Difficulty Scaling in Open World RPG's - Best methods?

[Penis Drager 2.0]

I want to sperg about "difficulty scaling." By that, I mean "how does a developer ensure their open world game remains challenging and fun as the player's stats improve?" There's two primary methods everyone has seen:
Level Scaling:
Random encounters get more difficult as the player levels up. So at level 1 you'll encounter brigands in tattered leather armor and rats or some shit while at level 100 you regularly encounter unobtanium-clad deathsquads riding dragons.
Pros: It ensures that, no matter where you are, you will always be faced with challenges theoretically appropriate to your skill level. It's a direct solution to the problem. "Player gets better; threats get harder."
Cons: It always feels unnatural/contrived, "why is everyone in the beginner's area suddenly dressed in adamantium?" It actively discourages specing into any non-combat skills lest you risk falling behind the difficulty curve. You don't really get much chance to "enjoy" being overpowered since everything gets overpowered with you.
Region Scaling:
Every region has a local difficulty which stays constant as you progress. You start our adventure in a nice, peaceful meadow where all the enemies do a pittance of damage while popping in two hits while your journey ends in the desolate hellscape where all the scary things live.
Pros: It definitely feels more natural, the world doesn't change just because you got more powerful. You potentially have more freedom to play around with unconventional builds. You get the opportunity to use your level 100 stats on level 1 enemies just to screw around if you feel like it.
Cons: It can discourage re-exploration of low-level areas; the world feels smaller when you don't feel the need to go to half of it. And doing this sort of scaling "well" can be a bit more mentally taxing as the developer needs to come up with ways to "lead" you to the right region for your level more organically than "You completed this mission, now go here" or else the entire plot can start to feel contrived.
An honorable mention can be made to Event Scaling where certain things the player does can increase global/local difficulty. Like you complete one side quest and now a rival faction is sending out troops to murder you or you progress the story and demons start to spawn everywhere. This can feel very organic and immersive, but comes with the risk of unwitting players basically fucking up their entire playthrough by doing the wrong mission too early and result in knowing players strategically avoiding certain quests because they know what's going to happen which can be immersion breaking.

Of course, these aren't mutually exclusive. Any combination can apply to a given game to varying degrees.
So what's best? Is there a scaling method I missed? How can the problems with each method be resolved? If you somehow found yourself seated at the table with some AAA game studio and were asked to solve "the difficulty question," what would you tell them? How much of a retarded faggot am I?

 

[The Last Stand]

Just scale enemies health while keeping yours constant. It's not fair, but there's money to be made.

 

[byuu]

Level scaling is just absolute cancer for RPGs.
The fuck is the point of even leveling up your character when I can go everywhere, kill everything with level 1 just as well as I can with level 100? Might as well make it an Ubisoft sandbox then.

Give me something to work towards to. Let me conquer areas that were instant death before, breeze through early areas that gave me a ton of problems at the beginning. And reward better players by letting them take on difficult areas sooner.
Make me feel like I actually made progress and my character grew.

 

[Stephanie Bustcakes]

Level scaling always felt pointless to me. I'm not actually getting any more powerful, it's just multiplying all the numbers in the game.

One solution to the problems on region scaling is to not make the player or regions increase in power so dramatically over the course of the game. If you start the game doing 10 damage per hit, you don't need to end the game doing 100,000 damage per hit. Changing this to be not so extreme would not only make lower level enemies not so laughably easy, but it feels more natural and realistic. Why would I now be able to slay the boss of the first dungeon with one hit just because I got a little bit more practice with a sword, or I have a breastplate made of dwarven steel instead of iron? Why do the level 1 townspeople shutter in terror at the name of the legendary ogre that lives in the nearby cave when they could have just called one of the level 10 guards from the next town over to kill it without breaking a sweat? The only downside to this is you have to have fewer upgrades or make each upgrade less of an improvement, but that has never stopped players before. People playing endgame content will grind for hours to get an item that gives them 1% higher dps.

 

[Pissmaster]

Just don't do it in the first place. Scale the enemies based on where you're going in the story and drop in stronger ones when you reach storyline events that have you retread. If you wander into the wrong end of town and get roflstomped, that's on you, but it also makes for a fun game where you can run in, try to grab some late-game stuff, and run back out without getting obliterated.

As for MMORPGs, I liked Guild Wars 2's thing where you'd get leveled up automatically when in higher-level areas, you just wouldn't have the appropriate skills and equipment. So you could still play with your friends, you'd just be gimped.

Just scale enemies health while keeping yours constant. It's not fair, but there's money to be made.

Scaling up health can veer you into the ever-dangerous bullet sponge territory. It won't be a good time if you end up spending several minutes a piece on boring early game enemies that don't do much more than basic attacks.

