Bethesda Studios had made the decision to cap the level of a playable character in their Skyrim game to 50 and mathematically the game can allow a person to exceed that number to only level 70. When a person thinks about getting to level 50 in any game most think they have completed half a milestone, the fact is that this cap can make the game feel incomplete and can make the game feel relatively short especially when the gamemakers have revealed that a person will be able to level up quickly. It would be more satisfying to be able to get a number that had three digits instead, like a level 100 to feel that your character has really gotten to a point that most other characters or NCPs have not gone to. What do all of you game fans of Skyrim think about the level cap?



Check out my other post and poll:
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1183729-environmental-ai-affecting-character-performance/page__p__17562607__fromsearch__1#entry17562607

You must have really felt shorted in Fallout then.

I'm guessing it's been capped at 50 to keep the game balanced.

The highest character I have ever gotten in Oblivion was a level 34 woodelf warrior. Don't ask.

I couldn't care less
I'll play a character until I feel I've completed their story, be that at level 30, 50 or 70
Although to be honest since I have Chronic Restartitis Syndrome most of my characters won't get past level 5

Sorry I have to. What possessed you to play a wood elf that long?

And Bethesda can always release some DLC that will up the level cap another 5 levels like in the Fallout games.

....uh, what?




No problem with it at all. Seems like a huge number of levels, actually.


...of course, "level caps" and numbers of levels don't really matter in and of themselves. The important thing is that the game itself (the challenges, combat, power levels, etc) are balanced around the levels that the game has.

Which is why I thought that the lv20 cap in Fallout 3 was good, and the increase to 30 in Broken Steel was bad - the game was designed and balanced around the powers you gained in those 20 levels. Adding another 10 on top of that (and all the stat gains, HP gains, perks) screwed everything up. (Now, I agree that the player reached the lv20 cap too quickly. But that's not the same thing as wanting more levels.)



Personally, I'm frequently mystified by the "want MOAR levels!" thing. It's all just a number and a framework. That number being able to get higher, doesn't necessarily make it better.


For instance - I can make basic Fallout 3 100 levels! DIvide the number of XP needed for each of the original levels by 5. Divide the number of HP you get each level by 5. And only give a perk every 5 levels. Voila! 100 levels! And it's absolutely no different than the 20 levels, statistically - the only different is you see a bigger number, and got to hear the "level up" noise 80 more times.

See how pointless that was?

I thought I was the only one suffering from that disorder.

Reaching a higher level doesn't matter to me very much.
Each of my charcters don't last beyond 150 hours of gameplay either.
but I guess people might say they should have the choice to reach level 1000 if they want.

Why turn it up to eleven when you can just make ten louder? :mohawk:
The numbers are entirely arbitrary, if they decided to make 100 the soft cap rather than 50 there'd be no real difference. The level 50 from one is exactly the same as the 100 from the other. Make each level up more significant (as the perks will do) rather than adding more.

The only way I can think of level 50 being "half a milestone" is if you're thinking of the common level 99 cap in JRPG's, of which Skyrim is not one, and in which you generally never got that high without powerleveling anyway, and often finished the game at oh, say, level 50.

How satisfying a certain level number is depends entirely on how the game presents levels, how hard they are to reach/how significant a difference they make, and so on. Things we know little to nothing about in Skyrim, and have no way to judge. I didn't feel cheated finishing Baldur's Gate at level 7-9, nor playing through Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, an RPG with no levels at all.

Actually, by the yardstick of the original RPGs (by which I'm referring to D&D, at the moment), by level 50 you'd be a God in your own right, 30 levels into the Epic content. Switch the yardstick to one of the other first RPGs (Traveller) and you've got 50 more levels than you would have anyway (since Trav is level-less).

Different games have different advancement schemes, it doesn't matter how it shapes up compared to other games at all. What matters is how the mechanics work internally.

thats pretty much how it was in OB and MW that hasn't really changed, the cap is just higher. and I think they have publicly revealed the theoretical cap pre OB release. its not really a big secret. and its not a problem if the let the prison trick alone from OB to SK.

Todd specifically said that there is NO level cap. You can glide up to level 50 and after that it is very hard to gain levels. I am sure he said this. It was in GI I think.

Yes, its a soft cap. You level quickly in the start, slowing down all the time until your'e level 50 and after that levelling will take far longer than is enjoyable. Supposedly you also get a maximum of 50 perks, meaning a level cap of 51 if you want maximum perks if you don't get to pick one at character creation.

When I play JRPGs, I power level to 99.

But in TES, power levelling doesn't mean anything. What matters in TES for me is to get the maximum skills in the specialities I choose, which incidentally lets me level up, and also to collect all the unique artefacts in the realm.

(Granted, the horrible Oblivion system means I had to get a mod in order to not obtain gimped low level artefacts, and I would probably attack on sight the member of Bethesda who thought it was a good idea to have levelled loot... We never did find out who's idea was it, do we?)

I'm fine with the soft cap of 50 and slower leveling afterwards.

Something like Fallout's 30 levels would 'feel' like too few levels in Skyrim, but 50 is perfectly fine and I doubt any of my characters will reach it.

I think my highest character in OB was level 28.

But even when a character reaches level 50 in Skyrim leveling won't stop, it'll just be harder, and since reaching level 70 probably would be almost impossible this means our Skyrim characters will never stop leveling, which is great.

Level cap should be at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgaea. Anything else means we are getting the short end of the stick!

Actually, I'm pretty sure that leveling isn't capped at 50, my understanding is that you can level past that point but only get perks up until level 50, level 70 or whatever is the only "hard" cap, and in that case, I'd imagine that it's not so much that levels can't go higher, in theory, but rather that you don't have anymore skills to raise in order to reach higher levels.

In any case, I'm not too concerned about the actual number of the level cap, because it's just a number, what's important is how it relates to the game. A level cap of 50 is not too low if you're very unlikely to reach it before the end of the game. What bothers me is when the level cap is reached too soon, like in Fallout 3 where you could easily maximize your level long before you completed the main quest, the level cap of 20 would not have bothered me too much in that case if leveling were slower, but since it was so fast, the cap felt too low. So whether 50 is too low or not will depend on how soon one reaches that level in Skyrim. And yes, it's been said that leveling is faster than in past games, but in past games my characters often didn't last past their 20s, so that doesn't really make me worry I'll reach level 50 too soon.

Nope, i feel that is something is capped to 80,90,99etc. Besides i never got past 34 in Oblivion

You could just say that indefinitely. A milestone is only a significant event in this context. Level 50 will be the milestone, because that is what Bethesda decided for the "soft cap."

Plus I feel like getting 100 perks would be a little ridiculous.

Pretty sure the way I heard it phrased is "the last set of perks is L. 50 content", not "you get 50 perks". That is, you can level up to about 75, and you'd get the appropriate number of perks. Just that it's the same old pool after 50.

Yeah, even though the level number is obviously arbitrary, few numbers are for weaklings! No leveling system is any good, unless ITS OVER 9000!!

Wait what am I saying... You should level to like a few centillion or something, you know, so that the game feels more epicness. Every time you got a few exp, you shoot up a few billion levels. Every few quadrillion levels you get a perk. Then the game will feel right. :chaos:

Yeah when I hit the cap in 1999 Everquest I thought, "Man this is IT? I just STARTED leveling!"

This thread is silly. Level 10 can be a huge accomplishment depending on how the leveling works.