Determinance screenshot

Auto levelling

For those who don’t know, “auto levelling” is a process Bethesda use in their recent games (Oblivion, Fallout 3).  It’s a process which basically means that all enemies you come accross in the game are always levelled to be “suitable” to your character – if you’re level 8, you’ll be facing level 8 super mutants.  If you’re a combat-oriented level 8 character you’ll probably find combat in general easier, as you’ll be relatively better at combat than your “average” level 8.  If you’re a speech or stealth or whatever oriented character you’ll find it relatively harder.   Fallout 3 also introduced a new wrinkle, which is that if you visit a location at level 8 say and then leave and come back at level 12 you’ll still be facing level 8 enemies.

It’s generally pretty controversial.  Actually, strike that, it’s just plain unpopular (and I can just feel Malakian getting ready to launch his bi-monthly Morrowind vs Oblivion rant at this thread).  But I think it’s a good thing.  Oh I’m so contrary.

Let’s say you have 100 missions in the game.  If they are auto-levelled, then you can wander around the landscape at will and be able to tackle any mission you find.  You have a lot of freedom.  If they aren’t auto-levelled, then let’s say 10 are suitable.  Suddenly you’re entering missions you can’t do, or ones which are facily boring.  Don’t get me wrong, I think there should be some incredibly difficult missions (and some hugely easy ones), but I think they should be the exception.  I don’t want to find a cool mission I can’t do because I haven’t got far enough into the game yet.  In my mind, the less auto-levelling there is the more linearity there is.  “Good” linearity can come from quests – long strings of missions.  If Bethesda are going to let you roam completely freely – an attribute universally lauded – then I think it would be pretty bad if could hardly tackle any of the missions at any one time.

I do understand why people don’t like auto-levelling though.  It feels… slippery somehow.  And I also think that Bethesda don’t mix it up with enough stupidly difficult/stupidly easy missions.  But I think it’s a very important part of their games.

I’d like to go further.  I’d like to make missions come to you, instead of you coming to them.  Instead of having mission A set in an abandoned apartment building, how about having mission A set in ANY abandoned apartment building – when you wander into one and the game decides you need a mission, it’ll place that mission there.  I do like exploring in Fallout 3, but I’d also like a bit more density to the missions as I don’t have 200 hours (unlike Bin) to put into seeing everything.

I had just finished the flame-ant mission last night and I came out of the subway and this dick from Talon Company started jawing at me about having a price on my head.  I killed him and then I very quickly found a Brotherhood vs Super Mutants mission that got me involved.  And I just thought – wow, that was awesome, because it was both completely non-linear but also wrapping me in missions (which is where I’d like to be) the whole time and it felt completely serendipidous.

I think a game which allowed missions to take place in general spaces – this mission requires an apartment building, this a bunker, this an open field – could give you even more freedom by giving you an experience as polished and designed as a great fps but within a freeform world.

I have a feeling the auto-levelling deniers are going to HATE that idea.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 14th, 2008 at 1:09 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Auto levelling”

  1. Kylotan:

    § November 14th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    Sure, it removes the linear aspect, by rotating the line through 90 degrees. You can go anywhere and do anything with little sense of progression, dipping in to these shallow and unrelated events as you see fit, reducing what should be a many-coursed feast to a vol au vent laden buffet.

    Worse, you can often find yourself effectively regressing through Oblivion, as missions that were easy at level 3 become gradually harder and harder as your skill set becomes more specialised, moving your abilities further from the average that the game is pitched at. You play well, earn a level, and now find that you’re less well equipped for a battle than you were before levelling up. How can that be a good thing? You end up deliberately not spending the experience you have earned in order to keep the game playable. Fallout 3 attempts to reduce this by fixing the area levels when you first enter, but that just shifts this new artificial metagame to a feeling of needing to visit areas early on to ensure you won’t find them too tough later.

    As for roaming completely freely being universally lauded, I disagree. Games should be about challenges on some level. There should be places that I want to go to, but can’t yet, providing there is an implicit promise that when I improve my character or my skill level sufficiently, I can go there. Whether this is a dungeon in Oblivion or a secret level in an FPS or an unlockable character in Soul Calibur 23, the promise of revealing extra content once you pass some threshold is generally enjoyed. It gives you motivation to improve and a reward for doing so.

    I don’t think that so-called non-linearity should be held up as the ultimate thing to aim for in games. Giving a player some choice is paramount, but only if those choices have meaning, and the order in which they attempt things should be one of the meaningful choices they get to make.

    There’s certainly a place for generating missions in ad-hoc locations for ad-hoc players in MMOs, where you can’t attempt to hold together any real sense of storyline since players can’t really change much about the environment. But in single player RPGs, it seems to be throwing out much that is good about the genre in the pursuit of the ideal of freedom, without really examining whether that is a positive thing or not.

  2. malakian:

    § November 14th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    lol, Ian must always be furious when I reply, as we seem to have (luckily not HUGELY divisive) but very different reviews on game issues. I am personally not TOTALLY against auto-leveling, believe it or not. However, I do believe having it in something like Oblivion and particularly Fallout 3 is the most irritating use of it ever. Omroth’s eyes will no doubt be narrowing now, and the urge to say ‘fuck you lakian’ overwhelming him. I’ve not been playing F3 for ages, but predictably, it’s a masterpiece. Bethesda are a great company which these days struggle to disappoint, but auto-leveling in these massive open world RPG’s is in my opinion regularly a large immersion breaker, and that is down to the MASSIVE focus the games have on a complex leveling/character development system.

    Lets take a look at an example of how I’ve been frustrated by it thus far. When you go into a building in fable 2, a game where I could see auto leveling working, the situation is hugely different. You have no lockpick skill. You have no explosive skill. You have no science skill. You want to go through a door? Out comes the sword, down goes the door. Snap back to fallout. I’m shooting my way through some raiders on a mission, and because of auto leveling, I’m not deterred by the raiders as we’re an even match. However, when I’ve fought my way to the back of the building and I’m hit with a ‘you need a lockpick skill of 25′, the immersion of the whole mission and any progress I’ve made is thrown in the toilet.

    Having auto level enemies but not environmental aspects of the game is TOTALLY out of sync and stupid, as it not only makes me feel way more like i cant do things than just ‘i’ll do this mission when i can take down that mutant’. Lets face it, in a world that big youre never going to go back to the bottom of that dungeon to see what was in the box you couldnt open when your skill hits 40, it’s just impractical unless you have a million hours. Having monsters in areas levelled to the kind of area around them just gives you a linear progression of ability which you have anyway, but keeps it a bit more on the rails.

    In morrowind you could still go in swords ablazing if you wanted, you just might need a truckload of skill to succeed. As I mentioned, fable 2 could cope with auto levelling as it doesnt have as much enviromental skills shit attached, so enemies are your only focus of levelling up. Coupled with the fact you can never feel truly powerful, I think auto leveling is more of a hindrance than experience enhancer.

  3. malakian:

    § November 14th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    TEXTWALLLLLL

  4. Ian:

    § November 14th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

    Oh but we agree! The whole “you need a skill of x to do this” in Fallout3 is BULLSHIT. I haven’t thought about that yet. I’m just saying that enemy auto-levelling works for me.

  5. Paul:

    § November 18th, 2008 at 2:24 am

    Everyone should just play Wing Commander Privateer and shut the hell up.

  6. Kylotan:

    § November 18th, 2008 at 4:06 pm

    Malakian – I’m guessing it ate all the paragraph breaks in your comment too. :)

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