Feedback:User/Shady Tradesman/Open Letter: Level-Scaling

Dear Arena Net, please don't make the same mistake that Oblivion did.

I have only ever really anticipated three games in my life.

The first one was KOTOR 2, the squeal to one of my favorite games of all time. Unfortunately when I finally got my hands on the game, I was faced with a very sub-par glitch-riddled experience. I managed to skip a quarter of the game due to a bug, making the plot completely nonsensical. Even if I hadn't faced that error on my first play-through though, I would still consider it a disappointment. What caused such a good sequel to go so wrong? Well I'll go ahead and blame it on Bioware handing the game off to Obsidian, a sub-par third party developer. Guild Wars 2 doesn't have that problem.

The next game I anticipated was Oblivion. I spent more time playing Morrowind than I ever did playing Guild Wars, which I have almost a thousand hours in now. I lost myself in the game's rich lore and open, challenging world. Of course I was excited about a new Elder Scrolls game after that. Anyone who was there waiting with me remembers the years slipping by as Bethesda hammered away on what looked like the best thing ever at the time. When it finally came out, again I was faced with a product that was fatally flawed. I forgive the awful technical art direction (it was one of the first current-gen games), and I'd even  forgive it for butchering its lore and substituting it for an uninspired fantasy realm if the game was playable, but it still had one fatal flaw: Level scaling.

You heard me folks. Vanilla Oblivion, while generally critically acclaimed and loved by the masses, missed out on legendary status because of the same thing Guild Wars 2 has been promising recently. In Oblvion, the idea was that any character could go any place in the game freely because the enemies would scale with you. First of all, that didn't turn out to be the case*, but more importantly, abundant level-scaling goes against the ideas of progression that make role-playing games fun to invest time in. In Oblivion, a nooblet character could go to a cave in the wilderness and be faced with shirtless bandits trying to make a living; then, after saving the world and becoming the most powerful warrior alive, he could return to any cave and find that bandits had suddenly practiced their swordsmanship until they could put you to shame, and gotten armor that was better than yours (the only real way to get the best armor in the game was to KILL BANDITS who had leveled with you). In the end, it was easier in Oblivion to never level your character up, and instead just increase your skills.

Of course the community kind of saved the day in Oblivion's case. Mods were created that rebalanced the game into a playable state (OOO, for example), and removed level-scaling almost entirely. These mods received millions of downloads. Really. These mods got more downloads than units sold of many games because people recognized there was a glaring problem and wanted to fix it.

So when I hear that GW2 is going to scale your level based on where you are and how many people are there, it scares me. Picture this: you go out and solo the shatterer; he's easy because no one else is around. Then you go back to a starting area and you're having trouble with a centaur because it's in a low-level area and there's 50 people present. Where is the sense of accomplishment in my character's progression if I can't go one-shot low level enemies after I've killed a primordial dragon? Making your numbers bigger doesn't matter if it doesn't FEEL like your numbers are getting bigger. There is a balance to be found between accessibility and progression.

Oh yeah, and that last game I've anticipated? That would be Guild Wars 2. Please don't let the community down with a simple mistake, Arena Net. We're counting on you. :)


 * The stealth-oriented classes couldn't survive at later levels because the enemies scaled similarly for a warrior or mage. That's just a balance issue, though, so it's kind of irrelevant to my post.