GERALTITUDE

Sim City wasn’t advertized as an alpha, that’s a pretty gigantic dfference.

<> thanks for everything duder, will be missed!

lol omg that game sounds hilarious

I also wanted to post The Measure of a Man :D

The other thing I wanted to say is that, the reason doing anything is right/wrong or whatever doesn't just have to with how that act affects others. Being a jerk, to a person, animal, robot, or even a fridge is just lame. Don't be a jerk!

That's just one part of sportsmanship.

Man, Drew is such a boss.

Yeah as someone with very little skin in the game this strikes me both ways

• sweet to get Ashly Birch back in and recognized for being a core part of the character
• kind a of a slap in the face to the other VA though

But still, feels like a net positive?

The victory theme from Mega Man.

Oh and This is True Love Making.

WO HO HO HO YEAH-EA - yes small coffee please - WO HO HO HO YEAH-EA!

Grenades can be used in many ways in a single game, much less across many. Throwing stuff and then that stuff exploding is really cool, at least in our toy worlds. Some of the things that made it hard to pick one poll answer:

• fighting NPCs or real people
• scarcity of ammo & grenades in the game
• game is very fast (doom) or slow (resident evil)
• grenade is regular (explosive) or not (ice/chaff/poison/etc)
• grenade has a timer (like the sticky OP mentioned) or just instantly explodes
• grenade leaves enemy in a dps state (burning/poisoned) or not
• throw physics are loose/floaty (halo) or heavy/fast (cod)

Otherwise what sweep & elmorales said sum up my feelings pretty well!

Hmm maybe this will be the first of these I play. It's crazy I've missed it until now really, most of it is way up my alley.

@justin258: Thanks for your post duder! I'll have to get back to you about games other than Witcher 3.. it's the only game not called Street Fighter or Nioh that I played in the last two years of its kind. Other than Skyrim, which I agree is not a great implementation. Will think on this!

But, one thing I wanted to add to the conversation is a little bit how you brought up Dark Souls: "Dark Souls is also an aversion to all of this because you cannot grind your way out of a challenge, you have to be able to play the game well to get anywhere".

This is actually also a potential result of level scaling! The idea is the same. In both Dark Souls & Witcher 3, for example, we can level up and get points to put into abilities. But, levelling up isn't going to allow us to walk through any enemies. No matter what bonuses the game gives you, numerically, your mechanical decisions (how you really play the game) are what will affect progress.

So, where I wanted to go with this was the way Level Scaling & Difficulty are married.

Let's use Witcher 3 as an example. My guess would be that on Easy, Level Scaling is a crappy option for me personally. My problem with the game is not feeling challenged in the first place, and so with level scaling on easy mode, this would really be exacerbated (it would start easy and get incrementally easier, regardless that some enemies would never be way below my level). But, when you play Blood & Broken Bones (aka constant game over mode) this is the opposite. On the hardest difficulty, in the very first map (White Orchard) a single drowner can you bring you the edge of life and death with *one* single jump in. Another two swipes and you're dead. With scaling on, this never really goes away (i.e it starts hard and gets only incrementally less hard). You become only slightly more survivable as you level up. BUT! you get lots of Witcher abilities, potions, etc to give you different options on how to deal. Sounds funny, but I don't think this is that far from how Dark Souls works. Our stats, armour, etc, only really makes slightly stronger. Our skills are the real differentiator.

So, top level, here is how this started to look in my head:

- Survivability (your HP and base damage)
- Tools (your options on how / when / where to attack)

Two concepts which work tightly together.

In most games, levelling up increases both your survivability and your toolset. A dead-simple example would be gaining more HP when you level up (survivability) and a new lunging sword attack or something (tools [range]). As such, one way to think of the "ideal use / scenario for good level scaling" is simply to reduce your survivability increases with each level. Note that all of the above is looking at level scaling as a mechanic, which, when paired with difficulty level, makes the game more challenging. This is only one of at least two applications of level scaling. The other application is to make the game easier on purpose, to allow you to more easily walk around and explore (the great Skyrim example) and fight enemies wherever. Skyrim's biggest issue was that whatever you did with the difficulty, ultimately, the entire tool set of that game just is not that fun to play with imo. It'd be like if Dark Souls had 1 sword and 1 shield and no other options, no magic, no items. The toolset matters so much.

I think, reading over this, it's still a bit convoluted, but I hope some of it comes across! I guess to summarize, I would say

- level scaling is a design option that works with the difficulty level to create a semi-consistent "difficulty experience" which could be either easy, or hard, or something in-between
- level scaling is ultimately still sub-servient to the toolset in the game
- the toolset has to be matched with enemy design that justifies the existence of the toolset
- I think often games fail in areas which are not level scaling, but, it may be the one we point at. Again, I think Skyrim is a great example of that. That game's problems don't begin and end with level scaling, but level scaling is not helping.