I became so distracted by all the side content in Velen and Novigrad that when it was time to finish up the Dandelion chain I was overleveled to the point where to content was trivial. I just reached Skellige and I am almost level 21, and the story quests are for level 16. Fine, I thought, I'll just ignore side missions for a while, except for the fact that the main story gives you so much God damn XP that this won't solve a thing. This leaves me in a spot where I will have to choose between turning the difficulty up to hard or finding a mod which lets me roll back my level, and from here on playing through the rest of The Witcher 3 feeling like I am ruining the game for myself just by playing the parts that I want to play. In retrospect I should have paid more attention to my level, but what does it say about the level progression of a game when the player feels discouraged to do content for fear of trivializing it?

I am at the same point and agree with you. I'm playing on hard though actually.

I haven't had a problem until this point I'm at... which I think is a little further than you are. I believe I am done with all main quests in Skellige. I'm about to see where I actually am as far as progress on the main quest to figure out if I'm about to hit the end game of the main quest.

I was confused why people were complaining about not getting enough XP (obviously the bug aside) because if anything this is actually the problem.

I think everyone should try to play this game on hard though. It makes it so if you're overleved that stuff isn't as much of a joke. Stuff above your level is pretty damn difficult.

Personally I'm just doing stuff though regardless of level. Yeah, it might be pretty easy but I can try to make it challenging in different ways (not using my potions for example, or meditating less and using less of them) and it's still pretty fun. I might even keep some less powerful swords on me to keep damage low. That might sound dumb to some but I am someone who will handicap themselves by choice in a game to adjust difficulty. Think of it as manually applying skulls in Halo.

I feel its more an eq. problem. I play on hard and it was a deacent challange in the beginning but as soon as i upgraded the armor it just got into a button mash fest. Instead of killing me in a couple of blows the enemies now just chips away at my health and its not worth the trouble of dodgeing or evading.

The biggest challenge thus far in the game was a level 11 nightwraith contract i took on at level 8. Past that everything has just gotten easier even if i do stuff 5 levels above me.

Definitely turn it up to hard.

Also don't worry so much, yes the main quest give a lot of XP but they also increase in level quickly. for example the next main quest steps after Skellige stes (not a lot) are lvl 21 i think.

Likewise if you are over leveled for quest you will naturally slow down your progression for a while since you will be getting less xp.

A lot of people found themselves over leveled when just arriving into Skellige, myself included. It's a natural occurrence if you try to do most of the side quests in Velen Novigrad. By the end of the game I was still level 35 after doing all the side content so the quests eventually catch up closer to you.

I found it was specifically around the Novigrad quests where I felt particularly overleveled. Once I got to Skellige the quests seemed to even out a bit more.

I would consider bumping up the difficulty though. Even without being overleveled the game does get easier in the latter half. I considered bumping it up to Death March a number of times, but I didn't want to risk screwing up the trophy after sending so much time with the game.

I'm playing on the hardest difficulty so maybe this is less of a problem for me. At level 14 a level 9 drowner can still take half my health in 3-5 hits.

To be honest I'm not sure I, uh, philosophicaly, can feel "overleveled" myself. I guess I just don't care about that. What I mean is:

• I don't really care about the XP I get from any quest. Mostly I'm interested in the quest itself.
• I don't care if my sidequests are more challenging than my story quests, so its irrelevant to me if I'm "too high level" for a quest

I've never had problems getting awesome loot either way, so, again, this whole overleveled thing is just not affecting me I guess.

Don't make sweeping general statements about the quality of a game because of your experience. I have 0 problem with leveling. So either you are wrong, I am wrong, or we are both right and the game is both of these things to both of us. Are you just one of the players who only does quests for XP rather than actually having fun doing the quest? That's what it sounds like to me. I just did a level 4 quest last night and got 10 xp for it. Doesn't bother me at all and I still look forward to doing other, low level quests.

