Skyrim - Interview @ IGN

Skyrim Lead Designer Bruce Nesmith has been interviewed at IGN. It's a short conversation but Bruce provides some decent responses on Radiant Story and level scaling:

IGN AU: Can you talk us through the way the enemies level up in relation to your character? Is this new system only related to dungeons?

Bruce Nesmith: This is a system we continually tweak and improve. It's extremely complicated and detailed at this point. Its main goal is to make sure that the player is always finding new challenges that do not devolve into unavoidable failure or trivialize success.
Skyrim's levelling system will feel a lot like Fallout 3's, although we have tweaked it. There are places that are always easy, usually near where the game starts, but not always. There are places that you shouldn't attempt until you are higher level. These are always in the more remote places in the world. If you leave and come back, they won't have gotten any harder while you were away. And there are lots of in-betweens. All of them do some dynamic adjusting to try and match the challenge to the player.

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More information.

Even though I love the games that Bethesda produces, they must teach supreme PR bullshit to every employee. You just can't get a real answer no matter what questions are asked. The only time you get close to a coherent sentence is if you catch someone who isn't part of the sales pitch group. Maybe living so close to Washington D.C. makes everyone there learn to say a 1000 words, all equally meaningless.

I'm constantly surprised by how much difficulty developers have with this extremely simple aspect of gameplay.

In fact, the ideal solution has been there for ages.

Just don't scale anything - and let the player discover what's doable at what time.

It's not rocket science, and even casual gamers will adapt - if the core experience is good enough.

Game too hard? There's this thing called difficulty level. Forget about level scaling. It's an "over-design" concept.

Sigh…

Better than the most E3 preview articles but like crpgnut says lot of PR bullshit!

Interesting bits I find from the article,

- Radiant Story, which sounds like gimmick and they know it too! Which is a good thing.

- very few physics puzzles.

- women in Skyrim are much hotter than Oblivion! That's not saying much (!) but we may get better faces than Oblivion after all.

- dragon attacks are not really random.

- you will get companions.

- there is going to be a construction set. This was pretty much given but this is the first time I see official confirmation. I was sort of worried that given consoles are their main focus now, they may skip this in order to cut costs. But its good see they are not doing that.

- best bit, it looks like they have learned their lesson about level scaling. It's going to be very similar to FO3. Most places near where you start will be easy and will remain easy. Remote places will be hard but monsters won't level up with you. There will be "in between" places. This is music to my ears!

All I need to hear now is they have good story and interesting NPCs to make the game world more alive! Fingers crossed!

DArtagnan said:

Just don't scale anything - and let the player discover what's doable at what time.

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I am not sure that will work in a sandbox game though. I still want the main villain (or something like that) to be hard fight regardless of my level. So you do need some sort of level scaling here because the dev can't predict what level the player will be when you get to the big boss.

To me nothing is more anti climatic than push over fight at the end since it makes all the levelling up, acquiring gear sort of meaningless.

However I do agree that level scaling everyone and their mum is a very bad idea and it back fired in Oblivion.

lostforever said:

I am not sure that will work in a sandbox game though. I still want the main villain (or something like that) to be hard fight regardless of my level. So you do need some sort of level scaling here because the dev can't predict what level the player will be when you get to the big boss.

To me nothing is more anti climatic than push over fight at the end since it makes all the levelling up, acquiring gear sort of meaningless.

However I do agree that level scaling everyone and their mum is a very bad idea and it back fired in Oblivion.

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That's not a problem in my world. You make the boss have a level corresponding to whatever you want as a "late-game" challenge. It's even less of a problem in a system like they've used in TES games, because the actual level has little to do with your ability to overcome challenges like combat. You can have max "Blade, Armor, Whatever" even at low level - and then it's a matter of equipment - which you can adjust as a player according to how challenged you feel.

As long as you provide players with decent equipment throughout the main quest-line, I don't think it's a problem at all.

As far as I'm concerned, it's an obsession with giving everyone a meaningful challenge regardless of what they do, and when they do it - which is not going to work very well regardless of how you go about it. That's because it gives way too much weight to the "challenge" aspect of gameplay, ignoring all the other vital aspects of a meaty CRPG experience - most importantly a decent sense of progression and a believable world. The latter in particular, because they're supposed to be making a truly immersive game.

So, as a designer, you have to make a concession for the game you're making.

Now, I'm not saying my way of handling such a design challenge should be Bethesda's way - but I have to say I think they're underestimating the average player's ability to adjust and overcome challenges.

If you're the "exhaustive" kind of player - meaning you don't mean to face the end-boss until you've completed every quest and picked up all the powerful items, then I think it's 100% right to have even the end-game be pretty easy. To me, that's the perfect reward for your effort as a player.

If you want to face the end-boss as the first thing you do, I think it's the perfect design to have it be VERY tough.

But that's me.

DArtagnan said:

If you're the "exhaustive" kind of player - meaning you don't mean to face the end-boss until you've completed every quest and picked up all the powerful items, then I think it's 100% right to have even the end-game be pretty easy. To me, that's the perfect reward for your effort as a player.

If you want to face the end-boss as the first thing you do, I think it's the perfect design to have it be VERY tough.

But that's me.

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Agreed. Level scaling makes Bethesda's levelling system pretty useless. If I let the character train before a dungeon to make it easier (which is seems like the point of their "increase-with-use-system" to me) it won't make a difference because the enemies levelled as well.

