The leveling of NPC's is done by assigning them appropriate equipment and stats when they're spawned. Normal followers get their stats incremented along with the player, and the game relies on the player giving them new equipment when needed. However, you can't teach a follower a new spell and that's one area where they fall behind. A "teach" dialogue is an option to the level-up events, but I'd still need to prompt the player to do so, which comes back to catching those events anyway.
In this case, I've created a follower who's not going to change equipment, and is spell-based for offense. So I'll catch the player level-ups and add higher level spells as you progress. The game is capable of using the best available spell, so that is effectively a replacement, although I won't take away the old ones. Defensive spells (the xxxflesh ones for example) can take the place of armor upgrades, too.
I'm going with all draugrs as the melee side - except for the skeevers and skeletons in the first level. Those are fixed level mobs of the lowest grade, just to set the scene. There's one Succubus mixed in who's leveled, and will thus warn you what to expect. If I find a good alternative for the draugr, a search-and-replace can be done later.
So far it's crypt, mines, abyss, and Andariel's lair. Since the levels are much smaller than the Diablo game, there's no progression through them, and the mobs just get a little denser as you go, rather than higher-level. The whole dungeon is an encounter zone that gets leveled when you enter, so even if you do a couple of levels and leave, when you come back later, it's still that level.
I've checked the leveling with an artificially adjusted test character running in god mode, just to make sure the right mobs are spawned, so I don't really have a feel for whether the balance is right. There's opportunity for tweaking the easy/normal/hard settings on each spawn point when I get round to that. A fresh-rolled level one character can just about manage a run, although Andariel will be tricky without the best available equipment, and sneak archery.
There are still a lot of small tweaks I need to make before a beta release, but I'll create an alpha soon as a vehicle for recruiting voice actors. I need two for Azura and Nocturnal, for a couple of scenes. They can have unique voices, which don't even have to match the ones for their other avatars, because magic. However, I need to adjust the timing of those scenes a bit before that.
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Mods for The Elder Scrolls single-player games, and I play ESO.
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