I played Elex 1 and even though I finished it, it's kinda hard to recommend. You really need to be a glutton for punishment and be able to sit through 5-10 hours of running away from everything before you can even start to fight enemies. You kinda go straight from horribly underpowered to horribly overpowered with no transition in between.
The dev is notorious for "balance" like that. For some reason the never bothered to smooth the progression curve out in any of the games. Gothic and Risen all suffer from this to some extent although Elex 1 was by far the worst. They do make interesting worlds though.
I like the progression on Gothic and Risen but I would not like a more extreme version of that.
For one is different then other games. I do not like scaling areas like in Oblivion and I do not like leveled areas as having are level 10, area level 40 etc, they feel way to artificial.
I also do not like leveled monsters, going from killing a giant lizard in an area and then getting my ass beaten by a higher level flamingo is just stupid.
There is no progression if you are always at the same level as the monsters around you and on a somewhat equal power level relative to the environment.
Progression is when you have to avoid the mind flayers or the beholder cult until you are stronger and can kick their buts. Sorry for the Baldurs Gate reference but that also has the same style of progression and is why I did not like BG3.
Going on a tangent, in BG3 you are level 3 but you kill drow, an owlbear, a hag, a beholder, miniotours, hook horrors, an ogre magi and I think a lot more. 3'd level characters should be fighting lizardmen, goblins and skeletons not take on a hag.
Sorry for my BG3 rant.
Gothic did it in a more organic way. You got warnings from the start to not go in to the forest because it was dangerous, you had guides to help you early on and you had higher level areas blocked by golems or orcs so you would know it is a higher level area.
Even lower level areas you still had to avoid shadowbeasts.
That made progression worth it.
Enough of my ramblings. But yea I like gothic and risen progression system but it is easy to go overboard and make the game to hard or to overpowered. Gothic 1 actually suffered from that, you got overpowered very fast. Gothic 2 implemented that progressive stat increase cost that made the game balanced but it was annoying as hack. They did fix the system in Chronicles of Myrtana but that also has issues with progression as well.
Is there really a difference between having leveled areas and the Gothic/Elex system? They've got the same stats, the latter just doesn't have a 10 or 40 floating above the monster.
But yea Oblivion's scaling sucked. I barely made it out of the starting area and random bandits were already wearing some of the best armor in the game. Needed a ton of balancing mods to fix that nonsense.
I played Elex 1 and even though I finished it, it's kinda hard to recommend. You really need to be a glutton for punishment and be able to sit through 5-10 hours of running away from everything before you can even start to fight enemies. You kinda go straight from horribly underpowered to horribly overpowered with no transition in between.
Still going to give Elex 2 a try eventually.
Elex 2 on stream was kind of ok but I do remember Synth complaining that he died a lot at early levels so not sure what to make of it.
If it has a progression similar to gothic 2 I'm ok with that.
The dev is notorious for "balance" like that. For some reason the never bothered to smooth the progression curve out in any of the games. Gothic and Risen all suffer from this to some extent although Elex 1 was by far the worst. They do make interesting worlds though.
I like the progression on Gothic and Risen but I would not like a more extreme version of that. For one is different then other games. I do not like scaling areas like in Oblivion and I do not like leveled areas as having are level 10, area level 40 etc, they feel way to artificial. I also do not like leveled monsters, going from killing a giant lizard in an area and then getting my ass beaten by a higher level flamingo is just stupid.
There is no progression if you are always at the same level as the monsters around you and on a somewhat equal power level relative to the environment. Progression is when you have to avoid the mind flayers or the beholder cult until you are stronger and can kick their buts. Sorry for the Baldurs Gate reference but that also has the same style of progression and is why I did not like BG3. Going on a tangent, in BG3 you are level 3 but you kill drow, an owlbear, a hag, a beholder, miniotours, hook horrors, an ogre magi and I think a lot more. 3'd level characters should be fighting lizardmen, goblins and skeletons not take on a hag. Sorry for my BG3 rant.
Gothic did it in a more organic way. You got warnings from the start to not go in to the forest because it was dangerous, you had guides to help you early on and you had higher level areas blocked by golems or orcs so you would know it is a higher level area. Even lower level areas you still had to avoid shadowbeasts.
That made progression worth it.
Enough of my ramblings. But yea I like gothic and risen progression system but it is easy to go overboard and make the game to hard or to overpowered. Gothic 1 actually suffered from that, you got overpowered very fast. Gothic 2 implemented that progressive stat increase cost that made the game balanced but it was annoying as hack. They did fix the system in Chronicles of Myrtana but that also has issues with progression as well.
Is there really a difference between having leveled areas and the Gothic/Elex system? They've got the same stats, the latter just doesn't have a 10 or 40 floating above the monster.
But yea Oblivion's scaling sucked. I barely made it out of the starting area and random bandits were already wearing some of the best armor in the game. Needed a ton of balancing mods to fix that nonsense.