I don't want to be challenged all the time, but be able to control the difficulty to sometimes win what seems like an impossible battle, sometimes feel powerful.

More dumping downs continue...

It seems that chest, pauldrons and greaves are now combined and just go into one slot...

Also guilds are now restricted to one city and not spread about. So fighter guild in city A only, mages in city B only etc..

http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1202030-couple-of-new-e3-interviews/

3 attributes, 3 armor slots, 3 factions
we have, like, tons of beards

2nd interview was hilarious, thanks to the unusually cool interviewer.

He's dodging a lot of the vital questions, and the primary answer is: "We've got a lot of cool stuff like in our previous games" - which means it IS dumbed down a lot.

Not a big surprise, and at least I now know not to expect a lot of gameplay enhancements.

It's all about "cool" experience stuff - which is what sells. Makes sense.

SveNitoR said:

If I let the character train before a dungeon to make it easier (which is seems like the point of their "increase-with-use-system" to me) it won't make a difference because the enemies levelled as well.

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It depends how the world scales. Monsters can stop scaling after a certain level.

Selective scaling warrants that the monsters a player farms on represent a rather steady challenge from the level a player can start taking them on to the level the monster no longer scales.

It makes a difference.

DeepO said:

3 attributes, 3 armor slots, 3 factions
we have, like, tons of beards

2nd interview was hilarious, thanks to the unusually cool interviewer.

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when he mentioned tons of beards, i was really speechless

Anyway thank god that they are releasing a toolset but i wonder if modders can add more armour slots...

The continuous silence over guilds leaves me to think they come with guilds involving commitment and regular missions to be a member of the guild. Not a simple quest system to move up through the ranks.

DArtagnan said:

I'm constantly surprised by how much difficulty developers have with this extremely simple aspect of gameplay.

In fact, the ideal solution has been there for ages.

Just don't scale anything - and let the player discover what's doable at what time.

It's not rocket science, and even casual gamers will adapt - if the core experience is good enough.

Game too hard? There's this thing called difficulty level. Forget about level scaling. It's an "over-design" concept.

Sigh…

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DArtagnan, I completely agree with you here, especially with the thought that if a designer is worried that a game is too difficult for new players, they can simply add different difficulty levels. The Witcher 2 did this quite well, for example; the game was challenging (especially early on), but if it was too difficult (or too easy) for a player, they could adjust the difficulty setting accordingly. (I think that part of the problem for game designers using this approach is that players will bitch about a game having a challenging default difficulty setting because they feel insulted that they can't beat a game on normal without some effort, but that's an issue that designers should ignore)

However, with that being said, if they stay true to their word that Skyrim's scaling mechanic will be similar to Fallout 3, then I think that's a reasonable compromise. It's personally not my ideal solution, but it's a system that is far less annoying and prevalent than it was in Oblivion.

They are giving too many interviews to IGN , guess which site will give SK a 10

"always challenge" is stupid, when my character invests weeks of gameplay to reach level 70 he should be god and one arrow kill everything .

Tragos said:

"always challenge" is stupid, when my character invests weeks of gameplay to reach level 70 he should be god and one arrow kill everything .

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I developed that type of character in Morrowind, and it wasn't very much fun.

Tragos said:

They are giving too many interviews to IGN , guess which site will give SK a 10

"always challenge" is stupid, when my character invests weeks of gameplay to reach level 70 he should be god and one arrow kill everything .

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JDR13 said:

I developed that type of character in Morrowind, and it wasn't very much fun.

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That's a fair point. I remember eventually becoming a "God" character in Morrowind, and running around one-shot killing everything that moved really took the thrill out of exploring. That's why the Fallout 3 method might just work as a decent compromise between the limited to no scaling of Morrowind and the ridiculous overkill scaling of Oblivion.

JDR13 said:

I developed that type of character in Morrowind, and it wasn't very much fun.

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This means you have to move into another character and try something different . This is the way free roam games tell you that you have finish them.

Nerevarine said:

That's a fair point. I remember eventually becoming a "God" character in Morrowind, and running around one-shot killing everything that moved really took the thrill out of exploring.

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You mean you reached level 40 and you still haven 't explored everything , strange , power gaming and Ordinator 's farming are MW's killers but nobody forces you to play like that .

It's not good design to have max level characters one-shot everything. That sounds like stupid and simplistic mechanics, or atrocious game balancing.

A "God" character should be able to "one-shot" only the weakest enemies. But it's a subjective thing that only the designers can decide for themselves.

Personally, I like to get to a point - late-game - where the challenge of MOST battles is rather minimal - as long as you play well. But I prefer my own personal skill as a player to weigh more (or at least as much) as the numbers on my character sheet. The Witcher 2 (up to the start of Chapter 2) was pretty perfect in this way, to my mind.

Gothic 1+2 are also among the very best examples of how to handle this design challenge.

Bethesda like to overcompensate and oversimplify. That's how they handle design challenges. I'm not impressed.

However, since they're targeting the mainstream first - one can't blame them. All they need to do is make it look "cool" - and have a ton of visual niceties. Then it will sell.

Their strength was never, and I do mean never, actual gameplay design or mechanics. It was always the structure of their worlds and the freeform experience.

Ordinator farming in MW! That bring backs sweet memories It did eventually made the game very easy due to the amount of money you had but its lot of fun killing them at low levels!