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Empty Levels: Difference between revisions
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== [[MMORPG|MMORPGs]] ==
* In ''[[City of Heroes]]'' (And, by extension, ''[[City of Villains]]''), this basically happens every 5 levels. Rather than having actual equipment, you slot your powers with 'upgrades', each of which has its own level. You can equip enhancements that are as much as 3 levels higher than your own level, which makes their effect greater - it then decreases as you level up, while they remain static. When their level becomes lower than yours, they begin to lose their effect. Enhancements of every level [[Randomly Drops]], but rarely the exact type YOU need. And the stores only sell enhancements with levels divisible by 5. The end result is that you're at your strongest when your level ends with 3 or 8 (since enhancements have a chance to merge for a +1 level bonus), and then steadily become weaker as you level up, until you're able to buy your NEXT set of upgrades... putting you back at roughly the same level of strength you were at 5 levels ago. Fortunately, this has largely been superseded by the addition of craftable Invention Origin Enhancements, which don't degrade (instead, higher levels ones are stronger).
** A more conventional use of the trope is the way that some levels provide a new power choice, while others only provide you with a few enhancement slots. While enhancements are the key to building a truly powerful character, these levels are rather less interesting - especially at lower levels, when the only available enhancements are rather weak, or higher levels, when all of the most important powers will already be fully slotted.
* ''[[
* Extremely common in Korean-styled [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPGs]], where levelling just gets you a couple stat points and a skill point, making the character only marginally better at most levels. Usually it's every 10 levels or so, when the next equipment set becomes available, that the characters actually make a significant advancement in strength. What this means is, as the enemies you are fighting start giving less experience, and you're forced to move on to stronger enemies, your character isn't meaningfully stronger until those key levels and the fights get harder.
** ''[[Trickster Online]]'', a Korean MMORPG, has "hell levels." For each class they are slightly different. The toughest class to play is the Lion who uses firearms, because his hell levels start at level 1. The lion's gun damage is determined by the accuracy stat, while melee damage is given by the strength stat. Every character starts off weaponless, making the Lion's high accuracy useless and his low strength a huge liability. Until level 20 he is denied quality weapons, cannot use a shield, and cannot move while attacking. You're like a [[Glass Cannon]], except just glass and no cannon.
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*** Of course, the important NPCs are indestructible anyway, so they only get "knocked unconscious" in seconds rather than torn apart. Still annoying when you watch your NPC buddy get knocked down, get up and fight for a second, then knocked down again, etc.
** Even worse, Skill Levels are more important for your character for everything except Raw HP, and you don't need to level up to get higher skill levels. The only real consolation you get for leveling up is that the Infinity Plus One items are only available at higher levels. It is highly likely that you are going to need them.
** Another of Oblivion's main flaws was that the level scaling ability doesn't actually account for gear-dependency. This was remedied in Skyrim, which was going to reuse the ones from Fallout 3, and it works much better.
** In ''[[Morrowind]]'' the leveling system was based on a few of you major skills increasing, but the stat increases were tied to all skills that used that attribute. The result was that if you didn't remember to train your secondary skills inbetween leveling from using major skills, you could end up with a character with a high level and pitiful stats. The most effective builds ended up tagging many of the least used (or at least hardest to level) skills as primary ones, so that you wouldn't "accidentally" level and cheat yourself out of stat bonuses.
** For the most part, this is averted in ''[[Skyrim]]''. You don't exactly have stats other than health, magicka, and stamina. You're guaranteed one at level-up, and you're always given one perk. The perks are basically the replacement for stats. It's possible to, say, grind a skill like smithing or alchemy and get to a fairly high level without upgrading any combat skills, but even then, you would have good enough gear or potions to offset this.
* ''[[Fallout 3]]'', if you have Broken Steel. It's particularly egregious because the new monsters it introduces would be [[Demonic Spiders]] to even a character who reached level 50, and the cap is 30.
** It's even possible for a character to gain no stats at all from a level up.
** ''[[Fallout 3]]'''s system was actually implemented as a direct response to ''Oblivion.'' ''Oblivion'' started with a basic NPC and added levels and improved gear as the player leveled. By level 20 or so, this created a bizarre world where every random bandit wears a suit of top-shelf armor and has an artifact-level enchanted weapon. ''Fallout'' instead uses a list of pre-built enemies with a short list of random equipment. These enemies rotate in and then out as the player levels. For example, a level 8 character will start encountering Super Mutant Brutes in addition the garden variety Super Mutants. By level 15, there will be almost no regular Super Mutants to be found, having given over almost entirely to Brutes and tougher-still Masters. (This was later used in Skyrim)
** On the other hand, Broken Steel also subverts it by leveling up your nonhuman party members ''as if they were monsters'' (and monsters get stronger far faster than humans). This results in the nonhuman companions being horribly, hideously broken, and while {{spoiler|Fawkes}} was already broken to begin with, {{spoiler|Sergeant RL-3 and Dogmeat}} become veritable death machines.
