If I let pass a few days before returning on the argument I’ll finish to forget about it as it always happens. So I continue here what I wrote about Oblivion and use the levels to let the player adjust the difficulty of the game.

As I explained (even on Q23) in Oblivion the levels don’t really exist in the game. There is no direct game mechanic or dice rolls factoring your level. The game is skill based and the level is only a way to measure and segment the overall power of your skill pool. Basically the level of the character doesn’t exist to be used by the player, but to be used by the system.

The system checks the character’s level as a way to measure its effectiveness and then balance the difficulty of the creatures and the value of the items around that variable. The player is passive in this mechanic.

It is not a case that the best mod for Morrowind effectively hid the levels to uniform the character growth while preserving the integrity of the rest of the game (even balancing it much better). The game is already skill based, and if the levels are only a way for the system to monitor the character growth, they can even be obscured.

There are many uses of levels, more or less apparent, from all that Raph wrote to cozy worlds. But they can be also used by the *player* (and not by the system) to control the difficulty of the game as many japanese RPGs are doing from a very long time: with the casual encounters.

This is an excerpt from a post written by Kitsune about Dragon Quest VIII and the flexibility of the casual encounters:

That’s one of the biggest misunderstandings about DQ. Since the original, you have never needed to grind to level up. Yuji Horii has always, always, always designed each game so that if you explore around you and try out things, you will be at the appropriate level to be able to win. Unless you have a certain hardcore purpose in mind (in which you use metal enemies to get the job done quickly), leveling up has happened as a matter of course, for doing what the game was designed to do. If you explore reasonably (you don’t even have to do it much) you can play the entire game through without ever stopping for the express purpose of leveling up.

More than any RPG series I’ve played, its easier to control the difficulty level in DQ. Exploiting very satisfying tactical plans pays off and you can do hella hard stuff at low levels. In fact, that’s one of the reasons the game sells so well in Japan. Its made for both people who just don’t want to have too hard of a time of fighting, but want it to be fun enough to do more than attack and for people who like to make their own challenges. Both exist in great quantities. I love doing stuff like going to the treasure cave near the thieves’ town before you do anything at the abbey or for the king and then an entirely different cutscene plays when you meet the thief lady (so many name changes, I’ve been purposely vague) to reflect that. You can enter the western continent anyway you please and the cutscenes reflect that (there are different flows to plot depending on which place you start exploring at). You can visit Lapan House and get the tiger before you ever hear about a spoiled prince. Or vice versa.

Just walking around that luscious overworld invites finding what’s hidden every nook and cranny for many a gamer now, but that’s the way it has always been for the Dragon Quest faithful. That’s why every town has lots of little goodies hidden in pots, or down wells (I love the hidden health club you can find in one, and the friendly monster in another, and the stuck slime king in another), or around obscure corners, or up ladders.

As has been pointed in this thread and others, the monsters have many unique abilities and animated meticulously with many creative and charming touches. Believe it or not, the monsters are the joy of the game.

So no they aren’t just there to grind XP. They’re the entire foundation of the game and one of its biggest selling points. If you can’t get into it, fine, but you can’t criticize a game for what you want it be, instead of looking at it for what it wants to be.

And then he returned on the same concept recently while discussing/arguing about Final Fantasy XII:

No need to grind. Don’t make me give you my “Leveling up is not a valid strategy in this day and age” speech.

I have done some mob quests, but not all of them, in particular, not the ones before the more difficult bosses, but guess what? You don’t get any experience for it, maybe some LP, but no experience. The rewards are indeed helpful, but not enough so that you will be able to win against a boss. When I lose against a boss in FFXII, I try a different strategy! And guess what? If its better, I win the next time!

Besides, there’s only a handful of hard bosses in the entire game. Most of them are only mildly challenging or wimpy.

There’s no such thing as any good console RPG that requires to level up since Final Fantasy IV. None. No matter what good game you spit at me (and you know I’ve played them all), I can spit back a way to get past the challenge without leveling up. (Note: “Good” game, shit like Saga Frontier doesn’t apply, obviously bad games have bad habits.)

Its pure logic, Ex-S. If one person claims you are forced to level up for the bosses, it cannot hold true if another didn’t and can get past them. Because then you wouldn’t be forced, there’d be another way.

