Empty Levels: Difference between revisions

 

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* Some racing games, eg ''[[Need for Speed]] Underground'', do this, making the opponents faster and cheaper the more your car is upgraded.

 

** 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.

* ''[[EverQuest]]'' suffers from this as when you gain levels, you have to fight tougher monsters to gain experience. However, something called Alternate Advancement (AA) points can make a big difference in your power, and you can earn them at the lower levels. So gaining levels actually can make it harder to earn AA points. It is also the case that as players get more powerful, they also get more specialized, so that the steel armored warrior has a much greater defense proportionately at higher levels than the leather wearing druid. And since the monsters have to hit harder to be a challenge to the warrior, they now can kill the druid in just a few hits.

 

 

* In ''[[Sonic Adventure 2]] Battle'', the Chao Karate has a feature like this where the amount of damage the enemy does and how much you do to them seems to be rooted in the swim stat. To elaborate: if your chao has all (just for the sake of simplicity, B-rank skills) level 84 skills except for swim and stamina, which are level 70 and you get your ass kicked in chao karate, you'd think that leveling up your swim (doubles as the defense stat) would make you more resistant to damage, right? Wrong! While leveling up swim increases your defense to the point where every single hit doesn't do extreme damage, it also makes the enemies themselves more resistant to damage, faster, more likely to dodge, and for some weird reason, hit harder (at a certain point, increasing defense will reach an equilibrium with their attack (power) stat resulting in a minimum level of damage). However, the fact that they also grow generally tougher too after you stop reaping the benefits of higher defense means that you are actually making this stronger. Now take that chao of yours and give him a level 91 defense state and keep everything else the same. Suddenly, even though you used to be faster than the guy who beat you and he never evaded, he's dodging every other hit and beating you to the punch.

** To cut it short: keep your swim a bit below your other stats (except for fatigue, which really doesn't ever need to go any higher than level 60) and focus on increasing your power and run stats, as these will let you hit harder and more frequently.

 

* Due to how the stat system works in ''[[Puzzle Quest]]'', every other level is empty, because you don't have enough points to raise anything important until two levels have passed.

 

* Early in ''[[Ogre Battle]]'', alignment does this. Later in the game, your lawful characters are ''so'' lawful, their levels are meaningless for alignment. You do need both lawful and chaotic characters to get the best ending, however.

* ''[[Dawn of War|Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2]]'' features squads that level up and can collect ever more powerful gear, but rather than facing more powerful types of enemies, you simply face the same old enemies leveled to match you. You fight level 1 slugga boyz at level 1, then level 15 slugga boyz at level 15. At first glance, there is no apparent point to leveling up, as doing so merely results in smallish stat boosts with every skill point, but every 10 skill points would provide a powerful new ability that could change how each of the squads played. This, combined with new unlockable wargear options that were exponentially more powerful than the initial loadouts(thunderhammers, orbital bombardments, and Terminator armour were the most egregious examples), caused massive spikes in the power of the player's squads every couple missions with little noticable gain in between.

 

* In ''[[Ancient Domains of Mystery]]'', the Small Cave (a common destination for beginning adventurers) is easily one of the most dangerous areas under certain circumstances. Within the Small Cave, enemies scale to your character very, very aggressively. A first-level character will have a fairly easy time fighting the basic monsters that spawn there. A fiftieth-level adventurer will find common rats punching through his dragon plate mail.

** This is because monsters in the SMC spawn at roughly twice the character's level. That 50th level character is fighting 100th level rats.

* ''[[Nethack]]'' monster difficulty is the average of experience level and dungeon level. If you are playing a class that gains little combat ability with experience levels, gaining a level can be a step backwards, especially if the new monster difficulty introduces some particular early-game terror.

 

* In ''[[Breath of Fire]]'' (the first one), when you get to about Level 60+, sometimes you will see see "Character reaches level yy!" and... that's it. Not even a single hit point. Not much reward after the ridiculous grind (especially since the game divides XP gained by how many group members total you have, up to 8) to get to those high levels...

* In ''[[Earthbound]]'', any level-up that's not a multiple of 4 can be very wimpy. You might get as little as only a single point increase to your max HP.

* While the levels in [[Dead Island]] do increase your total health and give you points to spend customizing your abilities, zombies level with you. Your damage is mostly dependent on your weapons, meaning your expensively upgraded weapons fall a little more behind the zombies each time you level up and you need to find, upgrade, and modify new weapons.

 

* In ''[[Battle Garegga]]'', the [[Dynamic Difficulty]] increases the further you go without dying, the more you shoot, and the more you power up, etc. If your rank is too high, the later levels may become [[Unwinnable]].

* The arcade shooter ''Twin Eagle'' can suffer from this, due to its piss-cheap and unbalanced [[Dynamic Difficulty]] system. For example, if you make it to the high-speed sequence fully powered up, there's a great chance you will encounter the [[Demonic Spider]] red jets, which will often deliver unavoidable death with their missiles and rapid-fire bullets, making these sequences a [[Luck-Based Mission]]. And the game has [[Unstable Equilibrium]] too, which means you lose all your powerups if you die, meaning you are fucked in the later levels. And those [[Goddamned Bats|goddamned mini-choppers]] appear a lot more often and shoot more rapidly on the higher dynamic difficulties, also often causing unavoidable deaths.

 

* The ''[[Fire Emblem]]'' games have this happen sometimes, due to the random level-up system. One playthrough may invoke this trope by having every one of your party members with level five stats at equivalent level 40; the next may see you with an entire party of [[Game Breaker|Game Breakers]] with maxed-out stats at level 25.

** [[Averted Trope|Averting]] this is the biggest change ''Radiant Dawn'' made to the series level-up system. The game will always force a character to gain at least one stat-up during each level up, so it's mostly getting more then one increase per level. But [[Empty Levels]] won't happen from ''Radiant Dawn''.

* As with many games, ''[[Shining Force]]'' increased statistics randomly when players leveled up. However, some can stand a chance of getting disproportionately low stats, such as gaining ''1 hit point'', and nothing else.

 

* ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' is the [[Trope Maker]]. While early-edition clerics and magic users could gain new spells with every few levels, fighters and thieves were mainly stuck with the standard increase in attack bonus, saving throws and hit points that everyone got upon leveling up, in addition to increase in skill percentages if you were playing a thief. Combine this with increasingly-horrifying supernatural enemies against whom sharp-sword-swinging was a decreasingly recommendable tactic ([[Demonic Spiders|powerful undead in particular]], whose [[Level Drain]] attacks didn't care a whit about your armor and [[The Virus|turned anyone they killed into more of them]]), and it wasn't too long before the [[Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards]] thing took hold (course, there were some enemies that were very resistant if not immune to magic, so the casters weren't immune either). Each edition has attempted to fix this, but ultimately only succeeded in making the problem worse. It is such that in 3rd/3.5 if you are not a caster you are required to take short dips in many different classes - something that only works because the martial classes are front loaded in addition to being loaded with empty levels. In 4th you might get features, but rarely are these features actually meaningful in any way. So not only are you required to heavily optimize your character just to keep your attack up at the same rate that enemy defenses scale, but you are most likely still using low level abilities to do this as the higher level abilities are not even necessarily better!

** Also literally an empty level is Rogue 20 (the Level Cap) in edition 3.5- unlike almost every other level or ''class'' in the game, you get actually nothing for it. The standard bonuses to health, accuracy, and defenses are given to all classes, so Rogue 19/Anything 1 is better than Rogue 20