Is there a realistic way to solve the RPG problem of almost every player becoming an invincible god by the last...

Is there a realistic way to solve the RPG problem of almost every player becoming an invincible god by the last half/last quarter of the game that doesn't involve level scaling or removing all optional content?

Wasn't aware that this was a problem

When things like that happen it's the developer's own fault, they never actually playtest the game beyond the intro or beginning areas.

>they never actually playtest the game beyond the intro or beginning areas.

Just make it so you aren't an invincible god by the end?

Make the monsters hard enough. Final areas should have angels or unholy demons and liches and shit. I think BG2 did this really well.

Your enemies are invincible gods by the last half/last quarter of the game.

Make late game enemies harder.

You should only ever feel like a god in early game areas, late game areas should be full of ridiculous enemies that only the most autistic grinder can kill with ease.

That's how it's supposed to be. You should feel stronger and more empowered as the game progresses.

Good RPGs that use well designed game mechanics.

Take Jagged Alliance 2 for example, even at endgame your characters can get wounded and bleed to death from a single enemy that gets a good shot in.

These days RPGs are heavily influenced by the likes of Diablo and World of Warcraft which were glorified level/loot grinding simulators.

This. Late game enemies should be cleaning the floor with the player should they find him at low levels. I also like the idea of early game bosses being late game normal enemies.

The obvious solution would be to do what most SMT games do and cap the HP at a fairly low amount, that way the scaling doesn't get out of control.

Add a time limit so people can't power level.

What’s the problem?

Add new enemy types with unique mechanics.

No leveling at all

Do the Elder Scrolls Oblivion thing of equipping average bandits with Daedric armor by the time you reach the level cap so you never truly become a badass

cap the players power level at somewhere where the end of the game still is a challenge
YOU should feel stronger, your character should stay roughly the same in terms of relative power level or even get slightly worse. If the final boss is a fallen angel that takes you 300 tries to beat, you will feel like you've grown in power even compared to when you beat the first boss that's a giant rat in one try, but if your character can just one-shot the final boss you will feel cheated out of your own enjoyment because the game became easier as it progressed. The scaling of your character is supposed to increase its complexity, because increasing its relative power makes the game boring, and just increasing its absolute power but not the relative power is completely pointless treadmill design.

To give an example, I played DOOM recently. There you go from having a pistol and a shotgun to having to evaluate 10~ different weapons, their 2 different addons, your double jump and so on. This makes the game more complex and really more difficultalthough I thought it got easier as it went on anyway

>that doesn't involve level scaling

Depends, you call it a "problem" but for some devs that's an intended reward for getting to the end-game. They want people to feel like gods because they've worked to get there.

If it's a problem that you need fixing then you just do it the Dark Souls way where your armor makes barely any difference and the enemies get harder.

what non-open world RPGs suffer from this

>mob scales with stats/gears
new WoW scaling(if I hear it right)
or
>stats/gears dont do much
Souls series

Hollow Knight, while not an RPG but has RPG elements, does this well in that it doesn't have a typical leveling system so you can't grind to get better stats.

Use a logarithmic progression and don't make the player an invincible god would be the easiest. Design and balance the game around the player having the best possible shit and then iterate and tune downwards so the player is always engaged.

Its boring to just 1-2 shot everything like getting a lucky BkS drop from the first black knight in Dark Souls. Sure its amusing the first time around seeing how stupidly broken you can be, but it stales quickly and trivializes everything.

I don’t know why you’re suggesting that it’s not the case, Mt Itoi in Mother 1 is notorious for not being playtested

>game canonically goes to epic levels
>being surprised that you're becoming an invincible god

Base progression around player becoming better and strategic equipment choices instead of number checks. Some encounters should be nigh impossible in melee whereas they should be very easy from range, while others are only doable if you're floating slightly off the ground or whatever.
Encounters are designed so there are more and more such requirements as you progress through the game, and it's up to the player to learn to adapt quickly and to come prepared.