Giving your opinion on the slow pace is one thing, but there’s no call for saying something incorrect about a high-profile game most people won’t be able to play for months. I’m really tired of this attitude where if you’re having problems, it must be something wrong with the design of the game, not with the way you play it.

Beside the discussion about the specific games I wanted to underline how the use of the same mechanic (characters levels) are used to achieve two opposite results. In Oblivion the levels are used to measure the power of the character to then adapt the difficulty, in other games they merely articulate the character progression, and in the great majority of the japanese RPGs they are instead used by the players to adapt the difficulty of the game to their needs/desires. Customization and self-imposed challenges.

The difficulty of an encounter is always static. There are fixed variables involved and the player is required to “learn the lesson” and go through that type of encounter (often the end bosses, this is evident in DQ8, for example). The bar is set at a precise height and the player has to surpass it. The casual encounters, always hated by the western players, are here a way to offer the player a customization. While the boss monster will have a fixed difficulty, the players can manipulate the variable they control: the characters.

The level of these caracters adds a customization to the formula. You can decide to refine your tactics till you win, trying every time a different strategy, or you can slow down and gain more levels. There’s always a gap between you and an encounter. When this gap is too wide, the encounter may feel frustrating because you don’t know how to overcome it. The levels add customization to the difficulty because they help to compensate the gap. You can decide to fill it by grinding the casual encounters, or you can try to fill that space through “skill”.

I find this interesting because, as Kitsune explain, this is a huge, if not the major, selling factor for japanese players. It adds a great deal of replaying value as there are always small details to discover. The western players are less used to toy with the small details, we glide on the content and get frustrated if an encounter is too hard without trying to find a different strategy. We go through these kinds of game with the fast-forward.

Too little patience and tolerance.

It would be an interesting mechanic even in mmorpgs, but too often the encounters are so strictly codified that there isn’t much skill involved (and again, “skill” doesn’t mean “twitch”) and the “playable” level range of the monsters is narrow (fighting monster fours levels above you becomes nigh impossible, no matter how well you play). So there isn’t much to “customize”, you are just locked in a precise situation. The group mechanics are more interesting, but even here there’s this awful trend to trivialize an encounter through levels and items. See for example the instances in WoW, where the players standardized the access to each 4-5 levels above the standards set by Blizzard.

There have been many discussions about the problem of “rubberbanding” in Oblivion. The term isn’t mine but it’s what I saw being used to describe the problem.

To explain, in Oblivion the whole game shapeshifts around your character. It’s the most often perceived flaw because it permeates the whole game, not only the game design, but also the graphic. The whole world is rolled at your feet like a red carpet, you walk around and things enter the rendered range and pop-up into existence, outside this radius and they cease to exist. The NPCs continue to exist and have their own schedules, which help to give the game some consistence, but everything else in is “volatile”. “Spawned on demand” and dynamically adapted to your level.

This means that all the content is potentially accessible at level 1. Every monster is in fact calibrated on your level. A wolf is spawned if you are level 1, or a minotaur if you are level 20. These are the “levelled lists” that were already present in Morrowind. You enter a dungeon and the game will populate it to be appropriate for your level, both in mosters and loot. No matter where you go and how well you play, at level 1 you will always find poor loot, while at level 20 or above you’ll always see the best of the best everywhere, and the whole world populated by epic creatures.

It existed as a way to address different playstyles in a sandbox game. It was needed to retain a general balance and keep the game always fun, trying to solve the problems that came up with Morrowind where you could quickly become god-like and then feel bored for the rest of the game because you were too powerful. It’s a general problem with an open-ended type of game, the story is not “directed”, so it becomes increasingly hard to calibrate the difficutly. You never know if the dungeon is being entered by a level 1 character or by a level 20. The solution was to populate the game world dynamically, adapting the spawns directly on the level of your character.

The result was that the players, not surprisingly, didn’t digested this workaround so well. It’s a solution that completely removes the persistence from the game in a similar way to what happens with randomly generated content. In a world and a game that relies heavily on the immersion, the world itself becomes “virtual”, potential. Every spawn represents a “possibility”, and not a fixed state. This type of virtuality has the direct consequence of removing the history. The mobs are “replaceable”, things do not exist. The world outside becomes pretentious, faked. You know that no matter where you go, every dungeon is tailored around you. The distance and space within the world cease to exist, because the world simply “walks with you”.

