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Cyberpunk 2077 1.63 vs v2.0 Steam Deck Performance Comparison
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Cyberpunk 2077
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True, but at that point why even have levels? Which, I'm not being sarcastic, levels are purely design theory inherited from taking D&D electronic, if they don't want levels they can just make a game without them. It's strange to have levels and stats and all the things around that and then just make all of it not matter secretly in the background.
This philosophy seems to be trending, from WoW and Anthem scaling where Anthem's beginner weapons doing more damage to endgame enemies than endgame weapons do, to Uber's "ghost" cars that don't really exist. There's this idea of giving you all this data and all of it being "fake", just to distract people.
Also, as mentioned before. It's very easy to mess up your leveling and be weaker than expected, possibly due to taking non-combat or non-applicable skills. At that point the scaling will just make the rest of the game a slog.
From my understanding of table-top cyberpunk RPG, when using level scaling, levels still matter, but they don't play the only major factor during encounters. You can still steam roll weaker enemies, but you can also die if you make some major mistakes. I think it makes the gameplay more engaging and interesting.
Scaling rewards the player's engagement and skills, while no-scaling rewards time and effort put into levelling your character. Both have their ups and downs, and most games use a hybrid implementation with some leeway for the scaling (skyrim for example).
In my opinion Skyrim is one example of it being done badly. Partly because not seeing weaker enemies anymore breaks immersion, but mostly because any attempt to engage with the non-combat systems will break your power curve. If you take Smithing from 10 to 80 for example, that's 8 levels the enemies now have on you. So you have to be using Smithing a lot to make up for that. It's worse if it's something like 150 points over Lockpicking / Speech and Pickpocket which have no benefit in combat. That's another 15 levels the enemies get, and it's even worse if you switch from one handed weapons to two handed, or change armor types at any point.
Levels allow scaling for other things like weapons, to also scale, making the user switch weapons enough to stay relevant.
When you have fixed weapons, you have situations like in Horizon Zero series where people make fun of getting a quest where you would receive the passed down family weapon ober the ages and was cherished, only to find out after that the weapon is trash and whatever your using ends up staying thr strongest.
I mean, there's a reason they gave that weapon away. Maybe it really was trash and that's all they had.