Dhruin
SasqWatch
Do’s and Don’ts: A Gamer’s Perspective: Role-Playing Games is the title of an editorial at eToychest. It's fairly JRPG-centric but does have a couple of valid points for western cRPGs and is an interesting subject to discuss. Here's a sample:
DON’T implement 1:1 scaling. It sucks and nobody likes it. Final Fantasy VIII had this and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has it as well. Basically, as the player levels up, so does every enemy in the game universe. So, if the player encounters a rat while, say, Squall is level one, the rat will also be level one. If they encounter this same rat at level ninety-nine, the rat will also be level ninety-nine. This tends to frustrate and annoy players more often than not. In Oblivion, scaling made the game waffle between being impossible to downright tedious, with players hacking at equally-leveled demonic fiends for tens of minutes on end.
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