Yep I've always played games like this. On Death March in Witcher 3 I don't loot any common objects from peasants, dismantle (rather than sell) most everything, and always go for maximum bets. Also, I walk a lot. :)

@erhard: I'm at the exact same spot and am the exact same level. I dunno, it's kind of a bummer that I'm steam rolling through some of this stuff but at the end of the day I'm here for the good writing and story. So I continue to do sidequests even when they're 7 levels below me because sometimes I just want to see what this particular side story is all about.

IT does seem like you are super weak for the first 5 hours of the game and then you just skyrocket. Worst part is that even at level 21, I'm at a tier of signs that is all "+15 intensity" which means that I won't be getting to SEE any new signs for some time.

I honestly think the ability tree from Witcher 2 was better than Witcher 3.

I keep a close eye on my level and that of my quests, I usually level a level or two above the quest level to keep it fun yet challenging.

Turning up the difficulty and hoping for the best. Thanks for the replies.

The entire point of my post was to say that I wish I could do every quest without having to worry about getting too much XP and ending up overleveled. Baffling how you could have misread it so badly.

@erhard: It's a hard thing to balance in an open-world game. If you could do everything without being overleveled then you would more or less HAVE to do everything to stay adequately leveled. The only solutions to that are to give no exp at all, so you are free to do as many as you want, which is certainly not going to please everyone, as there are already people out there complaining the side content doesn't give enough xp. Or you take the Bethesda approach and make everything always scale to your level, which I don't really think is an ideal approach either.

I think the only change I might make is to have the story missions scale by just a few levels, maybe like 3-5.

It's not just the levels, it's that the skills and potions become so incredibly potent that it becomes hard to not break the game. A couple points in Acquired Tolerance and you can run around with two decoctions active at the same time, and if you choose to go down the Signs skill tree, the alternate Igni just kinda keeps everything stun locked forever, while burning them for the entirety of their health. I actually specced out of Signs because of how powerful it was, it wasn't fun to just hold down R2 and melt everything effortlessly. At the same time, now I am specced into melee skills, and Whirl will take a bosses health from 100% to zero in about 4 seconds. This is while playing on Death March, by the way.

It seems like in order to keep the game challenging, you would have to not drink any potions and not put points into any skills. Shadow of Mordor had the exact same problem, where skills and runes would just sap any challenge the game had from it.

I'm about to hit level 19 and i'm still in Velen/Novigrad (is that what it's referred to as? Since it's 2 places but only one map?) And the main story quests I have are level 12. I've already gotten Every question mark I can see on the map (Though i'm still discovering more & discovering places that never displayed a question mark in the first place) And now i'm working on finishing every quest that is lower than my level before I continue the story...

Oh man, I really want to go to Skellige now... But I can't! Not yet!!

I'm level 20 and more or less just got to Skellige. I keep trying to do only quests at my level or beneath, but there's so damn many. Think I'm just gonna start bouncing back and forth between side stuff and story stuff, instead of worrying so much about clearing the side stuff out.

I think the quests are still fun even if you're over-leveled. The combat isn't a big draw for me in this game, so having it be easier and take less time isn't a negative. I'm level 20ish and about to move on, but I'm still having fun doing quests like "The Volunteer" (Trollolo is one of my favorite characters this year) even though they are way below my level.

@erhard: It's not that baffling :S ... you know, there's no where in your OP where you say what you just said now. Literally it does not say "the combat in this game is too easy" anywhere your first post, you just say "too much xp". Unless to you "overleveled" is defined as meaning "the combat is too easy". More importantly the Dandelion quest you're referencing has barely any combat as I remember it, so why would I think you think it's trivial because of your level? What does being overleveled have to do with conversations? :S

Either way my statement stands. There's nothing wrong with the leveling in the game for me. It's just your expectations, hang ups, etc. Like not wanting to play on hard when your current difficulty is too easy for you.

And I'm still baffled! What, exactly, is the problem with being overleveled? And being overleveled for what? I just don't follow. If you are oveleveled for one quest, you are too low a level for a different quest, aren't you? Until, you know, you do *all* the quests.

Honestly the more I read your OP the more baffled I am. Case in point:

"feeling like I am ruining the game for myself just by playing the parts that I want to play."

