doing C or you were so strong you didn't needed it.

On the other hand, there is even simpler way: scale the enemies to your level, but not 1:1. Say, specific boss will have level X + half your level. You are EXPECTED to take him out on level 2X ; if you get to him sooner, he will be stronger than you but not so much as if his level was fixed on 2X ; if you get to him later or do lot of levelling, he will be weaker than you but not so much as if his level was fixed on 2X.

See? Lot of options where levelling system and enemy scaling still makes sense together. It's just FF8 did it wrong.

 

[Scotty 1,061]

2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

The key word here is ALWAYS.

If the game scales enemy levels so they are ALWAYS roughly the same strength relative to you, it means big part of the levelling system was done needlessly ... or wrong. There may still be "interesting" parts like getting new abilities/spells at certain levels, but if your stats get bigger and stats of your enemies as well, it's pointless.

However, the example provided in comics and the commentary talks about enemies only "training" until you encounter them. That makes sense: even if you don't know about it, if the enemy will beat you, you can go level up, then return and have advantage due to levelling.

As I mentioned, it would work even better (but be more complicated) if it tracked your progress and stopped levelling the boss when you took the quest, BUT restarted it if you "get lost" and took too long to make any progress in it.

Or, alternatively, instead of scaling to your level the bosses could scale based on other quests you do. Basically, if, due to the open nature of the word, you can do quests A, B, C and D in any order you want, then doing quest C would make enemies in A,B and D stronger, based on assumption you either levelled doing C or you were so strong you didn't needed it.

On the other hand, there is even simpler way: scale the enemies to your level, but not 1:1. Say, specific boss will have level X + half your level. You are EXPECTED to take him out on level 2X ; if you get to him sooner, he will be stronger than you but not so much as if his level was fixed on 2X ; if you get to him later or do lot of levelling, he will be weaker than you but not so much as if his level was fixed on 2X.

See? Lot of options where levelling system and enemy scaling still makes sense together. It's just FF8 did it wrong.

 

Level scaling is really best suited for open world games where you're not obligated to go down a specific path. Skyrim has it's main questline, and I think it scales independently from everything else, but overall, if you decide to not dive into the main questline, you could go adventuring anywhere and enemies will be roughly scaled to you, and after you clear a cell (either a cave, fort, camp, etc) it will repopulate with new enemies and loot after a several in game days and then the next time you go, if you've leveled 5-6 times since the last time, they'll be appropriately equipped with new gear and stuff. It makes it so that it feels like the world is always changing, that new bandits or critters have moved in and are now causing trouble with villages and such.

[hkmaly 490]

51 minutes ago, Scotty said:

It makes it so that it feels like the world is always changing, that new bandits or critters have moved in and are now causing trouble with villages and such.

... that's quite depressing. I'm sure the villages would prefer if they would not have anyone causing trouble around for longer than few days.

[Scotty 1,061]

26 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

... that's quite depressing. I'm sure the villages would prefer if they would not have anyone causing trouble around for longer than few days.

Well, yeah, but these are dangerous times.

[hkmaly 490]

20 hours ago, Scotty said:

20 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... that's quite depressing. I'm sure the villages would prefer if they would not have anyone causing trouble around for longer than few days.

Well, yeah, but these are dangerous times.

Can't be THAT dangerous if the villagers are still alive.