[oneoff786]

I liked the first one. Sekiro was their best imo.

But elden ring’s design philosophy seemed to start with “what if we did dark souls but all doors and passages were open from the start?”

The answer is unsurprisingly that many players track awkward paths of hitting things too soon and too late.

If you’re going to have such significant character progression, linear games just make more sense. Breath of the wild gets away from it because link barely gets any stronger over the course of the game. Just a bit tankier.

Fighting bosses in elden ring and finding they’re drastically undertuned really ruins the point of playing a soulslike…

[rajup]

Having played some of the soulsborne games before I much prefer being able to go away and explore something else if I hit a hard boss or area. It keeps the game much more enjoyable and not feel as "grindy". You do have a point about hitting some things earlier or later than you should, but usually under-leveled players are not going to make much progress in the tougher areas anyway...

[oneoff786]

A larger problem is that the whole level system to all of these games is just kind of bad. It would be more fun if you just were appropriately leveled for each encounter and that was that. And each weapon were useable without needing to dedicate resources to it.

I prefer feeling confident that I’m at a good state to fight something and if I’m losing it’s just a skill issue to practice.

Farming in all souls games doesn’t actually net you that much, but it still feels like the easiest path forward at times. Elden ring is particularly weird with its scaling. Vigor gives much larger buffs to hp than people expect. Damage stats do much less.

[temp3738868585]

A key feature of the leveling system is that it allows somewhat for player controlled difficulty levels.

There is a wide range of skill levels of players, and what is "appropriately leveled" for one player might be trivial or impossibly hard for others.

Players level to the point where they can beat the bosses that they get stuck on.

[oneoff786]

In theory maybe. In practice not really. Leveling up does not make a huge difference. Leveling up weapons does. Leveling up flasks does too. The amount of time you need to spend to level up is a terrible trade off.

If you’re not good at the game, you can trivialize most encounters with the summons, or use multiplayer which adds a ton of luck to the outcome.

Actually farming runes is almost a trap for anything last stormveil.

[jerf]

I think leveling systems are arguably the biggest mistake in gaming right now. By that, I specifically mean things that just power you up or down based on a single number (give or take a few numbers), which you can go up basically by just playing the game for longer. It gives the entire game a natural skew towards becoming easier over time, which, being backwards, then requires a large number of gyrations to overcome.

I don't think the solution is just to rip them out and then proceed forward. And there are still other bad designs, of course; a sibling comment cites Oblivion. (Although I would call that an example of one of the "gyrations" I refer to; having a leveling system but then trying to remove it by somehow mathematically cancelling it is just weird. Quite distinct from not starting with one in the first place.)

I would cite something like Bayonetta as a good example of what I mean, though by no means the only possibility. Especially as "RPGs" continue to move more and more in the direction of straight-up-action-game combat anyhow. You open up some weapons. You can double your health and the other resource (forget what it's called), and I'm not even sure I love that, but you can. But fights are not about whether you're level 34 and they're level 63. Difficult fights are difficult because they are difficult.

In some sense the biggest mistake in my mind is that it gives designers such an easy answer; just slap a leveling system on it. More thought would be nice.

I could also cite something like Slay the Spire. No "levels" in sight, but your character certainly becomes more powerful over time, and your play gets better. Skill acquisition, clever combinations of abilities and features, etc. So much better than just a number that goes up.

[oneoff786]

Borderlands 3 does this thing where enemies are scaled to your local client level. So like if I’m level 30 playing with a level 20 friend and he finds a level 22 enemy, for me it’ll be level 32.

Which certainly seems another step removed from logic.

[jerf]

As much as I have enjoyed Borderlands (2), it is one of the things that really triggered this thought it me. For whatever reason I encountered a high-level enemy about 5 levels above me in one of the DLCs, and I managed to trap it on the level geometry and kill it with about 80% of my ammo. And I realized just how silly this was.

The primary purpose of the leveling system in Borderlands, at least to my eyes, is to make it so you can't just pick up a gun on level one and use it the whole game, defeating the purpose of the main game loop to be forcing you to be constantly changing guns. OK, I get that purpose and in context it makes sense. But the leveling system is a really weird way to do it. I'd almost rather see guns decay instead. (Not do the whole "100% functional until they instantly and totally break"; we've got enough experiences with that to know how frustrating it is.) Decay is somewhat plausible though then you have to have the strength of will to reject repair mechanisms, which is still physically weird.

But I'm not really trying to propose all the solutions to all possible alternatives to leveling systems; I'm just saying "hey let's make the player and all the enemies 11% stronger every 30 minutes, except across a large set of dimensions impossible to ever keep scaled properly relative to each other in an exponential regime" is a silly thing.

[sandworm101]

>> It would be more fun if you just were appropriately leveled for each encounter

Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. That leveling system meant you never ran into anything beyond your level. But it also mean that in the late game you were constantly hounded by insanely powerful creatures randomly out on the road.

[vkou]

Worse yet, if your character build scaled poorly, end-game became a horrible slog. If it scaled well, end-game became a walk in the park.

Unfortunately, mods that de-leveled the open world were not very good. You had no idea if you were walking into an area you outleveled, or were outleveled by, and many early quests took you to incredibly high-level areas.

[thot_experiment]

You're looking for a completely different experience than soulsborne games seek to provide my guy. The effort makes the experience meaningful. It's just like WoW was meaningfully better before the abundance of fast travel options later added to the game, or the nerfs to leveling and item acquisition. It's not everyone's cup of tea but it's a strong, flavorful and relatively unadulterated cup of tea and we stan that.

I don't even like soulsborne games that much but I recognize the beauty and purity of the experience they provide. I'd rather be playing quake 3, but it's the same thing in a certain conceptual way.

[oneoff786]

The defining feature of souls likes is undoubtedly their fluid combat. Not the shitty numbers behind them. You could. Have just as good of an experience getting x level ups after beating a boss and that’s it.

Farming souls is stupid.

[godelski]

One thing that changed my view is to just stop caring about runes. Unless it's a significant amount, close to a level up, they aren't important. The other thing is to use your items. It's easy to hoard in a game like this but you shouldn't.

[oneoff786]

Yes. They don’t matter. In part because the game is very stingy with them. In another part because of you actually need a level up you’re going to get what you need much faster going to a nice farming spot and starting from scratch. In third part because they’re nothing compared to the value of weapon upgrades and flask upgrades.

The game is also just unintuitive when it comes to defensive stats. Putting lots of points into endurance to wear the biggest armor is nothing compared to boosting vigor. Armor mostly sucks tbh.

[godelski]

Honestly I haven't farmed in the game ever. I'm not sure why I would need to. I do agree that some things are not as intuitive though, like armor. Or that poise is what's important, because it is about knockback.

[oneoff786]

You will have to farm a bit in late game if you want to try out different equipment. Because due to yet another stupid leveling system, any gear that isn’t upgraded is worse than the shittiest club with upgrades. So if you want to try anything else in the end game you need to go farm runes to buy stones to upgrade your weapons. Not terribly slow, but annoying and it could have been avoided entirely.