I was considering the games and the problem of the games becoming too easy at high levels. Compensating by decreasing your damage while increasing npc damage per hit just seems to make combat tedious by what others have posted.

So I was wondering would it be possible to do away with leveling entirely? Start players at the equilivant of perhaps level 20 with the choice of distributing health, magica and stamina as you want at the start of the game to suit your character. Skill might go up with practice which might give you bonuses of damage and protection or magica cost but not anything else. NPC's would have their stats fixed from the start of the game. Some would be easy some would be hard. Is there any real point to levels that make up for the problems they cause?

To me levelling up only works when enemy stats are fixed. Compensating by giving them more hit points and higher damage in attacks to keep you challenged takes away the whole meaning of levelling up for me.

Levelling up is part of any RPG; making your character stronger from experience and build him up is a big part of it. Not sure I′d want it to disappear.

I think it would get boring if you just wrecked everything after a certain point. There would be no fun, or risk involved in anything left to do.

It could get boring, I guess. But I have 2200 hours in Oblivion on the same character, he′s pretty much unbeatable at this point but I still find fun things to do like looking for things to collect, visit areas I haven′t been to in a while etc. Even combat can be fun, you just have to switch it around and come up with new ways to get rid of your foes

Of course, this is just me...

levels help with character advancement and development, and also lets the game challenge the player appropriately for their level.

no levels or scaling can work be does require more planning on the development side; otherwise the random lists can be very unforgiving early on.

there are mods available for the elder scroll games that do this, so you can experience the pros and cons yourself.

generally, for rpgs if your character is that powerful that the game is boring, it's time to start a new character and challenge yourself with a new class. you can't really expect game balance for characters completely maxed out in skills/stats/items/enchantments/powers.

Especially not in an open-world game that caters for so many different routes to the same place

In a linear game you know that by the time the pc reaches A they are likely to have visited B, learnt C and acquired D

I think that leveling serves a useful purpose by making some content too difficult to deal with at the start, with more viable options opening up to the player as the character "grows". It allows the developer to place more content tailored to the abilities of the character, rather than having only 10% of the content be challenging yet beatable. It allows the developer to "pace" the game, without placing artificial restrictions by openly saying "you can't go here yet".

On the other hand, most games tend to have far too large of a change from starting weakling to godlike wrecking machine, with 10x to 50x the fighting ability as compared to what the character had at the start. A lot of games spawn too much content (or nearly ALL or it, as happened in OB) specifically at the PC's level, which gives very little sense of advancement of the character because the character never gets any "better" compared to what he or she is fighting. Extremes of leveling and scaling result in no longer finding basic low level creatures and items in the world, because they've all been replaced by high level equivalents. (Example in OB: You can't buy a Journeyman mortar and pestle set because only Novice versions exist in the world at your level, but in a few more levels there well be LOTS of Journeyman sets and not a single Novice set to be found anywhere unless you already own it.)

The trick is to have enough character progress so you FEEL like the character is getting better, and a mix of content both above, below, and AT the character's level to show that progress compared to the rest of the game world, with a fairly large portion AT the character's level to provide an appropriate challenge in enough cases to be interesting. Too little variety and range of opponents and loot and it feels artificial (Oblivion suffered from having too much "leveled" and "scaled" content that adjusted to match you, and very little static content), but too much variety and range (as in a completely unleveled game) and there's not enough content that's a suitable challenge at any given time, particularly if the character makes huge advances in skill and ability over the course of the game. Note that Morrowind DID use leveled content, but interspersed that with static content to provide both easy, difficult, and "suitable" challenges at just about any level, until the character eventually out-leveled the content in the game (the developers never thought that players would take it that far), and then everything got far too easy.

I can hope for a more modest amount of character advancement in future games (easier to balance, and less restrictive for RP), and a mix of static and leveled content (Morrowind, for example, used leveled lists to place leveled creatures and Daedra, as well as static placed NPCs that didn't level with you), but if the developers want to turn it into a basic hack & slash action game, there's likely to be an even greater disparity and even more "appropriate" content, but not much else.

It seems to me that TES already has in place a perfect substitute for "leveling."

Skill advancement by use provides a kind of "leveling" without regard to traditional character levels. If they uncapped most skills, you'd always have the sense of getting better. And the game could adjust dynamically to your skill levels, rather than to your "level."

Internally, the game could separate skills into several categories, like Combat Skills, Social Skills, Craft Skills, etc., and keep a running score in each category, using that to initiate skill-appropriate quests, set loot tables, and spawn bosses.

