Most of games have their own level up systems, the character need to level up from level 1 to whatever level, that is considered as the character progression. It provide some fun, but actually it destroy realism in role-playing sense.

A samurai or a knight don't level up in certain point of their life, what i mean is, after they going into war or doing mission, they are not suddenly receiving message "You have been level up! Choose your skill now" or "you must sleep in order to learn new skill" or in anyway to show that they have been level up.

So, how about a game that have no level up at all? Such as in TES, just remove the level up. The character may learn something new, learn combat skills/combat moves, learn new spells, learn to do this and that, but there is no level up. (In fact in Oblivion, one can stay at level 1 to the end but still have fun learning new spells and combat moves)

One will question about difficulties and balancing, i see no problem, in fact level up system bring problems and imbalanced game. It will be debated over and over and there will be thousands of mods that try to fix it.

The difficulty of the game can be set up with the excellent AI. For example, a trash mob do not have high AI than a boss type. Most of game system will make a boss that have 4 million health points, that make the boss is the boss, but this boss is static and robotic. there is no challenge other than reducing the 4 million health points to zero. With a good AI, 10 health points boss can give a challenge and hard to kill.

You see, a leader of a mafia gang is just a human but what make him a boss? It is his intelligent and his skill. A leader of a group become a leader because of they are not simple people.

Another example, in martial art sparring, both who fight are the same, but the difference between the two are the skill, intelligent, and many other factors. An opponent is hard to beat not because of he/she have 4 million health, but his/her skill in martial art.

It add realism in the game.

We don't level up in our life but we learn something new everyday, only how well we use what we have learned.

Leveling up obviously isn't supposed to parallel realistic life. About realism, personally I can become immersed in a game, and roleplay fine without the need for voice acting, taking away menus, shrinking the UI etc. And I don't care about realistic gameplay, I care about fun gameplay. I'm the sort who enjoys tabletops and PnP too though.

Leveling systems are great IMO, I don't want strict realism.

i compare with arcade games such as Street Fighter, Tekken and so on. All the enemies have the same health bar, but when we start playing, the low level opponents do not fight well as the higher level opponent. And if the one who we fought first become the higher level in our new game, that opponent will fight well in higher level than our previous game.

All characters have the same health, pre-set skills and powers, but we will find out the more we advance in the game, it become harder and harder.

For example, if we play Tekken, Jin Kazama might be the first opponent we fought, he is easily to be beaten. But if we play again, Jin Kazama maybe the boss and he is hard to beat.

The challenge is to beat the AI.

In RPG, we can make in similar mechanic, the more game progress the more intelligent enemies we encounter. It is not determined by level ups. Not that it is because we are at level 10 we are weak, cannot fight the level 20 boss, or so on.

Character level serves a specific purpose in open-world games such as the Elder Scrolls series. Character level in open-world games informs the game engine which enemies to place in the game world to maintain consistent difficulty. As I said in the thread directly below this thread: this works, but it is a primitive system.

I would like to see a game compute only the averages of character skills, dynamically. Such a system could be written to take non-combat skills into account, to avoid the problem of raising character level (and introducing harder enemies) by raising non-combat skills. Which is the main failing of the current system, as I see it.

But, that said, fun trumps so-called "realism" every time, in my book.

Plus, such a system might introduce, even more bugs, Wyrd. The more complex the system, the more possibilities a nightmare of problems could occur, right?

I like the way Skyrim does it. In Oblivion I eventually hit a wall with the way the game leveled up...it just felt so fake to me, all the creatures that show up out of nowhere (and lower-level enemies disappear somehow) and all the glass-wearing bandits. At least in Skyrim, my characters so far have been able to level up, and the game still feels authentic to me.

you imply that realism is a good thing

however, this is 100% subjective

because i, for one, do not like realism. its a game after all, theres a world full of realism outside and i dont need it chasing me in games as well

Yea, you're right, flabber. I like Earth-like realism in games such as TES to an extent, but I understand a lot of gamers don't. I've been wanting a hardcoe mode in TES that we can toggle on and off for awhile now, for instance. I don't wanna get too far off-topic with my opinions, though.

Yep, you're right, that's a real possibility.

Despite what I said above I personally am happy with the way Morrowind and Oblivion work when I use mods like Galsiah's and Realistic Leveling, which modify the existing systems without completely changing them. With these mods each skill increase adds a small percentage toward leveling several attributes; all attribute increases happen instantaneously, without needing to wait for the next character level; health/magicka/fatigue also levels up instananeously; there's no sleeping to gain character levels, no menus to fiddle with, no bonus points to worry about. Using these mods nearly eliminates character levels altogether. The only thing character levels do is tell the game which emenies to throw at you. And that happenes behind the scenes. Most of the time I don't even know what level my characters are.

