Recently I have been playing Torchlight. Since this is essentially my first ARPG, it was a bit of a mistake on my part to attempt to play it on hard; I have abandoned my second attempt after combat became too frustrating.

Torchlight has a standard leveling system in which as the player levels up and improves his stats, the monsters scale up to the level of the player. The interesting thing here is that as these games scale up, the balance changes. The key thing to notice here is that as the game scales up, the time required to kill a typical enemy increases.

The problem I encountered in Torchlight was that the game became harder when I leveled up. Leveling up is theoretically a reward, a means of enhancing the player's ability. But I found that leveling up was ultimately decreasing my ability to fight the monsters. I was given incentive to not level up.

This problem exists in other games of course.

Nethack - This is a command line roguelike game that my brother enjoys greatly. Because its level scaling has the same effect that I observed in Torchlight, some fans developed a strategy of running through the dungeon and avoiding leveling up as much as possible. Once again, a supposed reward is actually a punishment.

Borderlands - We have the basic problem of time to kill typical enemies going up. Your weapons don't become more accurate as you level up; the game just increases your nominal damage output in direct proportion to the size of your enemies. You are upgrading your weapons as your performance in combat becomes worse.

Skyrim - I haven't played this myself, but I heard somebody telling me that he invested too many points in peaceful skills like crafting. Enemies scaled up in proportion to his level, even though his higher level did not reflect a superior ability to engage enemies.

Some games have ways of avoiding this problem.

Pokemon - The level cap is 100. The game's balance can shift no more at that point.

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy - A French made Indie FPS/RPG. This game is designed such that character level can't replace player skill. The beginning assault rifle is one of the most powerful weapons in the game. Player attributes grow very gradually, but they will provide a definite and lasting advantage. Increasing your firepower or accuracy skill will decrease the time it takes to kill an enemy. Increasing your defense stats will increase the time it takes for enemies to kill you. You can become overpowered, but it will take a long time, and you will have earned it, for this game is slow to let up on its challenge. This is actually the game that convinced me that I could enjoy RPG's.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat - It calls itself an RPG so I guess it's legit. This game doesn't have any leveling at all. But you do upgrade your equipment. What I want readers to get is that you don't endlessly increase your weapon's damage per shot; you increase how efficiently you make those shots. While obsolescence is a thing, equipment from early-mid game can still be effective late game. Getting weapons that deal more damage has the drawback that ammunition for them is more scarce.

Runescape - I stopped playing this game around 2007. But what I would like to point out is that this game doesn't scale enemies up. If you want to test your skills against tougher enemies, then you go out and find tougher enemies. While this can technically be said of Borderlands, Runescape further avoids scaling issues by putting a level cap so that like Pokemon, the game's balance can stay stable and enemy size can stay reasonable. (Note: I am not saying that Runescape is a better game. I am just saying it avoids a critical design mistake.)

The purpose of leveling up in games is to provide a sense of growth. Increasing the time it takes to kill enemies as you level up does the opposite.

You might argue that scaling up true difficulty will push players to develop strategy. While that is true, you still have the problem that the game is discouraging what is supposed to be a reward.

Traditional leveling and scaling is a convention that is implemented without question by too many developers without actually thinking about the practical effects. So I implore you developers, don't do it anymore. Please.

Yes I agree in concept, I have often found enemies scaling in that way to ruin the game somewhat. I must admit however I don't remember it from Torchlight (possibly because I only went through the game once.)

It didn't bother me too much in Borderlands either, the actual level mechanic was secondary to me in finding the really cool guns.

In some games it does bother me though, I remember it irritating me in Final Fantasy 8 and especially in Oblivion.

I'm not reading all that...

LOL

Torchlight is actually quite well balanced.

What your analysis is missing is the use of appropriate weapons, armor and equipment upgrades. Leveling up by itself won't get you anywhere but into the maw of more powerful monsters. But, leveling up also does your character the favor of meeting new equipment level requirements.

