Some of the old rpgs had great systems of not levelling up with you for example might and magic 9 there is a dungeon on the island at the beginning that if your low level team goes into they get killed off quickly as the enemy is high level.

I prefer this kind of system as you tend to avoid the areas or in some cases you want a challenge then go into these levels.

I hated Oblivions levelling up system a bandit with glass armour was just wrong.

Skyrim i found levelled better than Oblivion in fact love fighting a giant at lvl 5 for the fact you get to see the world from the air after 1 swipe.

It's actually quite the opposite. It would make more realistic approach, if the bear could rip your head off in leather and just as well in mithrill armour.

Depends how you look at it.

Not to mention Final Fantasy 8... if you avoid to ever level up, the last boss has 9,999 HP which is a one hit at that point.

but if you avoid to level up... you will not hit with 9,999 , right?

Chaining your stats with the drawn magic increases your stats much more than leveling so you can still get like 200-245 Attack(255 being the maximum) and easily hit for that amount.

Yes and no.

Torchlight is a bit odd in that it scales at two different rates, depending on whether you're pounding through the main story or taking on a side mission or map. I'm on my first play-through now and I've taken on a bunch of side missions and purchased several portal scrolls - or whatever the mechanism is - early on. That got me good loot and also leveled me independent of the main story. When I go back to the main story, the monsters there are much weaker than the same ones I encounter now on the side missions. As an example, Dragonkin in the main story I'm bumping off in a second or two; the same Dragonkin in the side maps are taking 2 or 3 times as long (assuming the same weapon and no spell use).

What's notable is the case of the wizard in Torchlight town who gives you missions to find certain ember samples. You find the stuff in the main story maps at one difficulty, and then he gives you a portal scroll to open a bonus map that plays at the other (in my case, harder) difficulty.

The loot follows those same two paths, so I'm selling everything I'm finding on the main story and taking some stuff from the side maps. On the side maps, I often find things that require another level or two before I can use them; on main missions, I'm able to use everything the moment I pick it up, and am noticing the level requirements are well below my actual level in nearly every case.

This is why I like Morrowind's approach. The reward is that you can see and feel your character getting more powerful. EVERY single mob in the world isn't training just as hard as you. You can get owned in a cave, level up, and then go back and get revenge. Its true advancement. When I play, I make notes... go back to this place with a grudge. There are pros and cons, but this is my preferred approach.

I'm replaying Neverwinter Nights rights now. The original campaign feels like it was balanced for every situation... but on the hard side. Playing a Rogue, combat is extremely difficult in places. I'm punished for putting my points into speechcraft, lock-picking, stealth, traps. etc. Its like the devs said, make this hard for a rogue, but make this next encounter hard for a warrior... that way we cover all of our bases. Well, since you can't control the idiot AI helpers... that is a very poor way to balance things. About half the time I feel like the game is telling me, "too bad, you should have picked a different class".

The other extreme is LOTRO... the MMO where auto-attacks from ANY class will win the day on landscape. They not only balanced the game for any class, skill set, and/or gear combination... they balanced the game for anyone with a pulse. While I like seeing the lore take a front seat... it really does add a boring tedium to the game at the extreme they chose.

I think the root of the problem stems from devs trying to force a playstyle on people (and again, this is why I like Morrowind). They want to prevent the edge cases from having it too easy, but if the edge cases want it easy, I say, let them. I think a best effort needs to be made on balancing, but I tire of the "tricks" to try and keep people on the "correct" path. Sure, in Morrowind, you can max everything... but its not the devs job to tell people they can't. Its their job to create a game worth playing. If people want to sink hours and hours into maxing the levelup modifiers and use skills outside of the "norm"... it means you made a good game that people want to keep playing.

Actually Morrowind does feature scaling, in most areas of the game, creatures appropriate to your level are spawned the first time you enter it.
So early on, you'll always fight a bunch of weak enemies, while when you're level 20 you're always fighting ogres, daedras and such. The monsters have static characteristics but which monsters you fight mostly depends on your level, although there are several areas with static enemies.

I dislike scaling, it kinda defeats the purpose of levelling.

In some J-RPGs like Final Fantasy 8 for instance, the ennemy level (especially bosses) would follow the level of your main protagonist (Squall). So a strategy would be to under develop this one particular character to the point of barely playing with him in the hopes that the bosses stay weak against your other members..
It's a pathetic resort to a pathetic system.


In Skyrim, you can set the difficulty WHILE in the game, so not much hindrance here. Plus you get new skills, etc... which adds a deeper level to the combats (other then simple health and damage increase).

I will agree that dealing "critical hits" in Borderlands tend to be so easy with certain weapons that its basicly the norm (leaving the skillcap pretty low, at least for any1 who's used to playing shooters). But again Borderlands class design is very much in your own hands, you do get talent points upon levelup, but the biggest thing about leveling up is the ability to use higher level weapons and class mods. Class mods and what weapons you choose + you class&talent tree will very much design your game for you.

If you design your charechter to increase shield and focus on that aspect, and then run around with a underdeveloped machine guns i could very much picture the enemy being "bullet sponges", if you ran around with, let's say a rocket launcher weak enemies would die a bunch in a hit with the right build, if you can't deal with the consequenses of your own charechter design, then play less gear and build focused games :)

^^^ this. Not to mention, as enemies get harder they also drop better loot (at least in all the RPGs I can think of), which also makes you stronger...personally I never found the game getting harder to be a problem

It's the games that are impossible from the outset that I have a problem with. At the very least give me a tutorial or one push over mission before you start beating me to death.

Have you played TwoWorlds I perhaps?
Following this discussion I just remembered the situation where I was mauled to death by a bear at the beginning, while a couple of levels later the bear is just fireball's barbecue main dish.

The Glass Amour Bandits in Oblivion where weird, although I like the approach that the opponent's equipment scaled as well.
It's rather stupid having a veteran Goblin Ubercommander LVL30+ wearing the same leather strips he wore when was level 3
The player oriented level scaling also makes your grinding effort more effective. In Oblivion you finally found reason to visit the area again, not for stupid looking glass-armour but rather for the loot.

In Sacred monster don't scale (as far as I know) I you can just waltz through them at some point. They don't give experience, they don't drop anything useful as loot, they just are a nuisance.

I think the main problem isn't leveling or level scaling, it's rather keeping the fights interesting, something that Skyrim is pretty successful at.
As the OP stated, fights that take longer, the higher level you are probably fail at being interesting. Another reference would be Inquisitor where there is no level scaling and the fights are simply a quite bothersome affair.