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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7724872" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I played WoW for about a year and had a level 90 character at one point and got the banner that you got for completing every quest in the game.</p><p></p><p>Your objection answers itself. Yes, you can go to zones you are not intended to go to. You can earn the right to enter zones that were previously too difficult for you to enter, and you can go back to zones that were once challenging and have a cake walk - for instance soloing an instance that before you found impossible. But the point is that the game actively punishes you for approaching the game this way, and as a practical matter long term players just don't play that way. Content is only meaningful if it is at your level. And the experience of play of things that are at your level is always very much the same after you open up your full hot bar quite early on. </p><p></p><p>Unless someone is consciously trying to mimic the idea of zones, this is very different than a typical D&D sandbox. The area the PC's in my current campaign started in had threats from encounter levels below 1 to encounter levels above 20. There are places a short journey from where they started they still couldn't go. They've moved on to other areas and they are still finding things above and below their level. More importantly, they've obviously grown in scope of power from being nobodies that no one paid attention to, to being highly influential figures that dominate pretty much any social setting they enter into. In WoW, if you play as expected you are the center of attention the whole time, and yet wherever you go everything is perfectly tuned to offer a particular experience that is exactly like the experience you had one or five levels ago and no where you go actually responds to your wishes. If you play the game as intended, and then step back from your experience of the game and try to imagine how the PC would perceive his experience of the world (assuming that the PC can't literally see numbers and health bars), I think you'll see that from the PC's perspective he's not leveling up. He keeps encountering things of the same sort and having the same degree of difficult with him. With instance scaling, that's even more the case - every BBEG is about the same 'level'. </p><p></p><p>This is very typical of Blizzard games. For example, once you hit about level 20 in Diablo 2, you'll have functionally unlocked all your basic skills and filled your bar with combat options. From that point on, the game plays basically exactly the same again and again and again. Everything scales with you. You never actually 'level up', the numbers just get bigger. </p><p></p><p>Consider also that even to the extent that I have zones, that zone isn't going to be filled (in most campaigns) with 10th level goblin fighters and double HD cave bears. Dangerous zones are going to be occupied by monsters of greater power. D&D has always encouraged monsters to be of a predictable difficulty. The lower level of the dungeon either has more zombies, or it has ghasts, or it has hill giant zomies. It doesn't just have ordinary zombies scaled up to threaten you. My BBEG and his minions have been the same level since the party was 1st level. </p><p></p><p>Skyrim isn't as bad as earlier Elder Scrolls games. They instituted minimums and maximums that do mean that to a certain extent you are leveling up and things that once were problems - saber-tooth cats, for example - will eventually no longer be problems. If anything, I found Skyrim suffered badly for inappropriate scaling, in that the game never got more challenging than it started out and the only way to produce challenge was gradually increase the games difficulty as you leveled up. If you didn't do this, all the main events were very anti-climatic. Worse, if you did the main quests first, you got the experience of the world shaking problems being caused by foes of no great power, while as you put it - the stuff in some random farmer's root cellar where lords of their kind.</p><p></p><p>It's also got terrible balance generally.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7724872, member: 4937"] I played WoW for about a year and had a level 90 character at one point and got the banner that you got for completing every quest in the game. Your objection answers itself. Yes, you can go to zones you are not intended to go to. You can earn the right to enter zones that were previously too difficult for you to enter, and you can go back to zones that were once challenging and have a cake walk - for instance soloing an instance that before you found impossible. But the point is that the game actively punishes you for approaching the game this way, and as a practical matter long term players just don't play that way. Content is only meaningful if it is at your level. And the experience of play of things that are at your level is always very much the same after you open up your full hot bar quite early on. Unless someone is consciously trying to mimic the idea of zones, this is very different than a typical D&D sandbox. The area the PC's in my current campaign started in had threats from encounter levels below 1 to encounter levels above 20. There are places a short journey from where they started they still couldn't go. They've moved on to other areas and they are still finding things above and below their level. More importantly, they've obviously grown in scope of power from being nobodies that no one paid attention to, to being highly influential figures that dominate pretty much any social setting they enter into. In WoW, if you play as expected you are the center of attention the whole time, and yet wherever you go everything is perfectly tuned to offer a particular experience that is exactly like the experience you had one or five levels ago and no where you go actually responds to your wishes. If you play the game as intended, and then step back from your experience of the game and try to imagine how the PC would perceive his experience of the world (assuming that the PC can't literally see numbers and health bars), I think you'll see that from the PC's perspective he's not leveling up. He keeps encountering things of the same sort and having the same degree of difficult with him. With instance scaling, that's even more the case - every BBEG is about the same 'level'. This is very typical of Blizzard games. For example, once you hit about level 20 in Diablo 2, you'll have functionally unlocked all your basic skills and filled your bar with combat options. From that point on, the game plays basically exactly the same again and again and again. Everything scales with you. You never actually 'level up', the numbers just get bigger. Consider also that even to the extent that I have zones, that zone isn't going to be filled (in most campaigns) with 10th level goblin fighters and double HD cave bears. Dangerous zones are going to be occupied by monsters of greater power. D&D has always encouraged monsters to be of a predictable difficulty. The lower level of the dungeon either has more zombies, or it has ghasts, or it has hill giant zomies. It doesn't just have ordinary zombies scaled up to threaten you. My BBEG and his minions have been the same level since the party was 1st level. Skyrim isn't as bad as earlier Elder Scrolls games. They instituted minimums and maximums that do mean that to a certain extent you are leveling up and things that once were problems - saber-tooth cats, for example - will eventually no longer be problems. If anything, I found Skyrim suffered badly for inappropriate scaling, in that the game never got more challenging than it started out and the only way to produce challenge was gradually increase the games difficulty as you leveled up. If you didn't do this, all the main events were very anti-climatic. Worse, if you did the main quests first, you got the experience of the world shaking problems being caused by foes of no great power, while as you put it - the stuff in some random farmer's root cellar where lords of their kind. It's also got terrible balance generally. [/QUOTE]
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