So I’m playing through Horizon Zero Dawn, and very quickly (like by level 15) stumbling into the same problem I had in the Witcher 3. Under the ordinary game rules, I am rapidly outleveling all of my quests.
I don’t want to bump up the difficulty.
What games are out there in this genre where just doing side quests and roaming the land killing things here and there doesn’t leave you 5 levels above the main quests and other quests you stumble across in the current zone?
It’s funny - that’s a pretty classic RPG problem that is now being ascribed to Open World Games, when in fact, open world games (like pretty much all games nowadays) just inherited it by providing RPG or RPG-lite elements.
I mean, GTA V doesn’t have this issue. Because it avoided the RPG stuff. I wonder if RDR2 will have it - somehow, I don’t think so.
…but I like outleveling things…
I’d suggest Kingdom Come: Deliverance if you’ve not already tried that one.
Both of the newest Assassin’s Creed games have enemy auto-leveling (It’s an option in Origins, and just part of the game in Odyssey). Of course, this brings in the opposite problem, where you never really feel like you’re getting stronger, because your enemies are always your approximate equal.
Yeah, I don’t love that either. But it might be better. I think the best way to feel like you are getting stronger is to have more options and skills available to you, and to be able to more easily kill certain enemies, while still having the actual quests and big bads themselves remain a challenge.
Like it makes sense that you would get far more effective at killing random mooks out in the wild, but as you get deeper into the meat of the main force you’re fighting, that you would be hitting their stronger guys at the same time you are getting stronger yourself.
Unless its pants sizes.
Well then you buy new pants. That’s just science.
You know, it’s kind of interesting, because it probably also says a bit about why people play these games.
I rarely have much interest in the story. I’m there for the actually fighting, shooting, and challenging gameplay elements of things. So it matters a lot to me if the game because a wet paper bag because of outleveling content and enemies.
Others, I think, are much more into the story and narration, which is pretty much unaffected. Dialogue trees don’t change simply because you’re 10 levels above where you’re supposed to be. So if you’re a story/narration guy, this does not matter nearly as much.
I do to.
I’m getting really frustrated with Odyssey right now, every time I level up it seems like the world does with me and it’s fucking maddening. Why even have levels and stats if every fight “feels” the same, technically?
I’m still relatively early in Odyssey, but it feels like it relies more on having new active skills to use as you level. Even if your opponent stays with you on raw numbers, it’s easier to defeat them if you’ve got four special moves you can fire off, as opposed to only having the one. However, given that a fair amount of those skills have their own levels that do nothing but increase the damage and/or crit chance, there are definitely diminishing returns.
What’s frustrating me most about the Odyssey autoleveling so far is when I find an enemy who is my level, but I can’t insta-kill them with an assassination. I don’t care if it’s a brute, elite, whatever: if I do the work to sneak up on a dude, it should be lights out.
I don’t have Odyssey, but I think when you level up, you put points into things, and you gain new abilities? I think that’s what’s supposed to change. So combat should feel different because of whatever you put points into.
Ugh. This is my most hated feature of any game. I just got accepted into Google’s Stream beta and have been enjoying my first few minutes in ancient Greece. I like that the enemies aren’t pushovers, but it will make me sad if I come back to Kephallonia 20 levels from now and find out that Cyclops’s goons have been working out the whole time I’ve been gone. It’s why I quit Oblivion and why Skyrim feels so bland to me.
I think the best way is actually to get more skilled as a player, e.g. Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, etc. You do earn some skills during those games, but what really makes the game get easier is that you get better at it. That feels like progression because you earn it. Horizon does this pretty well too.
GTA solves the problem by just having a butt-ton of different things to do in a wide variety of settings, and slowly unlocking your access to them through the narrative (rather than through an RPG-style skill-based system.)
Me too.
Me three
UnReal World… but I am cheating a bit, as it probably isn’t what you have in mind when speaking of an open world game.
What’s even worse than just outlevelling things is outright hitting a level cap when I explored 30% of the map and did 20% of the main quest. Hello unmodded Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
And what’s worse than even THAT, is everything levelling up with me so there is zero progression and zero reason to level-up in the first place. Hello Oblivion.
Seriously I have no idea why it is so hard to balance these games the way Gothic 2 was balanced.
Because most developers aren’t German sadists. :P
Not really.
When you level up you do indeed have an ability point to spend, but at least at level 15 I still haven’t “progressed further in the story” to be able to put a second point in almost anything meaningful, so most of my abilities are stuck at level and a few are on level 2, with everything I want to put points into gated behind story progress or level 16, which maybe is when you hit a big power shift, I can’t say. This has led to me spending “wide” and not “tall” so I have many abilities that are useful but not over powered by any means. I did this morning put a point in +30% more armor, so maybe that will help my survivability, but that’s the last thing I did before getting to work.
When you level up, you gain health and damage, and optionally if you pay the costs in materials and gold, you can upgrade your gear to match your level. That was fine early on but now it’s costing me like… 147 pelts to upgrde my armor from 14 to 15, so I’m not doing it and as such, I’m a little behind in some stats.
Enemies that were level 14 are now level 15, everything in the zone I’m in is level 15 despite the zone being (on the map) level 12-13. In fact when I hit level 13, that notation changed to 13-13 and remains 13-13, even though everything is now level 15 with me. Enemies that took several attacks and special moves to take down still take the exact same number of attacks and special moves to take down, so leveling up becomes meaningless - worse, if you can’t afford to upgrade your gear or buy/find new leveled gear, you’ll fall behind, it feels like.
I wonder if that’s a gameplay level thing (easy, normal, hard), because I’m not seeing that at all. If the zone is 13-13, and I’m 20, everyone there is 13.