So the player character should be a generalist instead of a specialist? That's awful for RPGs

I don't know but whatever you do, don't do what Larian did with DOS2.
>Fort Joy
>fight magisters with sticks
>all through Fort Joy the magisters get harder as you level up and find better gear
>at the end, fight a gigant void worm
>next area, fight magisters, they're harder than the Void Worm

It feels like you're not progressing at all.

No, the player should use the items and skillset available to him, which depends on the specialization. But each specialization would be able to do all the things. While one class might be able to cast a temporary buff, another would have to continuously use a skill, and another would come in with permanently enchanted gear, for example.
That said, another good thing to do is that not all encounters are mandatory, and each specialization can only deal with a specific set of encounters, thus increasing replay value as well.

Finite enemies

Gothic 2 does it pretty well, even end game when you have the best armor in the game and have maxed out stats you can still get rekt by a pack of rats if you aren't careful

It's notorious BECAUSE it wasn't playtested. As in, it's out of the ordinary.

>not killing everyone with barrelmancy
You're like a little baby

No respawn for players if they die. They start again at level 1 and have to start over.

I honestly just got to the blood isle because the game for some reason started working like ass, lags all over the place, loading screens take minutes and whenever I try to reload the game crashse.

It's because the stupid game saves every single body and all the trash I'm world world in every dave game. I think the fix used to be to delete all of your previous saves but I just moved them to another folder.

Play the first 30 mins of any questline in Skyrim and tell me they don't just frontload the awesome for publications to masturbate to.
After that first mission, which is usually great, the questlines devolve into garbage and usually are outright broken in the state they ship in.

> level scaling or removing all optional content
Those do not solve the problem either, wiseman.

delete all previous saveS?
i'm gonan try fuck it

Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are two big ones that suffer from this

Everything after Act I is a cakewalk

I know of at least one developer where this holds true and everybody and their mother knows it

>by just playing the game
>minmaxing results in a tedious shitfest that isn't fun at all

Because the ai is poor, as is all ai in games.
Early on they are significantly stronger than you individually, and you have to pull fuckery and tactics and exploit their dumb asses to beat them.

As you get stronger and more varied abilities, sure, they do too, but they aren't smart enough to actually make use of them the same way you are. Their only threat is either crazy special abilities, like the sallowmans annoying ass plague, or from simply being able to hit very hard. They don't make proper use of aoe, they don't make proper use of cc, they don't properly use movement and avoid 100 attacks of opportunity, they don't use terrain.

The problem isn't that you become too strong, the problem is literally that you have a brain and people cannot be arsed to improve the ai in games, they'd rather just keep giving them more advantages than improve what the real issue is.
Also making the ai good in games would feel like cheating. Like, if every single enemy in every game focus fired your cleric 24/7 and they don't put in options to mitigate that, like forcible taunts and such, that becomes no fun for anyone to actually play, both because it's repetitive and because it's predictable and easy as fuck to exploit.

No, it literally does it the worst out of any game.

My roommate went off on me for saying I don't like Borderlands because even though everything is randomly given to you, the randomness is still way too in my favor and it ruined the game.
>its your fault for wearing the OP gear user
No, its the game's fault for giving me nothing but OP gear, constantly and without fail.
The game clearly wasn't playtested or balanced.

>Also making the ai good in games would feel like cheating. Like, if every single enemy in every game focus fired your cleric 24/7 and they don't put in options to mitigate that, like forcible taunts and such, that becomes no fun for anyone to actually play, both because it's repetitive and because it's predictable and easy as fuck to exploit.
AI should be developed not only in an intelligence sense, but also a personality sense
like if this knight enemy is really honorable and doesn't use ambushes or dirty tricks, but also hates necromancers so he fucking flips out at your party necro and beelines for him, or if the ogre enemy is stupid and just hits whatever the most noticable target is, and this is in addition to making AI better at thinking in general

can't tell if bait or just utter pleb

>Assign a hidden grade based on composite of player level, gear level, and even minutae like quest-specific reward upgrades (like that permanent +50 to HP vial from whatever quest).
>Apply a similar score to zones.
>Chance-to-spawn drastically more powerful versions of enemies in the area increases as your score goes over the zone score.
>Further increasing the gap adds other modifiers.

