this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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There are mods that can adjust the damage scaling.
That being said, it kind of comes with the RPG genre. If you're going to make your character get steadily more powerful, then late game, everything is going to be trivial or you're going to have to implement some way of producing more challenges.
Most of the solutions to the problem are in some way unsatisfactory.
You can have a level cap. The original Neverwinter Nights did this, and each expansion you bought would increase that cap and add new and harder content. Most RPGs have at least some form of "soft" cap, where the experience cost to level rises exponentially. I'm not sure what introduced this, though Dungeons & Dragons certainly popularized it.
You can procedurally-generate harder content. The easiest way to do this is what Fallout 4 does, which is to keep jacking up enemy stats. This does get to kind of ludicrous levels if you keep playing the game for the long haul. This also keeps old areas interesting (and Fallout 4 does encourage you to backtrack through existing area).
You can just keep pushing the character ahead via some artificial mechanism, but that kind of sucks from a "time to explore an open world" standpoint.
You can not level. Most RPGs have some mechanism via which the character constantly gets more powerful, to have a sense of progression, but not all. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead -- really an open-world roguelike -- has the player learn skills (with a soft-cap due to exponential falloff), but in general, the stats you have are the stats you get when you make your character. There are some very exotic items that can enhance the character, but they are very rare and hard to find. Most of how you become more powerful is getting more powerful items. There are mods -- bundled with the base game -- that make the game play more like a traditional RPG, with level-up and stat gain. I think that this is realistic, as in real life, people don't really "level up", but I think that the "leveling up" concept is an appealing element of gameplay. People like progression.
I eventually got a cocktail of mods that made fallout4's progression bearable to me. A headshot on anyone without a helmet was always deadly, armor mattered, hp barely scaled with level. Endurance and its perks were more important.
The best solution for me is probably combining horizontal progression with some constraints in stats.
Imagine the toughest guy possible. Pick some numbers to represent that. Maybe 200 hit points for a simple, familiar, system. Now figure out what sort of abuse he can survive. 10 handgun shots to the stomach? Ok, let's say a handgun does 20 damage. Then just keep going. How many shotgun blasts? Don't let stats exceed the caps casually. This should hopefully let you avoid the "naked bandit takes forty shots to put down" problem.
The other part is to focus on horizontal progression. You start as a dude who can fire a pistol. Later you learn rifles. Then first aid. Repair. A trick shot to trade damage for accuracy, or the other way around. You're gaining new stuff to keep things interesting, but your numbers aren't really going up up up. Guild Wars 1 is probably one of the best examples of this.
Thinking about it, I really liked Sekiro. It had very limited stat progression, but it was also winnable without ever increasing your stats. Games like fallout4 tend to create stat checks where you're losing because your numbers, not your tactics/execution. That's deeply unsatisfying to me in a game pretending to be an action game. Like, in fallout 1 it feels better when my level 2 dude misses a shot. In fallout4 I clicked on his face he should be dead, but the numbers say no.
But to your last point: people do like progression. It let's people feel like they're improving without actually needing to improve.