** It was arguably the point, as the endgame didn't provide a decent batch of new enemies to constitute a real challenge without them.
** It is one of the most literal examples of the tropes because your attributes and skills only provide a minimal boost to effectiveness in combat outside the combat skill you are using (which you can max out at the very beginning of the game). Gaining levels causes enemy variant with higher health and generally better weapons to appear. Your actual combat effectiveness is based on what weapons and armor you have. So the level scaling is not actually related to the aspect of the game that defines how good you perform in combat.
*** This is somewhat of a moot point in any case. The effectiveness of late game weapons is so ridiculous that even mid-tier pistols would liquefy Behemoths, Overlords, and Hellfire Troopers with ease.
* [[Fallout: New Vegas]] makes things both better and worse. The list is less obvious, with Fiends using low-mid level equipment the whole game and ubiquitous NCR and Legion troopers peaking around level 8. On the flip side, Deathclaws are terrifying murder machines at every level. While this reduces instances of "These guys are nearly killing me, I must have leveled up!" the decision to only award a Perk every even level instead of every level makes all those odd levels ''feel'' emptier.
* [[Cool Old Guy|Tellah]] of ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' actually has his physical stats ''decrease'' as he gains levels to simulate the effects of old age. Fusoya is a more straight example, since his stats don't change after a level up.
** Most characters have a chance of not increasing any stats, or even ''decreasing'' them, when they level up after they reach level 70. Oddly, the one with the best post-70 level-ups is [[Spoony Bard|Edward]].
** If you want real ultimate power in ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'', put off gaining levels until you start getting a selection of Espers. The only thing you get for gaining levels before this is a pile of hit points and a tiny bit of [[Mana]]. (Well, the damage algorithm ''does'' take levels into account, but you're still not increasing your base stats without Espers.)
*** This also means equipment selections are more important than usual.
** ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'' is undoubtedly the king of this trope; the game becomes much easier once you disable random encounters and just abuse the crap out of GF-junctioning by playing the card game for items to transmute into spells.
** ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'' is similar, although not quite as bad because your characters' base stats do increase somewhat when they level. However, their base stats increase more when wearing gear that increases that base stat. Therefore, to get the highest stats possible, you need to keep your characters at level one until you get gear with high stat bonuses. <ref> Stats, however, are irrelevant in regards to Zidane, Freya, and Quina, since their best skills are based on reaching a total number of collectibles or kills, and the only thing the player has to worry about is MP.</ref>
** ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'' zig-zags this one. The game had several empty spots on its "spheregrid" leveling system, and several abilities required you to follow a sidepath and then waste time moving back to where you left off. Fortunately, you could retrace several previously crossed spaces for the cost of moving to one new one, and later in the game, you got both the ability to teleport around the spheregrid and the ability to fill in the empty spaces with new bonuses. (Heck in the "post-game," you could rip out weaker stat bonuses and replace them with stronger ones!)
** Common with most classes in ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]''. Even worse considering you have to reach at least level 15 for some classes to even start being useful, and levels take a long time. Red Mage is probably the closest thing to aversion to this, since they get a ridiculous quantity of spells, with surprisingly few of them not being useful in one situation or another.
** ''[[Final Fantasy Tactics]]'' can also fall into this trope if you [[Level Grind]] excessively without advancing the plot. Monsters get a lot of power just from leveling up, while human characters (especially physical-based classes) only get some power from leveling up and get more power from improving their gear. Since the enemies in random battles are tied to the average level of your party (while story battles have pre-set levels for the enemies), and many random battles contain monsters. Unless you go through the pains of nicking off gears off the humans from random encounters (their equipments are appropriately upgraded for their levels), those monsters can become a real pain very quickly.
** Easily averted by simply not using Ramza in random battles. He's the only character the developers could rely on being used frequently, so his level is the only consideration the scaling system has. If you sideline him in random battles, the game scales very slowly. When you gut [[Game Breaker|Thunder God Cid]] half way through, only the bonus dungeon or serious blunder could ever pose a threat to you again.
* In the browser RPG ''Heroes Of Ardania'', levels mean almost nothing to most classes except HP. If a player "plays as they should", their rise in levels and their rise in power should mostly be around the same.(Power will go faster for a player that really knows what they're doing.) But if a player just gains empty xp without doing quests or getting good items, in certain areas the number of monsters will rise depending on level and the player won't be strong enough. Of course, that is the player's own damn fault, and level only matters in a few instances anyway.
* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' suffered from this to an extent. The max. level one could get was 20. However, the protagonist would not become a Jedi until a few missions in to the game; party members also joined at whatever level the protagonist currently was. Thus it was of more benefit to not level the protagonist until they had become a Jedi so that the more useful abilities (i.e. Jedi) could be levelled up more.
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