What kind of argument is that? Just because it hasn't been done before it shouldn't be done now. With that mindset where would we be in the world today? we'd still be playing with sticks and stones.

Also, the level cap has nothing to do with how FAST you play through the game. If you complete the game a 100% no matter how FAST you do it, after about 70 - 80% you WILL be level 30. Maybe even less, but I'm just estimating here.

And saying that you shouldn't play the game to complete everything 100% is complete BS. Just becuase YOU don't want to play a game like that shouldn't mean that other people can't. If people want to go for a 100% playthrough then it should be fine. Therefore I think the option to control how many XP you get is absolutely brilliant. This allows everyone to play the game according to their style XP-wise. People who want multiple playthroughs can take enough XP so they will be around the level cap when they reach the end. And people that want to explore everything can take enough XP so that they reach the level cap just about when they've completed the game.

And lastly, someone said: " MEEUH there shouldn't be too much toggle options because it gets too much". How is ONE more toggle option ( out of only a few options ) too much!? Sure you don't want a hundred toggle options but just adding 1 more couldn't hurt. Especially if it greatly improves the gameplay for some people.


EDIT: Sorry for all the rage, but I'm getting quite sick of all the people who immediately start to flame because someone has a bit of criticism on their quite little game. Also no offense gabriel77dan, I was just a bit pissed off.

....it's not an argument. It's a question, to satisfy curiosity. i.e, I don't know of any games with this feature. Does anyone else? :shrug:


Edit: and to clarify, a game that has it as a specific feature, rather than a side-effect of the difficulty system (it occurred to me, after the fact, that there may be a few games out there in which, when you set the difficulty higher, you get -% XP among all the other things that become "harder".)

I don't have the data in front of me but I remember reading that the overwhelming majority of gamers do not finish games. The makers of NEW VEGAS surely tested for playthroughs reflecting a certain kind of casual gaming experience and "balanced" the XP rewards according to that. I estimate there are roughly 4XPs in the world for every 1XP needed to reach level cap, or a 25% character completion to game completion ratio.

Unfortunately for us scroungers, we need a mod to rebalance the game so we don't spend 50%+ of our gaming time already capped out.

An option to "fix" that would have taken the game makers 10 minutes to whip up. I understand that there can not be options for every single type of player out there but this was a fairly large issue fixed with exceeding simplicity.

The perks and levels are just there for you to better enjoy the game. Maxing out skills lets you explore every conversation tree and restricted area in the game to get a more complete picture. Leveling for the sake of it will only lead to dissapointment and no challenges worth playing or pointless grinding and that is something Fallout doesn't need.

I agree with a few other posters here… Options are great things and we should have them. BUT, there’s another great thing that goes along with options and we need it too, compromise.

Everyone needs to remember, this game was designed for multiple replays. Also, everyone needs to remember this game was designed and balanced to be completed by a level 30 character.

There are a huge number of quests in this game to support replays.

You have the option to play all the quests in a single go, but the result will be hitting the level cap AND having an overpowered, unbalancing character for the rest much of your game.

This is the COMPROMISE you must be prepared to accept for trying to complete all quests in a single game run.

Seems simple enough to me.
:P

Myron: I feel like I've passed an arbitrary experience point limit and gained more power.

And the game was designed for 4 different play paths and 4 different endings... I'd say that's just about right!

Well Alois, if you had read all my post, you would have seen that I was talking about my 2nd playthrough, where I did NOT use the Fast Learner perk.

btw - have you had your rabies vaccination for this year?

Don't mind alois he seems to be the worst kind off troll

You gotta remember that we’re probably pretty hardcoe players considering that we’re on a forum discussing the game. But I assume they designed the leveling system to enable the average joe player to hit level 30 around the time they “beat” the game.

If they had designed it just for us there would probably be a higher or harder to reach cap.

Personally, I can live with it because it sorta forces to make choices about the character you make and leaves lots of new options to explore when you start a new one.

Over 20 hours into my current playthrough and I'm level 18, I'm perfectly fine with the pace of leveling, if anything I'd wish it were a bit faster. I like the pace it's at though because I have a Perk Every Level mod, but if I was only getting a perk every 2 levels I'd be pretty fed up with how slow leveling would feel at this pace.

If you're doing many of the side quests and/or exploring much, you'll be hitting the cap long before you hit end of game - what then??

Umm... you play the rest of the game with a maxed out character?

The game isn't about leveling. The game is an interactive story and your character's actions reveal and impact the plot.

Honestly, if you don't care about the plot I don't understand why you'd play this kind of game...

BUT, I suppose you could simply declare victory and go play something else.

/butting in.

Question: What does inserting an artificial level cap have to do with the "interactive story and and your character's actions"? Answer: Not a damn thing. It is trivially easy to program a character's "stats", for want of a better term, to an asymptotic limit so that he can never become invincible/invulnerable. Any perks that modify the PC's stats should merely shove him slightly forward to that asymptotic limit. IIRC, the original Fallouts normally maxed out success at 95%, along with some special encounters that let you pump more than 100 points into a skill for a successful interaction. Very few of the F:NV perks work toward making you an uber-character; most are just "fun". Why would anyone take something like the Nuka-chem perk when he could take a combat or stat perk instead?