I agree about Skyrim. So far I haven't felt any need to mod any of this in Skyrim. Actually, I haven't felt a need to mod much of anything in Skyrim. Unlike the other games Skyrim is amazingly enjoyable to me in its pure, vanilla state.

like the fallout hardcoe mode with dehydration, hunger and all that? yes i think that would be an excellent addition, as long as its left optional ofcourse

That's cool. Wow, coming from you, that's pretty awesome, actually.

I think the way Oblivion levels skills up is fine in Vanilla state, by the way. I have no prob with that. You perform a skill? You get better at it. Makes total sense to me. It's the actual way the world levels up..

..ya know...bla bla bla...we've discussed all this to death in the past.


From what I understand, Fallout New Vegas has the character drinking water ALOT. It's a desert, after all. This obviously wouldn't work in Skyrim (as it's mostly tundra) but it would be cool to see all the food make an actual difference in the game. Some people get scared of this idea, I absolutely crave it.
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I liked the way Skills levelled up in MW and OB. I disliked the way Attributes relied on "multilpiers", and made sudden artificial jumps of 0-5 points each "level". GCD in MW, and Kobu's in OB both made Attribute gain a smooth and unobtrusive outgrowth of your skill increases, with enough crossover that you didn't absolutely have to use "Skill A" to get at least modest increases in the relevant attribute. Each skill provided some level of increase to secondary or even tertiary attributes. Levels existed for game-engine purposes, but you didn't even need to know what level your character was at.

Levels have some usefulness in maintaining game balance between different character builds and different rates of play, although there are other ways to balance a game (regional difficulty levels, average of all skills, etc.). Each method of balance has its own drawbacks. Regional difficulty tends to dictate when your character can safely go to particular places, making the game more linear, while averages tend to favor combat skills over non-combat, to the point where a non-combat character starts to find it impossible to continue. Doing away with levels altogether essentially forces one into a regional or a random difficulty system, since any averaging scheme will be weighted to favor one style of play over another, whether it's done intentionally or not, and is nothing more than an "on the fly" level system anyway.

I agree with you on this. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the way those games raise skills, and the thing that bothers me is the attribute jumps at level-up. I also use the leveling mods, and find that they make the game a lot more immersive.


Here I'm not sure I agree completely. I think that Level-based adjustment to enemies and loot is not essentially different from Average-based, given that the changes made have to do with combat anyway (this is an enemy, right?) It's all in how the adjustment is implemented. That's going to be the case in any kind of "evolving open world" where the opposition is scaled to match the PC's increasing power. I think it could be done without changing rats into bears and putting glass armor on bandits. Maybe some of these roadside nuisances should start running away from an approaching Hero.

It is possible to do this, Niza. I think the problem (for me) would be that my characters would become little uber-gods. It would happen very quickly the way I game. Their skills would increase and increase, and before you know it, I'd have a Journeyman/Expert/Master sort of character pwning every enemy he or she meets. Plus, I would get bored with a Level 1 game. I do like some new creatures and enemies showing up.

But if that's the way you wanna game, go for it. It's totally possible to do so.
.

Oh. Another thing you can try in Oblivion, Niza, is put Major skills that don't get used very often. Like if you're playing a pure mage who doesn't wear armor, give him/her Heavy Armor as a Major. Now, if at some point you find your game leveling up too low, try putting just a heavy armor helmet on the mage. That's what I did one day with http://i936.photobucket.com/albums/ad208/xenaclone/Photo-0062.jpg.

The game will still level up, but it'll be so much slower. New enemies get introduced into the game in a more natural fashion, and you won't have to worry about maxing your skills to "efficiently level" them. I've been doing "Minors for Majors" swaps for 3 years now, I find it works quite well.

I think it's a lot easier to track the game when your using a level system. If there is no leveling then everything must be set, including Weapons, Armor and enemies. It's not a terrible idea in theory, although I'd rather go with what Skyrim does and then hybrid it more towards New Vegas.

Thanks for all replies, i don't know which one to reply back lols

Actually my idea is like this :

1. Similar with TES, the character may learn new things/skills/spells/crafting and whatever the game provide

2. The character may use items, weapons, armors, potions, gears the character found or made
- the rule also apply to the enemy, they also using items, armors, weapons, potions and gears

3. The character have the same base attributes all the time, for example 100 health, 100 mana
- the enemies also have the same base attributes
- the character and the enemies progressions are determined by skills, armors, weapons, magic, gears and AI (for enemies)

4. The enemies are on fixed level as according to difficulty slider/mode chosen
- this difficulty slider/mode actually change the AI setting
- the dificulty slider/mode don't change the enemy physical attribute
- some enemy have less Ai than some other considered as boss/leader enemy

5. The enemies difficulty is not determined by their attributes, health, armor rating and damage but their AI
- in many games i play, enemies are actually weak intelligent, they are hard to beat just because of their health, and any other physical attributes
- What i mean by AI is the the enemy intelligent to counter and read what the player want to do, or posiibility that the player will do. Like playing chess.

