Tuesday, June 18, 2013

General RPGs' Level Caps

Any RPG that has characters gain levels to get stronger has a level cap, a point at which a character, upon reaching it, ceases to continue getting stronger (at least by means of leveling up). Most often the cap is set to Level 99, although with some games it can be higher. Star Ocean 3, for example, has a level cap of 255, while the standard for Nippon Ichi games is, I believe, 9999 (Nippon Ichi does love its stat extravagance). With some games, the level cap is set lower. This is usually the case in Western RPGs, such as Mass Effect 1, where the cap was set at 60, although not always--Fallout 2, a Western RPG, had a cap of the JRPG standard 99, while Super Mario RPG, a Japanese RPG, stopped at Level 30.

For most RPGs, this is not a problem. While it’s certainly possible to get to Level 99 in, say, Final Fantasy 6, you’re only going to do so if you spend hours and hours in random battles level-grinding, putting the game’s story on hold to do so. Obviously it becomes even more of an endeavor of time and patience with high caps--you can pretty comfortably beat Star Ocean 2, for example, at level 80 to 90, which is 115 to 125 levels short of the cap, and even if you want to pursue the optional ultra-bosses, a little skill and strategy will keep you from needing to go too close to the cap. But even lesser level caps can be fine in a well-balanced game. Those mere 30 levels in Super Mario RPG will take you pretty much to the game’s end, barring any extensive level-grinding, and if I recall correctly, you literally cannot hit the highest level of Mass Effect 1’s 60 without multiple playthroughs anyway, as there are a finite number of enemies and quests and such during the course of the game.

Unfortunately, the level cap CAN be a problem with some games that are not balanced well. And I hate to generalize, but I’ve found that this problem really only exists with Western RPGs. I cannot recall playing the JRPG for which simply going through the game’s plot and pursuing all its sidequests will, without specifically setting aside time to mow down random baddies to gain extra experience, cause your characters to hit the level cap significantly earlier than the game’s end. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine. In fact, it just plain drives me crazy.

You take Fallout 3, for example. Now, Fallout 3 is a fairly mild case of this, because for most of the game, you’re pretty much all set. Things are generally pretty well balanced, so it takes a good while for the player to hit the original Level 20 cap. But if you’re going through Fallout 3 pretty thoroughly (exploring each location, using your Skills, killing whatever enemies you encounter, and completing the majority of the game’s quests), you’re gonna hit Level 20, and it’s gonna be before the game’s finale. It then becomes very annoying to me to keep playing the game as I have until that point. I mean, if I can no longer gain experience from it, what real incentive do I have to combat enemies and waste my ammunition when I have enough HP and restorative options to just walk by them through to the next area of whatever ruin I’m exploring? Why bother using my eyes to identify and Skills to disarm traps when I’m strong enough and have accumulated so excessively many Stimpaks that I can just skip on through a minefield without any problem? I admit I get a bit obsessive with that little “cha-ching” and experience ticker that show up whenever you get XP in Fallout 3, requiring their satisfaction to motivate me to do anything outside the strictly necessary, but still! A game like Fallout 3 is designed to reward the player’s involvement in its world in 3 immediate ways: Karma, Loot, and XP. And since Karma’s barely a factor and loot applies more to non-XP-giving situations than anything, it makes the game start to feel empty if you have to go on without it. Admittedly, the DLC packages increase the level cap, but they also provide enough content to cover most of that increase, meaning that you’ll still be hitting that XP wall too early.

It’s much worse with Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout: New Vegas had a level cap of 30 to 50 (depending on what DLCs you got; the original game, however, is 30), which is higher than Fallout 3’s, but they balanced the game much worse at the same time. In Fallout: New Vegas, there are a TON of enemies who give the maximum 50 XP upon being killed; in fact, I think there’s more that give out that max amount than there are enemies worth fewer points. With Fallout 3, at least, only a few enemies were worth that full amount, and they weren’t freakin’ everywhere. Even with the 10 additional levels that Fallout: New Vegas’s cap has over Fallout 3’s, I still hit Level 50 when I was only about 65% of the way through exploring the game’s content! Thank goodness for the modding community having more sense than the game’s actual developers, and releasing various mods to raise that cap to something reasonable.

And don’t even get me started on Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. A classic and impressive game in most ways, but good lord, if you’re fighting enemies yourself in that game,* you can be hitting the Level 50 cap before you’re halfway through it!

I don’t think I’m being unfair with my expectations. I think it’s reasonable to expect that an RPG’s level cap be set at a point where it’s only going to be close to being reached at the game’s very endpoint, going by the assumption that a player fights any and all random enemies they encounter along the way but isn’t just walking back and forth looking for more baddies to bash. RPGs are generally boring to play already--taking away the main gameplay-related reward for playing through them is not a good thing! And the fact that all the instances of game imbalance resulting in too low a level cap I’ve encountered have come from Western RPGs, ones that pride themselves on the draw of the player’s ability to direct his character’s growth, makes it that much worse. If, in Fallout and Arcanum and the other games that suffer from an inadequate level cap, character advancement is such an important feature of the playing experience, shouldn’t THEY, of all games, be the ones to get it right?









* Arcanum has this game mechanic where you get significantly less experience for slain enemies if your companions are the ones who do the slaying.

8 comments:

  1. Oh god and don't even get me started on Paper Mario Sticker Star's lack of a lvl system which causes battles to be generally worthless and unneeded

    Oh and before any one ask the new fairy type in Pokémon is strong against dragon types because a lot of dragon slaying weapons in mythology are blessed by fairies

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    1. Sounds like a bit of a stretch, but I suppose I'll take it. Though I hate to give Steel more advantages than it already has, I suppose it would make sense to have Fairy weak to Steel, what with, y'know, the fay folk and iron and all. If they can just make Fairy absolute death unto Dark Type, though, it'll have my seal of approval. Fuck Dark Type forever.