Dragon's dogma did this with a few enemies. I believe it was trolls who favored attacking women, and there were some enemies that hated magic users if I recall right. Otherwise it was all opportunity or who taunted.

elaborate

>But each specialization would be able to do all the things.
You should work for Bethesda.

S L A Y E R
Energy Weapons
That said, the deathclaws where still scary. The Master? Not so much unless you had a fucked LUCK stat, or didn't acquire power armor.
Then again, in SPECIAL, you become a specialist. Sure, there are a lot of ways to become a generalist, but you still specialize.

Its not as bad as DND where the insane powercreep trough out the entire system fucks up any kind of scaling.
Especially when its a 5 cog system(Skills, Level, Items, Feats, Spells), and none of the gears interact properly against each other.

Its generally better the better done it is.
Even something as simple as Earthbound fucks it up far less than DND.
I still find Ascension to be a fun thing.

You do realize you're talking to Todd, right? He works at Bethesda already.

Gothic has the case where the combat is extremely janky
Meaning that any 1v3+ encounter is a nightmare if they can break your poised backbone.
And what makes Gothic into Gothic, is that its not that far off being a 10/10 combat system, with a lot of depth. And then it just janks together into something just workable, in a really nice fashion.
That said, Gothic 1 did it better, because fuck Critical Hit Combat.

>there's an actually great sense of progression and becoming stronger as you explore the world and by the max level you're the baddest motherfucker possible, a legend of the arena or a psi god
>but you're fighting against totally-not-aliums, lovecraftian monsters, psionic cult, entire hordes of bandits, mutants and either local ISIS or government forces so you're still challenged up to the very end of the game

...

Maybe make being an overpowered god entertaining? Enjoy breezing through areas that used to give you pause for thought.

>by the last quarter
how is this a problem?

ever heard of a climax and anticlimax?

Well like fire emblem on the game boy advance you couldnt really grind in there or had very limited opportunities to do so. You were constantly on the move and had to choose who to include in your unit.

Or you could make exp as painful as mmo levels combined with powerful enemies that take alot of effort to defeat.

Usually I find midway in the game you usually get some really strong skill or weapon or unlock a class that is fun but will carry you till end of story.

>Decide to start lifting
>After a couple years of lifting consistently I'm much stronger than before
>Power-walk to my local Walmart for some paper towels
>Everyone is fit, even the old ladies on scouters
>Took 20 minutes to pay because the cashier couldn't stop oiling his muscles
>I'm now average by comparison
>Get mugged in the way home
>I had to give him everything, he was wearing Daedric armor

Remove or de-emphasize levels and make progression skill
and equipment based? With new combos and mechanics perhaps?

Balance the Game so late Game enemies are not much more powerful than early enemies at the same time that the player is not that powerful late Game as well. Make the Game more dificult by adding more mechanics/options. No powerlevel BS.

Most fire emblem games are perfect examples of getting too powerful though. If you're not fielding at least 3 1-2 range death gods by endgame then you did something wrong

kek

RPGs used to have level caps around 20 and all the content was designed around reaching that level by the end. Nowadays you can just level super high on most games cause people don't like limitations.

at epic levels you should be fighting elder gods. if you beat them easily it makes *them* feel weak and boring, rather than making *you* feel powerful.

Is it actually a problem though? In most RPGs its satisfying to rise from dirt to become unstoppable ubermensch.

