Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Experience inflation

Two things that have slightly irritated me in many crpg games have to do with leveling and experience.

* Experience inflation; A simple task earns you 5 exp at level one, a similar task may earn you 5000 at level 15.

* Ability and damage inflation: Sometimes it just gets ridiculous (diablo 3, going from hitting 3 dmg, to billions in a single strike)

I understand the allure to develop from a young aspiring adventurer to a demigod during a game, but maybe make it less steep?
There are still a big difference in skill between an average lad and a heavyweight champion, but not thousandfold.

Experience inflation often comes as a means to prevent low level interactions from being as effective for leveling up.

CRPG's often don't have scaling values on things as you level up (I.e. A level 1 enemy killed while at level 1 giving 100 experience. While the same enemy killed at level 10 granting only 1 experience), so instead they just inflate higher level rewards to provide the same effect of reducing the relevance of "Low level" actions.

Personally, I think the entire "Experience" concept is a bit dated in CRPG's. Especially in the way that it ends up stifling freedom by making you have to interact with everything in order to not be underleveled (Which can be highly detrimental to actually role playing... Like, my "Evil" character has to save every cat from up trees and make nice with every NPC regardless of however stupid their request is because I need the experience... Or conversely, my "Good" character has to be a mass murderer because I need to do every combat because experience)

I quite like the popular Tabletop implementation of "Experience" whereby you simply gain levels from reaching specific milestones in the main story. Meaning you can do as much or as little side content as you wish and interact with it in however you wish (Do you kill everyone? Do you talk your way out of combat? Do you talk your way out of combat but kill everyone anyway? Do you stealth past it? Do you find an alternate route and simply avoid it? Do you find a non-combat method of eliminating enemies (Like poisoning their food/drink)?)

The only crux of levels as main story milestones, is providing side quests with enticing rewards to get people to want to do them (Which can be done via money (So long as it has actual worth in the game, without you amassing thousands of gold naturally), items and story impacts)

In regards to stat inflation, that is normally a byproduct of longevity.

I.e. If you go through 1,000 hours of progression, even getting a +1 damage bonus per hour is going to have you dealing 1000x your starting damage.

This is what lead to D3's ridiculous scaling. Many years and additional Torment levels of progression, leading to skills needing 20,000x damage bonuses to even be considered (And even then being quite weak unless further amplified)

The longer that progression lasts for, the higher the scaling ends up being as you have to do more incremental increases. This is exacerbated by how much those increments span. Often times people don't find it exciting to just get a +1 bonus per progression, they like getting more substantial jumps like +5, +10 etc. Something that makes them feel like they've progressed immediately even if ultimately the many small increments added up.

This is actually something that happened in Cyberpunk 2077. Originally the game had a perk tree full of stuff like "+1% damage with pistols". Which many people complained about feeling too "Low impact" when in reality the many increments of 1% damage meant that you started off doing 40 damage per shot but by the end of the game you were hitting for over 1 million. So they reworked the system to what it currently has, where perks feel more immediately impactful but there are FAR less damage increments, so people feel good when they unlock a new perk but they don't scale nearly as much.

alternatively you can also have a system where there you can only reach a certain level in an act for instance (if they still exist) even though there is a lot more exp. Like you do the main story and only 5 out of 10 side quests to reach the cap in that act, which would be level 6. So you dont feel like you have to do every single thing, since you cannot suprass that level.

Of course, you still have this feeling of needing to do those 5 side quests. As well as the problem of trying to maintain a lure for people to continue doing things within the act once they hit the "Experience cap" for it.

Given that the standard motivation for many to do side content, is the experience reward. If they stop getting it, then they stop caring to do it (And/or it feels unrewarding to do)

Hence why if experience is removed entirely, you'd need to ensure there is good enough draw to make people want to interact with stuff. Same would apply here, you'd need to provide compelling reason for people to continue doing stuff once experience stops (Of course, without going too far and making the rewards so good that people feel forced to do things to obtain them, effectively going right back to where we started with experience and the need to obtain all of it...)

Experience is a deeply nontrivial topic and there are many very different philosophies how to handle it, including different attempts to do without, or concepts to have for example different sources of experience, different types of experience to improve your character in different ways, etc.

Experience remains a popular concept that is used in most games. So I dont know whats supposedly "dated" about this topic. Calling a very universal concept that everyone except a few outliers uses "dated" is just very strange.

The situation with experience is very much like the situation with hitpoints. There are obvious drawbacks to the concept, but on the other hand its amazingly simple, compared to more complicated solutions. Solutions which always have to answer the question if the additional effort results in actual gain in regards to gameplay quality. Of course in regards to hitpoints, there is for example Fallout, which replaced hitpoints with hitpoints per body part. Losing all hitpoints on your head or the torso (easier to hit than the head, but also has a lot more hitpoints) is just fatal, but if you lose your legs, that merely means the movement is impaired, and if you lose your arms, well then you are restricted in weapon use; however the later four variables can fall to zero without killing you. This basically changes a single variable to six variables, without complicating much further; a decent change that works pretty well overall.