I play Dragon Age, in this game there are a lot of steroid enemies
- Revenants
- Dragons
- Harvester/Abominations

They are actually steroids enemies, they are tough just because the developer give steroid to them. Such as the Dragon who have "4 million hit points", other than that the dragon just jumping here and there, fire breathing that can kill you out right sometimes, bite that can kill you out right sometimes....there no challenge other than to reduce it's health to zero.

The same like the Revenants, they are super enemy just because they give more damage and have high health. Those things mostly just stay at their place, only move sometimes, with one swing Revenants can kill low health surrounding party members in one strike.... there are no challenge other than reduce it's health to zero.

The same thing happen in Dragon Age 2.

Different with TES, enemies do fight, they attack, block, moving here and there, using tactic, the enemy "think", i like that. But the problem is, as everybody already know is the leveling problem.

For realism issue, i don't mind if the character don't eat, drink, going to toilet ect. Just make like TES 'resting" i think it cover all that, when "resting" the character do all those things behind the scene.

realism = to real life is not the issue, but realism = something make sense is the issue here

So it sounds like basically what you're saying is that you like Skyrim's system. But you want the difficulty slider to adjust AI, not the damage done and the damage dealt. Is that right?

It seems to me that your approach seems to be mainly focused on difficulty of combat. This is one way to think about these games. But in addition to mere "fighting games" these are also roleplaying games. And many of us feel that starting characters off as generic "blank slates," where all characters are identical, aside from small racial differences, does not make for a quality roleplaying experience.

To be honest, I always play on default difficuty so I wouldn't see your advanced AI. And maybe that's one reason why Bethesda's sliders have remained so primitive. They may be asking themselves: why put a lot of work into coding sliders that introduce advanced AI if many players will never see it? Why not put our time and energy into game features that as many players as possible would experience?

Of course this kind of begs the question: if the difficulty slider made changes that players found more interesting than mere changes to damage, maybe more players would use the difficulty sliders? As it is, most of us never touch it.

But anyway, having said all that, overall I think your system would be an improvement.

I'm beginning to think Niza is talking about Skyrim, actually? ....100 health and 100 mana. That's the beginning stats, well 2 of them.


EDIT: oh never mind. This in the OP...

The one issue I have with having the player character and NPCs all starting out with the same base stats is that not everyone has the same strength, the same ability to handle pain and injury, the same walking or running speed, or the same personality and appearances. Skyrim, by removing the ability to adjust Attributes, has essentially created a situation where every character (and most or all NPCs) begin as clones of each other, and only change through raising skills and learning "perks". That's really a huge negative for someone who enjoys RPing different or quirky characters, at the very least.

I could see having every character start with 30-40 in each attribute (40 being "average"), and 20-40 points that could be assigned during character creation to make your character "somewhat different", then have MINOR in-game increases in those attributes through hard work (1 point assigned to an attribute now and then, not 5 points to 3 attributes every level). The "all stats at 100" problem isn't a problem when you're hard-pressed to ever hit 100 with even one of them. Different NPCs could have significantly greater or lesser points in one attribute than another, so there would be some functional differences between them: one up to twice as strong but rather slow and not very bright, another perhaps nearly twice as fast or intelligent, but frail, etc. In both combat and interaction, they'd behave differently because of their different stats.

An NPC or player character with 100 in any stat would (and should) be a rare and impressive exception. THAT is a system I could enjoy. Instead, everyone wants "stats over 100" simply because 100 becomes "normal" for a high-level character relatively quickly.

^ I agree.

No, i don't compare with Skyrim, actually i compare with Jedi Academy.

In Jedi Academy, all enemies have basic 100 health, 100 force power (or 200 force power for elites), the player also have the same. But the difficulty of the game is depend on the enemy AI and the player skill.

The player have the opportunity to learn new form of lightsaber fencing, new force power and neutral force power rise automatically in certain point in the plot/level.

The enemy and the player have the very same set of force power and lightsaber form. What make the different is player Intelligent vs enemy Artificial Intelligent

In Jedi Academy, the player must beat the enemy AI, and i can say the AI is good. i don't know how to describe it but if you guys have the opportunity, try to play Jedi Academy.

You're talking about a shooter when you talk about Jedi Acacdemy. The Elder Scrolls are roleplaying games. Like I said earlier you're not likely to find many supporters for your ideas here, to be honest. Most of us are roleplayers. And some of us feel that the Elder Scrolls series has already introduced too many shooter game mechanics as it is.