Not every player is that looking for style of "repeat until you succeed" gameplay. Someone going for immersive roleplaying would just delete their character when they die, and wants to be super OP because of such a high cost of failure.

i learned to exploit the ole bio gas grenade and bear trap wombo combo for nuts damage and became invincible in one versus one situations, but got overwhelmed hard when versus group fights. Great game.

is that a statue of Billy?

The Last Remnant already solved this problem. Actually, it solved it in the best possible way.

I think players willing to throw away and repeat 20~ hours of playtime because one death in a game not balanced around this sort of play style should look into mods, instead of the 99 other % having a disappointing late game because they're far too powerful

Hydras would split up their targets between heads until it was down to less than 4 heads, IIRC

Make a low level DnD campaign but filled with shitton of content a excessive amount of replayability

>I also like the idea of early game bosses being late game normal enemies.

If you think 99% of players will complain about being too powerful, I don't know what to say other than you have a warped understanding of the audience.

no without the player being able to complete the game at very low levels
this used to be a thing but it isn't anymore since people would just complain the game is too short because they are used to 30 hour railroad tracks

okay, the 99% of players who shouldn't be put into labor camps

Witcher 3 really suffers from this if you do everything.

make skill the hardcap

Strength doesn't effect the cutting ability of a blade, just your ability to use it. Getting stabbed by a low level creature is just as lethal as a high level creature.

I love RPGs and Action games but most people only really play one or the other. Also this is some piss poor play.

Going from 10 health at level 1 to 200 health at level 20 isn't that different from going from 200 health at level 1 to 4000 health at level 99
The main difference is how fast the power scales, the power curve in games with lower level caps is usually a lot more drastic since you're expected to actually hit the cap by the end. In other RPGs you'll be like level 50-70 by the time you hit the final boss if the cap is 99.

What game, if any, does this well?

As in, what game can I play where my lowly peasant rises up to godhood and has good-feeling conflict against other god-like entities, clashing their immense power in a titanic struggle for dominance?

Remove magic
Remove skills
Remove potions and enchantments
Remove save the planet plots
Remove elemental shit
Remove angels vs demons
Remove plucky teenagers wearing 50 belts
Remove flashy effects
Remove emotional storylines
Remove power crystals
Remove the planet having a voice
Remove anime

Add muscled blond dudes with shortswords
Add pig orc saracens and XXL angry ostrich mounts and lizard aztecs


I don't know if this will fix the power level but it'll fix my interest in rpgs

>Remove magic
The gayest. Just go back to playng forklift simulator

Make overpowered as fuck bosses, that kind of boss that set up for an attack, buff, debuffs and then strike your party with all it's might.

Shortswords are gay aztec shit is gay too. You have gay tastes.

>each specialization would be able to do all the things
but then it's not a specialization

If everybody is used to magic then nothing is really magic anymore. It's overdone, it's fucking boring vfx. If you want to excite me with magic, give me a land with no trace of it, then produce an old cunt hermit who can shoot a ball of fire out his hands with enough concentration.
Every fantasy setting nowadays just throws magic in there like it's fucking confetti and I'm bored.

Youre gay, but I don't like you much. Your point is disproven m8.

>sloth talisman
>weakness talisman
>living weapon
>skill

Make the gear scale with the players stats and let them upgrade it, EBF4 did a great job with this since you end up using most of the armors and weapons in the game to deal with elemental attacks and resistances.

The thing you like are gay but you don't like all gay things. Pretty straightforward.

>tfw this is the game I am making

You are being silly, user.

make enemies have the same overpowered perks as the MC, paired with an AI capable of using such items
level scaling is not necessaròy bad, it just has to be done right

Make levels give diminishing returns?
Make levels add new skills / variations that aren't OP?
Experience scaling?

>tfw no game where you feel like a god for a bit until some ultra poweful guys kick your shit in
That would be so hype and make getting more powerful than them the coolest shit

This is neither aztecs or shortswords. It's not super gay, but if good platemail is like 100% heterosexual this is like, thinks the odd man is attractive.