Nothing worse in an RPG than building yourself up into an unstoppable beast only for every stick brandishing bandit and feral dog to be juiced up to the eyeballs when you fight them, taking your god strength blows to the face with not even a flinch.
When you have a leveling system and everything in the world levels up along side you there may as well not be a leveling system at all. Devs do it when they want to say they have a leveling system but are too lazy to make it work correctly.
It makes sense for things to level in an open world game where someone could encounter an area at level 1 or 10. In order to provide a reasonable challenge for the player coming to that area. What oblivion did wrong is it was far too global and there weren’t sensible caps and floors on areas.
Or you just let players get their face smashed in by a high level enemy when they trespass somewhere they shouldn’t so they learn that they’re not ready to face that challenge yet. You also craft a world that gently guides them in a viable direction to level up to meet that challenge, ideally with multiple options to pursue.
Terraria technically has scaling (actually just three tiers) but it works fine. Your gear generally upgrades much faster than the scaling enemies. The new enemies are the real obstacle which feels better. I’ve never noticed old enemies becoming a problem and by the end game your ability to clear whatever random enemies stands in your way is trivial
Nothing worse in an RPG than building yourself up into an unstoppable beast only for every stick brandishing bandit and feral dog to be juiced up to the eyeballs when you fight them, taking your god strength blows to the face with not even a flinch.
When you have a leveling system and everything in the world levels up along side you there may as well not be a leveling system at all. Devs do it when they want to say they have a leveling system but are too lazy to make it work correctly.
It makes sense for things to level in an open world game where someone could encounter an area at level 1 or 10. In order to provide a reasonable challenge for the player coming to that area. What oblivion did wrong is it was far too global and there weren’t sensible caps and floors on areas.
Or you just let players get their face smashed in by a high level enemy when they trespass somewhere they shouldn’t so they learn that they’re not ready to face that challenge yet. You also craft a world that gently guides them in a viable direction to level up to meet that challenge, ideally with multiple options to pursue.
Wasn’t morrowind like that? There’s nothing wrong with going somewhere and going “oh I shouldn’t be here. I’ll come back later.”
New Vegas as well. Try and take a shortcut to New Vegas instead of going the long way? Here, have some cazadors and deathclaws lmao
Terraria technically has scaling (actually just three tiers) but it works fine. Your gear generally upgrades much faster than the scaling enemies. The new enemies are the real obstacle which feels better. I’ve never noticed old enemies becoming a problem and by the end game your ability to clear whatever random enemies stands in your way is trivial