Playing the parts you want to play just sounds like how every game should be played to me. What is the "better" way to play?

TL;DR: Is the game just too easy for you and you are not having fun? If that's the problem, consider mine / Artisan Breads playstyle and customize your own difficulty after Death March is too easy.

I'm still pretty early on in the game, but I'm running into a strange thing with the difficulty. I'm playing on hard, but I tend to steamroll over entire groups of regular enemies, but then when I get to "bosses" the fights take way too long because I'm just not doing enough damage to them. During the last major fight I had, I ended up turning the difficulty down - not because it was too hard, but because I was barely scratching the boss and I didn't want the fight to take an hour. At a certain point, I'm like...OK, I get the mechanics of this fight, I've seen what the boss can do and figured it all out, now I just want it to be over so we can move on to the next thing.

It's like I'm both underleveled and overleveled depending on what I'm doing in the game at any given time.

@mb: If you're playing on the harder difficulties I think they kind of expect you to utilize your oils, potions, decoctions, etc, when it comes to bosses. I never found any of the bosses took very long to go down if you used some of the more powerful elements of that stuff.

@geraltitude: No need to be this defensive about it. I understand the guy completely and several people in the thread have shared the sentiment. It's not really baffling at all - you want to experience as much of the story as you can because it's good, but then you realize that through doing so you are several levels above where the main quest is. Some people don't want to feel like they're steamrolling through the experience. Not sure what you don't understand about any of that. Personally I don't care that much. I want to experience the story and if it's going to be easy to defeat some monsters then hey, so be it.

Not sure why you're jumping down the guys throat for voicing a valid criticism that has been raised numerous times already.

ehhh defensive? That's my writing style I guess. I feel on the internet people always see lots of words and think "Defensive". Or, in your case, "jumping down throats". I'm verbose. What can I say? Sorry if I hurt someone's feelings, definitely never the intention. (also, don't you think there's something a little funny about defending a user from another user who you think is being defensive?)

Anyways, I just don't agree, top to bottom, and it's not really relevant to me how many people do agree. Tons of people also think downgrades are evil and E3 is ruined by pre-conference news. All that said, it doesn't mean the criticism isn't "valid" to them. I feel for the OP, but I also feel they can (probably) solve all their own problems. Or could at least try, before going the route of "what does this say about the game etc so on".

At the end of the day, I feel the vast majority of people complaining about leveling should look internally at themselves rather than at this, or any game. It's almost always someone's playstyle that is the real problem in my eyes. And yes I include myself in that. Games can't be played on any difficulty, by any person, any way they want. Some games try harder than others. But failure here should be expected. I think, for example, that @mb is running into the "Desired Play Style for Death March" - I would agree with @zeik and say that the game fully expects you to use oils way more, and to upgrade them, etc, for bosses on that mode. Some people will say "that's bad design". I don't really think so.

I just feel this culture of blaming the game, the developer, the publisher, this and that and the other is exhausting. Blame yourself for once.

When games get too easy for me I customize my own difficulty. And that's not bad design to me. That's the magic of video games. When I played Shadow of Morder I purposely never used runes or got any upgrades I didn't have to. That was the only way I could have fun and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. A game is what it is. It wasn't balanced for me, G, but for everyone.

As a concept games being "too easy" is never a valid objective, game-level criticism in my eyes. One man's easy is another man's hard. Who's to say what is "right"? Legacy is what matters when it comes to difficulty. Like if Dark Souls 3 is a cake walk for the majority of its players that is an actual, true blue problem.

I'm playing on blood and broken bones, i find the difficulty to be fine even when slightly overleveled. Mess around too much and you can still get swarmed by drowners. There are still free missions introduced post main game, and their is also the paid expansions coming out too so i doubt I will get too over leveled. If so I may up the difficulty again.

Gimping myself in games is a non-starter. Can't do it, won't do it! If the powers are available i'm going to use them.

When you folks say you're playing on 'hard' does that mean 'death march' or the difficulty level below. I'm playing on the second hardest setting and not having too hard a time smashing through enemies. But I do feel a need to get on some of the main quests (I'm in Velen at Lvl12) so those portions of the game are not entirely trivial.