I am on 125 in Skyrim. It takes longer to go up each level. I found a way to speed it up. Transmute iron ore to gold. Buy up the silver and steal it from Dragonsreach. Get 100 gold and silver ignots. When I legendary smithing back to 15, I might jewelry and get back to 70-80 on smithing.

I think a static world would definately be a good thing. I hate level scaling as it makes me feel like im not progressing my character and it also makes no sense when suddenly there are animals that werent there before or bandits weraing super strong armor. Or Bandits wearing the same armor as before are suddenly super strong... Makes the world less beliveable.

Yeah, okay, but we're talking about eliminating levels from future games, not methods for leveling higher and faster.

I agree with this. I remember not feeling that I made progress in Oblivion on account of stronger enemies all of a sudden.

While I will say the thrill of becoming better (I.E leveling up, stat allocation, ect ect) is a good one...I do think there's a point where we just sorta need to hit a ceiling frankly. Going to far and it becomes a point less about "How should I build my character in order to use them to the best of his/her personal capability" and more "Imma gonna get everything". I don't find that particularly engaging, and high level gameplay pretty much disappears due to our character being tremendously powerful. I just like looking at level up screens and allocating my hard earned gains to where I please. I see the appeal of a "natural" system, but its just not for me.

...The last half dozen threads like this and others though are frankly better off in the Beyond Skyrim thread though.

Well, leveling is good for leveled items so not everything is just weak at low levels, then you have stronger enemies, new enemy types. As for being the best at everything by leveling everything that is purely on the player, you can choose what to level and what not to level so it's kinda pointless to complain about it.

Yeah, but there's nothing real about it, especially with the knowledge that long term the skills and abilities I choose to use would basically come just as easy to any other character type I choose to play. It'd be like telling someone who really, really wants a survival mechanic in-game and have the actions they take be depicted and telling them just to do in in their head. Its two different ball games frankly. That, and a lot of people really have piss poor impulse control.

...I guess capping off getting "perk points" or whatever would be a reasonable solution. You still level, but you won't be as useful in the Skills you didn't invest in regardless of your overall training I guess.

Or just control yourself and don't enforce stupid "solutions" onto other players because a few players can't stop themselves from leveling up their skills. You play the way you want to and I'll play the way I want to, don't say there should be "solutions" when other people see these systems as fine and well. Honestly, I'm of the mind that level caps in general are pretty stupid and an outdated concept for RPGs the scale of TES or Fallout. Don't punish others because a few can't control themselves.

One perk per level is a good idea and being able to get as many perk points as the player wants is also good, punishing the majority because a minority can't accept that is not a good idea.

I agree totally with this. I really dislike this attitude of: "I can't stop myself from leveling all my skills up, so everybody needs to be prevented from leveling all their skills up, too."

Some people can't control themselves; they want to be controlled.

I want to replace K-12 grades with levels in each area. Set up K-12 based on levels. You start with Reading 1. You learn to basics of alphabet and words. Reading 2 and English 1. You don't progress out of Reading and English till you can read and write Reading 3 and English 3. If you can't read and write, the rest is useless. Why have grades that last all year? You level up when you finish the core material and test out. Reading 4, English 4, Math 1 and Science 1. History, Social studies, and similar classes would be in History levels. Each student has a laptop or tablet and progresses at their pace. Science would cover geology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, etc. Math is basic math to calculus and programming. Why not teach in Math 9 VB, C#, CSS, HTML, etc. Teachers are there as more of mentor and tutor. I have seen common core math. I tutor math and science. I had every math and science course for my B.EE. I program in many languages. We need better ways of teaching math and science to normal kids.

I like levels in games. In Skyrim, you usually don't get to level 28 without having the weapons and armor to handle the quests at that level. Do you want beginners taking on dragon, and vampires and other villians that can harm even someone at my level?

level caps are great when implemented well, if the goal is to balance the player with the world in an rpg. It especially makes choices in character development more important as there's limits to what one character can do well.

However, TES has never been much about character limits -- since Morrowind you can use master trainers to cap out all skills relatively easy. any limit would be modded out on the first day of release, haha.

Agreed as well, they end up enchanting everything with 100% chameleon in Oblivion, or smithing to no end in Skyrim, or do the restoration loop, then scream that the game is too easy and for everything to be nerfed to the ground.

Hey that's not an exploit, it's a strategy

I had an Oblivion character for whom 100% chameleon actually worked, as a roleplaying device. On the other hand, I quickly tired of it, and didn't play the character for long.