Jun 1 JDN 2460828

This week I’m going to take a break from serious content and talk about something a little more fun and frivolous: Video games.

One of my pet peeves about a lot of video games, especially open-world games, is level scaling: As your character levels up and becomes stronger, enemies also become stronger, and so the effects basically cancel out. It’s kinda like inflation: Your wage goes up, but so do the prices, so you feel no change.

This became particularly salient for me when Oblivion Remastered was released, because Oblivion has some of the most egregious level scaling I’ve ever seen in a game. (Skyrim also has level scaling, but it’s not nearly as bad.)

This bothers me for several reasons:

• It’s frustrating for players, and kinda defeats the point of leveling up: You put in all this effort to make your character stronger, and then your enemies just get stronger too, and it makes no difference.
• It’s unrealistic and hurts immersion: Even if you are the chosen one, the world shouldn’t revolve around you this much. The undead who lay undisturbed in their tombs for centuries shouldn’t get more powerful over a month just because you did. The dragons laying waste to the countryside shouldn’t be weaker just because you are.
• It creates incentives to metagame in strange ways: You sometimes want to avoid leveling up because it would make your enemies stronger. (This is especially true in Oblivion, because you can improve your skills without leveling up if you simply never sleep—and it’s actually strategically beneficial to do so. The easiest path to victory in Oblivion is to be a level-1 insomniac through the entire game.)
• It’s a lazy solution: Rather than find a good way to maintain a constant sense of challenge throughout the game, they just have the hit points and damage automatically adjust.
• If items are also leveled, it creates even worse incentives: You don’t want to go collect that ancient magical artifact yet, because if you wait a few levels, it will somehow be more powerful. (Oblivion does this, and I hated it so much I installed a mod that made it go away.)

I do appreciate the need to maintain a constant sense of challenge: You don’t want the early game to be absurdly difficult and the late game to be absurdly easy. But I have a proposal for how that could be achieved without level scaling:

• Each type of enemy always has approximately the same level, so there are no surprises when encountering familiar enemies.
• Make it possible to avoid or escape most fights, so that if you find yourself outmatched, you can flee and live to fight another day.
• Make tactics and advantages matter more, so that a well-prepared player can defeat higher-level enemies, and a player who is ambushed by lower-level enemies is still in danger.
• When it is necessary to face more difficult enemies at lower levels, provide allies to support the player or add other advantages.
• When it is necessary to face easier enemies at higher levels, make them more numerous or add other disadvantages.
• When quests would have time limits in the story, give them actual time limits in the game, and consequences for failure. None of this “you arrived just in time!” regardless of whether you went straight there or waited 10 days. This way, quests with easy enemies can still be challenging, because you are on a time limit. (Conversely, if you want players to be able to wait as long as they need to, make that make sense in the story.)
• As the player levels up, they should change what kind of challenges they take on. The escaped prisoner with only a rusty dagger and the clothes on their back shouldn’t be facing dragons or demons, and the chosen one savior of the world whose sword and armor were forced from dragonbone shouldn’t have any trouble with a gang of bandits.

The last one is very important, so let me elaborate further by offering an example of how progression could—and in my view, should—have worked in Oblivion:

1. At very low levels, you should mostly be avoiding combat. You can earn money and experience by doing odd jobs in towns or running errands—or by engaging in pickpocketing and burglary. You could hunt deer, because they don’t really fight back. You can maybe defend yourself against wolves or goblins, but only if you really need to.
2. Then, once you have started improving your combat abilities, you can start taking on easier enemies: Goblins are now no problem, and you can go out hunting for wolves, bears or sabre cats. If you encounter Mythic Dawn cultists, you hope you’re in a city, so that the guards can save you; otherwise, you’d better run.
3. After that, you can start escorting merchant caravans and taking on bandits.
4. As you get to moderate levels, you can start facing down Mythic Dawn cultists even when the guards aren’t there to protect you.
5. Then, you can start facing magical creatures, like trolls and minotaurs.
6. Then, you can start exploring ancient ruins and facing undead.
7. Then, once you are getting quite strong, you can fight mages and necromancers.
8. Finally, once you very powerful, you can finally travel through the Oblivion Gates to the Deadlands and face the Daedra. (This is basically travelling to Hell to fight demons.)

Notice how this still provides a steady progression of difficulty and reasonably constant challenge, but it doesn’t require any enemies to scale with you. Goblins are always weak, Daedra are always strong.

Moreover, I think it would be much more satisfying progression for players: As their character grows more powerful, they can take on foes that they couldn’t before, and enemies that were once difficult become easy.

It does mean that players can’t just do literally anything in any order; but there’s still lots of flexibility in the open world, because there are many different places you can go with various quests to do at any given level of difficulty. (And there should generally be this option when being offered a quest: “I’m not ready for that yet, but I’ll come back later.”)

It might mean that the main quest is too difficult to do without doing some side quests first; but if players want to go through quickly, let them lower the difficulty settings, rather than effectively forcing that on them with level scaling. Moreover, if players want to speedrun higher difficulties by facing opponents that by all rights they should have no hope against, that could be a very compelling challenge—and give them some serious bragging rights if they succeed!

Conversely, if players feel overleveled for a quest they want to do, let them raise the difficulty settings, rather than forcing that on them too. And sometimes being overleveled can be fun; you feel powerful and dangerous.

I would also be all right with making level scaling optional: If some players like to play that way, okay, let them do that. But don’t make us all play that way. (Wartales does this, but in kind of a weird way; if you turn off level scaling, it assigns a difficulty level to each region, which means that the same enemies in Drombach are much more dangerous than they would be in Tiltren. What I want is for quests and enemies to have fixed difficulty levels—not regions.)

Baldur’s Gate 3 did this well: there is absolutely no level scaling in the game. (It helps that Dungeons and Dragons 5E already has a system where proper preparation can allow you to defeat enemies substantially higher level than you are.) It’s not quite as open-world, because there is a fairly clear progression of what order to do things in, at least until you reach Act 3; but if that’s the price we have to pay for no level scaling, I’m willing to live with that.

You hear me, Bethesda? I want no level scaling in Elder Scrolls VI!