DonFerrari said:
HoloDust said:
Not at all. As I said, I don't mind difficulty scaling, if it's fairly narrow. But once you get to AAA levels of scaling, game designs tend to fall apart - and that is current norm in industry.
If you're happy with that state of industry, that's perfectly fine by me. I'm not and I'm happy there are devs that think the same.
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I play mainly AAA games and I'm yet to find a game that disapointed me because they had multiple difficult selections or even a game I thought that got dumbed down and unpleasant because they made it to be mass market.
Most were Sony 1st party or exclusives and considering their praise I fail to see this unique view you and some others are seeing that AAA games are on a very bad situation due to panderizing to mass market.
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Well then, good for you, I'm glad you're enoying them. I'm mostly dissapointed by AAA games and often tend to stay away from them, yet I occasionally make mistake, like recently with AC:OD.
SvennoJ said:
Mnementh said:
Rubber banding and adapted challenges are critized in it's own right. In many games part of the experience is to build the character and progress. If that is part of the game, you want to see, that in the beginning some challenges are impossible to beat, but if you come back later with an upgraded character they get a lot easier. If you adapt the challenge this feel of progression is lost. |
That;s why I said, unless you venture into areas you do not belong in yet. Skyrim had dynamic difficulty scaling, making sure some things don't become too easy yet also allowing you to get over powered if you wish.
I did 'abuse' the difficulty levels in The Witcher 3. I couldn't be bothered upgrading my character so I went to hunt the high level contracts on easy mode. Which was just about possible. Still hard, yet no need to grind to be able to get to the fun stuff. I don't enjoy backtracking all that much or quests piling up like a massive todo list. If you give me a lvl 40 quest when I'm lvl 20, that's the game's fault. Yet with being able to adjust difficulty on the fly I could keep my todo list in TW3 in check. The downside was that I out leveled story missions (so increase difficulty for those) yet the rewards were paltry as the quest levels were grey.
It's always difficult to balance open world games, dynamic difficulty is the only way to do it. In BotW I ignored the initial directions and went North to the desert and mountains first. Then when I finally went to Koriko village it was all way too easy there, or rather very unbalanced. The random encounters scale up yet the standard area enemies were all down with one hit. I also cleared / explored the castle early in the game, fun challenge. Then when I finally got there to finish the game the whole thing was pretty meaningless challenge wise.
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And that's why, when it comes to fusion of story and exploration, from my POV, semi-open worlds will always be vastly superior...at least until your first point is solved in video games.
I had a mini-rant about tabletop RPG experience yesterday in PC thread - that eventually we'll get good narrative AI that can handle game like proper GM and that (in addition to proper physics on everything) we'll get video game RPG that can match or even surpass tabletop RPGs.
Yet, even then I think narrow scaling will work better - cause some things are just difficult and should not be adjusted much. Come later when your're ready, and game's AI GM will allow for whichever approach you might choose to solve it, if it makes sense and your character can pull it of.
