Oh ok, I see what you mean. I think it depends a lot on the game, whether there is so much side content that you can end up being grossly over-leveled for the main quest. Even in those cases, not everyone necessarily tries to do every single side quest. I'm not really a 'completionist' myself, although I don't feel that I rush through the games. I tend to do side quests that look interesting, or I'll do one or two if I feel that I am under-leveled for the main quest. In a way, I see that redundant content as something that adds replayability and differentiates my playthrough from someone else's. Not everyone plays these games in the same way.

Can you give an example of a game where you felt you were over-leveled for the main quest, because there was so much side content?

1. I tend to explore and complete everything I can in a game, I'm not likely to skip any optional content.
2. I prefer RPGs where enemy encounters are set, opponents don't respawn and you can't really grind for XP.
3. Gaining XP and leveling up is a major motivation in RPGs, IMO, especially if they're heavy on combat.
4. I've played quite a few RPGs in my life and have seldom actually encountered level caps before the end of the game, but I did experience it in Pillars of Eternity, and yes, it drained a fair bit of my motivation to continue. The game already overstays its welcome a bit, and without XP gain, all the trash mob encounters you have to wade through in some parts feel really pointless and a waste of time. As far as I know, PoE is an RPG of category (2), meaning even though (almost?) all encounters in the game are set, the limited sum of XP available in the game still exceeds the amount needed for reaching the level cap, and personally, I thought that sucked. I could understand a level cap to prevent players from grinding XP ad infinitum, bringing their characters into a level range never intended for the game, but a completionist run of an RPG with finite XP should not be marred by reaching a level cap early, IMO.

Worth noting: For this scenario to work, there do need to be infinite enemy respawns or some other repeatable source of XP somewhere in the game. Otherwise, if one were to complete the game 100%, one would have no more XP to gain.

There are some early RPGs, like the original Dragon Quest and original Final Fantasy, in which you're not going to accidentally become overleveled. In DQ1, in fact, most of the playing time is just spent killing random enemies to gain XP in order to level up. While it is possible to overlevel, it is not going to happen by accident; reaching level 20 (the level at which the final boss is manageable) is going to take a few hours, and you outright can't beat the game below level 17 without luck manipulation.

(Luck manipulation lets you beat the game at level 7, but you need to put the final boss to sleep on the first try (1/16 chance), then each round you need to cast hurt (1/16 chance of working) and the boss needs to stay asleep (2/3 chance I believe); if one hurt fails, you're going to run out of MP, and your attack power is too low to do more than 1 damage, and the final boss can't be criticaled. In other words, you need to be as lucky as a TAS to win at this level.)

Or. the game is just designed differently. Every now and then, I like to replay Dragon Warrior (English version of the original Dragon Quest) and spend hours wandering back and forth, killing enemies, watching my XP slowly increase, and my HP go up and down (and watching out if it gets too low). Sometimes, that sort of zen-like playing style is what I'm in the mood for.

The trick is that leveling is basically a difficulty control mechanic. Rather than a player picking the difficulty, they grind or don't grind. The problem is, if the characters get too powerful, a game might get rated low for being too easy, yet really grindy." Now, someone who does game dev wil llikely say "oh, so they just basically played on very easy," while some people might be like "oh great, another super easy game with bad balance." Of course, how much you need to do to level up is another factor.

I'm working on making a game of my own, and i've been leaning towards making level caps a result of atrophy for things like strength stats. Individual skills will have muscle memory, but if you become a couch potato, you get fat, which might increase damage (IRL stuff is based on weight more often than strength, even though the two usually correlate more than people realize). As you exercise, you loose weight, etc. You might forget things like spells over time, like in nethack, but i think it would be best to do it based on usage rather than when you last did a book.

Of course, alot of devs making games anymore loose site of the basics. IMO, the traditional way of allowing you to be OPed is ideal, because it puts the agency on the player to choose their difficulty and make the game practically a VN if they so choose. The problem is, the average reviewer often ends up hating this agency. On the flip side, pokemon got away with it and was wildly popular, so maybe companies could do away with letting reviews be their end-all-be-all guiding point, especially with all the "professional reviewers" out there.

EDIT: Also, RPGs leveling mechanics also lead to implicit "redemption stories" but this isn't particularly related to level cap.

If you like spending hours doing random combat encounters, that's fair enough. Personally, it doesn't really float my boat and its not the sort of 'different' that I like in an RPG. Different strokes ...

I would say, levels and caps are intended to force you to be within a certain range, this allows you to always feel challenged.

Though i don't like level caps. If you're in a level 30 area and you are level 100 vs a 40 level cap, yeah it's easier to go through, you can choose to weaken yourself by wearing little or no equipment, changing play style, limit what skills/spells you can use, etc, which can add to the interest while having low chances of failure instead of always feeling like you never are really at an advantage.

Though honestly getting really powerful from an item or higher level damage output shouldn't matter much, as you'll quickly balance with the level you should be and soon enough it balances to where it should be innately vs having caps and stringent limitations put on you.

But then there's grind. Level numbers are often nothing more than a forced way to say 'your weaker, get XP' and you have to spend hours and hours bringing that number up, otherwise you can't progress, and it's a cheap and overused way to pad out the game, a game that may take say 2 hours to complete may take 30 hours from 28 hours of just grinding.

"Yep, your too stupid to know how to read" - Projared

I don't like hard caps in games, it doesn't make any sense. Soft caps are fine, at some point you'll just run out of enemies, quest, skill checks etc.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm curious.