Here what is broken is the discovery. In a immersive game you explore the territory, discover treasures, get to know characters and stories. Think to the original Ultima series. YOU are the one who is ported to another world, you are then asked to move, explore and learn. That word exists with or without you. The fun is in the “roleplay” as immersion. You are a stranger in a strage land. So the player experiencing the discovery through the character. Make experience of the world.

The world is an essential part of these games and its value is in its history, its objectivity. Its independent state, autonomous from your character. PvE implies the fact that your character is detached from the world he discovers. This discovery implies the fact that the two sets don’t overlap and remain separate. PvE implies an identity, and, as an identity, autonomous from the one of your character. “Identity” is the opposite of “virtuality”. Virtual defines a possibility: something else, somewhere else and in a different time. Identity defines something that cannot be modified, a state. And history is part of an identity.

These are the same concepts I analyzed when discussing the use of the instancing because all these different design strategies always revolve about possibilities and the adaptation of the content. About “virtualizing” parts of the game so that they can be reused.

At the core it is needed a balance between two extremes, because the concept of the virtuality is opposed to the identity and you cannot have one and the other. One goes against the other, it precludes the other.

In Oblivion the game feels completely unbalanced toward the virtuality, so, as I said, the world loses consistence, it’s all adapted around you and the underlying rules are too evident to not get easily recognized. The “artificial wires” that connect this world are exposed and you can kiss goodbye to the suspension of disbelief. The immersivity fades away and you are soon learning and interacting exclusively with these aritficial rules. Simply put: you know what to expect, the game becomes predictable.

You know that at the end of the dungeon there will be that creature and that type of loot because you are at that level. Before going in for the first time, you already know what’s within.

This is a rather interesting mechanic because in other games the levels are used in the exact opposite way: the creatures are at a fixed level, while your own level is the game design tool used to customize the difficulty (I’ll write about this in another moment).

“Fixing Oblivion” is a way to bring the game back within a threshold so that not all problem are fixed, but at least the suspension of disbelief is once again possible, and you can concentrate more on the immersion. This could be possible through two mods, working together and addressing the basic problems of the levelled lists.

The first can be found here (Francesco’s mod, with only the core components present in the versions before 2.3) and is already quite popular. There are various mods changing the levelled lists but they are too aggressive or don’t really fix the real problem, even if they may have nice ideas. The one I linked is the best compromise I found at the moment. The second is a simple mod that slows down the skill up rate four times.

The first mod intruduces min and max levels to the quests, so that they still adapt to you but only within a certain level range, recovering some of the missing persistence. This makes the difficulty more static at certain points, it scales the content indipendently to your character and you won’t be able to finish the arena or quest lines without reaching the appropriate level or at least moving near it. The second mod works in combo with the first, making the levelling process four time slower, so requiring you to spend more time hunting and exploring for each level (slowing down the skills four times essentially quadruples the “content”), encouraging you to take the side quests without worrying about outlevelling the main quest (which, thanks to the first mod, will adapt downward and upward to your level, but stopping outside a certain range. So Kvatch will never become impossible, floating within a smaller level range).

This gives the game and the player more breadth and even more control on the difficulty. The original game is completely shaped around your character, but the levelling process was also extremely fast. So it was easy to rack up levels quickly and then arrive at a situation where you have to fight the same epic creatures every two steps. Those two mods distribute the flow of the game more uniformly. You have more time to see low level content and explore without feeling like outpacing the rest of the game. The result is that everything should feel more natural. You may find quests that are too hard, so you have the time to go somewhere else to gain more power before you try again. Your level becomes a way from a side to still adapt the game difficulty appropriately, from the other a way to adapt yourself to the challenge. Possibly achieving that balance that was missing in the original game.

I still haven’t tested everything thoroughly but for now it seems to work and on the paper the ideas are solid. At the moment I’m waiting for the official patch to come out before I go through the game for good. Hoping that it won’t take too long.

This was mostly a digression on the design implications.