If you manage your loot aggresively and well, you won't find the new monsters too hard. Nor will you find the new monsters taking longer to kill (except bosses). I quite enjoy Nethack as well. Here, the mechanic is very different, though. Leveling up is one of many things you manage in order to survive. In Nethack, the only goal is winning ("ascension" in the game's terminology). Whatever helps you win is good. If limiting your leveling helps you win, then that is good. But there is more than one strategy. And, there are several things in Nethack that can be a great help to winning, but are level-dependent.

Borderlands and Skyrim - I agree. They have severe leveling problems. That is one purpose that many games but not all employ leveling to achieve. There are other goals. For example, Skyrim uses player level to pace the introduction of new enemies into the gameworld, so that there are constantly new experiences for the player as they progress. There are other uses and purposes as well. You should. It's interesting. And you should read mine as well. It's even more interesting. :p

While I haven't played a lot of the games mentioned I can point out the Diablo, Gothic, and Torchlight games and say that they have to get harder or eventually the games becomes a joke. Why? Because you aren't just leveling up in terms of skill points, you are leveling up as a player, getting better at the controls, hotkeys, tactics, what spells to use and when, and more than that HOW to use those spells without stopping and trying to remember the right key.

If this helps we can use a different genre as an example. Take Freespace; the missions get harder as you progress but as you progress you also get better with the controls; you no longer need to think about launching a counter measure and then looking for the right button, you just do it. If the game doesn't get harder eventually there would be NO challenge at all. Same with racing games. The tracks need to get harder to meet you as you get better at the game.

Think about it, if you keep playing a game and you get better but the game doesn't get harder, where is the fun to be had?

IIRC, Torchlight doesn't actually feature any scaling. If it becomes harder to progress, it's just because enemies in lower levels of the dungeon are much stronger. You would have an even harder time if you didn't level up.

Every hack&slash I know of is that way, being pretty easy at the start so gamers can familiarize themselves with the controls and the way their character plays, then getting harder and harder, with the hardest part of the game being the end fight.
It has nothing to do with scaling as such, and it seems pretty logical to me to have an steadily increasing difficulty curve to offset increasing character power and player skill.

Enemy scaling is one of the dumbest ideas in modern RPGs. I actively avoid levelling in those games because being forced to fight much more powerful enemies is really annoying.

However, I don't remember it in Torchlight; the scrolls take you to levelled dungeons, but AFAIR the normal dungeons stay the same, you just go deeper to find higher level monsters.

Erm, I don't think borderlands scale your enemies, at least i haven't experienced any of that in my plays (i admit to not have finnished the 2nd one though)

In games like borderlands where they don't scale your enemies, i don't get how you can see leveling up as a punnishment, as you HAVE to level up to be able to fight the enemies (that are staticly set to certain levels)
It does however scale adherent to how many players you are, perhaps this is what you experienced.

Also i think you effectively hurt your own case by using examples that you clearly haven't explored/thoroughly researched on, every game does scaling differently, skyrim for instantly uses a very light type of scaling, meaning the stat gain of your opponents will not be proportionate to your own in % (Meaning when you level up you're actually still getting stronger compared to your opponents) now. (now i actually hate scaling which is basicly the only reason i couldn't get myself to finnsh wizardry 8) (and i wasn't a huge skyrim fan either)

But one could argue that the level system in a game like skyrim is actually much closer to realism than most games, think of it, as time goes, most people who focus on something will develop their skills (from the rampaging bandit, to the hardworking blacksmith), if you yourself choose to use that focus on something like your social skills, and do not spend a lot of time honing your combat-abilities, you would realisticly fall behind your nemesis'.

Now im not gonna comment on the other examples, as i have not played them myself, but if you would like to experience some true scaling i suggest you try another elder scrolls game: oblivion.
And i do not think there's a problem with new games using scale-systems for their balancing, i think the new RPG's that come out tend to be the type that fits such Systems, I'd rather prey for more old-school-type rpg's to return instead, but hey mm10 soon.

then again, maybe I'm wrong. :P

The OP's complaint is this "Borderlands - We have the basic problem of time to kill typical enemies going up." It's not a generic rant about "level scaling."
There's a vocal slice of rpg players out there who simply spout negative things whenever anything like "level scaling" comes up.

