How grindy am you?

I think WoW had the right idea by making bosses have armor and hit modifers scale to 3 levels above the raid. Just apply the same concept to key battles or situations in any RPG and you have a solution. It’s when you scale rats and bears and kobolds that scaling becomes stupid.

Gus,

While a lot of what you say is true, isn’t that really more a criticism of non-linearity in RPG design? In any other game - let’s say God of War - if you do Random Side Objectives A and B but not C and J, you’re probably going to end up with some incrementally better crap with which to have your major plot fight, but the amount of variance from the average for character power is relatively well-known and I don’t remember a lot of fights, even in games that allowed you to develop your character, where the boss’s abilities and tactics were scaled to the upgrades you purchased. It seems to me like the problem is solved best by making the encounters very challenging for a competently assembled average party (whose composition can be determined from your test groups - just see what all those random dumbasses you’ve grabbed off the street do when you put them in front of the party creation screen) with no sidequesting and then allow any additional experience or material gained from those quests to make the fights easier.

BioWare has a unique problem in that they like to break their story up into separately navigable modules that you can do in any order. My advice to them on that end would be to stop that. Does anybody really even derive any benefit from that in the first place? Is Dragon Age better because I could have done the dwarves first instead of the mages? What are we gaining by putting in the amount of freedom that necessitates grind in your example?

To its credit, DA did a pretty good job with their system (other than some goofy dire wolf random encounters before they were patched out) because player character power came from increased spells and abilities rather than merely a percentage increase in stats and damage output.

It’s a criticism of badly implemented non-linearity.

I firmly believe that games are fun to the degree that they offer interesting decisions to the player. Strictly linear level design removes a whole set of decisions. Rigid character advancement also removes player decisions.

BioWare’s current approach of “modules” with no pre-requisites, so that you can play story elements in any order, is not interesting either. If it doesn’t matter which you do first, that’s not much of a decision.

Rather, a good nonlinear RPG design should allow you a variety of options of what to do next, but the order should matter. Some areas should be too difficult to do at the start of the game. The increasing difficulty fosters the sense of advancement, and adds an element where the player has to decide whether they’re up for a particular area yet, or whether they need to focus on easier tasks first.

Besides the sense of freedom, non-linear design avoids the problem of the player becoming stuck and frustrated. If there are other things to do, and the current task is too hard, they can choose to set it aside for now and do something else.

Star Control 2 is legendary because it did this very, very well. In more recent years, I think Fallout 3 is an excellent modern example. It does use opponent scaling, but in moderation. There are caps in both directions, so some areas are deadly for a new character, and starting areas retain the feel of starting areas late in the game, even if they do increase somewhat in difficulty.

Ultimately, scaling or not, the best solution is to provide more interesting content than you really expect the player to consume in a single playthrough. World of Warcraft does this. Fallout 3 does this. It’s a more expensive development process than linear design, where you expect the player to see everything the first time through, but overall it provides a more satisfying experience.

  • Gus

The OP doesn’t understand what most gamers mean by “grind.”