If you haven't already, I suggest playing Final Fantasy 2, especially one of the earlier versions where stats can decrease (Famicom or PSX, and of these two versions I'd recommend the Famicom version (either with the fan translation of the unreleased NES prototype), as the PSX version got spell leveling wrong so spells level even more slowly in that version).

This will give you an idea of how such mechanics can work in practice, and will also give you an idea of what not to do (as FF2 definitely has its issues, even if I do like that game).

I actually love how its is done in Mass Effect Andromeda, the game never really feels like you need the level and still all the goodies received from extra points spent in the departments of your choice really deliver

Skyrim is of course also a good system where you just keep getting better in what your doing most outside the personal levels

The whole need for extra levels and gaining them are most, to me at least, obvious in games such as baldurs gate where one level can mean a whole lot of difference or the usual mmorpg ( which i don't play anymore )

It occurred to me that SaGa 1 is another game where you can cap out early, but that's due to some quirks of the game's growth systems.

* Human: Strength and Agility upgrades have a fixed cost; 300G (kero in JP version?) to raise an attribute by at least 2 points (exactly 2 after 20). This is a lot early when enemies give 40G, but by the end of the game, you can get as much as 2400G per enemy; the most time consuming part of the task ends up simply buying and using all those stat potions. (Having only 8 party inventory slots (so you can't buy more than 8 at a time), having the items not stack in the inventory, and the lack of cursor memory (IIRC) doesn't help here.) It's as if every level takes the same amount of XP, but the XP you get for each enemy drastically increases as the game progresses.

* Espers (Mutants in US version): Stat growth is solely determined by the RNG state at the end of the battle (and the esper's position in the party order). The difficulty of the encounter does not matter (nor do the actions the esper takes during the battle).

Typically, I tend to max Humans and Espers in the 3rd major world (there's 4 major worlds, then a couple more dungeon areas to complete afterwords.)

* You can get a top-tier monster in the first dungeon of the 4th world just by eating the meat of a miniboss; the second dungeon has a repeatable encounter with the same enemy.

SaGa 2 doesn't cap your characters out until the end (and even then, it takes work for Humans and Espers to max their main stat), with the exception of Robots who can get endgame equipment in an optional dungeon a few worlds before the end (and Robot stats solely depend on equipment).

The SaGa 3 remake tends to cap character's primary stats during the final battle (you can gain stats mid-battle, which is rather interesting).

Original SaGa 3, which uses XP-based leveling, has a cap of level 99 but you'll likely beat the game in the 30's (and characters who aren't Humans or Espers don't get any stronger past level 31 anyway). Original SaGa 3 robots work like SaGa 1 humans except that they can gain slightly better stats and some stronger abilities by installing robot parts to tramsform.

(Note that SaGa 3 remake completely changed the growth system; in particular, levels and XP were removed entirely, replaced with entirely different growth mechanics.)

I don't mind level caps, there is a cap anyway when you got bored and don't want to continue the game anymore.
Thou levels should give meaningful advance to your champ/party.
mobile crap games have these +0,2% bonuses/lvl oh yes those are worthless.

there are 2 type of gamers.

1.
the me type, playing to reach godlike powers and destroy almost anything with little effort

2.
the cap people that wanna get challenged their for the level cap is absolute necessary.
(but those people do mini-maxi) so basic also cheat the game or abuse the game mechanics' (always wonder why bother then)

The Div games are an interesting example, and a category I feel dtgreene has missed (perhaps, declined to explicitly categorise) - "Level cap by finite experience pool". It means that for most of the games you can tailor your difficulty by slowly edging around the harder opponents and picking off the easier ones (Kings Bounty is another example of this) until you gain a strong enough level. This does in theory allow for a much more accurate tailoring of the level cap, as they know exactly how much XP you could possibly have acquired by a certain boss fight (if it's a "gateway" boss fight). In D:OS2 they make that absurdly hard anyway, but that's down to the designers.

They've finessed this over the various games they've gone through, I remember that in "Div 2: The Dragon Knight Saga" you gained experience relative to the level of the enemies you were facing (who were again finite in number), but then got fixed XP for quests. Thus it meant that you were best off clearing out as many enemies as possible, levelling that way, then handing in all your quests. The boost was only temporary of course as in the next area you were above the level of the initial enemies, and only got a smaller XP boost for a while until the game caught back up.

I think that makes for the best capping system, as it's the easiest for the devs to balance, prevents any "grind" for XP on respawning enemies, and if well balanced prevents you from getting bored.

Yes, some areas, not all areas or areas you need to travel through. It's one thing I really want to see in games, most areas have set enemies, you clear them and that's it, but there are a handful of "dungeon" areas, preferably quite small, with infinite respawns, maybe enemies just reset when you enter, so you can clear it while inside, then quickly get back to the exit if the area's not large, go back in and do it over again if you want more exp. But it's a specific area for that purpose, so you do that just if you want to, not because the game makes you.

If I'm playing the original Dragon Quest, it's precisely because I want to spend hours in trivial encounters for that zen-like feeling.

Dragon Quest 2, on the other hand, is different; endgame leveling involves fighting enemies that are actually dangerous. Unlike most games with level systems, reaching high levels by fighting random enemies actually requires a lot of thought, as so many of the enemies you fight are quite dangerous; one enemy has a spell that has a chance of killing each party member, and another, when low on health, can cast a spell that *will* wipe out your entire party! Fortunately, unless you're playing the original Japanese Famicom release, the person in the shrine there, which is where you respawn once you've saved there, will revive your dead party members for free. (This is one change they made for the US releas, and I'm glad they did that; you also see this change in the remakes of this game.)