Challenge Scaling in Dragon Age: Origins

Dragon Age origins employs what BioWare calls a 'limited, persistent' scaling system. It tries to solve the problems scaling systems are created to address while avoiding some of the obvious drawbacks that can cause the game experience to be diluted.

Dragon Age: Origins employs several different layers to balance creatures against the party (or not)

In Dragon Age: Origins, every areas has a minimum and maximum level. If the player enters the area, the party's level is taken and compared to the area limits. If it is between the limits, the creatures in the areas scale to the party's level. If the party level is outside the limit, the creatures scale to the upper or lower bounds of the area limit, whatever appropriate.

Once this has happened, the game stores these values and they are never changed. Creatures in Dragon Age: Origins, once encountered, will never change their existing level, to allow the player to come back to an area later and overcome previously impossible challenges, therefore having getting sense of accomplishment.

In simple terms, there are three types of areas.

• Areas that are really easy (such as maybe a cave filled with rats).
• Areas that feel 'just right'.
• Areas that feel very dangerous'.

We tend to put so called 'gating encounters' at the start of many areas to allow the player to get a sense of how dangerous the area is. In theory, a player having trouble or being defeated a number of times in an areas should trigger a 'maybe I should come back later' reaction from them (it does in MMOs, doesn't it?), in practice, well, there are too few games to that give you the freedom of doing this, so many non veteran RPG players are not trained for this mechanic.

The High Dragon is a great example for that. Nobody needs to fight him right there, yet there are dozens of posts on the forums of people that think they are stuck because there is a dragon sleeping nearby on the rock…

Nothing is more damaging to players experience that noticing that the same rats he fought at level 1 have magically grown alongside him.

Dragon Age uses 'creature type limits' to prevent creatures from behaving that way. Like area scaling, creature type scaling has limits up and down.

• A normal Rat will always be a rat and never exceed level 1 or 2, even if the player is level 20.
• A Revenant will never be a weak pushover if encountered early in the game.

A lot of work by technical designers went into many areas of Dragon Age: Origins to hand-customize individual combats and quest sequences of Dragon Age to provide unique challenges and to prevent the battles from feeling stale or systemic. Encounters that include bosses and lieutenants are always hand designed. Some encounters spawn different enemy numbers based on difficulty as well.

Additionally, enemies in the game are ranked by hand, meaning a designer manually set their relative power to the player when designing an encounter.

Creature ranks add a unique overlay on top of the scaling that adds on top any existing limits.

All of the above steps are blended together to determine the final setup for an area when the player enters it which never changes:

• A rat in a level 20 area would still be limited by it's creature type limit.
• A rat boss (not that such thing exists) would still be +2 levels on top of the creature limit.
• A revenant in a level 2 area would still be forced to a higher level by his creature type limit.

Note that it not pays to play the system by entering many areas to lock them to easy difficulty, as experience is partially dependent on creatures levels you are fighting.

Why have challenge scaling? asks the D&D purist forgetting that minor entity called 'The Dungeon Master' that probably did a great job of designing encounters on the go for their party.

But Baldur's Gate didn't have them states the BG veteran, forgetting that challenge in Baldur's and NWN gate was controlled by customized AI scripts and encounter trigger scaling creature numbers to the player party capabilities or CR.

If the game was completely statics as some people demand, it would be completely linear as there would be only a single path through it. With Dragon Age's open world portion offering significant freedom to the player in terms of where to go next, this would be counter productive.

The area levels inside the larger quests ramp up as you proceed in the plot. Some areas, such as the High Dragon's peak, will have significantly higher levels than the surrounding areas, but they are optional content.

Below is a map of the recommended level you should have for some of the major areas in the game. It doesn't mean you absolutely must have a specific level range to go into that area (although the gating encounter might convince you of that) and it does not mean that things will be a cakewalk if you go there late in the game, but offers an indication the challenge level that will await you.