Go up to Death March and you won't complain anymore.

Same thing happened to me. Didn't really change much since the endgame gives you so much XP you'll way overlevel just about everything anyway.

Yeah it was funny when Brad was worried about that bug that gave you 0 XP. I *need* that bug.

@geraltitude: I think there is valid criticism and then there is tinfoil hat conspiracy theory criticism that results from people not understanding how game development works. If I buy a music CD and I have to keep fiddling with the volume knob on every song, then I think thats a poorly mixed CD and not my fault. Likewise if I play a game, to the best of my abilitiy the way the developer intended it to be played, and I constantly have to make concessions about gameplay or artificially limit my options within the gameworld in order to not break the experience for myself then I think thats a poorly balanced game and not some shortcoming of my own. Now I don't necessarily think Witcher 3 is doing that bad, but they could have done a better job of distributing rewards throughout your adventure. Some incredibly long and ardous quests give you 30 gold and 25 experience while other much shorter affairs spill forth hundreds of xp points. At the beginning of the game every encounter was a huge challenge and I struggled in a lot of fights. Now I have signs that completely slow my enemies while damaging them, a shield that restores health and mind control that stunlocks even bigger monsters. If the answer to making the game more challenging now is to stop using signs, then that is bad design, it's not me. I'm not going to play through a game based around a hunter with supernatural abilities and not use the abilities. People who play games and put artificial limitations on themselves are crazy to me - not you specifically, but people who play the Souls games for instance and follow some strange creed of making the experience as daunting as possible to the point where they completely ignore several gameplay mechanics put in there by the developer for you to use.

Also as to your initial comment about defending someone etc, I fully agree that backseat modding is dumb and I apologize for that. I was having an annoying night and it slipped out, but thats no excuse really, my bad.

@humanity: The main challenge is the wide spectrum of abilities and gameplay preferences of players. You have people having problems with the combat on the lowest difficulties and people schooled by the previous Witcher games or Dark Souls, who quickly find combat a triviality on the highest difficulty. Then you have a person who wants to finish the game as quickly as possible doing only the main quests and on the other end a completionist who will do everything out of habit or because he/she simply enjoys it. How can you possibly make the experience equally enjoyable for four individuals marking four vertices of these two spectrums? Especially if you take into account extreme products of the entitlement era - people who won't choose a below average difficulty because they overestimate their abilities and then complain on messageboards and in user reviews on metacritic when they die constantly when trying to hack'n'slash.

One solution which works is world scaling, but we all know how grotesque it feels when it's the main mechanism (Oblivion and common roadside thieves in most esquisite armor ever crafted). The other is doling out XP mainly through main quests and/or introduce a drop off in XP earned when level difference is too large. This guarantees that most players will, by the end of the main story, be roughly the same level. However, it inevitably causes frustration when capable players choose too low a difficulty. I guess that the game should stress at the beginning that you won't find the gameplay challengin for long on the first three difficulties if you tend to explore and mid/max at all. Or maybe some world scaling at the beginning wouldn't be a bad thing. I found the game quite hard at the beginning on Blood and Broken Bones even though I came straight from a second playthrough of TW2. Packs of wolves weren't a big problem for me since they tend to stay two jumps away from you until they decide to attack, but drowners were a significant nuisance until about level 13. Since level 16 I haven't done a single quest that wasn't 4+ levels below except a couple of the very last ones. If I knew this would happen I'd choose Death March from the start since I don't get easily frustrated and quite enjoy experimentation and learning new tactics.

I guess what would work is having two difficulty sliders - one for the combat difficulty and the other for the amount of XP given for each quest. Actually the second one could be a hidden slider, meaning that the game would adjust the XP rewards according to the percentage of secondary quests finished, contracts fulfilled and POIs visited. I doubt it would satisfy many people though, since a large part of completionists seem to expect some gratification for the work done and they would feel cheated.