Your observation about player skills is right on the money. Well crafted games have something like a tutorial period for each new game mechanic before returning you to your regularly scheduled difficulty. Older games didn't really have this feature much. They were typically a whole bunch of controls and mechanics thrown at you all at once in the beginning of the game, which overwhelmed you at the beginning so you were dying to a bunch of easy enemies. Then you got the hang of things and the enemies had to get harder in order to make things fun.

Having just finished Borderlands, I completely agree with that. New enemies are automatically tethered to your level when you enter a new zone, so "over-levelling" was generally frowned upon.
I think Fallout 3 did levelling well.
Pokemon is also interesting because there were so many different aspects to attacks. You do extra damage if the pokemon is using an attack with the same element. And then there's also elements and their strengths/ weaknesses

Again i do not know which of them he talks about, but I personally didn't experience this, it's ofc dependent on you keeping your equipment on par, which might have been the OP's problem?

He also says this:
"Your weapons don't become more accurate as you level up; the game just increases your nominal damage output in direct proportion to the size of your enemies. You are upgrading your weapons as your performance in combat becomes worse. "
Which leads me to believe this is a very uninformed soul, seeing as there is blatant lies in that small text paragraph.
Your accuracy does actually increase for some classes with your levels, borderlands (both 1 and 2) runs a talent system, the sniper class for instance have a talent tree with accuracy ++.
Most classes has damage increase in their talent tree, if you played a sniper like me you would actually kill enemies quiker later in the game then earlier (but then again you would die faster) as a result of specilizations and focus on damage over hp, if you would play a different class with a different focus (let's say focus on your defense) you naturally would propebly suffer some in your offense, do not confuse specialization with weakening.

I think you're misunderstanding some of the game mechanics at work here. The main dungeon in Torchlight didn't have any level scaling (a secondary, endless dungeon did, but that one only opened up once you'd completed the game). Also, the main campaign in Borderlands also didn't have any level scaling, at least during the first run through it (although all of the DLC did scale to the player's level). What you were actually running into is a very typical design in action RPGs, which amounts to assuming the player is going to kill most everything they come across, then determining how much experience they'll gain from that and setting enemy progression to match expected player progression. This is further smoothed out by having enemies of significantly lower level give much less experience, and enemies of higher level give more experience. The end result is that enemy difficulty mostly keeps pace with the player, but there's still the option of the player grinding for experience in place if they what to try to take the edge off the next set of enemies they need to face.

However, despite this, aRPG design often can't account for how players will develop their characters, so as the player progresses in levels they could design a very efficient character that easily mops the floor with enemies of equal level, or they could end up designing a somewhat gimped character that has quite a bit of difficulty with enemies of equal level later in the game (I've had this happen to me in quite a few aRPGs, most recently Torchlight 2 where my first attempt at a Berserker resulted in a character that was dying every five minutes by the end of the game, while my second attempt at a Berserker resulted in a character that was stomping the shit out of everything while being the same level and facing the same enemies). Of course, it could quite reasonably be argued that this is a key part of the game itself, and that a large part of aRPG gameplay is designing a good character over the course of the game.

I am going to confess that my difficulties in Torchlight were my own fault. And I applaud those that would point out errors in my observations of certain games, because unfair arguments should not be tolerated.

But I still do find it interesting how the damage number you inflict can be multiplied 10 times while the time it takes to kill an enemy goes up.

Some of my examples don't scale monsters up with the player level per se, but the scaling effect of increasing the time it takes to kill a monster as you level up is still an issue. The balance will change as you play, and if there is not a reasonable level cap then the balance will get worse and worse. Imagine a fight between two lvl 999 pokemon. It would take hours to make one faint.


I went as a soldier when I played. Balance was okay for the first 20 or 30 levels, but it did become a problem. Enemies became such bullet sponges that I was forced to choose damage output over accuracy. I apologize for not noticing any increase in accuracy, but I didn't... Perhaps the sniper class does more in terms of this.

But the principle that the game was about arbitrarily large damage per hit rather than how efficiently you dealt it was an issue when I played. And enemies were becoming bullet sponges. I'm sorry, but they bloody well were.