 

[The Last Stand]

Scaling up health can veer you into the ever-dangerous bullet sponge territory. It won't be a good time if you end up spending several minutes a piece on boring early game enemies that don't do much more than basic attacks.

Who cares? Coding is hard. Buy my game.

 

[A-Stump]

Capping the experience gained seems like the best. I was playing Pokemon Clover for the first time the other day and noticed how much more difficult it was compared to anything Pokemon related I'd played. It's because exp is capped, well one of the reasons.

 

[The Last Stand]

In all seriousness, I'd think it'd be better if AI was given more moves with combat with difficulty. I was going to say add more enemies on screen, but that's a cheap way to increase difficulty as well.

 

[Colon capital V]

Realm of the Mad God has it where it starts off easy in the center of the map but gets progressively more dangerous as you reach the ends of the world. There's also random events for you and every player to be teleported to "defeat" the Mad God himself and in turn gaining a helluva lot of experience in the process. Shit's pretty addicting despite the microtransaction.

 

[StacticShock]

I feel ya with this problem but simply there isn't a good way to add level scaling in a damn RPG.
something something could be that the enemies color palette swap and they get different skills that give more attacks per hit instead of a fully scaling the enemy system, keeping level brackets is also a good thing as a fucking rat shouldn't be as powerful as the giganigga the godkiller armor but making said rat throwing a spastic fit that makes him roll around and hit you multiple times could be funny, bandits and shieet same thing, get some nigga, make him bigger and make him hit more instead of harder daddy though the animator/artist won't like being given more work.

Risk of Rain 1 is a game where the more time you spend in it the stronger the enemies get to a point they will one shot you after a while if you forget the stacking hp item (around 89 minutes), risk of rain 2 is the same shit but you can't stack items to become a god and instakill them too because faggots complained about being able to do that on the first game.

Skyrim does level scaling but it has level brackets per parts of the region plus a dark soulsy thing on vanilla because armor cap which will make enemies always deal a certain % of damage to your health.

AND THEN THERE'S FUCKING OBLIVION GIVING DAEDRIC ARMOR TO FUCKING BANDITS

 

[Kheapathic]

Never cared for level scaling; because it can result in you being boned because you might focus on skinning or flower collecting. Meanwhile you're still running around in hard leather, while everything is decked out in adamantium and their eyes are now glowing red. Region/area is best, because you know your boundaries and what comes from trying to get too big for yourself.

I'm not sure if it's because I was young and didn't read everything, but I remember the original Saga Frontier on the PS1. One thing they don't tell you is that after you win X amount of battles, all enemies; randoms, bosses, etc all get a level up. And this will continue to happen the more fights you win. The problem is how the level up system works and you can easily make the enemies super-powered and you'll have to go all out and get a little lucky to get by everything. Another problem is money could be an issue, and while there was a way to get infinite money, you need to reach a certain amount to start the manipulation... and by the time you get there, enemies are insanely powered because fights drop very little money. The game literally rewards speed run strats, because you avoid most fights which means enemies are at their weakest, and I hate speedrunning/skipping everything in RPGs.

The counter to this is Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. They try to steer you to different regions by saying other regions are more difficult than others; but the counter-attack is busted to hell, if you have decent timing you can clear the highest difficulty region at your beginning level, because the combat system was poorly designed.

 

[Idiotron]

I don't play MMOs so fuck those.
In single player RPGs, part of the appeal to me is going back to areas that 10 hours ago were really difficult to get through and bullying the enemies.
It makes you appreciate all the grinding and leveling up you've done.
If all the enemies would level up with you, what's the fucking point of leveling up in the first place?

 

[Honored guest]

The best level scaling I've come across was from mods funnily enough, in particular the Enhanced edition mod for Witcher 3, and Requiem for Skyrim.

In The Witcher 3 mod the world was deleveled so a drowner at the starting zone is the same as a drowner found much later in the game. The mod makes up for this by having every creature in the game deadly. Skill is much more important than raw numbers, but you can get better gear, and as you level you can increase things and give yourself minor bonuses. It really added to the game because nothing sucks more than coming across a random quest or monster and seeing that its X levels above you so its currently not possible to complete.

In Requiem for Skyrim enemies were scaled based on what they are. Bandits are just normal guys so you can kill them relatively easily, and they can kill you just as easily. Magical or unnatural creatures are much more deadly, so undead, vampires, dwarven constructs, dragons, and falmer require a higher level, better equipment, and use of expensive consumables. I liked this method as it made the world a dangerous place, instead of a sandbox thats centered around you, and I found myself running away for many encounters that I wasn't equipped for.

