Some Key Changes in patch 1.04

No just the same post. And maybe process it, rather than just kneejerking.

The first 2 Gothic games were much smaller. W3 has much more content. The solution is to give less and less XP, which makes it less and less rewarding. I seem to remember a similar issue with Gothic 3. Very little XP rewards and combat being too easy.

I'm not really into these "Thrasher goes stubborn" fights - as you seem to lose perspective once you go into OCD mode

You added to your original post, and I can't go back in time to change my response to what you didn't write at first.

But it doesn't really change that they're working on the XP "bug" - meaning it's not meant to work like it currently does.

Scaling was never a problem in the past, though, even with large games. It's a relatively recent standard.

That said, I never thought of being overpowered after a long game to be an issue.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
No just the same post. And maybe process it, rather than just kneejerking.

The first 2 Gothic games were much smaller. W3 has much more content. The solution is to give less and less XP, which makes it less and less rewarding. I seem to remember a similar issue with Gothic 3. Very little XP rewards and combat being too easy.

I don't think you need to level up every five minutes to make a game rewarding - they can do other things like give you skill points and different weapons etc. Giving too much XP is a killer for open world games - how then can you possibly maintain a consitent challenge over a huge area like Velen?

One solution that hasn't really been tried in open world single player games is to have special abilities that only work against particular mobs and that level separately from each other - works very well in Guild Wars (lightbringer pointrs etc.)

There's the rub. If they didn't discount XP so much when you are overlevelled I wouldn't care. I am much more worried about ending up underlevelled by not matching my level to the quest level because I've killed too many trash monsters by freeeform exploring. Some of them can give you good XP if they are above your level.

Just a quick side note: Not only were the Gothics MUCH smaller but they also RESET the entire world between chapters to spawn old (unchanged = cannon fodder at higher levels) and genuinely new (higher level) monsters appropriate for the player's advanced level.
That can't really be compared to TW3 or TES games that have a "persistent" world instead of a world that gets reset four or five times during the course of a playthrough.

Yes, so in that case, the world leveled up with you. I had forgotten about that.

I guess the solution to my Witcher 3 leveling concerns will be that if I become underlevelled because of missing quest XP for being overlevelled, I can hunt high level monster respawns and farm them. This assumes they do respawn. But so far, all the highest level monsters I've found have been single spawners. :/

EDIT: In a sense, Gothic 1 and 2 level scaled the world to your character in discrete chunks, with the assumption that you had built up your character between chapters.

Still, that's a design choice that could have been made with any game, including The Witcher 3.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
There's the rub. If they didn't discount XP so much when you are overlevelled I wouldn't care. I am much more worried about ending up underlevelled by not matching my level to the quest level because I've killed too many trash monsters by freeeform exploring. Some of them can give you good XP if they are above your level.

It really isn't going to matter that much. In multiplayer games its a really big issue, cos you are competing with other players (even in PVE) and so devs take serious flack if there is the tiniest problem with levelling or discrepancy between classes. I very much doubt you will be under levelled in Witcher 3, but if you are you can always reduce the difficulty level a notch, for a bit. Much more likely though you will be overlevelled - my Geralt is already much more effective than he was 5 levels ago…

And I reckon the game is designed on an either/or basis - either you level up quickly through story quests or you do it in the open world more slowly and you can combine those two in any progression you want. But you can't expect to get hugely powerful wandering around in the world and then get even more power from story quests - thats why they level cap XP gains from quests. And surely, if it works, that is a good game design.

I'm not playing TW3 yet but from Thrasher's comments it sounds like they rather strictly balanced the game for a critical path playthrough so if you do a lot of optional content, you get "punished" by overleveling.
Is this also true for the higher difficulty levels or only on 'normal'? If the game is well balanced, then I'm thinking the point of the higher difficulty levels should be to kind of force you into doing a lot more side content before venturing forth, no?
Oh well, by the time I play it, I'm hoping for official balancing fixes or alternate balancing mods because the risk of overleveling does indeed hamper the whole open world, non-linearity thing.

