AScottishDandy: Your analogy is quite extreme. I am willing to suspend my disbelieve be the mere fact of playing the game, so the exp system is trivial in comparison, so I think its quite silly to look at it in those terms.
I am also rather curious why you seem to be defending it? I do not mean to aggravate, as the game has many of the best items in a place you cannot possibly achieve - that is a problem, and a serious flaw that needs to be addressed.
Charon121: In open-world games you don't have many mechanisms to ensure that the challenge for players will be fairly distributed throughout the game. That's why you need to implement either level scaling, which has proven to be horrible at worst and annoying at best, or employ some other system, such as artificially closing off areas, but then it's not an open world anymore. TW3 devs opted for an approach with fixed-level encounters, but the XP rewards scale up or down relative to your level. There's no good way to tackle this, really. That's one of the reasons why I dislike open-world games. Give me a "railroad" plot/map anytime, but then ensure that it's balanced and tightly designed.
From the roleplaying perspective, there's very little Geralt still hasn't experienced. When it comes to monsters, he's seen it all. Likewise when it comes to human behaviour. Also, I don't do quests for loot and XP, I play them for the story and dialogues, like adventure games. So I don't mind if they give me only 5 XP. There are plenty of Places of Power scattered around the map to counter that.
I love open world games I've played so far despite the flaws they may have, but I agree with the majority of what you've said above. The problem ultimately is that as gamers we're both used to and also expect a concept of levelling up, gaining skills that grow ever more powerful. But that both is very unrealistic compared to real life and real life dangers even if you were to fictionalize some dangers. The problem it creates is this very problem - where animals/monsters/beings you encounter in a game either have their own static level and you're either below/at/above their level and they're correspondingly easy or hard to defeat, or else their skill level to defeat scales up to match your own skill level whether that is realistic or not and probably not. I mean after all if everything you attack in a game has its own skill scale with yours then what's the point of levels and experience at all ultimately.
If I'm level 10 and attack a monster and it is level 10 too, then it's going to be a baseline difficulty to kill. If I instead wait and am level 15 and it is now magically level 15 too then it's the same difficulty more or less. You can get rid of experience points and levelling entirely and have monsters that have no concept of experience or skill level and likewise with your character.
But, would it be fun? I dunno, I suppose it is possible to make a game that is more realistic but the challenge is ultimately to make the games fun in the end. People like levelling up, getting skill points to distribute and whatnot, but that unrealistic aspect of many games as fun as it is for all of us, creates real problems for the game designer to which there is no perfect solution - all solutions are compromising something important in the end. Some games do this more smoothly than others per se, but it's one of those things that is more or less impossible to solve in a way that is universally superior and to which every gamer out there agrees is the best way to solve the problem.
It's similar in that regard to the problem game designers face in games like this with "what do we do when the person runs off the edge of the map?" Where you have a game world that is a map that is usually a 2 dimensional square or rectangle area which is the outermost border of where you can travel to. Some games may have multiple such rectangles and transition between areas or zones by loading screens or some other mechanic but either way eventually you hit the edge of the map/game world and then what? You either have:
- an insurmountable mountain or other obstacle, a blocked off road or similar that basically says "no, you can't go here this is the edge of the world sorry tough luck". (most FPS/TPP games, open world or otherwise)
- an invisible wall that just stops you from walking forward even though it looks like you can continue to walk in that direction but you can't (Mount and Blade games)
- a game world that is actually a completely spherical game world full planet style where there is no natural edge of the world just like in real life. This either means the game is insanely massive beyond any game company's ability to code fully, or it has areas that are locked off and unreachable due to sheer size of an entire planet, or the planet is very very very small and you could see a very visible horizon radius due to the small planet - losing the illusion that the land is flat due to the relative size of a planet like Earth.
- You pause with a loading screen to load the next area, and keep doing that probably until you do reach an invisible wall or mountain like scenario anyway.
- Some combination of the above.
All of these break immersion no matter what. They are all unpleasant and require suspension of disbelief when playing games and there is not with current technology anyway a universal way to solve the problem without a lot of computing resources and ultimately games becoming incredibly larger planet-sized games with 100% free roaming compared to what we're used to now. I think we'll get them some time but probably as MMOs rather than as single player type RPGs, and the planets will probably end up being on the small size compared to Earth or even the moon for that matter. There's just too much data to create, too much manpower resources to populate an entire planet just to solve this type of problem.
Likewise, I think the game leveling/experience problem is of this same nature where there is no real solution that is perfect, just a set of different choices as to how to handle it, each with it's own set of pros and cons.
One thing I noticed is that these problems seem to be getting more visible and more irritating as games get bigger and better and I think the reason for that is that they are getting so much more realistic and immersive that things that break the immersion like discussed above - break it so much more right in your face than say 15 years ago. Our expectations are getting higher faster and faster and computing power and game development manpower resources don't scale currently to keep the issues from breaking immsersion.
The only option we ultimately all have as gamers no matter what approach a game company takes on issues such as these is sadly - suspension of disbelief.
