It's a good thing you tried to find an alternative to the level-scaling problem, but your method poses a big problem in my opinion: What is the ideal total playing time for the game to be balanced? Gameplay A : Rush the main quests Gameplay B: Main quests + side quests (close to 100%) Gameplay C: spend a lot of time looking at the landscape -> If you base your timing on gameplay style A, B will have a hard time, and C will find it impossible. -> If you base your timing on B's style, C will have trouble, and A will quickly get bored with weak enemies. -> Is fast-travel considered or not ?
To better express my feeling, I refer to @FrizeHsueh's post:
either time "overwhelms" me or I'm faster and overwhelms the mobs, it all depends on a single" in-game time "factor ,but not something "gameplay related
Even with similar objectives, 2 players can have very different in-game times (e.g. enemy rush or infiltration?). Note: For fast-travel, I use zone teleportation for example, not the vanilla travel system
In my opinion, a good system would be : 1) Scaled , but each type of enemies AND zones has its different PC level mult -> I'm taking up @FrizeHsueh's idea
2) A difficulty that increases drastically with each main quest completed -> In this way, people with aggressive gameplay will be challenged, and others will be encouraged to explore in order to level up and find enemies of the right difficulty.
"Scaled , but each type of enemies AND zones has its different PC level mult." NPCs already have their own individual multipliers. My mod doesn't change them, but you can find or make another mod if you want to tweak those.
"A difficulty that increases drastically with each main quest completed" It's an interesting idea, but I'm not gonna implement it for this mod. It's too specific. But you can still achieve this effect using my mod, because it gives you the ability to manually increase your level with a spell. You can manually cast that spell whenever you want, e.g. after completing a quest, or after dying...
(Just a few idea I wanna leave here, if it's not welcome because too long or boring, I'll edit it to remove.) The best way I think for lvling system would be : Scaled , but each type of enemies or zones has its different PC level mult, so that Level actually has less influence in character build but still feels like there's RPG elements, and acutally only as a calculating system for dynamic difficulty of each enemy type . (This means level becomes useless , but will still remain scaling enemies' health/stats as a base dynamic difficulty setting so that the world zone are dynamic, plus, scaling player's loot/reward as a number to rate how many efforts player put into. That should be what vanilla Skyrim tries to present. But yes, it has problem with the unbalanced number and setting,making you don't wanna level up too quickly. But it's not the fault of this system itself, it's the powerless skill tree and other elements ,and overall numbers too hard to tweak for balance. So if you scale level based on those enemy type, or adding "curve" making late game scale smaller or slower, will minor this "un-balanced "problem.)
The reason vanilla Skyrim choose to use scaling level is beacuse fixed zone will interfere with open-world and " free gamplay" ,like this mod's author mentioned, you can't travel any place you want at anytime in a level-fixed world. And the zone will become unrecyclable, so low-level region will become boring and "played,no need to revisit",thus making the game world fixed and felt empty. ( I think vanilla level system is the key condition for it's gameplay and leveldesign, which unlike previous traditional RPG. And the whole design makes the interesting open-world possible.If you tried Enderal , the game made with Skyrim by team Sureai, you will know why Skyrim world are better and more "attractive", with it's random events or radiant quests and level-scaling world, even when those elements alone has its problems or seems "bored"themselves.)
I like this mod's concept, by using alternative factor as scaling factor. But the problem is this factor"time" has less "depth" itself (it's not the factor itself has problem,but overall design or elements related to it .) , which means either time "overwhelms" me or I'm faster and overwhelms the mobs, it all depends on a single" in-game time"factor ,but not something "gameplay related".(It is motivating , but not the game itself motivates you to grow, but…" time" ..which I think not that much needed, because people already have less patience when playing game. XD) Again it's not the concept itself, for example if some scaled enemies are" trained for certain time" to get stronger, and has various training method or even player follower related, that " time factor" will have more involving depth into the game and more interesting. But that's more complex and troublesome, so I still prefer using original system with some mods to tweak it.
Yes, it's safe to install mid-game and it's maximally compatible. My mod just makes 1 small edit to the game settings and, during the gameplay, simply "types" the console command "player.setlevel ..." every ... days.
So, in a nutshell, what this mod does is makes the enemies stronger over time, even if the player doesn't do anything? So, say, at gamestart, everything is lvl 1, but by the time the player reaches lvl 10, enemies might become lvl 25, simply because the player didn't level quick enough?
Something like that. Although, the system works a bit differently... The link between the player level and the skill levels is broken, not between the player level and the enemy level.
Hey, I really like the idea of this mod. I started setting up a playthrough with it and I realized that there are a lot of other mods that tie different things to character level. For example, in Sacrosanct, there are a handful of vampire powers that gain magnitude as the player level increases.
Now I know the obvious solution would be to just not use those mods, but I have an alternative suggestion that may be just as simple with less strings attached - Instead of letting the world automatically scale with the player level, increase the health and damage of enemies by X amount every Y amount of days. This way, you could have an unleveled world that does still increase in difficulty with time, but it avoids the complications of the level mechanic being tied to the difficulty of enemies you see.
