Dynamic Difficulty Levels: PvE game design theory at work (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 16:25 (2364 days ago) @ Ragashingo

I absolutely hate overleveling. Both because too often I've experienced it as a crutch necessary to simply comple games (lookin' at you Final Fantasy XIII... no I don't want to grind 20 more hours to make this random fight or boss fight beatable without perfect tactics and luck). I am of the opinion that it give game developers, especially RPG developers, an easy out of "oh, they'll just grind and come back" when really they should have made the content progression more even.

So you're opposed to taking the time to outlevel content because you just want to finish the story now even though you're not leveled enough, rather than engage in sidequest type activities?

No. I am opposed to overleveling because it is sometimes used to justify uneven shifts in difficulty.

The 1st Barthandelus in FFXIII, for instance. I was battling my way through the previous enemies. Not blasting through. Not barely eeking by. I was doing good but was being challenged. Then comes this boss that just wiped my entire party with a super attack before I could knock down even 1/3rd of his health. It wasn't a close fight or even a tough challenge. It was a curbstomp favoring him. No amount of better tactics or stacking item buffs helped.

This sounds like the designers made this level poorly balanced. The earlier non-boss fights should be the gear/level checks, and the boss fight himself should be doable albeit slightly harder, such as requiring better tactical play or needing a buff or two. Definitely shouldn't be a brick wall.

Totally massive spike in difficulty. I eventually beat it by literally turning around and beating up on all the enemies I'd already fought through. Several times. There were no sidequests in this point in the story either. It was a straight path from like a crash site through some ruins to the boss. Several fights and even a mini-boss or two along the way, but this certainly wasn't me ignoring portions of the game.

That sounds really lame and not fun. :( On the plus side, the monsters didn't dynamically scale with your level, and you were able to eventually gain enough exp to overpower them, so character and monster dynamic scaling allowed you to surpass the overly difficult encounter.

I've also experienced overleveling turning what should be challenging, dramatic moments into lame knife through hot butter-y cheese fests (lookin' at you Skyrim and the time Alduin went down to a single base level arrow during the final boss fight.)

Wait, so you spent a lot of time in sidequest type activities which resulted in you outleveling content, and you're opposed to having been given extra levels for the time you spent in the game? This is literally the opposite of what you just said about FF XIII.

No. I am opposed to overleveling because it sometimes ruins the immersion of games when the key challenges are not properly scaled up to the player's level.

I remember in Morrowind when I got my level 80 guy to the final fight and I one-shot the dude and then got a mace I wouldn't have looked twice at given how far I was in the game. I feel like it was tuned for a level 20 person or something. So I made a new game and blitzed there and got to the boss at level 13, which was hella hard! But fun! And I did it! And then I just reloaded my level 80 guy to keep exploring because I didn't want to spend all that time doing every side quest again. My point being that dynamic leveling allowed me to make the game harder for that part by speeding there to get the challenge I wanted rather than lollygagging around as I'd done earlier. It worked.

This is basically the inverse design mistake of the previous point. Instead of too hard, some games end up being too easy. If you've played games like Skyrim or Fallout 3/4 you can often have this happen just by playing the game too long before engaging in the main story. It has absolutely nothing to do with be opposed to getting levels for playing.

For Destiny, that often has me playing along side others, having someone who put more time in being able to lol-skate through enemies that I can't hurt has exactly zero appeal to me. And I have little sympathy for someone who refuses to meet a reasonable level of gitting good.

Didn't you just say you were opposed to meeting a reasonable level of gitting good for FF XIII?

No. I'm not sure why you would think that. I was trying to provide an example of the two main reasons I don't like overleveling. That it can sometimes be used to excuse away odd difficulty spikes in games, and that in some games bad encounter design can cause a curbstomp / insta-kill in the player's favor in what should thematically have been a tough fight.

This makes more sense now, thank you for the explanation.

I enjoy a decently challenging baseline difficulty and a difficulty progression that doesn't blindside me with gameplay that is far too easy or too hard compared to the battles I was playing just minutes before.

Ideally every game should hit this, but it's hard to do without either difficulty levels that are finely tuned, or without using dynamic interplay between character levels and enemy levels to allow larger, more sandboxy games to find their own balance. The trick with that is, just as you demonstrated in your examples, they designers have to maintain a very steady increase in difficulty which ramps evenly with average play, can be circumvented by hardcore play, and can be exploited for overleveling purposes for more casual play. Destiny has elements of character and enemy levels, but lacks a true dynamic there, and so the difficulty level of the entire game is fairly even across all activities (sans prestige modes) which is, in my opinion, boring. That game could use levels to make this more dynamic, or could just get rid of levels altogether in favor of more finely tuned design, but the between place the game currently occupies is not a boon to the final product as far as I'm concerned.

So yeah, levels / power levels are pointless busywork, but no, overleveling sucks in just about every way and really shouldn't be a thing.

I think that intentionally allowing players to overlevel is a good thing, but scaling your leveling exp structure such that you naturally overlevel without trying to is a bad thing. You want to be able to play in areas which naturally challenge you rather than find that you can't catch up to challenging content because you're always overleveled, nor do you want to feel like you always have to grind for levels in order to advance the story. It's a delicate balance, to be sure, but one which is often attainable in sandboxy loot-based RPGs.

Intentionally allowing overleveling is... acceptable... if it makes sense in context to the story and gameplay. If you are suppose to be invincible and god-like, then sure. But, like in my Skyrim example, I was not supposed to be that powerful so it felt like a total disconnect. It really is a delicate balance and it is one that I would most time rather be thrown out for a more solid constant difficulty (as Destiny does apart from things like Nightfall, Prestige, etc).

If its not entirely clear from my post, I think the implementation of levels in Destiny is nonsensical, and the game would be better served by removing them entirely.

Agreed.

<3