The Elder Scrolls is an example for how to have a system without experience points, but still levels etc as usual. I cannot say I like the TES idea much. Since you level by using your skills, you get the strange situation that you literally cannot do certain actions because you dont want to level the related skill. And there are many more problems with this system. For example because running is also a skill in TES, you move quite slowly at the start of the game, while running quite quickly at the end of it. This is frankly really annoying.

A very pure "roleplaying" solution can be found in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. In this game ONLY quests give you experience, and you use experience to level your skills. So there are no levels as such, you just improve your skills. Because the developer has very high control over where the player can go, this allows to know quite well what powerlevel the player at this point in the game will likely have, and allow to scale encounters pretty well to that powerlevel. All in all it doesnt work flawlessly, because newbies can easily screw up their character royally, making it impossible to manage certain hard encounters of the main story that you cannot avoid, but once you learned the ins and outs of the game, you can relatively easily navigate it. Though even with that I had problems to solve hard encounters on Nosferatu, the weakest of the clans.

Btw one could make the only XP for quests idea even more extreme by only rewarding quest xp for unavoidable MAIN story quests, while all side quests only give you item etc rewards. This way one would have full control over how powerful the character is.

But all in all I would be very surprised if we dont see just another example of classic experience with levels. Probably with different sources of experience, just like in BG3 (quest xp, dead opponent xp, protagonist xp and exploration xp). And very likely there will be again people who optimize this to the maximum.

That seems to be the most likely way this goes, and I'm frankly perfectly fine with that. Aside from pseudo-ideological arguments like "outdated", I dont think there is anything actually broken about this concept that needs fixing. Quite on the contrary, in my experience systems like that work best. You really have good control over how you want to develop your character, and the programmer can have a pretty good idea about the powerlevel of your character, allowing them to keep a good level of challenge - not too easy, but also not too hard - that is great to have to neither bore the player with overly easy encounters nor overly frustrate the player with impossible encounters.

Just because it's popular doesn't mean it isn't dated.

It's an old fashioned mechanic derived from TTRPG's that continues to see usage "Because that's what is done"

Even then, many TTRPG playgroups have ditched the system YEARS ago, because of how such a system interferes with the actual experience of playing the game.


And it's more complex than simpler solutions.

You see how much of a non-statement such things are?


And yet, apparently the way experience currently works is exempt from being questioned if it's worth the effort for the results it provides.

Given that there's continual balancing issues done in terms of experience gain rates, player engagement in activities that provide experience and other minutia (Such as BG3 explicitly adding in experience gains for dialogue options to avoid combat because in prior Larian games, the prevailing trend was just to murder everyone because you got experience for that... Which of course, in BG3 leads to players both doing dialogue to skip combat then initiating combat anyway to get both forms of experience)

Experience as is, is just haphazardly thrown in to every game because "It's an RPG and RPG's have experience". It's much the same way where a lot of RPG's throw in stats because "It's an RPG and RPG's have stats" irregardless of how meaningful such a thing actually ends up being (With it often not providing even a slight amount of customisation and instead being "You just equip the latest item because it has more stats")

I'm highly critical of a lot of these systems that get thrown around because they're the status quo, without anyone bothering to think about what their implementation actually ADDS to the game itself. It is just used because it is used.


Meanwhile, I highlighted the flaws with the system.

The system stifles player freedom as well as design. Developers have to imagine what the "Average" person will do and what their powerlevel will be. Players can feel forced to do things simply for the sake of gaining experience instead of actually role playing as a character.

A system that is tied exclusively to the main story, opens up freedom:

Developers don't have to care about balancing experience between completionists and those who do the bare minimum. They only have to factor in where in the main story a player is.

A developer doesn't have to balance HOW someone does things, they don't have to set up experience bonuses for dialogue based combat skips, they don't have to consider "What if players stealth past/avoid this situation", they don't have to factor in players gaming the system by dialogue skipping AND murdering everyone.

They simply set up the challenge based on progress through the story.

Meanwhile players are free to do whatever they wish. They can be completionist and do everything. They can do nothing. They can do a few things that fit their role play. None of it affects the balance of the game, they will always get an adequate challenge without overleveling or underleveling being a concern.

Nothing about the way experience currently works provides any benefit besides a global reward.

Even in this statement of yours, nothing about it is specific to this particular way of how experience works. It is just a statements that function for literally any form of experience/level management.

What benefit is there for getting experience for doing every random thing? In a way that can mean players accrue vastly different amounts of experience depending on how they play? What does it add to the game specifically? What makes it better than literally any other system of progression?

Your only statement about it is "It's simpler than more complex solutions" and that's its only benefit. What about simpler solutions (Such as tying levels directly to main story quest progression. Which is much more simple. Or tying progression to specific objects like Shrines/Orbs that give you skill points when interacted with. Again, simpler.)?

What about if any more complex solutions provides a better experience? Wouldn't that be preferable than just doing something only because it's simpler (At least from a player's perspective)?