It's been several years since I've played Jedi Academy so my memory is a little hazy, but I sure don't remember the wonderful AI you speak of. But, like I say, I'd be in favor of the difficulty slider affecting AI rather than damage in future games. I wouldn't be in favor of generic, "blank slate" character generation, though. In my book that's a shooter game mechanic, not a roleplaying game mechanic.

In FPS (first person shooter) like Halo, Unreal, and many others the player just gather any powerful weapon they can and then shoot the enemy, have little strategy, and mostly depends on your weapon power and nothing more.

While RPG like TES, Dragon Age, KotOR, Mass Effect and many others focus on character development and character building.

Like i mention before, the player have the opportunity to build their character as they like, learn and use whatever the game provide. If want to play as a rogue there are rogue skills to be learned in game, and so for warrior, mage and any other available. But this topic talk about level up mechanic that flawed in most RPGs.

It is true that in Halo, there is no level up, but you don't build your character. You are a Master Chief from beginning to the end and using what ever weapon the game provide, and shoot anything hostile through out the game.

So, my suggestion do look like FPS, but actually it is not. Because the player have to build their own character, just with different mechanic.

Level up mechanic is ancient. Game mechanic that need tank, dps, nuker and healer also ancient.

Well, in Jedi Academy, you may choose what force power you want to learn, at least you may choose to be good or evil or good with evil power or evil with good power. There is little RPG in it, of course you play as Jaden Korr, but you can determined what Jaden Korr he/she is

I agree with much of what you say. But I just cannot agree to a system that starts every character out the same. That is just not roleplaying character generation, no matter how you slice it. That is shooter character generation (to the extent that there is character generation in shooters). A good roleplaying character generation system will allow the player to create all kinds of different characters right at the chargen screen.

Part of creating a roleplaying character happens in chargen before we even get into the game. If you take that away you take away part of our ability to fully roleplay our characters. Do you see what I'm saying? It is still possible to roleplay - I do it in Skyrim - but I am hampered because the game forces me to play a character with stats that are (nearly) identical to every other character. If all characters start out with, as you say, "the same health, pre-set skills and powers" our ability to roleplay is crippled.

Okay, on to leveling. We have discussed this to death in other threads that are still right here on the front page, so I don't really feel like going into it in great detail now. But, suffice it to say, an open-world game needs a mechanism to control difficulty as the player gets more powerful. Bethesda's solution is to key enemy difficulty to player level. I agree, that isn't the best solution. In other threads we have floated the idea of doing away with character level and finding a way to compute enemy difficulty based on some average of skills instead.

Some games, like MMO's for example, get around this by dividing the game world into "zones." You have your 1 through 10 zone, your 11 through 20 zone, your 21 through 30 zone, ect. This is still leveling. The difference is that MMO zones use space rather than time. In an MMO-style zoned game you travel to a new area of the game to increase your difficulty. In a Bethesda game you do not need to travel to increase difficulty, you need to spend time (gaining skills). The MMO-style game world, in my opinion, is not an open game world. It is not a sandbox game world. As open worlds are one of the hallmarks of the Elder Scrolls series I do not favor it.

As to the idea that tank, dps, nuker and healer are ancient, I agree. But I have never felt that that kind of thinking had much of a place in the Elder Scrolls series to begin with. Tank, dps, nuker and healer are roles, they are roles we assume in parties or groups or raids. Here in the Elder Scrolls universe we are, for the most part, lone adventurers. We quest and dungeon dive all by ourselves. The Elder Scrolls games tend to encourage jack-of-all-trades characters. This is not unrealistic: on the real life American frontier, for instance, pioneers had to master many jobs, many skills, if they were to survive alone in the wilderness.

Phew, that was a lot more than I intended to write.

I never did like the "jack of all trades" philosophy in games and perhaps even in life. I'm wired to be the "specialist" type of person. That's one reason why I LOVE rpg's in which I can forge a character with skills/attributes that no other character has or not too skilled as the one who specializes in it. To have an open world is the soul of TES but to have an "open" skill kind of system in which anybody can be just like the other guy is nothing but rpg failure of the highest order.

Freedom is boring when there are no restrictions to conquer which, in turn, kills replay value. I've played other rpg's that after building my warrior character so well I found myself stump at an ordinary quest where I have to use magic to move a giant boulder. I wasn't a mage and in order for me to cast that spell I needed a hell of a lot of a particular magic skill. I could work harder to achieve that skill despite me being a brute warrior but it would have taken me so damn long that it wasn't worth it. I build a mage later just to see those areas that were barred to my warrior character. Balanced restrictions is good, balanced elitism is good.