Just general commenting....I didn't like the fast leveling either. from lvl 1 to about lvl 10 or so the balance/everything felt pretty good to me (on Very Hard). But then you start killing enemies that give 50xp a pop plus quests that gave huge xp, and the levels skyrocketed quickly. I made my own lower XP mods, including increasing the amount of xp needed to actually gain each successive level, which I've liked quite a bit/makes me happy. Tho as time went on I began to realize it's less the leveling speed as it is the high powered weapons/gear you can gain so quickly, relative to what level/where you are in the game. Even if you don't rush to the special places for certain items. Now I also self-gimp quite a bit, by not raising my guns skill very high, for example.

Difficulty/leveling speed isn't a major issue for me, still love/play the game like crazy for tons of reasons that have nothing to do with levels or difficulty, but I did find it distracting, thinking leveling surely was going to slow down "soon" and it never really did. Thankfully via the editor I can fix almost anything I personally want to be different.

I would totally go more of a 'extrinsic reward destroys intrinsic motivation' route. Skinner's model of behavioral psych only works on a very base instinctual level. The pigeon only sees the corn as a reward because it's hungry. So for that model to work, the player would have to see the XP gain or item gain as a necessity toward existence. You would also see an increase in responding behavior before the onset of reward since this is a continuous reinforcement schedule set up. No, this game appeals at more of a cognitive model where people have an intrinsic motivation to play, which is then crushed by the need to gain the highest level.

Ideally, the best solution is to just remove all XP gain and simply have a gear based setup which would eliminate the speed levelers. Seriously, max level in 15 hours without a previous play through or a cheaters guide? I call BS. But where's the fun in that? Me, I argued for the lack of a level cap, cause at one point after a few play throughs, I want a god mode to try and max stat everything. But I'm weird cause I play RPGs for stories and not to satisfy my lust for power ( I have guns and megalomania for that).

Long story short, the people [censored]ing about level caps will never be happy, because their intrinsic motivation is to reach max level, not the end of the story, and thus they'll always reach it and be unsatisfied.

Speaking only for myself, my issue with speed of leveling is that I initially thought it was making the game (for me) too easy, combat-wise. And since level-ups are enforced so I couldn't just not use my skill points/perks, I wanted to level slower to gain those things slower. But as I said, I realized it wasn't really the levels that were the problem for myself. But I still like leveling slower because it does make the combat more challenging when combined with some self-gimping.

Very nice to put a label on a group of people again. But I personally want something changed with the level cap so that I just am level 30 at the end of the game. And the end of the game is when I've done 80 - 90 % of the quests and explored the world.

How about someone design a mod where you don't level at all?

Hang on...isn't that STALKER? I think you guys are playing the wrong game....

If I'm reading the basis of the OP's argument correctly I'm assuming/presuming that what he is trying to say (going by the most basic, probably extreme example) is that we should only get Experience and thus levels for the main quest line, for everything else be it combat, side quests, passing skill challenges we should not get any experience at all.
For this to work fully the main quest line would have to consist of a minimum of 31 quests/parts, which would mean at 'best' we gain one level per main quest segment or at worst (if there are more than 31 segments to the main quest) part of a level.


Personally given that the OP has stated that he had to fully explore, side quest and search to reach the max level, that it took at least a reasonable amount of effort to reach max level and thus in my own opinion gaining max level before the end of the game should be viewed more as a reward for that hard work and effort. For the more casual gamer, they probably won't reach the max level by the end of the game and changing the exp would penalise them.


Yes I know what I've just put down can be viewed as somewhat extreme but I put it that way to try to make my point as clear as possible and am not trying to flame/have a go at anyone.

I'd certainly say leveling is still too fast in New Vegas. Which is kind of dissappointing, because Fallout 3 was criticized for that too, so I thought that maybe Obsidian would have tried to fix this, and I did not use any slower leveling mods with my first character even when I started to feel like I was leveling far too quickly because I hoped that the later levels would be harder. By the time I realized I was mistaken, I had already gotten too high level for it to make much difference, but I kept that in mind when I decided to try a second character/



I'd disagree. Because once you reach the level cap, there isn't much reward for doing things, sure, you can still get better items, but what if you already have the best items in the game? And even if I don't, just getting better items is not enough of a reward to make up for the fact that I can no longer gain new perks or raise my skills, and when there's no longer any reward for doing things, I feel much less inclined to play the game. Sure, there's still finishing the story, and that might be enough if I reached the main quest when I was close to the end. But completing the story is something I can do in any game that has one, but developing my character through gaining experience is something only RPGs, or games in other genres which incorporate some RPG elements, and this is what appeals to me about the genre that other genres don't offer, yet once I hit the point where that character development is no longer possible, part of the motivation to do things in the game is lost. There's still the fact that I want to complete the story, of course, but I can't help but feel like everything I do is less rewarding once that motivation is removed. Of course, raising the level cap might also solve the problem of reaching it too soon. But without making other changes, that could cause balance problems as the game was originally designed under the assumtion that players would not reach a level higher than 30. If you're not careful, you might end up with the player ending up maximizing all skills since you didn't change the skill caps or the amount of skill points gained per level. Or you might make it so characters of maximum level are pretty much invincible, unless you add in more powerful enemies to compensate. And if you're not careful with this, you might end up causing a problem like Broken Steel where the high level enemies just become bullet spounges. This is not to say raising the level cap is always a bad idea, just that one needs to be careful when doing this to avoid messing up game balance.