Both methods require some thinking on the players' part, with the Witcher mod needing the player to "git gud" as they couldn't be carried by gear, and the Skyrim mod making the player grind/level up killing bandits before they can move on to killing stronger types of enemies. So its safe to say that such scaling will be regulated to niche indie games or mods for the foreseeable future.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

Regional level ranges with hand tuning for unique/special encounters. There're some games that allow you toggle level-scaling plus decide on how difficult the enemies are (even enable extra enemies or replace some with tougher variants).

Generic, global level-scaling is the laziest way a developer can handle this.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

I'm gonna vomit out more thoughts here:
As we've established, level scaling is ass. But if you are committed to it, ensuring every skill is combat relevant and scales well is key. One should be able to min/max just about any skillset and have it be viable. Focused on charisma? Expand on any sort of companion system where a sufficiently charasmatic guy can recruit a proper militia of disposable NPCs to do the fighting for him and/or allow him to use his gift for gab to dissway would-be attackers. Alchemy? Potions should be able to make your pansy-ass hero quite powerful in comparison to the enemies you'll be fighting. You just have to keep yourself stocked. There's something to be said about skills that are shit early on but become very powerful later being a legitimate gameplay mechanic, and you can have that. But the difficulty should maintain a "playable" level. Obviously, it shouldn't be 100% forgiving. If you fucked up your build, you fucked up your build. But the idea of going from bitch-ass nigger who's only skill is being able to get a slightly better deal on a weapon to becoming a master manipulator able to convince a squad of fully geared soldiers to go on a suicide mission and have that be a viable gameplay strategy sounds hilarious.
The problem to be solved here is "how do you make leveling up feel rewarding despite the increasing difficulty?"

Region scaling can be significantly improved through mindful use of event scaling. You complete a certain mission and it results in lower leveled areas becoming harder. Let's say you do some raid on an invading force's base and now that you killed their captain or something, a new invading force comes to port at the starting area, unlocking new missions and adding a new set of powerful enemies to face in what was a level one region.
Another potential idea is to toss a few high level enemies wandering around low level areas from the beginning. It's something that adds a level of anxiety in the early game and a challenge to come back to in the late game. Add a "titan" or two to every area and people will come back for the sense of accomplishment and maybe find some of the region's easter eggs that went overlooked at first glance.
The problem to be solved here is "how do you give people a reason to come back?"

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I hate level scaling. It's often either very arbitrary (no in-universe justification) and inconvenient when not warned to the player, and it makes leveling a pointless grind. A game should present increased challenge through different kinds of enemies, or more enemies, or enemies used in more challenging situations, or (gasp) removing player abilities/power to make them play more tactically.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Just make certain areas harder to survive in at low levels, but design it in such a way that it's still technically possible to survive anywhere. That's easier in an Action RPG, but a turn-based one would probably require RNG to survive tough areas.

I don't feel strongly about it, but level scaling isn't ideal. It feels like it renders your progression obsolete, or at least undermines it.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Event scaling can work really well when you do something like the apocalypse starting and now every thing is 50 levels higher.

The best open world game I played that did it good was Xenoblade X. There wasn't too much of power imbalance between the different regions, but they all had specific areas that were far more dangerous. The environment itself was big so trying to circumvent a very tough area was fun, and being able to go back and return there afterwards and kill the roadblock felt satisfying.

People forget that the point of an open world is exploration. Running away from impossible fights is just as valid as fighting them.

The problem to be solved here is "how do you give people a reason to come back?"

The best way is having entire cool areas being inaccessible until the player is good enough, and make good enough UI that the player will remember those areas exist.

 

[PFM]

I'm not really a gamer so I have no idea how well this'd work but just an idea I have; make disengaging enemies easier so that you can have the "hard dudes" in the "easy areas", you just don't fight them 'till you're ready.

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

I've been replaying Oblivion recently with the Ascension mod, and I feel that it tackles some of the issues with Oblivion's vanilla scaling pretty well. Bandits and the like aren't delving into ancient tombs, so they aren't getting artifact weapons and armor. You leveling up doesn't affect what unique item's stats should be, and instead are scaled on the difficulty in obtaining them (meaning no meta-gamey shit about leveling to a certain point before doing a specific quest for a specific item's "tier"). You level up more slowly, so that way you experience more of a level's scaled content before jumping to the next. So even if you made a class that's got a major skill in something like Mercantile, leveling it up a few times isn't going to have you fighting minotaur lords everywhere, which the mod also adjusts by allowing weaker enemies to still show up (and get stomped by you), but can appear in groups on occassion so it isn't a walk in the park.

It's not perfect, but it (and the attribute level-up carry-over mod) do a pretty good job at showing how Oblivion's scaling content can work alright, if it's just tweaked in a way that makes more sense.