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It helps that Soulsikes are not open world, of course, but you can imagine the same idea working here. Gear, too, can be upgraded, but armor in these games is lateral: no one set is better than any other. There’s basically no way to trivialize combat in these games, and you spend your time grinding for much more marginal improvements to your core stats, with XP(or souls) doled out in such a way that players often reach similar places at similar levels.
#Witcher 3 level cap mod series
The other way is more what the Dark Souls series does: just squish everything together a whole lot more. The games in the GTA series, the early Assassin’s Creeds and plenty of other open world games don’t rely on stat progression.īut stat progression is still fundamental to how these games work, so we won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is how a lot of open world games were before The Witcher 3, incidentally. You still get the feeling of improvement by getting new abilities, but the developer has a much better idea of how powerful the player is going to be at any given moment, and can balance different difficulty settings accordingly. Ghost of Tsushima does this pretty well: most of the progression revolves around abilities, and while you do have some stat progression, it’s pretty limited.
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I feel like there are some ways around this, and the easiest is just to de-emphasize or eliminate stats all together. Once you can be sure that all the players are on the same page, you can actually start to balance endgame content. This is the reason that nearly all MMOs tend to balance their games around a level cap. Because, again, difficulty is not a fixed concept in RPGs, it’s dependent player level and the enemy level. For one thing, it weakens the fiction and invalidates all that grinding from the early game: the whole point was to get powerful, damnit! And for another, the fundamental problem always remains: the easiest solution to any given combat problem is never to engage with the game’s deeper systems or develop new strategies, it’s just to go off and grind until it becomes easy. The thing is, there are a lot of problems with that, too. So couldn’t you just adjust the difficulty? Bethesda games have sliders, after all.
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The story missions, at this point, are probably still working just fine. As you forge your way into the open world, you find a degree of different challenges, some manageable, some trying, some downright impossible. When you start, the game is balanced, because the developer knows exactly how powerful you’ll be at that beginning moment. It happens in every game like this that I play, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, the recent Assassin’s Creed games, whatever. The problem is not that the game is too hard, or too easy, the problem is that balancing difficulty is basically impossible and so it feels off nearly all the time. If you take the time to do side content you wind up overlevelled, and encounters become easy. If you go straight through the main story, you might be underlevelled, and encounters become frustrating. Cyberpunk 2077 is just the latest example of a longstanding gripe I’ve had with these RPGs where difficulty is an elusive, changing concept that interferes with the flow of basically every one of these games.