That's interesting, but not simple. It'll take overhauling the game completely, changing almost every NPC in the game, especially enemies. It would be incompatible with too many already existing mods.
Fair enough I see what you're saying. What about tying it to the player then, increasing the amount of damage the player takes (similar to difficulty) from NPCs by x% each week?
I would suggest reducing player damage by x% each week too but after a certain amount of weeks it would end up at 0, which wouldn't quite be ideal.
Then things like collision damage or fall damage would also scale. That wouldn't be good. And disabling that complex vanilla leveled list system isn't something I would like to do.
I can respect that. I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being critical, I just think this is a great idea and the only thing preventing me from using it is a couple staples in my load order. Thanks for the response :)
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What is the ideal total playing time for the game to be balanced?
Gameplay A : Rush the main quests
Gameplay B: Main quests + side quests (close to 100%)
Gameplay C: spend a lot of time looking at the landscape
-> If you base your timing on gameplay style A, B will have a hard time, and C will find it impossible.
-> If you base your timing on B's style, C will have trouble, and A will quickly get bored with weak enemies.
-> Is fast-travel considered or not ?
"Is fast-travel considered or not ?"
Yes, vanilla fast-travel costs some time. You can edit that as well, using some other mods.
Note: For fast-travel, I use zone teleportation for example, not the vanilla travel system
In my opinion, a good system would be :
1) Scaled , but each type of enemies AND zones has its different PC level mult
-> I'm taking up @FrizeHsueh's idea
2) A difficulty that increases drastically with each main quest completed
-> In this way, people with aggressive gameplay will be challenged, and others will be encouraged to explore in order to level up and find enemies of the right difficulty.
NPCs already have their own individual multipliers. My mod doesn't change them, but you can find or make another mod if you want to tweak those.
"A difficulty that increases drastically with each main quest completed"
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not gonna implement it for this mod. It's too specific.
But you can still achieve this effect using my mod, because it gives you the ability to manually increase your level with a spell. You can manually cast that spell whenever you want, e.g. after completing a quest, or after dying...
You need to choose alternative ways to gain stats (read the step 2 in the description).
The best way I think for lvling system would be : Scaled , but each type of enemies or zones has its different PC level mult, so that Level actually has less influence in character build but still feels like there's RPG elements, and acutally only as a calculating system for dynamic difficulty of each enemy type .
(This means level becomes useless , but will still remain scaling enemies' health/stats as a base dynamic difficulty setting so that the world zone are dynamic, plus, scaling player's loot/reward as a number to rate how many efforts player put into. That should be what vanilla Skyrim tries to present. But yes, it has problem with the unbalanced number and setting,making you don't wanna level up too quickly. But it's not the fault of this system itself, it's the powerless skill tree and other elements ,and overall numbers too hard to tweak for balance. So if you scale level based on those enemy type, or adding "curve" making late game scale smaller or slower, will minor this "un-balanced "problem.)
The reason vanilla Skyrim choose to use scaling level is beacuse fixed zone will interfere with open-world and " free gamplay" ,like this mod's author mentioned, you can't travel any place you want at anytime in a level-fixed world. And the zone will become unrecyclable, so low-level region will become boring and "played,no need to revisit",thus making the game world fixed and felt empty.
( I think vanilla level system is the key condition for it's gameplay and leveldesign, which unlike previous traditional RPG. And the whole design makes the interesting open-world possible.If you tried Enderal , the game made with Skyrim by team Sureai, you will know why Skyrim world are better and more "attractive", with it's random events or radiant quests and level-scaling world, even when those elements alone has its problems or seems "bored"themselves.)
I like this mod's concept, by using alternative factor as scaling factor. But the problem is this factor"time" has less "depth" itself (it's not the factor itself has problem,but overall design or elements related to it .) , which means either time "overwhelms" me or I'm faster and overwhelms the mobs, it all depends on a single" in-game time"factor ,but not something "gameplay related".(It is motivating , but not the game itself motivates you to grow, but…" time" ..which I think not that much needed, because people already have less patience when playing game. XD)
Again it's not the concept itself, for example if some scaled enemies are" trained for certain time" to get stronger, and has various training method or even player follower related, that " time factor" will have more involving depth into the game and more interesting. But that's more complex and troublesome, so I still prefer using original system with some mods to tweak it.
Btw is it safe to install & use it in existing saves (mid-game)?
Now I know the obvious solution would be to just not use those mods, but I have an alternative suggestion that may be just as simple with less strings attached - Instead of letting the world automatically scale with the player level, increase the health and damage of enemies by X amount every Y amount of days. This way, you could have an unleveled world that does still increase in difficulty with time, but it avoids the complications of the level mechanic being tied to the difficulty of enemies you see.
I would suggest reducing player damage by x% each week too but after a certain amount of weeks it would end up at 0, which wouldn't quite be ideal.
And disabling that complex vanilla leveled list system isn't something I would like to do.