Well, this has been bothering me for a while, and the Era thread motivated me to post it.
So level scaling is generally when the game scales all the levels of enemies based on your own level.
The benefit of doing this is especially important in open world games, where you can go anywhere. Take Skyrim, having a mix of ultra strong enemies for level 100 players mixed in with super weak enemies for players that just started, would be frustrating. You'd either be making the game very frustrating, or you'd basically have to massively limit where the player goes. Which goes against the core of what a game like Skyrim is about.
The alternatives here are pretty much:
1.) having all strong enemies, but then it'd be a frustratingly difficult game.
2.) having all weak enemies, but then it'd be too easy of a game.
Otherwise you can level scale in other ways. Have more easy enemies, instead of just simply stronger ones.
The big con of level scaling though, particularly if it's done too aggressively, is it can make leveling up pointless. Why should the player bother leveling up if the game doesn't really reward them for it?
So level scaling is generally when the game scales all the levels of enemies based on your own level.
The benefit of doing this is especially important in open world games, where you can go anywhere. Take Skyrim, having a mix of ultra strong enemies for level 100 players mixed in with super weak enemies for players that just started, would be frustrating. You'd either be making the game very frustrating, or you'd basically have to massively limit where the player goes. Which goes against the core of what a game like Skyrim is about.
The alternatives here are pretty much:
1.) having all strong enemies, but then it'd be a frustratingly difficult game.
2.) having all weak enemies, but then it'd be too easy of a game.
Otherwise you can level scale in other ways. Have more easy enemies, instead of just simply stronger ones.
The big con of level scaling though, particularly if it's done too aggressively, is it can make leveling up pointless. Why should the player bother leveling up if the game doesn't really reward them for it?