      Mostly I'm just confused about where Fairy even comes from, elemental-wise. I mean, Dragon, okay, I guess. Ghost, well, I guess the nether-world deserves an element of its own, even though Dark seems redundant to it, rationally-speaking. Bird type, a bit of a stretch, and by all means Bug makes no sense to have, but...Fairy? Why Fairy? Where's it come from? Just seems very random.

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  2. In my limited WRPG experience, the major difference seems to be how developers interpret the level concept. Levels in JRPGs are more incremental and gradual in progression, often to the point of providing nothing more than HP and some stat points, with a separate system dealing with equipment proficiencies(if that's even a thing), or skill learning. Gaining a level has been a major thing so far in my WRPG career, where even in a game with a cap of 60 like Mass Effect*, any given level can open up a new Skill or evolve it to a significantly higher level of performance. Those spikes in progression are experienced all the way to the end, too.

    But the amount of levels or even hitting the cap doesn't determine my opinion one way or the other. What makes or breaks gameplay for me is if the balance of how frequent levels are relative to how influential they are. For the most part, WRPGs have done a better job of this as far as I've experienced. They also seem to have an easier job of it, but yeah.

    This is something I give Tri-Ace a lot of credit for. Their stories may be awkward and overly ambitious even while they're uncommonly subtle and sophisticated for JRPGs, but they do a good job of making character levels part of the gameplay package, not the be-all of performance, and certainly not a substitute for being at least half-decent at the game. I can level grind in Star Ocean 3 and Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria, but without a sensible setup and approach to combat, being sufficiently or even overleveled won't do much to help me. Battles in those games are a test of how well you can use the system, and it makes for a refreshing approach to improvement.

    It doesn't help FF6's case that you can become nigh-immortal in several different ways entirely based on equipment, and wreck any opposition in 31 flavors.

    I had a very good experience with the way Fallout 3 balanced levels. Just about every task you did gave some experience points, enforcing the notion that your character truly gains experience as they hone their skills. Hardly a new concept, but it's far more in-depth and nuanced than standard Character Levels where people get slightly better at casting magic even if they stab rabbits to death for their experience gains. To add to it, if you didn't have a particular Skill trained up, you simply couldn't do it worth a damn, and couldn't gain experience with it. Not having Science or Lockpick on a character was painful for me, having to walk past those opportunities for XP, moreso than the missed loot which is sadly hard to miss in the constant rain of resources that is the Capital Wasteland. But the concept of leveling up was very, very well done. Compare to New Vegas, where I was leveling so fast skill/perk choices didn't matter much, because you get another set of points at JRPG grinding speed. I would even say it was the prime driver in my F3 exploration.

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    I don't like Fairy Type because it seems like a catch-all for cutesy stuff, a burden the Normal type has done well enough at. And yes, to hell with Dark Type. A typing full of the most forgettable and generically "cool" designs in the franchise. The point of the type was apparently to nerf Psychic, but Psychic was nerfed just fine with the Special split and underwhelming specimens in Johto in the first place. It's not like they weren't weak to anything that looked at Defense in the first place. Bah.

    And come on. Dragons are only WTFBBQ in ways not unique to them(multi-typing is not a rare trait or even all that amazing), their type is only Weak is Kill against other Dragons, they're weak to Ice and doubly so whenever they're paired with Flying or Ground(which also cancels multiple resistances Dragon provides, ugh), and Ice is hardly a difficult type to slap on half of the Pokedex. I say this without Diamond/Pearl/Black/White experience, mind you.

    *There's always the Therum Mining Laser Glitch if you're especially patient. And sad.

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    1. Son of a bitch. I'll vomit all over my own blog next time I type this much. Due apologies, man.

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    2. Well, Fallout 3's XP cap didn't last ME long enough, anyway, although I do admit that I did absolutely fucking everything in that game including revisiting every single location of any, I mean ANY, note later on to collect miscellaneous items that I hadn't known in my first visit were good for turning in for repeatable quest rewards (books, teddy bears, scrap metal, you know what I'm talking about), so I suppose it is POSSIBLE that maybe my experience with XP might be a little more demanding than most other players who are somewhat sane. But STILL!

      And dude, we've been over this. Don't apologize for typing a lot. It's fun and interesting to read. At least it is for me, but since I am the most important person in the world, if I am to be believed (and I would know, right?), that is all that matters.

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  3. I'm a decade late to this, but... I think in JRPGs level caps generally exist solely for technical reasons, to keep out any integer overflows or weird formatting bugs from having too many digits in a number. This is less relevant today, but now it's just tradition.

    On the flipside, western RPGs (this is just my 2 cents) I think originally the idea was to make it so you could 'lose' the game. You can see it even as late as NWN1, it's possible to have a level 40 character by the end of HotU that absolutely has no chance of surviving the last few dungeons. But, nobody actually ever /liked/ that, so it's no longer a real thing but more of a cultural inertia tradition.

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    1. Yeah, I think you're right about both points. Still, even if JRPGs were designed as such only for the sake of technical safeguards and later thoughtless tradition, it still feels better for the audience than running around for the last quarter of the game without any real motivation to engage with the boring battle system. The best system is one where you're only just able, through reasonably complete gameplay, to reach the highest level at the game's end, but if you're incapable of planning that out correctly as so many western RPGs are, then way-higher-than-possibly-needed is the better option for a level cap.

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    2. Oh, also, never feel like you're late to the party in commenting on my old rants - I soak attention, feedback, and readers' alternate perspectives up like a sponge regardless of what year's attached to the article. Thanks for the comment!

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