Level Scaling in both RPGs and Computer Games is Stupid!

 I've been playing Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It seems to be mostly good, but does have a lot of bad things in it too. One of them is level scaling. Computer games tend to have that, and I fear even "table top" RPGs with level mechanics may suffer from this design flaw. In fact, the game doesn't have to have level mechanics for the designers (or Game Masters) to fall into perpetrating this mistake.

In case you don't know what level scaling means, I'll put it simply: as the player character(s) advance in levels, the opposition also gains levels.

Levels in general is a stupid, but often used mechanic to indicate how powerful someone is. Usually, following Dungeons & Dragons, levels are really only or at least mostly about fighting ability (in some cases with magic perhaps, but still it's mostly about the ability to cause and to take "damage").

The main problem with level scaling is obvious:
It seems that no matter how good you get, everyone around you also becomes that much better. In effect, your hard earned "experience points" really didn't change anything, you're still just as good, compared to others, as the designer intended.
In some games, this means that the simple town guards that you meet in the beginning will be level 1 fighters, but later on you will meet simple town guards who are level 20 fighters.
In other games (AC Odyssey included) this means that soldiers or your enemies in one area will be mostly level 5 fighters while in another they will all be level 40, because the story of the game is obviously intended to take you to those latter places only later in the game. In some cases, those level 5 soldiers are supposed to be at war with the level 40 soldiers, yet somehow the latter don't just quickly crush the former. Weird, huh? Or plain stupid design, rather.

How should the games (or RPG campaigns) be designed then?
Realistically. That's the simple answer.
First of all, levels would ideally not be used at all. If they are used, the significance of the difference between consecutive levels (e.g. level 1 and level 2) should be small, especially if the game allows progress through dozens of levels.
In fact, there should be a reason why the player character is able to progress faster than normal, if that is the case, be it divine bloodline or whatever. 
Second, and most important, is to be consistent about levels. Town guards everywhere should be pretty similar in quality, unless there is a good reason within the story for some of them to be better or worse than the average.
The world should not change around the player character, but rather stay relatively static, or change according to whatever realistic reasons it does change. In a mundane world, the abilities of soldiers in two opposing armies are likely to be very similar, and also similar to many other soldiers. If on the other hand, a mighty god of war should appear, he might be able to change his followers into much more effective (and horrible) fighting machines. But even those demonic soldiers cannot continuously get better and better conveniently at the same pace as the hero of the story.

IMHO, the above is pretty damn basic for RPG designers/Game Masters. That big game companies still fail at this, after decades, I cannot comprehend. If any company would like to hire me to tell them how to improve their games, I'd be happy to take the job. 😀

Far Cry series, or How to Ruin a Game

I recently played through Far Cry 3, Far Cry 5, and Far Cry New Dawn. The first of these was the best. In fact, I had played it once before, and I still played it again, which is unusual for me. I hate to repeat things, so a game that has a story line, a plot, I will almost always only play once. But that's the thing - Far Cry games have open worlds, where you can roam freely, and that I love. "Freeing" outposts is fun. The improvements to that in the later games of the series are good. So, there is much good in these games, but then there are the things that ruin these games, to greater or lesser extent, to me at least.

Where all the games in the series AFAIK fail, is in trying to add a completely linear plot on top of the open world fun. 

These stories have good things in them as well, but this combination sucks. The way the player is frequently railroaded into the next part of the story usually just makes no sense. For some reason, the designers wanted to have the main player character captured several times in some of these games, and even failed to come up with realistic ways of doing that, even though it really wouldn't be that hard. If you want to design a game, do that. If you want to make an "interactive movie", do that. Don't try to do both at once, or if you do, be very, very good. Ubisoft, you are not that good.

Also, the worlds of these games are all way too full of things, especially animals, but also humans. The designers clearly thought the players would want to be constantly fighting something, anything. So, the games are designed for idiots. Fine, but they could easily have added realism options, where the player can choose how densely populated the world is, and also to how likely the animals are (unlike real animals) to attack humans.

How frequently something happens, significantly influences how important it feels.

If combat - and even just encountering people (or animals) - is rare, then those fights become important. The F.E.A.R. series had this right: they understood how to build suspension and atmosphere in those games. Not so in Far Cry, where you are constantly blasting away with your guns.

Consistency in how the game looks and how it behaves matters. Realism is good.

What I mean is that if you have guns clearly simulating (in name and appearance, as well as some statistics like magazine size) real world weapons, and the world mostly looks (and hopefully feels) very much like the real world, then the player will probably expect those weapons also to behave like real weapons. That means, if you shoot a bear in the head with a light machine gun, you shouldn't have to shoot 200 rounds into that head - as you unfortunately have to do in Far Cry New Dawn. If you shoot a human with a 9 mm pistol, they should not be eager to just shoot back at you, at least not all the time. Guns should have effect. In these games, unarmed attacks or attacks with a knife are usually more effective attacks than shooting. It makes no sense. Guns were invented for a reason.

I understand that a game where the player character dies easily may not be popular (although I understand ARMA is, and IMHO that's exactly what made the early Rainbow 6 games so interesting), it does add to the realism. And realism enables willing suspension of disbelief in those hopefully rare cases where that is required. Even more importantly, it enables immersion - feeling like you're really in the world of the game, as opposed to just playing a game from the outside, like Pacman or something.

There is also one recurring thing in these games, as well as in some others. For decades, it has been the standard in PC games that you can save and load, even quick save and quick load the game. For some reason, this cannot be done. (Even ARMA 3 had this problem, which is what drove me crazy while playing it, and I failed to play it through partly because of that.) I find this lack really hard to accept. It should always be possible to quickly and easily "undo" something dumb you've managed to do to ruin your mission, because it usually is something the character would never have done.

There is much good in the Far Cry series - otherwise I wouldn't have played them through even once. But the things they got wrong are infuriating. It's like they had a great game, and then decided to ruin it with stupid additions and very bad design choices. Other games may have done things right. The Stalker series is very good.

So how do you ruin a game you're creating? 

1. By not knowing what sort of game you are designing in the first place.
2. By not having the usual options to Save and Load the game.
3. By ignoring realism.
4. By not caring about atmosphere, instead just trying to maximize "action".
5. By ignoring role playing elements, like immersion.

Please, game designers, don't keep making these mistakes!