It's especially hard in a story-driven RPG like TW, in which the protagonist hasn't just left the dungeon as an inexperienced blank slate, but should actually have all the abilities from the beginning. I don't envy the designers, I can tell you that.

@qrdl: I hear ya, it's a tough dilemma. I also fully agree that world scaling is the devil and trivializes gaining levels completely since every enemy automatically adjusts to your starts. The static system is better in my opinion because early on it creates real tension when traversing the world. You might venture deep into an area only to find out the enemies are all way higher level than you are and you nervously book it out of there. I think it also helps with feeling the progression when you come back to older zones and easily dispatch the very same monsters that gave you a lot of trouble in the past.

I'm not a designer so I don't have the answers for how you would engineer a solution to this problem. What could they do to alleviate the problem of overleveling? Perhaps make main quests scale to your level while the rest of the world remains static, which means that you would always find a challenge in the main portion of the game while still feeling a positive sense of progress when taking on oddjobs from the field. I honestly don't know. The quest levels themselves feel a little off. I think the optimum challenge is found in quests 4 levels above you, but the rewards sure don't feel the same way. In one particularly long quest that was 4-5 levels above my range I was awarded with a sword that was rated 5 level BELOW me, making it essentially a useless reward.

This is their first really big, non-linear open world game so they definitely get a pass on what ultimately isn't THAT BIG of a deal.

@humanity: Oh yeah, a couple of days ago I thought that scaling of the main quest only would be a good solution. There must be somthing to it if we thought about it independently (as tens of thousands people before us probably). I also agree there something is wrong in the assignment of levels to quests. After I had finished the game I wanted to do some more fighting and I remembered that there was an Archgriffin on an island north of the elven crypt who was waaaaaay above me when I first found him. This time I was 34 and he was level 40 (the number wasn't showing when we first met and he dined on my entrails). After beating the bastard I fould a letter on a body which triggered the usual "hidden treasure" quest which involved finding a chest 50m away. The quest was level 48. I can only assume that the level somehow corresponded with level of the enemy I had to beat before being able to even start the quest, but if so, why 48 and not simply 40? This enemy would be a piece of cake for a hypothetical 48-level character.

@karkarov: I tried to make that contract the second of the two I needed for the "Even Odds" trophy, so no signs, oils, potions or bombs. Bad idea. Thankfully that fur is really flammable so after I've given up my lofty goal, the fight was a walk in the park. For the trophy I killed a nearby forktail instead.

@qrdl: just wanted to point out the biggest problem imo with the Quest Levels is they are damned liars. It should be a range, not a number. A level 40 player playing well could do a level 48 quest. At level 8 you can level 15 quests. The game does change the color of the text to try to tell you about your range (light green, dark green, red, dark red) but it's a poor communication system.

@humanity: ok so first off thanks for reading my wall of text (got another one for ya) and your general maturity in this back-n-forth. Never heard "back-seat modding" before and find it amusing / good name for a blog but ultimately your apology is more than I deserve. Right or wrong for you to step in it does require me to be A) more specific B) more polite and C) refine and re-examine what I feel. Here's how I'd like to present my thoughts on this matter of overleveling, in general, if you care to read them. I want to say too that I know we've argued in the past before and sensitive as I am I harbor no hard feelings at all. I agree with your sentiment almost entirely, but not the ultimate analysis.

1) There is no perfect difficulty level

Every game is too hard and too easy for different people at different times in the game and at different difficulty levels. It is impossible to either design a one size fits all (Shadow of Morder) or custom difficulty level sliders/options (Elder Scrolls, Thief) to make everyone happy.

So I always measure difficulty vs myself and vs legacy. I expect certain difficulty from Souls games and Civilization.

2) You can be unhappy with traditional RPG difficulty curves, but this "issue" is much bigger than any one game.

The Witcher 3, like the previous Witchers, and like Skyrim, Zelda, Fallout and Dragon Age is designed to get easier as you go on. That's the whole idea! Regardless of difficulty levels, in all of those games the basic format is goes, from the begining to the end of the game, Hard -> Normal -> Easy, with bosses being the only exception generally.