Originally Posted by Moriendor
I'm not playing TW3 yet but from Thrasher's comments it sounds like they rather strictly balanced the game for a critical path playthrough so if you do a lot of optional content, you get "punished" by overleveling.
Is this also true for the higher difficulty levels or only on 'normal'? If the game is well balanced, then I'm thinking the point of the higher difficulty levels should be to kind of force you into doing a lot more side content before venturing forth, no?
Oh well, by the time I play it, I'm hoping for official balancing fixes or alternate balancing mods because the risk of overleveling does indeed hamper the whole open world, non-linearity thing.

No that isn't the case at all. Think of it like having two baskets of experience points - if you take more from one basket you get less from the other one. That is how it is meant to be designed.

I am trying to prevent over- and under- leveling naturally, while allowing for natural exploration of the the surroundings. I'd rather not experience a repeat of the recent open world problems of PoE AND DA:I.

EDIT: It's rather unsatisfying to get little to no useful experience from main quests. I'd rather both baskets be equal. But that discourages thorough exploration, which is my main attraction to this kind of game. It's a conundrum with no obvious solution except level-scaling, which I dislike. :/

Originally Posted by Thrasher
I am trying to prevent over- and under- leveling naturally, while allowing for natural exploration of the the surroundings. I'd rather not experience a repeat of the recent open world problems of PoE AND DA:I.

PoE - Path of Exile? I played that long ago in beta and haven't looked at it since. As to DA:I, IMOP it is a really good game up until about the time you leave the first big area, assuming you stick around there a while, but after that it goes rapidly downhill as you get seriously overlevelled if you even look outside the default quest progression. Then, absolutely zero strategy is required for even the hardest battles - and thats on hard mode.

Sorry, Pillars of Eternity. Acronym overload.

Originally Posted by Thrasher
Sorry, Pillars of Eternity. Acronym overload.

Haven't played that yet. Impression I got was that it needed a bit more time in the oven. Wasn't too impressed with Divinity:OS either, even though everyone was raving about .

Originally Posted by Moriendor
Just a quick side note: Not only were the Gothics MUCH smaller but they also RESET the entire world between chapters to spawn old (unchanged = cannon fodder at higher levels) and genuinely new (higher level) monsters appropriate for the player's advanced level.
That can't really be compared to TW3 or TES games that have a "persistent" world instead of a world that gets reset four or five times during the course of a playthrough.

I just wanted to point out a small factual error: Gothic does not reset. It adds X monsters per chapter of monster type Y, and those numbers are static. If you clear the entire thing in every chapter (which I've done), you'll quickly realize that the actual number of respawning monsters is fairly low. It is especially easy to notice in the Valley of Mines in Gothic 2 (chapter 2 vs chapter 4).

In many ways, the world of Gothic is far more persistent than TW3 or TES, as those games simply respawn everything whenever you've been out of a region for a period of time. In fact, I've had to kill the same packs of harpies and what not both to and from a quest objective, which feels a bit silly.

I was hoping that they stopped spawning if you clear their nests?

They sort of do, but far from every type of monster in every region has nests. Wolves and harpies especially seem to respawn at a crazy rate. Edit: Oh yeah, and drowners in swampy regions.

Originally Posted by Maylander
They sort of do, but far from every type of monster in every region has nests. Wolves and harpies especially seem to respawn at a crazy rate. Edit: Oh yeah, and drowners in swampy regions.

I've noticed that too. I was hoping they might have had hidden nests or something.

I'm not crazy about high respawn rates like that.

Then again, it was the same in Witcher 1, wasn't it?

Yeah I think so. TW2 also had quite a few respawns, but there were so few open regions it's not as "in your face" as in Skyrim, TW3 and DA: I.

To be perfectly honest it's really not an issue. It's not as if it's spawning griffins or noonwraiths all over the place, so it's rather straight forward to deal with. I barely even notice it unless it's one of those "both to and from a location" type of thing.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
I've noticed that too. I was hoping they might have had hidden nests or something.

I'm not crazy about high respawn rates like that.

Then again, it was the same in Witcher 1, wasn't it?

Last night I destroyed nekker or drowner nest with bomb and looted it and a mob still popped on top of me from the same bloody nest. I was annoyed!