Moreover, in video games, I generally like a challenge. If I don't have to work to achieve my goals, the game can easily become boring. Now, there are some games which can still be fun even when they're easy, often, though, these games are ones where the entertainment comes from the feeling of being some sort of unstoppable one man army, but I'd say Fallout is not such a game. In this game, I want to see challenges, and by that, I don't just mean putting lots of deathclaws and cazadores in the game either. I also want getting rewards to be challenging, this includes both loot and other rewards, like levels, this way, not only is the proccess of gaining these rewards more entertaining (as long as the challenge isn't TOO unreasonable, in relation to the rewards that it offers. I don't want to have to fight ten people in power armor armed with plasma casters and anti-material rifles just to get ten bottle caps, that would be kind of extreme.) but also makes actually getting the rewards more satisfying. The problem is that in New Vegas, gaining levels really isn't hard at all. Not when later on in the game it seems everything I fight gives 50 experience and quests can give a thousand or more. It got to the point where between the experience gained from actually completing the quest and the enemies I killed along the way and other such things, I'd often find that it semed like for every quest I did, I'd end up advancing the level, or at least cover a lot of the distance towards it. In a game where the level cap is only thirty, I'd say this is too fast.

My opinion is that in an RPG, you should be able to hit the level cap shortly before you reach the end of the main story, far enough before that you actually have time to enjoy the benefits of that last level, but close enough that you won't need to spend much time not being able to gain levels after that, assuming you make an effort to do as many quests as possible, do as much exploration as possible, and kill all your enemies. When I've heard about people reaching level thirty before even getting to New Vegas (And I have.) There's a problem.



There's a difference between not wanting to gain levels and not wanting to reach the level cap too soon. In fact, the very reason why I don't want to reach the level cap too soon is because I LIKE gaining levels, and I don't want to be deprived of the chance to get that reward too early in the game.

I want to get the feeling that I'm becoming better at what I do over time, I just want to have to work for it, and I don't want to reach the limit before I'm half way through the main story.



I don't play any games for the story, I play them for the gameplay, New Vegas is no different. A story is a good way to drive the gameplay forward, and create the illusion that there's some point to what you're doing, and that it's not just some abstract, potentially repetitive when you get down to it, actions to achieve an abstract goal in order to earn the satisfaction of "winning" the game, if the story is well written, I even get the welcome bonus of experiencing a good story too, but if I just wanted to be told a story and weren't looking for gameplay, I'd read a book.

As I said earlier, this is really easy in a very linear game. The programmers know all the quests you have to do, know that the few sidequests are easy to find, etc - they know that every single player who gets to the end will have between X and Y experience points. (And X-Y is a reasonably small range) So it's easy for them to set a level cap that you'll hit near then "end".

FO:NV? Ten million quests, twenty million ways to go through them, and only a small number of them on the "main quest" path? In a mostly non-leveled world, so that you need to be powerful enough (i.e, high enough level) to get past them? They set the XP Cap near the theoretical "90% completion" mark, and someone who mostly just follows the main quest will end up trying (and failing) to claw their way throught the final battles. And "forcing" people to search out all the optional sidequests kind of goes against the Open Sandbox concept - choosing not to search under every rock and cactus is just as valid as ignoring the MQ and heading off into the sagebrush.

Personally, I'd prefer a higher level cap (for the perks).

Also, kills from Followers giving you experience points? How does that make a damn bit of sense? It's even easier to gain levels in this game then in FO3!!!

That's why I think you need to be able to select how much experience you receive based on how you want to play fallout. If you're in it for the main quest or to explore everything both kinds of people need to be satisfied with the leveling system. As someone already suggested I think it would be even better to bring back the leveling system from fallout 1 and 2, but since they won't do that. A toggle option seems like a very good solution.

Wow! I think we are playing very different games.

I'm 115 hours in on my first playthrough and I am on level 19, just about to go to level 20 (playing on very hard + hardcoe + harder hardcoe rates mod).

I deliberately avoided the main quest and spent most of the time exploring all the locations in the wastes, doing a few side quests, getting to know the different factions, and I'm enjoying it immensely. This game is so rich with so many characters and little bits of story that you only encounter by exploring every location. I'm also playing through without using fast travel except when I need to quickly hire and fire my companions, who all remain at the locations where I originally found them. (The companions die very quickly if you let them join you in combat in very hard + hardcoe. also I've found combat to be more enjoyable solo). If you don't use fast travel, each journey to and from the strip is lots of fun, as you never know who or what you will encounter on your way. I continually find new triangle markers for locations I haven't visited yet.

For those of you who don't want to level up too quickly, just initiate all of the side quests but don't complete them all yet until you are ready. The amount of XP you get from completing quests is so high that you can control your own pace very easily.