So I feel complaints about being overleveled in the Witcher are fundamentally the same as any RPG complaint of "game is too easy by the end". Dark Souls and that style of game maintain their difficulty better (mostly because you gain stats and not abilities) but even they are subject to the same arc and the same complaints.

Partially I think the Witcher has an erroneous legacy as a Hard Core or Hard RPG. It's tough, but it's not even Old School RPG hard or Dark Souls hard. And definitely it is built into the game that you feel powerful by the end. Isn't feeling powerful what we call "overleveled"? Or are they two seperate things? In a game that is extremely tightly balanced, you are never powerful, but instead always one swing away from death. I *wish* the Witcher was that game - hence why I try to force it to be - but it's not. Can you feel powerful without feeling overleveled? I'd love to discuss some games we think achieve this.

So when I read your feelings here:

"At the beginning of the game every encounter was a huge challenge and I struggled in a lot of fights. Now I have signs that completely slow my enemies while damaging them, a shield that restores health and mind control that stunlocks even bigger monsters. If the answer to making the game more challenging now is to stop using signs, then that is bad design, it's not me."

I read it and feel you described the intended feeling of the game (feeling powerful with powerful skills). What I get from you is that you wish you weren't so powerful and that the game constantly challenged you (or at least moreso). This makes sense to me, but I'm still not on the same page that the design is bad. The design you want just sounds different. This design, I think, is working as intended, we just don't like it. Because I don't like it, I actively change my selection of skills and which are equiped. I experiment with skills I may not use otherwise. I'd rather customize my own experience than be unhappy with what I think the developer may or may not want.

As you and QRDL are talking about, the Scaling vs Stagnant systems are both full of pluses and minuses and even a dream melding of the two would be problematic because players want different things. I never want a power fantasy. NEVER (insert Nintendo Crossed Arms Lady). I am an underdog roleplayer. I want to fight tooth and nail for everything. 99% of games are not designed with me in mind, but luckily they are designed with options to allow to me get what I want.

3) Games Always Suggest Play Styles, But Still Have Options

I think it's very important to note the difference between games that actually force you to use skill points, and those that don't. Like I said about Shadow of Morder, I never used any skill points except for the 3-4 skills the game forces you to acquire to continue the story. Why? Because I felt right away the game was too easy for me, and so any abilities that add offensive or defensive abilities would just make things worse.

In the Witcher I do the same thing. I don't spend my points right away, and when I do, I consider how it will affect my playstyle. I think one thing that's important for me to say here as I am a roleplayer. My Geralt doesn't use crossbows much, for example, and potions are the core of a Witcher. So I've purposely not upgraded by Defensive Spell very much because my play style "doesn't need it". It would make my experience worse, in fact.

@geraltitude: I agree with pretty much all of that. I think the "hardcore" RPG label may come from the fact that Witcher 2 was a fairly mainstream game to come along in a long time that didn't completely hold your hand through the entire experience - which is kind of unheard of in the AAA market. Seems that developers rather cover all their bases and explain every little thing, for which I honestly can't blame them, but it's a shame sometimes. That said I agree it wasn't an exceptionally difficult game apart from learning how to interface with your character and the world.

Reading what you wrote about what I would call the "RPG power fantasy" made me re-examine my own view on the matter. I've come to realize that maybe it's not so much that I wanted to be challenged as that I feel that I'm outpacing the recommended path through the game and it feels wrong, even though there is nothing wrong about it. In fact I always enjoyed being overleveled in RPG's as it fed into that power fantasy of being a "badass" rather than just eeking on by. So I think the problem for me is actually purely superficial in that I see the recommended level and feel as if I've done something incorrectly because I overshot it so much. If they didn't show those levels and I simply went into the quest blind, then proceeded to completely annihilate any opposition, I would probably think nothing of it.

Lastly, the options are indeed good here. It appears that I'm playing the game in a completely different manner than you are, barely investing any skill points into physical abilities and relying purely on signs, and that offering of diversity in gameplay is really great.

From what I've heard the normal difficulty is a cake walk whenever you're over leveled or not. Play on hard if you think it's too easy.